Welcome to Sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, April 26, 2026, and the day o0f the Turkmen Racing Horse Festival:

The Turkmen Racing Horse Festival is annually held on the last Sunday in April. This year, it takes place on April 26. While it is an important holiday, one of national pride, it remains a working Sunday for many in Turkmenistan, with schools and offices remaining open. Before we plunge into the why of this holiday though, a brief geography lesson. Turkmenistan — not to be confused with the separate nation of Turkey — is a country located in the southwest region of Central Asia. Its neighbors are Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Uzbekistan. It also touches the Caspian Sea, along its western border. Horses are an integral part of Turkmenistan’s history and culture, hence there is an entire season dedicated to horse racing. The pride and joy of Turkmenistan is the Akhal-Teke breed of horse, said to be one of the oldest breeds in the world.

Here’s a one-minute video abut the Festival:

It’s also Alien Day, celebrating the 1979 movie Aliens, and “Alien Day is held on April 26 because one of the planetoids or moons in the Alien films is named LV-426″. Audurbon Day (the illustrator and ornithologist, now in bad odor, was born on this day in 1785), National Pretzel Day, and World Intellectual Property Day (I just got a few hundred bucks because some bot stole from my trade books and got sued).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Breaking news: There was an attempt to assassinate the President at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, but it failed.

Investigators were working on Sunday to determine a motive in the shooting that sent Secret Service agents rushing President Trump from the stage at the White House correspondents’ dinner, an attack that raised questions about how a gunman was able to get close to one of Washington’s most heavily guarded events.

The suspect, identified by two law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., was taken into custody after running through a security checkpoint and exchanging gunfire with the authorities inside the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. Officials said he did not reach the ballroom, where Mr. Trump, top administration officials and hundreds of journalists had gathered.

Late Saturday night, federal authorities in the Los Angeles suburbs surrounded a two-story home where records show Mr. Allen lives. Residents gathered nearby on darkened sidewalks as police helicopters circled overhead and law enforcement vehicles with flashing red and blue lights blocked the street.

The suspect was armed with knives, a shotgun and a handgun and had been staying at the Washington Hilton, the interim Washington, D.C., police chief, Jeffery W. Carroll, told reporters on Saturday night. He said that the authorities were still investigating whether the suspect had targeted the president, but that they believed he had acted alone.

Trump and Melania were escorted out of the event. A Secret Service agent was hit, but apparently saved by his bulletproof vest.

*Trump has called off further negotiations with Iran, canceling Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s trip to Pakistan:

President Trump on Saturday called off a trip by two of his top negotiators to Islamabad, Pakistan, just before they were set to leave for talks about a potential deal to end the war in Iran.

“I’ve told my people a little while ago, they were getting ready to leave, and I said, ‘Nope, you’re not making an 18-hour flight to go there. We have all the cards,’” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “They can call us anytime they want, but you’re not going to be making any more 18-hour flights to sit around talking about nothing.”

Steve Witkoff, the special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had been scheduled to travel to Pakistan on Saturday, along with top aides to Vice President JD Vance. Officials in Pakistan have been mediating between the United States and Iran to try to end more than a month of war in the Middle East.

The cancellation of the trip is the latest sign that Iran and the United States are far from reaching a deal to end the war. A previous trip to Islamabad by Mr. Vance proved unsuccessful, and the Americans appear no closer to achieving the administration’s political goals, including convincing Iran to turn over its nuclear stockpile and curtail its future program. The two sides are also locked in a stalemate over control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows.

Mr. Trump’s decision came after Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who had been in Islamabad for talks with Pakistani officials, left the country and traveled to Oman. No direct meetings had been scheduled with U.S. officials.

After leaving Islamabad, Mr. Araghchi said in a social media post that he had shared with Pakistani officials Iran’s position on a “workable framework to permanently end the war on Iran.” He did not give details of the latest proposal. “Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy,” he added.

Given the distance between the negotiating parties, and the untenable nature of Iran’s demands, right now it seems useless to try negotiating. Let’s see what happens. Prices throughout the world will go up (gas prices in Chicago are already about $5.25 per gallon), so this remains a test of the ability of each side to play a game of what amounts to economic chicken.

*The NYT has an interview with three entitled people (including the wealthy and odious antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker) about why it’s okay to steal from capitalists: “The rich don’t play by the rules. So why should I?” Here we see the antisemitic content streamer Hasan Piker,  The NYT Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman (daughter of graphic novelist Art Spiegelman), and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino  discuss the circumstances in which they’d break the law to steal from the rich (see also the Free Press article on this unsavory trio; the NYT article is archived here). There is also a video.  We can assume that at least two of these discussants are rich. Piker is a multimillionaire, and The FP says that Tolentino:”lives in a $2.2 million brownstone in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn when she’s not at her second home upstate”, and Grok reports that Spiegelman ears a six-figure income as well as being co-owner of two NYC properties, including a SoHo condo. We can assume they are not starving, but they’re willing to steal—and not always for a good cause.

A couple of quotes:

Spiegelman: Would you pirate music from an indie band?

Tolentino: Is it 2005 and I’m using LimeWire? Because yes.

Spiegelman: I feel like every millennial has at some point.

Tolentino: I mean, I feel like, fundamentally, Spotify is kind of deleterious to the musician livelihood, and I use that, but then I go to the shows.

Piker: Yeah, I’m pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board. Would you pirate a car? Yes. You know, if you could.

Spiegelman: What would it mean to pirate a car?

Piker: It was just a classic thing back in the day. The government-funded antipiracy initiatives would be like: Would you steal a car? I’m like, yeah, sure. If I could get away with it, if it was as easy as pirating intellectual property, I would do it.

. . .Spiegelman: Yeah. Would you steal a book from the library?

Tolentino: Never.

Piker: No.

Spiegelman: Would you steal from the Louvre?

Piker: Yes.

Tolentino: I would not be logistically capable of executing such a fact, but would I cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it? Absolutely.

Piker: I think it’s cool. We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.

Spiegelman: Would you steal from Whole Foods?

Tolentino: Yes. And I have, under very specific circumstances. I will say, I think that stealing from a big box store — I’ll just state my platform — it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action. But I did steal from Whole Foods on several occasions.

Tolentino steals from Whole Foods (she calls it “mircrolooting”), but only to give the food to others:

Tolentino: But I didn’t feel bad about it at all.

Spiegelman: And was part of it because of how you feel about Whole Foods as a corporation?

Tolentino: Yeah. It already felt like a bit of a compromise. At the time I was like, I had not been to Whole Foods. I had a bit more consumer discipline about where I was spending my money then, and I already felt like I was in the hole, even by shopping there. And it certainly felt, in a utilitarian sense, I was like, this is not a big deal. Right, guys?

. . .Spiegelman: There’s one thing that’s stealing when you are a teenager and you want the adrenaline rush. And part of it is about testing the rules and getting away with something. But what I’m seeing on TikTok and social media is people saying that they’re stealing from Whole Foods not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification. Because the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I? And Jeff Bezos has too much money — he’s a billionaire — so why should I have to pay for organic avocados?

My friends and I have started calling this microlooting, because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something. Have you noticed this around you online? Have you noticed more people talking about stealing in this way?

Murder, they say, seems justified by many:

. . . Spiegelman: But then when you feel this much anger — and it doesn’t feel like there’s hope for it to be changed in a regulatory way — I think that’s when you get to things like Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing the C.E.O. of United Healthcare, and there being an outpouring of glee for murder online, because it feels like, finally, someone can actually do something about health care.

I think 41 percent of Gen Z-ers felt that murder was morally justified. But it’s scary to be in a society where people feel that murder is morally justified. And I’m curious how we thread that line.

Piker: Yeah. Friedrich Engels wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare C.E.O., was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care in this country — and the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths. And that was a fascinating story for me, because Americans are very draconian about crime and punishment. They’re very black and white on this issue.

And yet, because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.

. . . Tolentino: One thing that should be legal that isn’t — it’s interesting, because I have to regularly explain this stuff to a small child, and have so thoroughly explained to her that some things are against the rules, but they’re OK, depending on who you are. And some things are not against the rules, but they’re not OK. There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action. I have taken so many planes for so many pleasure reasons; I have acted in so many selfish ways that are not only legal, but they’re sanctioned and they’re unbelievably valorized, culturally. So, maybe things like blowing up a pipeline, let’s say that.

These are the people who will lead the Revolution, and who are active on the “progressive” Left.

*Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was demonized by the Southern Poverty Law Center a few years back, is glad that the SPLC has now come to a reckoning. The writes at the Free Press:

I was placed on an SPLC blacklist in October 2016. The document was called “A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” My name appeared beside Maajid Nawaz, a reformed radical who ran a counter-extremism organization, and an array of figures also dedicated to combating Islamism and antisemitism, such as David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes. The list handed journalists a ready-made roster of 15 people whose views were to be seen as toxic. But to call it a mere reference guide is to understate what it was.

It was published at the peak of a jihadist campaign of terror against the West. The ISIS caliphate still held territory across Syria and Iraq. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was issuing hit lists of writers and cartoonists in its English-language magazine. In January 2015, two of AQAP’s followers walked into the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and murdered 12 people, some of them cartoonists whose offense was drawing. Ten months later, a coordinated ISIS cell killed 130 at Paris’s Bataclan theater and the cafés around it. Terror attacks in Brussels, Nice, Berlin, and Manchester soon followed.

This was the climate in which the SPLC chose to publish the names, faces, and affiliations of 15 people it accused of “anti-Muslim extremism.” The list endangered everyone it named. I know the threat of Islamist violence all too well. In 2004, a jihadist named Mohammed Bouyeri murdered my friend and collaborator Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street. Bouyeri shot him, cut his throat, and pinned a five-page letter to his chest with a knife. The letter was a fatwa against me. I have lived under armed protection for more than two decades because men with weapons and conviction want me dead—for apostasy; for writing about Islamist-driven antisemitism and the subversive actions of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the West; for drawing attention to practices such as honor killings and female genital mutilation; for arguing that Muslim women deserve the same protections under the law as other women.

The SPLC considers all of this beyond the pale, and accused me of using “the political bully pulpit to bash Muslims.”

Thus, an organization founded to combat bigotry chose to place me on a list together with others whose lives were already under threat from the same movements, just for having the audacity to combat Islamist bigotry.

Nawaz sued the group, and won. In June 2018, the SPLC settled for $3.4 million and issued a written apology. The field guide vanished from its website. No apology was ever extended to me or to the others unfairly placed on that list.

. . . But ruining reputations was, and remains, only one of many offenses.

In 2000, the journalist Ken Silverstein published a long investigation in Harper’s Magazine describing the SPLC as the wealthiest civil rights organization in America, one whose fundraising had grown to dwarf its legal work. CharityWatch later gave the organization an F for stockpiling donations it did not spend on its stated mission. Tax filings uncovered by reporters in 2017 showed millions in SPLC money parked in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. Think of it for a moment: an anti-poverty organization, headquartered in Alabama, hiding millions offshore while positioning itself as the nation’s moral conscience. That should have ended it. Instead, the donors kept giving, and the lists kept growing.

I’m surprised that Hirsi Ali didn’t sue the SPLC like Nawaz did. The organization apparently ran out of civil rights cases to prosecute, and so began sniffing out what they construed as “hate groups” that didn’t violate anybody’s civil rights.

*Speaking of the SPLC, the conservative National Review says that even if the government charges against it are bogus, “The SPLC was always awful” and “deserves to be shunned and marginalized” (archived article).

A grand jury returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with financial crimes, suggesting that the organization — which claims its mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and fight discrimination broadly — has secretly paid informants to participate in the groups it deemed “racist” or hateful, as well as organize activities under the guise of these groups, such as the “United the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. If the allegations are true, then it means that SPLC has been coordinating some of the very events it raises funds to fight against — and as anyone familiar with the organization knows, it then construes those demonstrations as representative of the entire right-wing coalition.

But here’s a challenge: Engage in a hypothetical and assume, purely for the sake of argument, that absolutely everything alleged in the indictment is completely false. Even if the SPLC neither committed financial crimes nor helped orchestrate bogus “hate” events to create bad optics for conservatives, the organization has long been deserving of ire. The SPLC is societal poison dedicated to disparaging any individual or group perceived as even mildly right-wing. Rather than bashing the SPLC because it allegedly misrepresented its organizational activities and use of funds, we should emphasize that the SPLC misrepresents everything all the time.

For those unfamiliar, the SPLC is well known for awarding the “hate” label to certain organizations or individuals. While these designations might seem negligible, they have facilitated actual hate: Floyd Lee Corkins II was motivated to attempt a mass shooting and “kill as many people as [he] could” at the Family Research Council’s headquarters, in part because he had identified the organization as anti-gay from the SPLC website.

One might have hoped such an awful incident would have prompted the SPLC to reconsider its “hate” labels, and that the mainstream media would refrain from referencing such designations carelessly. However, high-profile publications routinely cite the SPLC-issued “hate” badge as if it is some sort of assessment grounded in a rigorous methodology. An article will read as follows: “[Right-Wing Organization], which has been named a “hate group” by the SPLC, blah blah blah.” (See here for an example about the Family Research Council in the New York Times, which was published after the terrorist attack on the organization.)

The scandal raises urgent questions about the integrity of the SPLC’s broader work, particularly its influential Hate Map, which began as a tool for tracking armed militias and skinhead gangs. Over time, it expanded to include mainstream conservative and religious organizations such as the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, and the Center for Immigration Studies. In August 2012, a man named Floyd Lee Corkins walked into the Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C., carrying a gun. A security guard named Leo Johnson stopped him and was shot in the process. Corkins told the FBI he chose his target using the SPLC’s map. The organization never acknowledged what its list had set in motion.

The SPLC promulgates falsehoods — or what progressives might call “misinformation” — not only when borderline defaming individuals and organizations, but in its attempts to refute the claims set forth by those people and groups. In one article, the SPLC insists that “sterilization” is merely “an alleged medical risk” (emphasis mine) of “gender-affirming health care for children,” which is based on “myths, pseudoscience, and flawed historical comparisons to eugenics.” The SPLC further asserts that children are not receiving procedures that would render them infertile, nor does hormonal therapy pose fertility risks. This is difficult to reconcile with the fact that a reality-television show revealed to the world that Jazz Jennings, a male, underwent (botched) surgeries to construct a pseudo-vagina before age 18. Then there’s all the scientific data and personal anecdotes about how hormonal therapy can lead to infertility. Even Planned Parenthood produced materials for students as young as middle-schoolers conceding that puberty-blocking drugs may have long-term fertility consequences, saying they “might change someone’s body permanently, like affecting whether they can get or cause a pregnancy when they are older.” In another post, the SPLC claims that “anti-transgender” and right-wing individuals rely on “junk science” and “disinformation” — ignoring piles of evidence to prove that the so-called studies in support of medicalized gender interventions are not only wrong, but entirely nonsense. (For more thorough descriptions of large-scale scientific reviews on “gender-affirming care,” see some of my reporting here and here and here.)

Like the ACLU (which still does good stuff), the SPLC was once engaged in a honorable mission, but that mission has become ideologically tainted. It’s not clear whether the government’s charges that the organization gave money to informants, enriching the very organizations it was spying on, will hold water. But even if they don’t, the SPLC has outlived its usefulness, and I would be glad if it disappeared.

*The AP’s reliable “oddities” section reports that three people in California donned bear suits and then damaged their cars, all to get insurance money by pretending that the damage was ursine rather than human. They were caught:

Three people in California have been sentenced for insurance fraud in a bizarre scam that involved someone dressed in a bear costume damaging luxury cars.

The California Insurance Department said the three used a person in a bear suit to stage fake attacks inside a Rolls-Royce and two Mercedes in 2024, then submitted fraudulent claims seeking nearly $142,000 in payouts from insurance companies. The department called it “Operation Bear Claw.”

Two Los Angeles-area men and a woman pleaded no contest to felony insurance fraud and were sentenced to a weekend jail program, followed by probation, the department said in a news release Thursday. Two of them were ordered to pay over $50,000 in restitution.

A fourth person faces a court hearing in September.

The group is accused of providing several videos from the San Bernardino Mountains of a bear moving inside the vehicles to the insurance companies as part of their damage claims, the department said. Photos provided by the insurance department show what appeared to be scratches on the seats and doors.

AD

A California Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist reviewed the footage and concluded it was “clearly a human in a bear suit,” the insurance department said.

After executing a search warrant, detectives found the bear costume in the suspects’ home, the department said.

A news video showing the suit. Opposable thumbs!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, two geezers commiserate:

Hili: Once, the world was better.
Andrzej: Not exactly, but we were younger and stronger.

In Polish:

Hili: Dawniej świat był lepszy.
Ja: Nie bardzo, ale my byliśmy młodsi i silniejsi.

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

From Meow Incorporated:

From The Language Nerds (there’s one typo):

From Now That’s Wild:

From Masih; four Iranian women protestors waiting to be hanged (for protesting):

These 4 women receive death sentences simply for demanding freedom in Iran and right now sitting in prison, waiting to be hanged.
Where are the left and Liberal in America?
Why are the leaders of feminists movement so quiet?
Where are the progressive leaders?

So let me get this… https://t.co/5T2DF7gE8d pic.twitter.com/9g1FG3NMFD

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 22, 2026

From Luana:  I’m not a huge fan of Francis Widdowson, but it’s wrong, and a violation of free speech (which Canada apparently doesn’t allow) to demonize (and arrest) her for questioning whether the bodies of indigenous people have been buried when there is simply no evidence that this claim is true.

This is a political arrest. There are NO MASS GRAVES of indigenous students.
Questioning the narrative is heresy.
Shut people up by arresting them for trespassing. https://t.co/5RWlmOvyft

— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) April 26, 2026

From Cate: a squirrel eating a chicken wing–in Chicago! I knew they were a bit carnivorous, but not this carnivorous!

This is in #Chicago.
They said he had a 6-wing, fried hard, with salt n’ pepper and mild sauce.
😂 pic.twitter.com/r9hUPU7gVj

— C.W. Harris (@cwharris773) April 24, 2026

Two from my feed: a crow helps the hedgehog cross the road. But did it get over the ledge?

A bird explains to a hedgehog that it has to cross the road so it doesn’t die. pic.twitter.com/WXtwAQUqE0

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) April 25, 2026

From Barry; a vampire cat:

“Hush now, be still. Soon you shall be one of us.”

— Uncle Duke (@uncleduke1969.bsky.social) 2026-04-24T12:58:07.644Z

Elephant kisses girl, girl gives elephant pineapple, girl kisses elephant.

Pure kisses… pic.twitter.com/4qbxKAdxO8

— Nature 🦜and Music 🎶 (@GuGi263) April 25, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial

This Hungarian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he got to Auschwitz. He was 14 years old. https://t.co/BVvbt6RgoQ

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 26, 2026

From Matthew; Katie Mack is a physicist and science communicator.  See the link for the quoted post, which is about relativity being necessary to use GPS satellites accurately.

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it.Anyway: fund basic research.

— Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) 2026-04-23T13:01:20.978Z

Welcome to CaturSaturday, April 25, 2026.  I just returned to the office, as our plane to Chicago from Savannah was late because of rain in Baltimore, and I didn’t get to sleep until nearly midnight.  I stopped by the duck pond on the way in and found Armon and the undocumented drake, but of course no ducklings, which is too much to hope for. I tried to feed Armon to reward him for his paternal services, but he was too busy chasing the other duck.  I didn’t expect to see baby ducks, as I don’t believe in miracles, but the pond looks very empty.

If readers have any wildlife photos, please send them in.

There will be a truncated Hili dialogue today, and perhaps posting will be light for a while as I get up to speed. Bear with me; I do my best.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 25 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The WSJ reports how fissures in Iran’s leadership are frustrating efforts to make peace:

Tensions between Iranian leaders over talks with the U.S. spilled into the open this week, highlighting how difficult it will be for President Trump to secure the diplomatic win he wants to end the war.

The disagreements were apparent in the first round of talks earlier in April. Mediators said Iran became vague when pressed by the U.S. for specifics on issues it had said it was willing to discuss, people familiar with the matter said.

It’s now becoming clearer that there are deep divisions within the country’s leadership over how far to go to strike a deal with the Americans—a concern as mediators scramble to arrange a second round of talks after the U.S. and Iran abandoned a planned meeting midweek amid rising tensions in the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will go to Islamabad for talks with Iranian officials, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Friday on Fox News. Vice President JD Vance will be on standby to travel in case there is progress in the negotiations, she said. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Islamabad Friday, but Iranian state media said no meeting was planned.

Tasnim, a news service affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, accused the U.S. of telling stories.

“There is basically no negotiation with the Americans at the moment, and Mr. Araghchi’s trip to Islamabad is not to negotiate with the Americans,” Tasnim said.

During the fighting, Iran’s leadership showed unity in its political messaging and maintained tight command and control over its armed forces. But that cohesion appears to be fraying as it turns to the task of securing sanctions relief by cutting a deal with the U.S., which likely will require making difficult concessions.

Clearly, regime change that gives power to the people is not on the table. All we can say is that any agreement between the U.S. and Iran will be difficult.  And I don’t think the U.S. should have folded a Lebanon cease-fire into the agreement, for that has nothing to do with Iran save for Iranian support of terrorists in other countries.

*I return to find more news of Jew-hating in American colleges. The UCLA Hillel hosted Shem Tov, an Israeli hostage who, after being kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival on October 7, had been held captive for five months before being freed in a prisoner swap.  What happened at the school? The UCLA student government condemned the appearance as “selectively platforming” Tov’s narrative in the face of Israeli genocide .

A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Shem Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.

Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.

“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.

“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”

“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”

A UCLA spokesperson defended the groups who hosted the event Wednesday and said the school would “review the process by which the letter was issued.”

“The event’s message was one of resilience and respect for human rights and dignity – a message we support,” the statement in part read.

“We firmly stand against violence of any kind. Omer Shem Tov spoke with students and other members of the community with the Chancellor and Dr. Felicia Knaul in attendance, and the event occurred without any disruption,” the school added. “We will review the process by which this letter was issued. The condemnation of such a peaceful event to share a story of resilience in the face of extreme suffering is antithetical to the values of our Bruin community.”

UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.

“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”

You can read the UCLA student government’s letter at the link above.

*Meanwhile, it’s encampment season again, and the first participant is Occidental College. It’s not in any news I can find, but Grok has culled this information on the “Rafah to Jenin liberated zone” just set up, complete with tents. Rafah, of course is the southernmost part of Gaza, and Jenin is in the West Bank, so they are encompassing all of the Palestinian territories.

A new pro-Palestinian student encampment was established at Occidental College (Oxy) in Los Angeles on April 24, 2026 (yesterday).

It is organized by groups including Occidental Students for Justice in Palestine (Oxy SJP) and described by participants as the “Rafah to Jenin Liberated Zone” (sometimes called “Rafa to Janine” or “Rafah-Jenin Liberated Zone”), occupying the campus’s Academic Quad—echoing the 2024 encampment site there.

Key Details from Organizer Statements and Videos

• Setup and appearance: Tents (green, white, yellow, blue) and a canopy have been erected on the quad amid trees and benches. Protesters (many in keffiyehs, some face-covering, sunglasses, or safety vests) are visible setting up, with Palestinian flags present. Banners include messages like “THERE ARE NO SCHOOLS LEFT IN GAZA” (with imagery of fire, an American flag, and a burning school building) and references to solidarity with Palestine.
  instagram.com
• Demands: The encampment calls for Occidental’s Board of Trustees to divest from companies tied to Israel/weapons manufacturing (described as “war profiteering” and “genocide”), as well as private prisons and ICE detention centers. Organizers frame it as renewing pressure ahead of a Board meeting, two years after the 2024 encampment. They describe it as building a “transnational community” in solidarity with Palestinians amid actions in Gaza, the West Bank (Jenin), Lebanon, and Iran.
  instagram.com
• Activities and invitations: On day one, students invited supporters to “sleep in a tent with us,” share meals, or drop off food/supplies. Planned programming includes community self-defense/ICE patrol training, a Torah study, workshops on “academia and genocide,” and discussions of the “student intifada.” One speaker noted campus police threats to involve LAPD but affirmed they are staying.

If you click on the tweet below (h/t Luana), you’ll hear a cowardly woman, face hidden by a keffiyeh, boasting about the encampment at “Oxy”:

🚨 BREAKING: An encampment has sprung up at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Activists are calling it the “Rafah to Jenin Liberated Zone” and say the encampment is animated by the same “social justice” values Occidental claims to uphold.

They are demanding divestment from… pic.twitter.com/RR92Hai4DO

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) April 24, 2026

*For reasons that aren’t completely clear, the mainstream media has within the last year or so embarked on a campaign to highlight the value of religion.  The NYT started a weekly newsletter about religion called “Believing“. It’s written by Lauren Jackson, who claims she’s a nonbeliever, but one who longs for there to be a god.  And although she’s supposedly an atheist, her lips are fixed firmly on the posterior of faith, osculating it vigorously.  (I read it so you don’t have to.) Now the Washington Post has followed suit with one called “Awakenings, whose motto is “Religion and spirituality are remaking America — and transforming lives. Encounter the new face of faith.”

One episode of “Awakenings” was posted yesterday, by Christopher Beha, a Catholic, former editor of Harpers, and author of Why I Am Not an Atheist (see my critique of his anti-atheism New Yorker article here). His new osculation is called, “I used to be a skeptic. This changed my mind.” (The subtitle is “Skepticism is tearing society apart. Belief is the answer”.) Beha begins by asserting that philosophy has failed to provide us with a shared basis of “certain knowledge,” but of course he’s wrong—he should be looking to science, not philosophy. Then he proposes faith as the nostrum for a fulminating skepticism:

This in turn makes it easier to appreciate the early modern fear of skepticism. The term increasingly calls to mind not just religious skepticism but vaccine skepticism, election skepticism and the army of “truthers” who coalesce around every major news event. These people often proceed not by proposing an alternative view but by “asking questions” that undermine the official narrative and make it difficult to believe in anything at all, which is precisely the skeptical method.

By now the dangers of this approach should be clear. Today’s great epistemic institutions — government, universities, media — face much the same crisis of authority that befell the religious institutions they replaced. While philosophical skepticism promised detachment and tranquility, modern skepticism has curdled into cynicism and despair.

What can be done to address this fact, particularly if the philosophers are right and there is no shared foundation of objective knowledge from which to proceed? Hume once suggested that even the most confident conclusions should be tempered by a “degree of doubt.” Looking around today, I’m more inclined to say that skepticism should be tempered with a bit of belief.

What I’m proposing is not a return to simple credulity or a slavish submission to authority, but rather a recognition that it is not really possible to survive on certain knowledge alone. Every person must take some things on faith, if only to open the door and go out into the world.

True, we take things on faith (like our doctor’s advice), but most often when we are relying on authorities who know their stuff.  But here’s Beha’s solution:

My own turn to belief eventually led me all the way back to the church of my childhood. I’m not suggesting that it will take others that far. But perhaps they could do with a bit more belief than modern society encourages. By the skeptics’ own lights, it takes belief to recognize the reality of the world outside one’s head, the reality of other people and the obligations that these realities entail. It takes belief to transcend despair and work for a better future. It takes belief to escape the cynicism and nihilism that seem the default mindsets of the day. It takes belief to put skepticism in its proper place.

Beha doesn’t seem to realize that there’s a difference in “believing” that a virus causes AIDS and a belief that a god sent himself/his son down to earth to redeem human sins by getting crucified. In other words, Beha doesn’t see the difference between belief based on evidence and belief based on wish-thinking).  But I’m still puzzled at the MSM’s love of religion? Whence the “God-shaped hole” that needs to be filled?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has given the garden (and the house) to the upstairs lodgers.

Hili: Our orchard is blooming again.
Andrzej: Not ours anymore, but it’s still blooming.

In Polish:

Hili: Nasz sad znowu kwitnie.
Ja: Już nie nasz, ale nadal kwitnie.

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

From CinEmma:

From Terrible Maps: a mnemoic for memorizing the Great Lakes:

From Masih, a “human story” that shows how horrible the Iranian regime is:

A nurse in Iran helped wounded protesters. The security forces killed her. Then abused her body. Then used her finger to unlock her phone and sent the images of sexual abuse to her husband.
Listen to her story and please on’t stop talking about Iran.
💔pic.twitter.com/cRhk95uaa7

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 24, 2026

If you subscribe to the Free Press, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (here). She was named by them, along with Maajid Nawaz, as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

“…the SPLC chose to publish the names, faces, and affiliations of 15 people it accused of ‘anti-Muslim extremism.’ The list endangered everyone it named. I know the threat of Islamist violence all too well. In 2004, a jihadist named Mohammed Bouyeri murdered my friend and… pic.twitter.com/FRtsBvDhDQ

— Eli Steele (@Hebro_Steele) April 24, 2026

From Malcolm: the difference between cats and d*gs:

Difference between dogs and cats..🐈🐾🐶😅

📹destynieIyn pic.twitter.com/HdoKQ4KunI

— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) March 18, 2026

One from my feed: Hem and a beloved cat:

American author Ernest Hemingway was undoubtedly one of the most famous cat lovers in the literary world, alongside Mark Twain, who adored cats so much that he avoided people who didn’t share his affection and even rented cats when he couldn’t bring his own on trips.

Many are… pic.twitter.com/Inrw3VHmVW

— Archaeo – Histories (@archeohistories) April 25, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This German Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was about nine years old. https://t.co/Iu4P39I21r

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 25, 2026

And one from Matthew, at a science festival in Chile: morning on the Space Shuttle:

"Day 068, Orbit 1054 — Opening the shutters in the morning: what a beautiful way to start the day! 🌍"– @esa.int astronaut Sophie Adenot #εpsilon 🎥 NASA/ESA

— ESA Exploration (@exploration.esa.int) 2026-04-22T12:38:22.088Z

Welcome to Thursday, April 23, 2026 and World Table Tennis Day. It’s a good day to watch the excellent but not world-class movie “Marty Supreme“, about the sport and a down-at-the-heels master of it.

Here’s a video of one person’s top ten table tennis players, with each getting about a minute. The caliber of play is amazing, and doubles competitions look quite hard!

It’s also English Language Day, German Beer Day, Lover’s Day (but which lover?), National Cherry Cheesecake Day, National English Muffin Day, National Picnic Day, Talk Like Shakespeare Day, and World Laboratory Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*From this morning’s report at It’s Noon in Israel. (There’s more, too–about a rift in Iran’s leadership):

It’s Thursday, April 23, and the war with Iran is no longer about oil or gas; it is a battle over a single resource: time. The question that will determine the fate of the Middle East is who controls the clock, who can afford to wait, and who is simply out of time?

Currently, the Ayatollahs boast that their dictatorial regime will allow them to hold out indefinitely, while the closure of the Strait of Hormuz imposes an expiration date on U.S. aggression. Meanwhile, Trump claims to be in an equally comfortable position: Iranian ports are blockaded, some commercial ships are still navigating the strait despite the closure, and fresh U.S. military assets are on their way.

The question is, who’s bluffing?

The reality is both. But Iran’s position is significantly weaker.

Every American president sits on a ticking clock, and with the midterm elections approaching, Trump has less time than most. But Iran is bleeding an estimated $400 million a day to the blockade. It’s true that the U.S. is also sustaining high costs to forward-deploy its forces, alongside the strategic opportunity cost of their absence in other theaters. The difference is that Washington can afford it: the Iranian annual budget sits around $56 billion; the U.S. budget is over $6 trillion.

It all comes down to the blockade. Rather than risk casualties to seize Kharg Island or force immediate results through an aerial campaign, the U.S. military can cruise safely out of range in the Arabian Sea, intercept the occasional breakout vessel, and simply wait for economic isolation to do its work.

While Washington holds the front door closed, Tehran’s most crucial ally is starting to push them harder from behind. Xi Jinping is fighting a clock of his own as China’s oil reserves rapidly dry up. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Iran accepted the Pakistani-mediated ceasefire following a last-minute intervention by China, which asked Iran “to show flexibility and defuse tensions.” But that was the rhetoric of a China that had an extra half-month of oil reserves compared to today. I doubt their words will be as soft now.

The Iranians certainly believe the blockade is effective. Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf recently compared the strategy to the bombing campaign and demanded its cessation as a precondition for continuing the talks in Islamabad.

Tehran has another, separate crisis draining its time reserves. As a senior Pakistani source recently confirmed to the U.S., a significant rift has paralyzed the regime. On one side are the Revolutionary Guards and the Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, representing the uncompromising extreme; on the other is the civil-political echelon led by Ghalibaf. Presiding above this fracture is the severely injured Mojtaba Khamenei, whom both sides defer to as the final authority. Because of his grievous wounds and the constant threat of Israeli assassination, simply communicating with the supreme leader has become a lengthy, complex logistical nightmare.

*On Tuesday, Vice-President Vance canceled his trip to Pakistan to continue brokering a peace deal with Iran.  But Pakistan remains hopeful that the talks will go on.

Pakistan had hoped for another windfall of global good will as it prepared to host a new round of peace talks between the U.S. and Iran this week, locking down its capital for the second time in a month in the hope that the warring sides could make a deal. But this time, after the principal players were no-shows, disappointment has set in and businesses are counting their losses.

. . . Pakistani officials say they remain hopeful both sides could agree to de-escalate and meet again. An advanced U.S. security team sent to protect a senior American delegation remains on the ground, said people familiar with the matter.

. . .“Both countries are back on the brink, there is no getting away from that,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistan diplomat who was twice the country’s ambassador to the U.S. “The question is how to get them to step back from the brink.”

Pakistani officials are still speaking with both sides and pushing for flexibility. “They haven’t given up by any stretch of the imagination,” she said.

. . .There were glimmers of that again this week. Trump said he had unilaterally extended the cease-fire, which was supposed to end Wednesday, at the request of Munir and Sharif, and the American president has continued to heap praise on Pakistan for its mediation efforts; Iran has said it isn’t bound by Trump’s announcement, with officials saying the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports means the cease-fire had already lapsed.

Yet the prevailing feeling in the Pakistani capital is that it is a city stuck in limbo. Authorities have maintained security measures for now, given the logistical challenges—and expense—of withdrawing the security net and having to reimpose it should talks suddenly materialize.

I have stopped trying to make useful comments about this war. The two sides are far apart, and Trump is chaotic.  All I can say is that there should be no moratorium on Iran’s attempt to make nuclear weapons: there should be a blanket prohibition forever. And one of my most fervent wishes—that the Iranian people could somehow take control of their government and eliminate the theocracy—seems to have dropped off Trump’s agenda after he deluded himself (or us) that there has been “real regime change.”

*Speaking of “regime change,” the NYT describes how IRGC generals have replaced the Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei (the son of the late Ayatollah) as the figures running Iran (article archived here).  But they imply that Mojtaba is still calling the shots.

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the son, is an elusive figure who has not been seen and whose voice has not been heard since he was appointed in March. Instead, a battle-hardened collective of commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and those aligned with them are the key decision makers on matters of security, war and diplomacy.

“Mojtaba is managing the country as though he is the director of the board,” said Abdolreza Davari, a politician who served as senior adviser to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was president and knows Mr. Khamenei.

“He relies heavily on the advice and guidance of the board members, and they collectively make all the decisions,” Mr. Davari said in a phone interview from Tehran. “The generals are the board members.”

. . . Mr. Khamenei, who was selected by a council of senior clerics as the new supreme leader, has been in hiding since American and Israeli forces bombed his father’s compound on Feb. 28, where he also lived with his family. His father, wife and son were all killed. Access to him is extremely difficult and limited now. He is surrounded mostly by a team of doctors and medical staff who are treating the injuries he sustained in the airstrikes.

Senior commanders of the Guards and senior government officials do not visit him, fearing that Israel may trace them to him and kill him. President Masoud Pezeshkian, who is also a heart surgeon, and the minister of health have both been involved in his care.

Though Mr. Khamenei was gravely wounded, he is mentally sharp and engaged, according to four senior Iranian officials familiar with his health. One leg was operated on three times, and he is awaiting a prosthetic. He had surgery on one hand and is slowly regaining function. His face and lips have been burned severely, making it difficult for him to speak, the officials said, adding that, eventually, he will need plastic surgery.

. . . The combination of concern for his safety, his injuries and the sheer challenge of reaching him has resulted in Mr. Khamenei’s delegating decision making to the generals, at least for now. Reformist factions, as well as ultra-hard-liners, are still involved in political discussions. But analysts say that Mr. Khamenei’s close ties to the generals, whom he grew up with when he volunteered to fight in the Iran-Iraq war as a teenager, have made them the dominant force.

Generals, schmenerals  Whether they run the country or whether the theocrats run the country, it’s still hard-line authoritarians.  That is the “regime change” that Trump says he’s effected.

Of course the sources, “senior Iranian officials” would say that he’s still “managing the country.”

*One of the most amazingly persistent bis of “fake news” is the Canadian fixation on the unsubstantiated claim that 215 indigenous (“First Nations”) children were killed (or dued) and were secretly buried at a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Jonathan Kay recounts the story at Quillette, which speaks very poorly about Canadian journalism and its “search for truth” (h/t Luana). You won’t see this story in the American MSM. Tha article is archived free here.

As just about every Liberal in the Palais des congrès audience would have known (or at the very least, should have known), those “215 kids” risen from the dead in Kamloops are fictional characters. They never existed “in flesh,” even if their “spirit” once felt very real to Canadians, thanks to a nationwide social panic that spread in mid-2021 following false claims that 215 “unmarked graves” had been found on the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in the aforementioned city of Kamloops.

The original 27 May 2021 announcement convulsed Canadian society for many weeks. The Canadian Press called it the “Story of the Year.” Justin Trudeau lowered flags on federal buildings for almost six months, and had himself photographed bowing his head and taking a knee, BLM-style. He also authorized hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Indigenous groups—including $12.1-million to the Kamloops First Nation alone—so they could find, exhume, and identify the children whose bodies (we were told) had been tossed anonymously into the earth by murderous white teachers and administrators.

In the four years and eleven months that have passed since then, not a single actual grave (let alone human remains) have been found at any of the identified sites. It turns out that back in 2021, no one—not the Kamloops band leadership, not Canadian journalists, not Justin Trudeau—had bothered to educate themselves about the limits of the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology that had been the basis of the unmarked-graves claims.

GPR technology doesn’t provide X-ray-type images of what lies beneath the earth’s surface, as Canadians had been led to believe. Rather, it identifies sub-surface soil dislocations. Such dislocations can signify graves, but also many other things—including pipes, irrigation networks, rocks, and tree roots.

It so happens that the area in question had formerly been used as an orchard when the Kamloops residential school was operating—a place where trees were planted in neat rows, much like graves. And one might think that would provide a more likely explanation than—oh, say—the hitherto unreported slaughter of 215 unidentified children.

. . . One might also think that the people who’d spread this misinformation would now be humbled, abashed, and perhaps even contrite. If so, one would be wrong. While the CBC belatedly admitted that no “unmarked graves” have been found in Kamloops, most media outlets and politicians have simply gone silent on the issue altogether, hoping that history will forget their role in signal-boosting fake news.

and here’s the kicker:

Moreover, Deer’s gauzy language about the invisible “spirits” of those 215 (non-existent) children captured one of the fallback claims that public figures have been making in recent days: that it doesn’t actually matter if there are real bodies under the ground—because what we should truly focus on is the “symbolic” idea that such graves would represent.

When the facts don’t support your ideology, simply say that the facts don’t matter: what matters is that there was (or is) still oppression.

Canada should be ashamed at how its politicians and media have quietly dropped the story when they couldn’t substantiate it, but won’t even mention the lack of evidence. Now, it’s possible that there may be graves, but until they find them (and they’re not looking), people should, as Archie Bunker told Edith, “stifle themselves.”

*The Harvard Graduate Student Union, part of the United Auto Workers (!) is in its second day of a general strike. There’s a lot of information at the Crimson, including this:

Harvard’s graduate student union began its second day on strike Wednesday morning, with roughly 20 picketers gathering at the Science Center as the walkout continued.

Around 8:30 a.m., demonstrators assembled in the Science Center plaza, where they set up a tent and began circling outside the building’s main entrance.

The strike centers on disputes over pay, workplace protections, and benefits. Union leaders have said some graduate workers earn as little as $26,300 annually and are calling for a $55,000 base pay floor, along with raises tied to inflation. They are also seeking stronger protections for international students, an independent process for handling harassment and discrimination complaints, and the restoration of benefits that expired with the previous contract in June 2025. (Harvard, however, has pushed back on the union’s characterization of compensation, saying that Ph.D. students receive at least $425,000 in total benefits over a minimum of five years.)

Benefits not mentioned above include restoring child care and medical expenses that were in the contract that expired last June.

Union members – including teaching fellows, course assistants, and graduate research assistants – have paused teaching and research duties as the strike continues.

Harvard has not scheduled additional bargaining sessions beyond April 28. Union leaders said Tuesday that Harvard has yet to reengage with the union since the walkout began.

Given that the median income for all Americans is about $63,000, and many Americans get neither childcare nor medical insurance with their jobs, these seem like extraordinarily high demands for work that is not only not full time, but also is part of their education as academics. Not to mention that while getting a Harard Ph.D., students already receive over $400,000 along with their prestigious degree. It’s not like they’re making cars or anything.

*In 2012, based on his osculation of religion and increasingly bizarre takes on evolution (see here and here, for example),, I predicted that paleontologist Simon Conway Morris would win the Templeton Prize within a decade (it’s now $1.4 million bucks). Well, I was off, but by only four years.  Although respectable scientists have won the Prize without osculating gods (e.g., Jane Goodall), Conway Morris, a Christian, was awarded the big bucks this week (h/t Robert).

The president of the John Templeton Foundation, Timothy Dalrymple, said: “What makes Conway Morris abundantly deserving of the Templeton Prize are his groundbreaking advancements on the theoretical foundations of evolutionary theory alongside his commitment to addressing the philosophical implications of that work for humankind.”

. . . Professor Conway Morris said: “As somebody once said — ‘Be careful when you step on to the unending road.’ A Ph.D. on fossil worms might logically lead to fieldwork in Greenland, but to an absorption with evolutionary convergence and thence the Fermi Paradox? And still the road stretches on, now to the question of human uniqueness and, I suspect, way beyond.”

As I’ve noted, Conway Morris sees evolutionary convergence (the arriving of different animal and plant groups at similar phenotypic “solutions” to environmental challenges) as signs of a divine hand behind evolution. He is a theistic evolutionist.

A professing Christian, Professor Conway Morris is highly critical of materialism and reductionism, and has participated in many public debates on religion and science. His study of the patterns and processes of life on earth has, in recent years, led to a keen interest in astrobiology — “the study of things that do not exist”, as he says.

His criticality of materialism and reductionism is only because he sees a divine hand behind evolution. Earlier in his career, Conway Morris made big contributions to paleontology, particularly in early life around the time of the Cambrian Explosion. But he went off the rails and his recent books have been osculations of God as a dab hand in evolution.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron have an arcane discussion:

Hili: What color was Sisyphus’s stone?
Szaron: Blue, the gods do not value gray.

In Polish:

Hili: Jaki kolor miał kamień Syzyfa?
Szaron: Błękitny, bogowie nie cenią szarości.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From Stacy:

From Animal Antics:

From Masih: more death sentences for Iranian protestors:

Where’s the outcry?👇 https://t.co/U8XWpLGiTP

— Ambassador Mike Waltz (@michaelgwaltz) April 22, 2026

From Luana, who hopes that many people see this (you can read the article here):

Hamas terrorists are gang-raping displaced widows in tents in Gaza. But when it gets reported up the chain, leadership orders silence. The media has largely ignored it too.

The Daily Mail’s @NatalieLisbona obtained video testimony from inside Gaza. A Qassam Brigades commander… pic.twitter.com/nB9GDmoHhR

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) April 18, 2026

From Barry, who adds this: “But can it be a ‘pet’? I don’t understand why it’s in someone’s home. And as someone commented, ‘How long until it starts chewing off the stairway railings for wood supply?’“

This beaver was orphaned and rescued as a newborn. See the incredible instinct to build a dam, even though no parent has ever passed this information to it. [📹 hmuraco]Original post

— Massimo (mirror) (@rainmaker1973-m.bsky.social) 2026-04-22T18:00:44.722Z

From Simon, a NYT correction. The Mets have the second biggest salary budget in Major League baseball but a horrible win-loss record:

One from my feed. I’ve posted this before, but it’s well worth seeing again:

Lithuanian composer and conductor Mindaugas Piečaitis, directs his orchestra on the notes of Nora the cat playing the piano.

She earns a standing ovation.pic.twitter.com/DhzvHvb2hZ

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 22, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Czech Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was fifteen years old. https://t.co/VJmGx4pTAI

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 23, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb. LOOK AT THIS SQUIRREL! It’s a thread and I’ve put in two posts:

The Tufted ground squirrel (Rheithrosciurus macrotis) is a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in floof.Let's start with the *FLOOF* & talk about why they're called "VAMPIRE SQUIRRELS" last.They have the largest tail: body size ratio of any mammal on Earth: the tail is *130%* the size the body.

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2025-04-29T12:51:59.842Z

They're only found on the island of Borneo, which is why they're an enigma. They have many properties SHARED with squirrels from Europe & America (baculum, grooved teeth), but almost none of the characteristics of Asian squirrels.Their closest living relatives are in South America.

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2025-04-29T12:51:59.843Z

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Gjornade dal gof” in Friulian): April 22, 2026 and, of course, that means it’s Earth Day, now celebrating its 56th birthday—but who remembers? Here is the unofficial Earth Day flag, noted by Wikipedia as created by John McConnell and including The Blue Marble photo taken by the crew of Apollo 17:

There is a Google Doodle for Earth Day; click the screenshot to see where it goes:

It’s also “In God We Trust” Day, marking the day in 1864 when Congress passed an act allowing that religious phrase to appear on U.S. coins. Finally, it’s National Jelly Bean Day, and here are two fun jelly bean facts from Wikipedia:

The “jelly bean rule“ is a rule put forth by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on May 19, 1994.

It says that just because foods are low in fat, cholesterol, and sodium, they cannot claim to be “healthy” unless they contain at least 10 percent of the Daily Value (DV) of: vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, protein, fiber, or iron. The FDA also made a policy that companies could not fortify foods with the sole intent of making that claim.

and

In United States slang during the 1910s and early 1920s, a “jellybean” or “jelly-bean” was a young man who dressed stylishly but had little else to recommend him, similar to the older terms dandy and fop. F. Scott Fitzgerald published a story, The Jelly-Bean, about such a character in 1920.

The next time conversation lags at a gathering, just ask people what the connection is between F. Scott Fitzgerald and jelly beans. You’ll be the life of the party!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

UPDATE: Iran apparently fired on two ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

*Trump has extended the cease-fire with Iran indefinitely as talks have gone nowhere:

President Trump said that the U.S. will extend its cease-fire with Iran and continue the blockade of the country’s ports until its leaders present “a unified proposal.” The move came after Vice President JD Vance paused plans to travel to Pakistan on Tuesday for negotiations with Iran over ending the war, highlighting uncertainty about possible talks. Regional mediators led by Pakistan are racing to try to convince Iran to join the talks, and neither Washington nor Tehran have informed the mediators the talks will be cancelled.

Earlier on Tuesday, U.S. forces boarded an oil tanker in the Indo-Pacific region that was previously sanctioned for working with Iran, the first such move outside the Middle East in connection with the war. Trump, in an interview with CNBC, said he wants to make sure the threat from Iran is ended even if it means the war doesn’t wrap up quickly. “I have all the time in the world,” he said.

“Based on the fact that the Government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so and, upon the request of Field Marshal Asim Munir, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal. I have therefore directed our Military to continue the Blockade and, in all other respects, remain ready and able, and will therefore extend the Ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump didn’t set an end date for the new cease-fire extension. A previous two-week cease-fire was due to expire Wednesday evening, he said previously, and had signaled earlier this week that he was unlikely to extend it.

The question is this: who does the extension help more: Iran or America? As gas prices rise and Americans get weary of war, it hurts the U.S.  But as Iran loses its main source of income, it’s bad for them.  And Trump doesn’t have all the time in the world: he has about 2 years and six months (or six months if you count of Republican losses in the midterms).

*Imagine what would happen if two members of Hamas made their way into Israel and one photographed another smashing the door of a synagogue. They’d be heroes! But when one IDF soldier photographed another smashing the head of a Jesus statue in southern Lebanon, it gave the whole world an excuse to damn Israel (the NYT reported it in detail), even though this is totally atypical behavior for the IDF, reflecting a couple of bad actors.  And, sure enough, the two IDF soldiers were jailed:

Two Israeli soldiers have been pulled from combat duty and given 30-day jail sentences after one photographed the other swinging what appeared to be a sledgehammer at the head of a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon, the Israeli military said on Tuesday.

Other troops who stood by but did nothing to intervene, the military said, have also been summoned and could face disciplinary action.

The military replaced the damaged statue with a gleaming new sculpture of the crucifixion of Christ and released a photo of it.

The extraordinarily swift administration of military justice by Israel was a tacit acknowledgment of the reputational damage the incident had done to the country, more than the seriousness of the crime.

The incident occurred in Debl, a Christian village in Lebanon a few miles from the Israeli border. The village is in an area that the Israeli military seized as a buffer zone before a cease-fire with Hezbollah went into effect late last week.

The photograph surfaced online Sunday, sparking widespread outrage in Israel and beyond, and demands for harsh punishment of the soldiers.

Experts said the act of vandalism reflected both ignorance and a growing hostility to Christians among some Israeli Jews, who see Christianity as a form of idolatry or Christian proselytizing as a threat.

The incident also prompted immediate and profuse apologies from Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its foreign minister, Gideon Saar.

In a statement Tuesday, Israel’s military expressed its “deep regret” and said that its chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, had condemned the incident as “a moral failure.”

I’m no expert, but this is the first I’ve heard of a fulminating hatred of Christianity among Israeli Jews. At any rate, it shows the very high (and double) standards to which the IDF and Israel are held compared to other countries.  One or two rotten apples in the military suddenly tars the whole enterprise. But of course that is the way it has always gone.

*This is a surprise: The U.S. Department of Justice has charged the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with financial crimes, namely defrauding donors by misusing their money. As you may remember, the SPLC was once a respectable organization uncovering and enforcing civil rights for all groups. But it then fell on hard times, with accusations of misusing funds and selectively leveling charges based on ideology,  There were mass layoffs and the leadership quit or was fired.  The latest news, however, seems to be a very hard blow (article archived here):

The Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that has long tracked hate groups, on Tuesday with financial crimes, accusing it of defrauding donors by using their money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations.

At a news conference announcing the charges, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that from 2014 to 2023, the group made payments totaling more than $3 million to people who were affiliated with extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America. The law center, he added, was “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism, but funding it.”

The indictment, however, offers little to support the notion that the group’s payments to informants was meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated.

That last paragraph, however, seems less than accurate in light of this:

Prosecutors describe how one informant, which the law center refers to as a field source, “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the S.P.L.C.”

That rally included torch-wielding marchers chanting antisemitic slogans, and violent clashes that culminated with one participant ramming his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman and leaving at least 19 others injured.

The informant “made racist postings under the supervision of the S.P.L.C. and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees,” the charging document said. Between 2015 and 2023, the informant received more than $270,000 from the group, the indictment said.

Is that not helping the organization?

The center faces charges of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. No individuals were charged in the indictment, though Mr. Blanche said the investigation was continuing. He accused the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”

Luana sent a tweet thread with more information, if it can be trusted:

Context: The SPLC spent more than $3 million in donor funds on informants from 2014-2023.

The crux of the DOJ’s case is that the SPLC did so duplicitously in violation of the law. pic.twitter.com/eo7dp35YXC

— Patrick Casey (@restoreorderusa) April 21, 2026

That thread also alleges that the SPLC set up dummy corporations to funnel the money to a series of extremist organizations. I guess this all depends on whether it is considered illegal to use donor money to pay off informants, especially if the dosh somehow furthered the goals of the organizations that the SPLC was infiltrating. We shall see.

*The Free Press describes a new literary genre, “Gazology,” in which, says author Matti Friedman, the whole world is seen through the lens of the war between Israel and Hamas, and to the detriment of Israel.  Whole sections of bookstores in the West are devoted to these tomes.  Here’s one example:

It’s likely that much Western culture, journalism, and politics in the coming years will be downstream of these books and the ideology behind them. Students in disciplines from anthropology to medicine will be assigned these works and invited to see the world’s problems through the lens of “Gaza.” For this reason, the genre is important. What follows is a survey of five representative samples of the volumes in question, in an attempt to sketch the contours of this expanding body of writing and to understand what it is trying to say.

. . .The memorable cover of the genre’s most popular title, and the first one I read, shows a stylized girl with a bomb about to drop on her head. The author, Omar El Akkad, was born in Egypt and immigrated to Canada, where he reported for The Globe and Mail before moving to the United States. He’s now an American citizen living in Oregon.

In the pages of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad watches the war in Gaza unfold in portrayals on television and online, describing it as an era-defining evil that people will eventually claim to have opposed, like the crimes of the Nazis or the conquistadors. The war resonates for him as someone living with the displacement of his own migration from the Islamic world as a teen, with a heightened sensitivity to racism, and with the abiding discomfort of a Muslim man living in North America.

The book’s title, particularly the word this, led me to expect an account of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, or the war itself, but the strangest aspect of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the author’s slim interest in any of those topics. We follow his travels in Oregon, and in Montreal. He listens to Nirvana. His backyard deck collapses in a way that feels emotionally significant, an episode that gets more space in the book than the entire ideology of Hamas—including the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews in pursuit of the supremacy of Islam—which is never mentioned at all. He writes sentences like “We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance,” and “Fear obscures the necessity of its causing.” His daughter, we learn, “turns seven soon, a hundred in dragon years. She is made of dreaming.” The book won last year’s National Book Award for nonfiction.

El Akkad complains about racism from officials on the U.S.-Canada border, about the hardships of the writer’s life, and about the immoral Israeli investments of people who once gave him a Canadian book prize worth $100,000, which he doesn’t mention giving back. “I’ve sat through a wildly uncomfortable book tour interview once after I joked that I write all my novels in Arabic and then run them through Google Translate, and the interviewer believed me,” he tells us. We’re meant to sneer at this prejudice and sympathize with its victim, but why wouldn’t the interviewer believe him? And why does an author claiming to have discovered the age’s defining evil seem to be concerned primarily with himself? This was confusing at first, but as I read Gazology more deeply, I realized this approach is a characteristic of the genre: In these books, Gaza is not a subject but a stage.

The author gives no indication of ever having set foot in Gaza or in Israel, and when he talks about witnessing events, the recurring phrase is “I watch footage.” Some events are “witnessed” in this fashion—that is, via images that are subject to Hamas censorship and intimidation in Gaza, often curated by Western activists practicing journalism as agitprop, and then supercharged by the various Qatari, Chinese, and Russian information campaigns bending our online algorithms. Other events are not witnessed but ignored to the extent possible, most notably the October 7 massacre that began the war. In what turns out to be another feature of the genre, El Akkad sidesteps the butchery of that day by homing in on one false story promulgated after the attack about Israeli babies who were beheaded or put in an oven. That didn’t happen. But a reader doesn’t learn what did happen: namely, a premeditated mass murder committed by teams of terrorists going house to house through Israeli communities, burning families in their bedrooms, kidnapping toddlers and grandparents, and gunning down more than 350 young people at a music festival. To a reader of this book the motivation behind the attack remains mysterious. Though it was carried out by the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by the Arabic acronym Hamas, the words Islam or Islamic appear in the entire book a total of four times. The word genocide, on the other hand, appears more than 40 times.

There are four more examples, of course. The reason for the popularity of this genre, of course, is because Gazans and Palestinians are seen as The Colonized, people of color who have been victimized by “white adjacent” Jews.  It’s the world turned upside down

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Princess demands her due:

Andrzej: What are you doing here?
Hili: Waiting for applause.

i

In Polish:

Ja: Co tu robisz?
Hili: Czekam na oklaski.

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

From CinEmma:

From FB, source unknown:

From Give Me a Sign. Even I am not enough of a curmudgeon to carry around a bunch of these pre-made signs:

From Masih; another political prisoner executed in Iran:

Today, right after the call of “Allahu Akbar” at dawn, the regime in Iran, placed a noose around this young man’s neck and kicked the chair from under his feet, so he would struggle, suffocate, and die.
Yes this is happening in 21st century. They executed him because he went to… pic.twitter.com/4uAcRRVT9L

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 21, 2026

From Luana, who says that this book was “banished from Amazon for telling a dystopian story of France after immigration in the distant future”.  This article gives more information; the book definitely appeals to the Right, but Amazon is not supposed to censor books based on ideology. 

In an egregious act of censorship, Amazon has removed @VaubanBooks‘ new edition of The Camp of the Saints, by the prize-winning French novelist Jean Raspail, from its US site. Since I wrote the critical introduction for the new edition, this turns me into a banned writer!

It had… https://t.co/S0t1m2PZa1 pic.twitter.com/yEXRmgkgo0

— Nathan Pinkoski (@NPinkoski) April 20, 2026

From Malcolm: orange cats!

It’s always the orange cats. Love them all. pic.twitter.com/ZAKjpaklV1

— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) March 9, 2026

One from my feed; parrots share the wealth:

Scientists taught parrots the concept of money, and what happened next shocked everyone pic.twitter.com/GV8HEuiq5h

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 22, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz She was nine years old. https://t.co/t0VSPqs3XR

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 22, 2026

And Matthew posts a picture of his cat Harry:

Harry.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-04-21T10:45:53.374Z

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, April 21, 2026, and National Chickpea Day, honoring one of the main ingredients of hummus. a delicious dish, and good for you, too. When I was in Israel I spent a lot of time trying to find the best place for hummus, which to me was Hummus Ben Sira in Jerusalem. I don’t have my photos of the place here, but here’s what hummus looks like: superb with lots of hot pita bread and raw onions and pickles:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 21 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The WSJ says that Trump now has five options vis-à-vis Iran:

1. Stick to his guns: Trump has presented Iran with demands to freeze enrichment of uranium for at least 20 years and remove highly enriched uranium from its territory, as well as fully end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. These are red lines for the president, senior administration officials said.

Weeks of U.S. and Israeli strikes devastated Iran’s military and the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports is ratcheting up pressure on an already weakened Iranian economy, administration officials said. But so far, the Iranian government has refused to ease its blockade of the strait and signaled it will not abandon its nuclear enrichment program.

If Trump refuses to budge on these demands, there’s a chance that Iran relents in negotiations—but also a risk Iran refuses and war breaks out again.

2. Buy some time: Both sides could walk away from the talks in Islamabad without a final deal, but at least a “memorandum of understanding” that outlines the broad parameters of what an understanding could entail in the future and an agreement to extend the 10-day cease-fire in the war again. This would buy time for more diplomacy.

3. Compromise: There are ample ways to hash out a compromise, officials and analysts said. One idea negotiators are floating: Iran agrees to a 20-year freeze on enriching uranium to higher levels, but after the first 10 years can conduct nuclear-related research or produce a modest amount of low-enriched uranium for at least another 10 years.

Other variations of compromise could include Iran agreeing to give up its stockpile of 60 percent or 20 percent enriched uranium, but keeping its stockpile of lower-enriched uranium.

It’s unclear if Trump would accept compromise proposals here. There’s no discounting the likelihood Iran secretly enriches to weapons-grade levels again in the future.

4. Restart war: Trump has warned that he isn’t inclined to extend the cease-fire again if talks in Pakistan fail. Renewing the war would open Iran to another round of devastating strikes, but it carries risks for the U.S., too.

The war is controversial at home, opening rifts within the Republican Party and driving up energy prices and inflation across the U.S. Defense officials have also raised fears of the U.S. running low on critical munitions in the Iran war that would be needed for the U.S. military in other parts of the world.

5. Walk away: Trump’s fifth option to just walk away from the whole endeavor is the most unlikely, U.S. officials and people close to the White House said, but it’s a fear that senior Arab and European officials have raised in private discussions among one another after the first round of talks failed.

*Carl Zimmer at the NYT reports on a new Current ‘Biology paper with a stunning result.  A male kea (Nestor notabilis), the world’s only alpine parrot (From New Zealand) lost his upper beak, probably in a rat trap.  That injury would normally prove deadly, but Bruce the Kea has learned to compensate for the loss in two ways. It was known previusly that Bruce, who lives in a wildlife reserve, was already famous for using a tool to groom himself: he put a pebble between his tongue and lower beak and groomed his feathers that way. Now he has a new behavior, one he’s used to become the dominant bird in the group:

Last year, Bruce delivered a second surprise.

Male keas fight for dominance. Those who lose fall to the bottom of the circus hierarchy, and they experience stress as a result. The alpha male ends up with the lowest stress levels.

To measure the stress among the nine male keas at the reserve, Dr. Taylor and his colleagues analyzed certain hormones in their blood. Much to their surprise, the male kea with the lowest levels was Bruce.

“We never expected him to be right at the top of the males,” said Alexander Grabham, a zoologist at the University of Canterbury and an author of the study.

The surprise prompted Dr. Grabham and his colleagues to look more closely. Reviewing videos, they discovered that Bruce had risen to the top with a new style of kea combat.

Male keas typically bite one another around the neck. Bruce can’t bite; instead, he has learned to joust. He rushes his opponents and slams his lower beak into their bodies.

Jousting proved a clever strategy. Bruce consistently won his fights, and the other males deferred to him. One perk of becoming the alpha male: Bruce got to visit the bird feeders first.

“Nobody ever tried to jump him or displace him,” Dr. Grabham said.

After enjoying a meal, Bruce permits lower-ranked males to preen his feathers and clean his bottom beak. “And when Bruce is done, he’ll give a kick or a little joust to say, ‘Right, that’s it, I’m done,’” said Dr. Grabham. “That to me is a sign of dominance.”

Here’s a video of Bruce jousting:

. . . and Bruce using a pebble to clean himself:

*The NYT Style Magzine‘s pretentiously named “How to be cultured” segment gives the opinions of actors Marcia ‘Gay Harden, Stephen Root, and Wendell Pierce about “11 unforgettabls film performances.”  (Article archived here.) How many have you seen?

1. The supporting cast of “The Wizard of Oz.” (1939)
2. Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946_
3. Bette Davis in “All About Eve” (1950)
4. Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1950)
5. Faye Dunaway in “Chinatown” (1974)
6. Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975)
7. Meryl Streep in “Sophie’s Choice” (1982)
8. James Earl Jones in “Fences” (1987)
9. Cynthia Erivo in “Wicked” (2024)
10. Eva Victor in “Sorry Baby” (2025)
11. Michael B. Jordan in “Sinners” (2025)

I’ve seen all but #9 and #10, but this list is for punters, containing as it does three movies from the last year.  And, for crying out loud, how about Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Robert DeNiro in “Raging Bull,” Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca,” or, if you want to go modern, Jessie Buckley in “Hamnet”.  Oh, and of course Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia.”  Don’t take your lessons on “How to be cultured” from the NYT!

*I’m getting stiff in my old age, so of course I clicked on a WaPo article called, “Just 2 minutes a day of this type of exercise may help you live longer.”  The key, or so DOCTORS SAY *the same ones who told us not to drink wine, perhaps) is to up the intensity of your exercise for brief periods. (The article is archived for free here.)

A recent study in the European Heart Journal looked at people who didn’t engage in formal exercise and found that just one to two minutes a day of vigorous activity, accumulated in short bursts, was associated with a significantly lower risk of chronic disease and death.

Not a workout class. Not a training plan. Just everyday life, done with a bit more intensity.

Exercise physiologists call this vigorous physical activity, or VPA. Sometimes referred to as vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA), it includes things most people don’t think of as exercise: climbing stairs quickly, carrying heavy groceries, walking uphill with purpose or hurrying to catch a train.

These moments are brief, but they matter. Huffing and puffing, even for short periods, can shape long-term health.

This is not the same as high-intensity interval training, or HIIT. HIIT is structured and deliberate, performed in an exercise setting. VPA is opportunistic. One builds fitness and the other reinforces it throughout the day.

Two minutes can sound almost too simple. But physiologically, it makes sense. When you push your body harder, even briefly, you activate systems that don’t get challenged during lower-intensity movement. Your heart rate climbs, your muscles recruit more fibers, your mitochondria (which are like the battery packs to your cells) proliferate and your metabolism shifts. These adaptations drive improvements in cardiovascular fitness, strength and resilience.

The good news is that you don’t need long workouts or extreme training to tap into these benefits. Even small, manageable doses of intense movement can help counter the effects of aging. That could mean burpees at the gym, if that’s your thing. But even if it’s not, short bursts of effort in everyday life still make a difference.

For Joan [a walker], we made a simple adjustment. She kept her daily walks but added short intervals. Every few minutes, she picked up the pace for 20 to 30 seconds — not a sprint, but a brisk effort that made it harder to speak in full sentences. Then she recovered and repeated.

At first, it felt uncomfortable. That’s the point. Intensity should feel like work. But within a few weeks, she noticed a difference. She felt stronger. Her energy improved. Even her regular walking pace became easier.

As I tell my patients, “Pushing yourself means getting comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s the only way to grow. Mentally, physically and physiologically.”

I already do this; I’m gonna live forever!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is and Andrzej differ about Nature, with Andrzej touting its advantages of “love, beauty, and passion.”

Hili: Nature is cruel.
Andrzej: Yes, but it also has certain advantages.

In Polish:

Hili: Natura jest okrutna.
Ja: Tak, ale ma również pewne zalety.

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

From CinEmma:

From Things With Faces:

From The Language Nerds:

Masih disses the Democrats, save the renegade Senator John Fetterman (whom she calls “the Big Man with Hoodie”), for their attitude towards Iran:

ONE OF THE ONLY DEMOCRATS TALKING ABOUT TRUTH

WATCH: Iranian Activist and Journalist @AlinejadMasih says ‘thank you’ to Dem @SenFettermanPA for exposing Iran’s evils, supporting military action to prevent nuclear threat pic.twitter.com/G2VkF9VfxS

— The Story (@TheStoryFNC) April 20, 2026

From Luana, who says, “Chicago is screwed.” Indeed. This is an arrant violation of institutional neutrality in Chicago’s schools (read the article):

Chicago Public Schools declare May 1 a ‘day of civil action’ for students https://t.co/aqe70IeALr pic.twitter.com/fuBGuKZRiG

— New York Post (@nypost) April 20, 2026

From Malcolm: one minute of introverted cats:

Introvert car pic.twitter.com/pJm3COUpbd

— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) April 1, 2026

Two from my feed.  This first one is of course AI, but well done–and creepy:

Which bed are you picking?pic.twitter.com/zblmiFVcG2

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 20, 2026

A lovely murmuration:

Incredible starling murmuration gracing the Italian skies over Sassari, Sardinia. 🇮🇹 pic.twitter.com/Myz1femvfQ

— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) April 20, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was twelve years old. https://t.co/pQIU4y5K3a

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 21, 2026

From Matthew, the first post on a thread about ‘Able Seacat Simon. Below that is an audio version:

The Dickin Medal is the highest award that can be issued to animals in British military service. Bearing the words "We Also Serve" it has been awarded 75 times since its creation in 1943.Only one cat has ever received the award. This is the story of Able Seacat Simon, of HMS Amethyst. 🧵 1/25

— John Bull (@garius.bsky.social) 2024-08-06T12:36:52.079Z

Just to note that if you'd prefer an audio version of the story of Able Seacat Simon, the only feline recipient of the Dickin Medal (animal Victoria Cross) then I did one on Youtube a while back.That's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v5N…

— John Bull (@garius.bsky.social) 2024-08-06T13:14:11.179Z