Category: Hili Dialogue

Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 19, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, March 19, 2026, and it’s National Poultry Day, and you know what “poultry” includes:

Today we celebrate poultry: domesticated birds that are raised for their meat and eggs, and sometimes also for their feathers. Besides referring to the bird itself, the name may also refer specifically to the meat of the bird. Birds such as chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese are considered to be poultry, while birds such as parrots and songbirds are not. Other birds considered poultry include quail, pheasants, and guineafowl. Birds that are hunted, known as game birds, are usually not included in the definition. The word “poultry” goes back to the Latin word pullus, which means “small animal.”

And so I’ll declare it National Duck Day, a celebration of wild ducks—ducks not raised for meat or eggs.  And here again is the photo of the World’s Finest Mallard, Honey, celebrated in three Chicago Tribune columns by Mary Schmich. Honey had a big brood but also, in 2020, ducknapped the entire brood of another hen, Dorothy—and raised them all (17 ducklings) to fledging! (Dorothy, initially bereft, went on to nest again and raise her own brood of seven.) Here’s Honey and her 17 babies resting on the cement circle that used to be in the middle of Botany Pond:

It’s also Certified Nurses Day, National Chocolate Caramel Day, and Oranges and Lemons Day.

There’s a Google Doodle celebarating men’s college basketball (click to see where it goes):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 19 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Here’s a WSJ clickbait headline for those following the war in Iran, “Israel is hunting Iranian regime members in their hideouts, one by one.”

Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official, strolled confidently in dark sunglasses and a black coat Friday through a rally of regime loyalists in central Tehran. It was his first public appearance in a war in which he was a known target. “Brave people. Brave officials. Brave leaders. This combination cannot be defeated,” he wrote later on X.

Four days later, he was dead. Early Tuesday morning, Israel’s intelligence services found Larijani gathered with other officials at a hideout on the outskirts of Tehran and killed him with a missile strike.

That same night, Israel got a tip from ordinary Iranians that the leader of the feared Basij militia, Gholamreza Soleimani, was holing up with his deputies in a tent in a wooded area in Tehran. It was the sort of payoff Israel had been hoping for after blowing up Basij headquarters and command posts for more than two weeks, forcing its members to gather out in the open. Soleimani, too, was struck and killed.

Israeli and American leaders said at the outset that the war with Iran would create the conditions for Iranians to topple their regime. The killings early Tuesday——followed by the Israeli announcement a day later that Iranian Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib had also been killed—were milestones in that campaign made possible by the fast-accumulating damage from airstrikes and a growing harvest of intelligence about possible targets.

With thousands of regime members killed—from top leaders to street-level grunts—Iranians are reporting that a sense of disorder is starting to take hold. Security forces are under stress and on the run as they threaten protesters to stay off the streets and direct strikes at the U.S., Israel and Arab neighbors across the Persian Gulf.

But where there’s good news, there’s also bad news:

So far Israel says it has dropped 10,000 munitions on thousands of different targets, including more than 2,200 related to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Basij and other internal security forces. It believes thousands have been killed or wounded.

The advanced technology deployed by Israel and the penetration of Iranian society by its agents are combining to create the greatest threat yet to a deeply entrenched regime.

But decades of military experience show it is difficult if not impossible to dislodge a government from the air. And if the Iranian regime survives, it could emerge emboldened and more dangerous. “It will be a clear victory for the regime with both predictable and unforeseen circumstances,” said Farzin Nadimi, an Iran-focused senior fellow with the Washington Institute, a U.S.-based think tank.

I didn’t realize that ordinary Iranians could tip off Israel with the whereabouts of high state officials. How do they do that?  Or are there Iranians spying for Israel? It is true that everybody with any power in the regime has a target on his back—they’re all men, of course—but it’s also true that regime change simply by bombing would be very hard. How would the people take control of their government. They’d need both organization and a leader, and they have neither, save for the son of the late Shah who is not in Iran.

*For those like me feeling down about the war with Iran, it’s heartening to read Bret Stephen’s op-eds at the NYT. Today’s is called, “For once, with fight with an equal ally.” That ally, of course, is Israel, and I’ve noticed an increasing number of claims that Israel manipulated Trump into this war, something I don’t believe. Stephens:

For most of the postwar era, the United States has gone to war with partners whose military contributions ranged from moderately helpful to mainly symbolic. Britain in Afghanistan and Iraq comes to mind in the first case. Germany in the 1999 Kosovo war comes to mind in the second.

The war against Iran is different. As of Monday, Central Command reports that the United States had struck over 7,000 targets inside Iran. Israel, for its part, had carried out some 7,600 strikes, according to a representative of the Israeli military. This may be the first time since the Second World War that Washington has had an equal partner with which to share the burdens of war.

That’s a good starting point from which to consider the claim that the U.S. war with Iran is really a war for Israel. Past administrations have, in fact, gone to war for other countries. In the early 1990s, we went to war in the Persian Gulf for the sake of freeing Kuwait and defending Saudi Arabia — two countries that couldn’t defend themselves — from Iraq. Later that decade, we went to war in the Balkans after Europe proved shamefully unable to police its own neighborhood.

In both cases, American presidents believed they were serving the national interest. But the military helplessness of our allies was a major factor in the decision to intervene.

As for Israel, the charge that the United States has gone to war for it isn’t new. . .

. . .Those charges always sat awkwardly with the facts. Israel stayed out of the gulf war under heavy U.S. pressure, despite being hit by Iraqi missiles. As for Iraq, Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli prime minister, told the journalist Nadav Eyal that George W. Bush was fighting “the wrong war.” Sharon thought Iran was the more dangerous enemy in what was then called the war on terror.

In the case of Iran, the idea that crippling its capacity to threaten its neighbors is some sort of purely Israeli interest is belied by every Iranian missile or drone that falls on Dubai, Doha, Manama or Riyadh, not to mention U.S. and NATO military bases in the region. In October 2024, Kamala Harris called Iran our “greatest adversary,” adding that one of her “highest priorities” as president would be to ensure that Iran never became a nuclear power. Was she, also, just another of Benjamin Netanyahu’s little stooges — a manipulated American politician with no mind of her own?

That charge is now being leveled at Donald Trump, never mind that the president first expressed a desire to thwack the Iranian regime in 1980, during the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and repeated the point over decades. Whatever one thinks about the wisdom or the timing of Trump’s decision to go to war, it was, plainly, his decision — one for which he needed little convincing from Netanyahu, or, for that matter, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who, The Times reports, is urging Trump to “keep hitting the Iranians hard.”

. . . What is true is that the United States is going to war with Israel, not for it. That’s something many Americans, MAGA-type conservatives most of all, often claim to want: an ally that pulls its weight, shares the risk and contributes meaningfully to victory.

. . .But the central point is that Israel, population 10 million, is behaving as an equal partner to America, population 342 million, in a war that the elected leadership of both countries believe is in their respective national interests. Whatever else that is, it isn’t the tail wagging the dog.

The killing of Larijani may help dispel the odd gloom that’s descended on a war that is persistently dismantling Iran’s ability to put up a meaningful fight, beyond the desperate play of seeking to shut the Strait of Hormuz. That, too, won’t last long, thanks to the United States achieving what’s known among war planners as “escalation dominance.” Good thing that, in this war, the United States for once had a bold and competent ally to help us achieve it.

The accusation that Israel manipulated Trump into going to war smells of antisemitism—the view of Jews as puppeteers who control Hollywood, the press—indeed, all of America. And the accusation doesn’t jibe with the facts. As far as the “odd gloom” goes, well, it’s because it looks like we’re in a war that is going to last a lot longer than we though, and against a regime that, like Hamas, is unwilling to surrender. Stephens does a good job here of dispelling the myth of Israel as a puppeteer, but, given the situation, I find his column oddly optimistic.

*More war news, but pessimistic. Israeli historian Benny Morris, whose takes on the war seem accurate and sensible, if not optimistic, has his latest take in Quillette: “War in straitened circumstances,” with the subtitle, “After nineteen days of war, Israel and America face a grinding conflict with Iran and Hezbollah, and there is no clear end in sight.” The long but well-worth-reading article is also archived here, so I don’t have to give extensive quotes. Some short excerpts (the piece is pessimistic):

After a fortnight of war-making against Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, the rocketing of Israel by the Islamists has come to seem almost routine. Here in the Jewish state, people have been growing increasingly pessimistic. Some are despondent. The widespread jubilation that characterised the first days of the war—which saw the surprise Israeli–American decapitation of the Iranian military leadership, including the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, on 28 February and the subsequent devastation of the Islamic Republic’s air defences and ballistic missile capabilities—has given way to a realisation that neither Iran nor Hezbollah will be easily brought to heel. We have reached Day 19 of the conflict and both adversaries are still proclaiming that they will continue the fight until Israel and America are defeated. Meanwhile, people in Israel’s populous centre around Tel Aviv and in the frontier villages and towns bordering Lebanon continue to live under periodic, albeit small, barrages of ballistic missiles and short-range rockets and drones, which continue to disrupt the economy and education system, and render normal life impossible.

Yesterday (17 March), Israelis had a moment of uplift when Defence Minister Israel Katz announced the assassination in Tehran of Iran’s strongman, Ali Larijani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, and the almost simultaneous killing of Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of the Basij militia, which was prominent in January’s brutal repression of the Iranian opposition demonstrations. But such killings are unlikely to have any effect on the emerging strategic big picture.

At the start of the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the joint Israeli–American assault on Iran would pave the way for an uprising of the Iranian masses and the fall of Tehran’s internally tyrannical and externally aggressive Islamist regime. And should Hezbollah join the fray, he added, Israel would demolish or at least disarm the Lebanese fundamentalists once and for all. But the brutal suppression of the mass anti-government demonstrations by the Islamic Republic’s police, Basij militia, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in early January, which claimed many thousands of lives, left would-be protesters afraid to return to the streets, while Hezbollah began rocketing Israel on Day 3, in revenge, they declared, for Khamenei’s assassination. On 9 March, the Islamic Republic named Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader—but Mojtaba has yet to be seen in public and is believed to have been seriously wounded on 28 February. In effect, Larijani managed the war. Meanwhile, despite massive Israeli and American bombardments, neither the Ayatollahs nor Hezbollah have even hinted that they might eventually concede defeat.

. . . For the moment, it is unclear whether and how Trump intends to continue his war-making. Given his mercurial personality, he could well order a halt tomorrow or the day after and claim victory. If the Americans called things off, Israel would almost certainly have to do so, too—though it would probably continue its counter-offensive against Hezbollah. But if, as appears likely, Trump is resolved to continue the war for weeks or even months, he could deploy Marines to occupy the coastal area of Iran bordering the strait to enable its re-opening or to attempt to conquer Kharg. Marine battalions are already on their way to the Middle East. But any such operation would run counter to Trump’s traditional opposition to any war involving boots on the ground.

. . . according to reports, the Israelis are suffering from munitions shortages, especially of long-range Arrow Two and Arrow Three anti-ballistic missile interceptors. Israel’s anti-missile defences are bolstered by one or two American THAAD anti-missile interceptor batteries. But America reputedly also has only a relatively small stockpile of THAADs. This may turn out to be a major factor in determining the length of the war, alongside the international and internal American pressures bearing down on Trump. Over the past few days, both Trump and Netanyahu have spoken of “two or three more weeks” of warfare. But at the moment it is unclear whether Iran will accede to such a timetable.

Morris is clear-headed and experienced, and a good historian of the Middle East. When he’s pessimistic, I’m pessimistic. But it’s in the nature of Jews to be pessimistic.  Jewish pessimist: “Oy, things couldn’t get any worse!”  Jewish optimist: “Sure they could!”

*We will have a vacant Senate Seat in Illinois (Democrat Dick Durbin is retiring), and there was a bitter Democratic primary for it, for whoever wins the primary will likely, given that Illinois is a diehard Democratic state, wind up in the Senate. Yesterday Juliana Stratton, the sitting Lieutenant Governor, won that primary. (I didn’t vote for her as she’s a progressive, but I did vote for a good left-centrist.)

Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton won the Democratic primary race for Senate in Illinois on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, riding the power of political and financial help from her chief patron, Gov. JB Pritzker, to prevail in a bitter three-way contest.

Ms. Stratton defeated two veteran members of Congress, Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly, in a race marked by efforts from Mr. Krishnamoorthi’s allies and Mr. Pritzker’s detractors to split Black voters and hand the nomination to Mr. Krishnamoorthi.

I watched a lot of ads and read the stands of the candidates, but I didn’t see anything that looked remotely like an attempt to split black voters (Stratton is black). What I did see were completely negative campaign ads, with every one of them mentioning the promoted candidates’ opposition to both Trump and ICE I guess it’s more effective to attack someone than to promote the positive things in your platform. (I think psychology has shown that.)  And here’s what I saw:

Ms. Stratton, 60, will be heavily favored to win the general election in deep-blue Illinois, where no Republican has won a statewide election since 2014. She would be just the sixth Black woman to serve in the Senate, and her potential arrival could mean that three Black women serve together in the chamber for the first time in U.S. history.

She has spent most of her political career inside Mr. Pritzker’s orbit, having won election to a single term in the Illinois State House before he chose her to be his running mate in the 2018 election.

The primary in Illinois to fill the seat being vacated by Senator Richard J. Durbin, who is retiring after five terms, was defined early by personal animosity among the candidates and Mr. Pritzker.

After President Trump sent federal agents to Chicago last fall, the three contenders jostled to be viewed as the most hostile to his deportation agenda.

And in the closing weeks, groups backing Mr. Krishnamoorthi and Ms. Stratton unleashed large amounts of spending on ads — with some Krishnamoorthi allies trying to elevate Ms. Kelly in an effort to tank Ms. Stratton.

The three candidates had no major policy differences, only degrees of separation. Mr. Krishnamoorthi pledged to “abolish Trump’s ICE,” Ms. Stratton said she would eliminate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement entirely and Ms. Kelly introduced legislation to impeach Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary who was later fired by Mr. Trump.

It must be nice to be a shoo-in for the Senate, for I’d bet big bucks that Stratton beats whoever runs on the Republican side. Well, she’s not an AOC type of progressive, and for sure I’ll vote for her over whatever hapless Republican is chosen to lose.

*A meteor streaked through the sky over Cleveland, Ohio, yesterday, and then exploded with a large “boom.” It was a big ‘un: about two meters in diameter and an estimated weight of seven tons.

A meteor exploded Tuesday morning north of Cleveland over Lake Erie.

The American Meteor Society received hundreds reports of a visible meteor from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Kentucky; it was widely visible across Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and western New York state, too.

Though the meteor occurred during the daylight hours, it was bright enough to be seen for about 5½ seconds. Tens of thousands of people across northern Ohio heard a loud boom, and some people even felt the ground shake. That may have been the meteor’s sonic boom orthe sound of it actually exploding. A seismometer, or earthquake-measuring instrument, detected subtle shaking of the ground at 8:56 a.m. in Lorain County, Ohio.

. . .It’s too early to know the approximate size or trajectory of the meteor, or whether any fragments reached the ground.

This does happen from time to time, however. On Jan. 16, 2018, a meteor exploded over Michigan, producing shaking equivalent to that of a 1.8-magnitude earthquake. Fragments were found after the fact, and debris could even be seen on weather radars.

And here’s a news report showing several videos of the meteor:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili looks as if she doesn’t want Andrzej to be too skeptical. But look at that cute cat!

Hili: Careful, you’re losing your sense of proportion.
Andrzej: In what?
Hili: In how suspiciously you examine reality.

In Polish:

Hili: Uważaj tracisz miarę.
Ja: W czym?
Hili: W podejrzliwym przyglądaniu się rzeczywistości.

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

From The Language Nerds:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Stash Krod:

From Masih, who explains what Iran’s now-blown-up intelligence minister did, while showing pictures of two of his victims:

Amazing!  Harvard has lost a lot of Jewish students in recent years:

Luana found this from the world’s wokest physicist. What does “non-trinary” mean for neutrinas. And who ever said the binary is “inherently natural” in the laws of the universe? The biological sex binary is an observation, not a law, but it happens to be true.

Two from my feed.  First, the care taken with Israeli strikes:

Oy! A pile of small d*gs!

. . and I have to add this one. The sign reads “A cat may appear”

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

. . and two from Dr. Cobb. This one had its anniversary yesterday, and it’s a good one:

128th anniversary today of this rather important story appearing in the Lawrence Daily Journal, Kansas

— Odd This Day (@oddthisday.bsky.social) 2026-03-18T13:10:17.608Z

An an adorable wasp larvae. It even has a cute little face!

Meet the king of the Weird Little Guys, the Butternut Woollyworm (Eriocampa juglandis), native to North America.They're the larval form for a wasp-like sawfly & they secrete tufts of wooly substance from epidermal glands to aid in camouflage.All hail the king!(📷: Robert Gromotka)

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2026-03-18T13:31:17.209Z

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

March 18, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a hump day (“Горб кече” in Meadow Mari): Wednesday March 18, 2026, and National Sloppy Joe Day. I love them (a vmore hamburger-y version in the Midwest is often called “loosemeats”), but haven’t had one for years. It was a staple of cafeteria school lunches when I was young. Here’s one with coleslaw:

Buck Blues, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Lacy Oatmeal Cookie Day, whatever that is. And that’s about it for holidays today.

Here’s an explanation of the cookie:

National Lacy Oatmeal Cookie Day celebrates lacy oatmeal cookies, commonly known as lace oatmeal cookies. They differ from regular oatmeal cookies in two ways: they are particularly thin cakes, similar to wafers, and they are often topped with Sorbet or ice cream.

Oatmeal cookies, which are healthy but not tasty, are the rhubarb pies of cookies. And they’re even worse when they put raisins in them (another desperate attempt to make a healthy cookie).

Oh, and there’s a Google Doodle put up yesterday celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. Click below to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first. Biologist Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist who became famous as the author of The Population Bomb, has died:

Paul R. Ehrlich, an eminent ecologist and population scientist whose best-selling book, “The Population Bomb,” was celebrated as a prescient warning of a coming age of food shortages and famine but later criticized by conservatives and academic rivals for what they called its sky-is-falling rhetoric, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93.

His death, at a nursing facility in the retirement community where he lived, was caused by complications of cancer, his daughter, Lisa Marie Daniel, said.

As a young professor of biology at Stanford University in the mid-1960s, Dr. Ehrlich was known for his absorbing lectures on evolution, in which he described what plants and animals faced on a planet stressed by industrial pollution and rapid population growth. He distilled those lectures into an article published in December 1967 in New Scientist magazine.

Six months later, encouraged by David Brower, the executive director of the environmental group the Sierra Club, to write a book on the subject, Dr. Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb.” In 233 pages, he asserted that the planet’s condition began to deteriorate rapidly in the 1950s, when the rate of population growth exceeded the increase in food production — or, as he put it, when “the stork passed the plow.” He called on couples to limit their families to one or two children.

Witty, knowledgeable and not at all reticent, Dr. Ehrlich gained a huge audience on television, especially on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” which he appeared on roughly 20 times. His forecast of food riots in the United States and of imminent global famines caused by escalating population growth found a worldwide readership.

One of the best-selling nonfiction books about the environment to date, “The Population Bomb” sold three million copies and transformed Dr. Ehrlich, who was 37 at the time, into one of the global environmental movement’s most recognized leaders. His influence motivated international governments to convene conferences on controlling population, and his message was heard in private homes across the industrialized world as couples conceived fewer children.

Dr. Ehrlich expanded on his thesis in “The End of Affluence” (1974), which he wrote with his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, who wrote or edited 15 books with him. The book forecast a “nutritional disaster” in the 1970s, predicting that “before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity.”

Ehrlich was a good scientist (he studied butterflies) who became The Chicken Little of Biology, and perhaps in love with his fame. His predictions of overpopulations and famine were not met, but perhaps for reasons he couldn’t predict. Here’s an op-ed in the LA Times (click to read; you’ll have to block ads):

An excerpt from the LAT article:

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is not that Ehrlich turned out to be so wildly wrong, but that he was so obviously wrong from the beginning. My old boss Ben Wattenberg battled Ehrlich throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His feud began with a 1970 article for the New Republic titled, “The Nonsense Explosion,” in which Wattenberg explained that even as Ehrlich was writing about soaring birthrates, birthrates were already declining.

Ehrlich’s defenders — and they are legion — argue that he was a true prophet in that prophets issue apocalyptic warnings that, if heeded, can be avoided. This is more nonsense. He said mass “die-offs” were unavoidable with even the best policies, and the anti-growth fads he supported largely made things worse.

Simply put, his pessimism was simply too big to fail.

*War news.  Israel says it’s targeted and killed two important figures: Ali Larijani, an important official in running Iran since the death of the Ayatollah and the injury of his son, and Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of the Basij (Iran’s plainclothed police who killed so many protestors in January).

Iran’s top security official and the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ volunteer force were killed in overnight strikes in Iran, Israeli officials said Tuesday, claiming to have eliminated two of Tehran’s most senior remaining officials.

Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, and Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of the Basij, were “eliminated” in strikes overnight, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement.

Iranian authorities did not immediately comment on the strikes or Israel’s claims. A post on Larijani’s X feed appeared to show a handwritten tribute to Iranian Navy servicemen ahead of their funeral this week, but it was not clear when it was written.

Larijani’s death would mark one of the highest-level assassinations of Iranian officials since the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a strike on his Tehran compound on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

The military campaign has decimated Iran’s political and military leadership, destroyed critical infrastructure and damaged civilian buildings, but the weakened Iranian regime maintains its grip on power and has stifled shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices spiking.

The Israel Defense Forces also announced the deaths in separate statements Tuesday, saying Larijani was killed in an airstrike near Tehran. Iran’s “de facto leader” led national security coordination across the country, including the repression of anti-government protesters, the IDF said.

Larijani had recently shared photos and videos that appeared to show him in Tehran on Friday for a march marking Quds Day, a day of solidarity with Palestinians held on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan.

Here’s the WaPo diagram of the government hierarchy of Iran and those who have been eliminated (click to enlarge).  They really need to know the proper meaning of “decimated,” which has come to mean “destroying everyone/every thing” instead of its original meaning.

That’s pretty good striking, but how does Israel know Iranian leaders are dead before Iran even confirms it? Spies? Those without “killed” labels should be shaking in their  slippers. At any rate, the regime is not collapsing yet and I’m scared to think that this war will end like the one in Gaza, with many of the oppressors still in power. (Hams still controls a lot of Gaza with its armed goons patrolling the streets).

*U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that despite several weeks of war, the hard-liners remain in charge in Iran and are consolidating power.

Despite more than two weeks of relentless airstrikes, U.S. intelligence assessments say, Iran’s regime likely will remain in place for now, weakened but more hard-line, with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps security forces exerting greater control.

The United States and Israel have significantly degraded Iran’s missile capability and navy, removed the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out scores of top military and intelligence leaders. But the war’s costs are mounting — at least $12 billion so far and 13 U.S. troops killed. Iran’s viselike grip on the Strait of Hormuz has slowed shipping traffic to a trickle, creating a historic oil disruption.

Western officials and analysts who study Iran said they see little near-term prospect of a “regime change” end to the 47-year-old Islamic republic or the rise of a more democratic government. The latter is a goal cited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sometimes by President Donald Trump, who has said he’ll know the war is over “when I feel it in my bones.”

U.S. intelligence assessments issued since the war began predict Iran’s regime will remain intact and possibly even emboldened, believing it stood up to Trump and survived, according to two people familiar with the assessments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. U.S. Arab allies in the Persian Gulf, meanwhile, are angered and alarmed at being the targets of retaliatory barrages of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.

One European official said the likeliest postwar scenario is a “rump IRGC regime” in Tehran that will retain some nuclear and missile capability as well as the support of regional proxies, though the regime will be “degraded enough that we’re in a better place than we were.”

Trump has been receiving “very sobering briefings” on the U.S. intelligence, said one of the two people familiar with the assessments. And he was told of the likelihood of a more entrenched IRGC before he gave the go-ahead to jointly launch the war with Israel, this person said.

“It wasn’t just predictable,” they said. “It was predicted. He was told in advance.”

He got the predictions, and they might be right or they might be wrong. Nobody knows what will happen save that we have at least several other weeks of war ahead of us. In the meantime, I wonder what the good people of Iran are thinking and feeling now that they haven’t yet been liberated, and perhaps never will be.  But note that one by one, the leadership is being eliminated.  What will happen when there’s not enough left to “consolidate”?

*The Free Press reports that “Canada no longer feels safe for Jews“. The author is Casey Babb, an expert on antisemitism. And remember, as the article notes, Jews have had a significant presence in Canada for a long time (there’s a list of notable Canadian Jews on Wikipedia).

Last month in Toronto, at one of the largest synagogues in North America, I stood in the back of a dimly lit auditorium and listened to law expert Natasha Hausdorff speak at length about Israel, antisemitism, and threats to Jewish life in Canada. To attend the event, guests had to pass through a police checkpoint, wait in freezing temperatures to get an entry badge, and then go through metal detectors. The venue was teeming with security both inside and out.

This has become the norm in Canada, and for good reason. Just weeks later, that same synagogue, along with two others in the city, was riddled with bullets. Then, in what police are calling a “national security incident,” two suspects shot at the U.S. consulate in Toronto, leading to beefed-up protection for U.S. and Israeli diplomatic buildings in the city.

The question many Jewish Canadians are now asking is, how long before we experience our own Tree of Life or Bondi Beach attack? Virtually everywhere I turn, Jews in Canada are not only wondering whether this country can remain our home, but if it’s ever truly been ours to begin with.

. . . . Yet, since the terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, that has been turned on its head, and the expectation of Jews for safety, security, and acceptance in Canada now feels like a shattered illusion. There are no warning sirens alerting us to run to bomb shelters like in Israel, but we live with a general unease that comes with isolation and a growing sense of abandonment and betrayal. Jews in Canada have been forced to recognize that, making up just one percent of the population, they are no less a minority than their ancestors were in Kishinev, Baghdad, or Kielce, and now may face the kinds of threats that drove Jews away from the places that they once called home.

According to a report published by B’nai Brith Canada in April 2025, there were 6,219 antisemitic incidents in Canada in 2024, or an average of about 17 incidents of harassment, vandalism, and violence per day, or nearly one incident an hour for every hour of the year. Data released by Statistics Canada confirms the severity of the situation, showing that between 2020 and 2024, antisemitic hate crimes in Canada nearly tripled.

At the time of writing, it is not yet mid-March, and already 22 antisemitic incidents have been reported in Toronto alone, accounting for nearly 65 percent of all hate crime reports in the city. In addition to multiple shootings of synagogues, numerous Jewish-owned businesses in Montreal were recently vandalized with antisemitic graffiti, and earlier this year in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a synagogue and childcare center were spray-painted with swastikas and other hate symbols.

A bit more:

Heather McPherson, a sitting Member of Parliament, is sponsoring a petition asking the current government of Canada to investigate Canadian citizens who have served in the IDF—effectively including almost all immigrants from Israel, where military service is mandatory—on suspicion that they may have committed war crimes.

There are also the weekly demonstrations across the country, veiled as Palestinian activism, which often include vile antisemitic content and images reminiscent of Nazi Germany, calls for Jews to “go back to Poland,” direct threats to “Zionists,” and a wide range of libels used to vilify Jews and Israel. Virtually none of this is considered a “hate crime” here, yet it all fuels a deep and growing sense of seclusion, helplessness, and alienation.

From coast to coast, demonizing and targeting Jews has become so normalized that large swaths of the Jewish community are beginning to retreat inward.

The situation in Canada has become so dire for Jews that Iddo Moed, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, recently described the country as one of the world’s leading “centers of antisemitism.”

You could tell similar stories about Belgium and Spain, and to a lesser extent France. Nobody loves the Jews, or, as Dara Horn said in her book, they love only the dead ones.

*Here’s a video of Barbra Steisand, now 83, paying tribute—and offering a bit of singing—to Robert Redford at the Oscars on Sunday. Redford died last September at 89.  I love Babs, one of the two greatest female pop singers of my lifetime (the other was Karen Carpenter), as well as a great actor and director. Redford was, in my view, the handsomest actor of our era, and also a very good one. They starred together in only one movie, “The Way We Were”, a romantic tearjerker from 1973. The song she sang at the Oscars. written by Marvin Hamlisch, was the theme of that movie theme (original release here). Her voice has gone, but what do you expect at that age? She retired from singing long ago, but managed to come up with a tune for this tribute.

The final bittersweet scene, when Hubbell (Redford) meets ex-wife Katie (Streisand) in front of New York’s Plaza Hotel, where Katie is demonstrating to ban the bomb. They haven’t seen each other for years, have a sad, extended goodbye, and slip out of each other’s lives. If you look into the dictionary under “handsome”, you’ll see Redford’s picture.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili plays Galileo:

Hili: And yet it moves.
Andrzej: Some are still not sure.

In Polish:

Hili: A jednak się kręci.
Ja: Niektórzy nadal nie są pewni.

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

From Jesus of the Day, with the caption, “While many are feeling green and rather drunk, I prefer St Gertrude of Nivelles,patron of cats and gardeners.🐈‍⬛👒💐” ”  St. Gertrude died on St. Patrick’s day in 659, aged 30 or 31, and the cat attribution is a bit questionable. 

From Stacy:

From The Language Nerda:

From Masih. The gang-rape of nurses appears to be true (see here and here). Not a good look for Starmer:

I can’t remember where I found this, but it’s very sad. I wonder what will happen to the soccer players who tried to defect and then decided to go back home. Iran was horrible enough to arrest their families just to get lure them back in the country.

Another one I found:

Two from my feed.  Another from Massimo:

. . . and a lovely ballerina:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. I’ve posted the first one before, but it’s worth seeing again. If you’re near Exeter, go see it:

thinking about the medieval cat door in Exeter cathedral again

— weird medieval guys (@weirdmedieval.bsky.social) 2026-03-16T19:58:33.183Z

Matthew says this is the third Guardian article about Colossal in the last year. Is the paper credulous?

I can see every ancient DNA scientist in the world currently cringing about @itiscolossal.bsky.social scientists' lack of gloves when sampling moa bones 🤦‍♂️ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026…

— Nic Rawlence (@nicrawlencenz.bsky.social) 2026-03-16T02:20:03.773Z

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

March 17, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, March 17, 2026, and it’s St. Patrick’s Day, honoring the patron saint of Ireland. The parades in Chicago were on the weekend and went on despite rain. As usual, the Chicago River was dyed emerald green by spraying nontoxic dye from boats. Here’s what it looked like when they dyed it during on the weekend.

It’s also Corned Beef and Cabbage Day (the traditional Irish meal), and Submarine Day, explained this way (it’s connected with St. Patrick’s Day):

On March 17, 1898, St. Patrick’s Day, Irish-born engineer John Philip Holland demonstrated a submarine he designed, the Holland VI, for the U.S. Navy Department, off the coast of Staten Island. During the demonstration, the vessel was submerged for 1 hour and 40 minutes. Holland launched the submarine the year before, on May 17, 1897, after it was built at the Crescent Shipyard in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The submarine was noteworthy for having features that would become the standard for submarines in future years. It and other of Holland’s submarines are also noteworthy for being the first to run on electric batteries when submerged, but on internal combustion engines when on the water’s surface. We celebrate the Holland and all other submarines on March 17 each year.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT’s war news summary.  Bombing continues from both sides. And our allies aren’t keen to join in at keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. Israel says it has killed the head of the Basij (Iran’s plainclothes police division) in a targeted strike.

American allies around the world have responded coolly to — or outright rebuffed — President Trump’s call to send warships to escort merchant vessels in and out of the Persian Gulf, illustrating the consequences of his dismissive approach to global alliances.

“You mean for 40 years we’re protecting you and you don’t want to get involved in something that’s very minor?” Mr. Trump said at a White House appearance, noting that Europe, Japan and others depend on oil from the Persian Gulf far more than the United States does.

He said that “numerous countries have told me that they’re on the way,” but when asked to name them, said, “I’d rather not say yet, but we’ll be announcing them.” And he expressed frustration that some nations have demurred on requests for military assistance, adding that he has long believed that, “if we ever needed help, they won’t be there for us.”

“We don’t need anybody; we’re the strongest nation in the world,” Mr. Trump insisted. He suggested his current request for assistance amounted to a test for allies: “I’m almost doing it in some cases not because we need them but because I want to find out how they react.”

The sharpest refusal to his belated effort to build an international coalition against Iran came Monday from Germany, whose defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said, “This is not our war; we did not start it.” Top officials of Japan, Italy and Australia said Monday that their countries would not participate in efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Others were noncommittal, including France, South Korea and Britain, whose prime minister, Keir Starmer, said his country would not be “drawn into wider war.”

Well, we are responsible to some extent for stemming the flow of oil by getting into a fight with Iran, so I suppose you can justify the U.S. being responsible for opening up the Straits.  I am not mad at our allies who don’t want to help out. Apparently some of them are helping but haven’t been named.  And on the continued fighting:

  • Israel strikes Iran: The Israeli military said on Monday it had launched a “broad wave” of attacks across Iran. Earlier, airstrikes again targeted the Mehrabad airport in Tehran, and a thick plume of smoke was rising from the airport, according to several residents of Tehran.

  • Iranian response: Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told CBS News on Sunday that the country was “ready to defend ourselves as long as it takes” and denied Mr. Trump’s claim a day earlier that Iran wanted to make a deal. “We never asked for a cease-fire, and we have never asked even for negotiation,” he said.

The NYT also reports that in the arguments over who would be Iran’s next Supreme Leader, there was a squabble (the NYT calls it a “full-on war of succession”) between the moderates and the Revolutionary Guards. Since Mojtaba Khamenei was chosen, the Guard clearly won.

*At the Free Press, Michael B. Oren, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., tells us “How this war ends.”

 . . . barring an irrepressible popular revolt or a coup within the Iranian regime, neither of which currently seems probable, there is only one way that this war can successfully end. Decisively defeating Iran requires an initial application of massive military power followed by a long-term strategy of total containment. The model must not be the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather the generational struggle against Soviet Communism—the Cold War that the United States ultimately won.

. . .Should the war end now, much of the Middle East would once again fall into Tehran’s sphere of influence. Confident that future American presidents will not renew major operations against it, the regime can resume its manufacture of ballistic missiles and reconstruct its nuclear facilities. The Strait of Hormuz will become an exclusively Iranian-controlled channel while terrorist attacks multiply across the Western world. The Gulf States, already afraid to alienate Iran by retaliating for its rocket and drone attacks against them, will rush to pay homage to the Islamic Republic. The people of Iran will be subject to unending and increasingly violent oppression. The international balance of power will also be skewed, with Russia and China reaching dangerous conclusions about America’s staying power.

To avoid that catastrophic scenario, the United States and Israel must deny Iran a victory by any definition. They must continue their intense bombing campaign to destroy Iran’s ability to produce, store, and launch missiles and drones. They must clear the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian mines, so that oil freighters can be safely escorted through its waters. Once defanged, Iran can be sealed by a hermetic naval blockade that will prevent the export of a single drop of oil and the entry of all but essential foodstuffs and medicines. Every effort should be made to ease the suffering of the civilian population while facilitating their ability to resist—and perhaps overthrow—the regime. It may take several years, but the Islamic Republic will fall. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed because outside pressure forced it to collapse in on itself. The same can be true of Iran.

None of this will require a single boot on the ground, nor certainly a prolonged military occupation. Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is a long-established nation that America need not intervene in to rebuild. But like the Soviet Bloc, Iran represents an idea that must be defeated. And once that is accomplished, energy supplies can be safeguarded and Russia and China deterred. The U.S. can broker previously unthinkable peace treaties in the Middle East and help forge a strategic alliance stretching from the Mediterranean to the Ganges. Iran can rejoin the community of nations and rekindle its people’s hope for freedom. That, in answer to the interviewers’ most frequently asked question, is how the war must end.

Note that Oren says that this is how the war must end, not how it will end. His last paragraph is optimistic, but I still wonder how regime change, which is assumed, will be effected.  Will Iran, after a long period of being besieged, voluntarily adopt democracy? That’s what Oren assumes, but also says it will probably take several years to accomplish. What happens if we get a Democratic President before that?

*Trump is now going after radio stations, threatening to revoke their licenses if they don’t cover the war patriotically, but instead propagate “fake news.”

President Donald Trump on Sunday endorsed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s threat to revoke broadcast licenses over news coverage of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, calling media organizations “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic” in a Truth Social post.

“They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings,” Trump wrote.

“As I used to say in The Apprentice, ‘FIRED,’” he added.

Carr, in his Saturday post on X, warned he would deny or revoke government-issued licenses if broadcasters run what the agency deems “fake news.” The warning was the latest salvo from the official who since becoming FCC chairman at the outset of Trump’s second term has relished the role of media enforcer.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote on X. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Here’s Carr’s tweet:

If it smells like censorship and walks like censorship, it is censorship.  This is an arrant threat to shut down broadcasters if they don’t toe the political line, and will surely bring on big-time lawsuits if it’s enforced. It is an unconscionable violation of freedom of speech.

*One way to severely impede Iran’s nuclear program is to seize the uranium the regime has already enriched. That would require boots on the ground, but could be done. The WSJ discusses the pros and cons.

President Trump has said preventing Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons is a central aim of the war he is waging. In the absence of regime change—or at least a deal to hand over its enriched uranium by Tehran’s leaders—that could mean seizing the country’s fissile material.

Accomplishing that in the face of resistance from Iranian forces would be a complex military operation that could require the deployment of hundreds of troops at one or more sites for days, former U.S. military officers and experts said.

The U.S. military has elite teams specially trained to remove radioactive material from a conflict zone. But locating and seizing the hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium that Iran possesses would require an intricate choreography and could be fraught with risk.

President Trump has said he wouldn’t rule out sending ground troops into Iran if necessary. But on Friday, he signaled an operation to seize the country’s enriched uranium wasn’t imminent.

. . .Before Israel and the U.S. conducted a series of airstrikes on Iran in June last year, the country was believed to have more than 400 kilograms of 60% highly enriched uranium, and nearly 200 kilograms of 20% fissile material, which is easily converted into 90%-weapons-grade uranium.

President Trump has signaled that an operation to seize Iran’s enriched uranium isn’t imminent. Nathan Howard/Getty Images

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi has said he thinks the uranium is mainly at two of the three sites that the U.S. and Israel attacked in June: an underground tunnel at the nuclear complex in Isfahan and a cache at Natanz. Around half the 60% material was in the Isfahan tunnels, Grossi said recently.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has acknowledged that Iran isn’t currently enriching uranium. Grossi’s agency hasn’t seen any signs that the Iranians have sought to move that material. Iran’s leaders insist publicly that they don’t want a bomb.

But if those caches remain in the hands of an Iranian government looking to ensure its survival, they could be used to pursue a bomb. The Iranians have centrifuges to enrich uranium and the capability to set up a new underground enrichment site, experts said.

. . .The White House could decide to leave the stockpile in Iran’s hands, with a warning that any attempt to remove it or to resume enrichment would trigger further U.S. military strikes. Given Israel’s penetration of Iran’s nuclear program and U.S. satellite reconnaissance, there is a good chance Tehran’s work would be caught.

If Trump decides to try to grab the uranium, retired Adm. James Stavridis, who served as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander and the former head of Southern Command, said it could require “potentially the largest special forces operation in history.”

The article adds that it could take 1,000 personnel on the ground to deal with the material from just one site. For all the sites it seems an impossible task. This is something to worry about later, though we can be sure that the U.S. is already planning it now.  We surely cannot leave a theocratic Iran, bent on terror, with a stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

*And from the UPI’s odd news, a snack was auctioned off for a very high price (I love the phrase I’ve bolded):

Guinness World Records said the auction of Cheetozard — a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto shaped liked the Pokémon Charizard — resulted in a new record.

The record-keeping organization said Goldin Auctions’ March 2025 sale of Cheetozard ended in a final price of $87,840, earning the highly-specific record for the highest price paid for a video game likeness corn snack.

The 3-inch-long Cheeto is affixed to a custom “Cheetozard” Pokémon card and encased in a transparent box.

“Goldin specializes in rare and one-of-a-kind collectibles, and the Cheetozard is exactly this,” Goldin Auctions Head of Consignment Dave Amermanat told NBC’s Today. “Part of what makes this item so fun and unique is that it bridges two fandoms — Pokémon and Cheetos.”

The Cheeto was originally purchased on eBay for $350 by Paul Bartlett, owner of sports memorabilia company 1st & Goal Collectibles, sometime between 2018 and 2022. Images of the snack went viral on social media in 2024.

Here’s the highly valuable corn snack from Instagram (click to go to site):

 

I dare not reproduce the Charizard for fear of being sued for violating copyright, but you can see it here. I guess they sort of resemble each other.  I can see a hoax forming, when an employee of Cheetos deliberately makes one Cheeto that looks like another Pokemon character and then, for a secret cut, gives it to someone else to auction off for big bucks.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is reassuring a worried Hili:

Hili: This garden once gave a feeling of safety.
Andrzej: Little by little, everything will return to normal.

In Polish:

Hili: Kiedyś ten ogród dawał poczucie bezpieczeństwa.
Ja: Powoli wszystko wróci do normy.

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

From Cats that Have Had enough of Your Shit:

From the Unitarian Universalist Hysterical Society:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Masih. Judge for yourself. For once the Netherlands was less woke than Germany. Sound up:

From Luana. Is the caption true?

From Barack Obama. This Center is very close to where I live, but I don’t think people will be able to make out the words that are high up:

Two from my feed. The first one is cute, but they won’t be lining up at the slaughterhouse. . . .

And a wickedly smart (and self-aggrandizing) crow:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, a nice cuppa tea. Be sure to listen until the end. The “WVS” is the Women’s Voluntary Service and they’re talking about WWII.

So, BlueSky, one of my passions is the study of tea in WW2. I need you to watch this oral history from three ex-tea ladies from the Bermondsey WVS.Because you could guess for ONE THOUSAND YEARS and you would not guess where it is going… #skystorians #history #tea

— John Bull (@garius.bsky.social) 2026-03-15T20:06:47.614Z

And a historical irony (click on tweet to go there):

Monday: Hili dialogue

March 16, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to another damn week: Monday, March 16, 2026, and National Panda Day, celebrating what is arguably the world’s cutest animal. If they didn’t exist, you couldn’t imagine them. Enjoy these six minutes of adorable herbivorous bears,  They seem too clumsy to survive!

It’s also Curlew Day (so named because “it is on today’s date [or around today’s date] when long-billed curlews arrive at the Umatilla National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon to begin courting and nesting)”, National Artichoke Heart Day, and St. Urho’s Day, a confected holiday:

The day was created by Richard Mattson, a worker at Ketola’s Department Store in Virginia, Minnesota, in the spring of 1956. The name “Urho” was possibly used because Urho Kekkonen had just become President of Finland the same year. The legend originally said that St. Urho expelled frogs from ancient Finland, in order to save the grape crops, and thus the jobs of vineyard workers. Later the legend was changed—possibly by Sulo Havumaki, a psychology professor of Bemidji, Minnesota— to say that Urho had expelled grasshoppers, not frogs.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*War news, including a bunch of Israeli strikes on Iran and more kerfuffle about the Strait of Hormuz, with Trump threatening to bomb the oil facilities on Karg Island,

Fears about the global economic fallout from the war in Iran grew on Sunday as the U.S. energy secretary acknowledged in a televised interview that there were “no guarantees” that oil prices would fall in the coming weeks. A day after President Trump called on other countries to send warships to the region to end the de facto Iranian blockade of the economically vital Strait of Hormuz, foreign governments responded with caution — if at all.

Israel launched a new wave of airstrikes on Iran, while Iranian forces said they were firing at U.S. and Israeli targets as the war continued in its third week, with no end to the fighting in sight.

The energy secretary, Chris Wright, told ABC’s “This Week” that he believed the conflict would end in the “next few weeks,” while Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told CBS News that the country had not sought to negotiate with the United States and was “ready to defend ourselves as long as it takes.”

Mr. Araghchi said on Telegram that the strait — through which about a fifth of the world’s oil passes — “is open to everyone, except American ships and those of its allies.” In practice, however, the oil shipped through the passage comes from either Iran or American allies such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

. . . . Iran faced another wave of strikes on Sunday that the Israeli military said had hit bases of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij militia in the western part of the country. Israel has conducted more than 7,000 attacks on the country since the war began, military officials said.

The Revolutionary Guards force said it was continuing to target Israel and U.S. assets in the region. Iranian missiles repeatedly set off air raid sirens in Israel andSaudi Arabia said it had intercepted drones near the capital and in an eastern province, without saying where they came from.

This is going to last a while, and I can’t see the value of a ceasefire now, but of course with a very careful attention to not striking civilians. It’s impossible to ensure that none are killed or hurt, but striking the girls school was apparently based on outdated information, which should be checked before each strike.

*Apropos, the WSJ tells us what it would actually take to secure the Strait of Hormuz (article archived here):

President Trump has vowed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital artery for the world’s energy supply that has been closed off by Iran. It won’t be easy.

Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have repeatedly pledged that naval vessels will escort oil tankers and other ships through the strait. On Thursday, Trump said escort operations would begin “very soon.” In a pair of social-media posts Saturday, the president called on other nations to help.

The U.S. is holding off on sending warships into the narrow strait—just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point—with Navy officers saying Iranian drones and antiship missiles could turn the area into a “kill box” for American sailors.

One option to clear the way for escorts would be a more-intense use of air power to hunt and destroy Iranian missiles and drones before they could be fired at ships in the strait. Another would be to use ground troops to seize the territory around the waterway.

The administration has said it is keeping all options on the table, including the use of ground troops. On Friday, Trump ordered a Marine expeditionary unit, which typically has warships with thousands of sailors, attack jets and 2,200 Marines, to the Middle East.

In an escort operation, U.S. warships, maybe in conjunction with allied navies, would travel through the strait alongside oil tankers to clear mines and fend off Iranian attacks from the air as well as from Iran’s “mosquito fleet” of small, fast-attack boats.

Experts estimate it could take two ships per tanker, or a dozen ships to guard convoys of five to 10 tankers, to have the necessary air defenses. The short distances involved make shooting down missiles and drones much more difficult.

Despite weeks of American and Israeli attacks that have decimated Iran’s navy and military capabilities, its commanders are still demonstrating the ability to attack.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a veteran naval officer, estimates that, alongside warships, it would require at least a dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones patrolling the skies and striking Iranian missile and drone launchers when they pop up on the coast.

The article weighs other options, including sending in troops to guard the Strait, but those have obvious downsides. I am curious how, if Iran lays mines in the Strait (it probably already has), how US naval vessels can find and disarm (or avoid) all the mines. There are underwater mines these days, as well as submarine drones. Do any readers know how the “escort” ships would clear mines?

*The New York Times has an article by Kyle Buchanan, a reporter who covers Oscars, predicting who will win in the Big Four categories. By the time you read this, the Oscars will have been awarded, but you can at least see how accurate Buchanan is (the article is archived here). This morning I’m adding the winners;

Do you really want to know? Kyle Buchanan, a reporter who covers the awards season beat for The Times, makes predictions every year, and he’s really good at it. Last year, he nailed seven of the eight big awards. His picks for this year are here; given his track record, consider it a possible spoiler alert.

Best picture

Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” has taken the top prize at nearly every show this season, including the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and the directors and producers guild ceremonies. The latter group is an especially strong predictor of best-picture success, since the Producers Guild uses the same preferential ballot as the Oscars and shares significant member overlap with the academy.

Still, you can’t rule out a late surge from “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama. It has earned fresh momentum since breaking the record for the most Oscar nominations, and it performed strongly at the Actor Awards, winning the ensemble prize and best actor for Michael B. Jordan. The energy was so electric that it recalled the night “Parasite” won the same ensemble award on its way to toppling the Producers Guild winner “1917” at the Oscars.

But those upsets tend to occur when the season-long front-runner is respected rather than loved. I don’t think that’s the case with “One Battle After Another”: Many voters adore this movie and that should be enough to safeguard its big win.

WINNER: “One Battle after Another”

Call me misguided, but I didn’t like “One Battle After Another”. The premise was good, but, like many movies these days, it turned into a series of long chase scenes.

Best director

If you’re voting for “One Battle” in picture, you’re definitely voting for Anderson in director. What has surprised me is that a sizable chunk of “Sinners” voters I spoke to are opting for Anderson in the directing category, too. Maybe it’s just his moment.

WINNER: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle after Another”

Best actor

At the beginning of the season, I speculated that this Oscar was Chalamet’s to lose. Has he? The 30-year-old was recently defeated at the BAFTAs and the Actor Awards, revealing some resistance from industry voters. Still, I wonder if the academy’s longtime bias against handsome young A-listers in this category will also hinder the 39-year-old Jordan, who won with the friendlier Screen Actors Guild. If voters would rather reward a veteran, there are almost too many options: Do they choose DiCaprio, who led the likely best-picture winner? What about Hawke or Moura, who are well-liked and seemingly everywhere? Any of these five men can win, though I’m betting on Jordan, who is peaking at the right time.

WINNER: Michael B. Jordan in “Sinners”

I haven’t seen “Marty Supreme”. Jordan was good in “Sinners”, a movie I liked–at least the first half–but I make no predictions.

Best actress:

With so many acting races giving me agita, thank goodness for Buckley [in “Hamnet], who has thoroughly swept this season. (Not even a late-arriving bomb in “The Bride!” could slow her momentum.)

WINNER: Jessie Buckley “Hamnet”.  I TOLD YOU SHE’D WIN!  Go see the movie.

I did see “Hamnet” and thought Buckley’s performance was fantastic, fabulous, out of the park. I can’t imagine she won’t win.

As for supporting roles, Buchanan’s prediction for Best Supporting Actress is Amy Madigan in “Weapons”, and for Best Supporting Actor is Sean Penn ib “One Battle After Another.” There are predictions for many other categories, too, but you can see them at the links. WINNERS: Amy Madigan in “Weapons” and Sean Penn in “One Battle after Another” 

Buchanan got these all correct!  This morning you can see NYT op-ed writers discuss the winners and losers (article archived here). They were not keen on “One Battle After Another” compared to “Sinners’, nor were they as enthusiastic as I about Jessie Buckley’s performance in “Hamnet.”

*Being a geezer, I had to click on the WaPo article “Dying is costly: here’s how you can prepare.” (Article is archived here.) Even if you’re not concerned, click on the unarchived page (if you subscribe) to see the animation (!) that accompanies. it.

The average cost of dying in America is $195,501. Here’s the breakdown:

Elderly care:

Elderly care takes many forms. The costliest is paid long-term care: living at a nursing home or hiring a caretaker at your residencewhen family members need help. Medicare generally does not cover long-term care. Though Medicaid covers nursing home costs for most people, whether you qualify depends on your location and income level.

According to federal data, about 7 in 10 Americans over 65 today will need long-term care, and most of them will need it for about three years.

Funeral costs:

The cost of dying compounds when including expenses for a funeral, a cemetery plot and legal matters. When death occurs, emotional stress can make decisions difficult, and people could spend more than necessary. An industry survey of more than 1,000 respondents in 2024 put the total costs at about $12,616. Almost half of the money went to funeral planning.

That matches data from Funeralocity, an online platform for comparing funeral prices. The platform estimates that the average price of a burial is about $8,590, and cremation is about $6,250 around the country as of March. More than 6 in 10 Americans choose cremation today. When taking that breakdown between cremation and burial into account, Americans can expect to need about $7,726 for funeral costs on average.

But crikey: why does it cost $6,250 to incerate somebody? Should I donate my body to science?

When a death occurs, some parts of the estate may be taxed. Most Americans don’t reach the threshold for estate taxes. A smaller share of the population, however, might want to choose carefully where they retire to maximize tax benefits.

There are two types of death taxes: estate taxes and inheritance taxes. There’s no federal inheritance tax, and the taxable threshold for federal estate taxes starts at $15 million per individual in 2026 — a concern for less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. However, a bigger share of Americans would be taxed on the state level.

Twelve states and D.C. charge an estate tax. State estate taxes start to kick in if the estate is larger than $1 million in Oregon — the lowest among all states — or larger than $13.99 million in Connecticut, the highest.

Five states charge an inheritance tax, though certain family members, such as the surviving spouse, are exempt.The state where the death occurred collects the money regardless of where the heir lives.

If you’re old, make sure you’ve got the dosh!

*From the UPI’s Odd News; the screenshot from FB tells the tale, but the article doesn’t say what happened to the badger except that it was “removed.” I hope they didn’t euthanize it unless it was very ill. Badgers are underappreciated.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili apparently read my Quillette article!!

Hili: Beauty uncovers the truth about our tendency to be filled with awe.
Andrzej: I see that you read Jerry’s article.

In Polish:

Hili: Piękno odkrywa prawdę o naszej skłonności do zachwytu.
Ja: Widzę, że czytałaś artykuł Jerrego.

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

From Stacy:

From Dad Jokes, a sign warning you DO NOT SEASON THE PIGEONS:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Masih, two brave Iranian women (I’m not sure about the Mamdami tweet since it may be calling for violation of freedom of speech):

Via Luana. I disagree with the “mass deportation” call, but it’s horrible that people in America are supporting terrorist organizations so openly (note also the call, “USA, go to hell” and “close the Strait, burn the bases.” The whole thing is horrific.  And yes, they want to either destroy or take over the West:

Hypocrisy in the UK. Give them the damn visas!

From Cate. At first I thought this was an AI-generated cat, but it might be real (it’s a Silver Savannah cat):

One from my feed. How does she do that? Translation from the German: “Belly dance by Valeria Veremeenko.  Turn the sound on. She’s fantastic!” (More belly dances here.)

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a salacious one he tweeted (and retweeted):

Deeply buried massive statue of Batman with an erection.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-03-15T08:05:22.633Z

Did this dg place a bet? Matthew’s comment, “Dg but a hoot”. Indeed!

🪄🤣 Spreading JOY 🪄🤭🤣This laugh worth the wait 🤣

— 💙 Keep Rising 💙 (@keeprising.bsky.social) 2026-03-14T10:34:44.235Z

Sunday: Hili dialogue

March 15, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a gray Sunday, with snow in the offing tomorrow for Chicago. Oy!.

It’s Sunday, March 15, 2026, the dreaded Ides of March, the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC.  Here’s a painting of the aftermath, with the Wikipedia caption, “Aftermath of the attack with Caesar’s body abandoned in the foreground, La Mort de César by Jean-Léon Gérôme, c. 1859–1867”.  Click to enlarge, and be careful out there!

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Egg Cream Day, a classic drink of New York Jews that contains neither eggs nor cream, National Peanut Lovers Day, and National Pears Hélène Day (poached pears with vanilla ice cream and chocolate or caramel sauce).  Here’s a bunch of those pears; the dessert sounds good but I’ve never had it:

Comrade Foot from Taastrup, Greater Copenhagen Region, Denmark, Scandinavia., CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Oh, and yesterday (3/14) was Pi Day, and there was a Google Doodle. It takes you to an AI question! Click to see where it goes (hint: it has something to do with Archimedes)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Well, the U.S. finally attacked Iran’s Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, the off-loading point for 90% of Iran’s oil. But only military targets were struck; apparently the pipelines and such weren’t touched.

President Trump said on social media that the U.S. military had conducted a large bombing raid on Friday on Kharg Island, a key port and Iran’s oil export hub. Mr. Trump said the raid had “totally obliterated” military forces on the island, but that he had directed the Pentagon not to damage its oil infrastructure, “for reasons of decency.”

The global price of oil has surged by 40 percent since the United States and Israel began the war with Iran last month.

The strikes on Kharg Island targeted all of the military infrastructure on the island, a military official said. U.S. Air Force bombers struck missile storage sites, as well as sites that housed Iranian mines, the official said. He said the United States did not target the economic infrastructure on the island.

A senior official from Iran’s Oil Ministry said the attacks on the island were enormous and destructive, and that employees of the oil refineries reported nearly two hours of nonstop explosions and airstrikes that shook the island like an earthquake.

The senior official, who asked not to be named because he was discussing sensitive issues, said that an attack on Kharg Island’s oil and gas infrastructure would immediately halt a major part of Iran’s oil exports, with severe economic and infrastructure consequences.

Kharg Island is one of Iran’s most strategic and critical energy outposts, situated deep into the Persian Gulf’s north, about 20 miles off the mainland’s coast. About 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports go through Kharg. The island has huge oil storage facilities, and pipelines from the island are connected by sea to some of Iran’s largest oil and gas fields.

Decency my tuchas! Trump doesn’t know the meaning of the word. If he destroyed the oil infrastructure on the island, gas prices would shoot up beyond reason, perhaps to $200 a barrel.  Remember that Bret Stephens recommended that the U.S. seize the island:

What, then, should the Trump administration do? My prescription: Seize Kharg Island. Mine or blockade Iran’s remaining ports. Destroy as much Iranian military capability as possible over the next week or two, including a second Midnight Hammer operation to destroy what’s left of Iran’s nuclear capacity and know-how. And threaten the regime with further bombing if it massacres its own citizens, mounts terrorist attacks abroad or returns to nuclear work.

I don’t know if this will bring an end to the war acceptable to Trump (or America, which is much less keen on the war), but seizing Kharg Island means no more oil from Iran, and would have the same effect, though the flow could begin again soon. (But under what conditions?)

*We have a credible motive for the man who drive a firework-laden vehicle into a Detroit synagogue, and then died (via suicide) after a firefight with private guards.  The man was born in Labeanon and lost family members in that country during an airstrike last week. Bolding is mine.

The man who rammed his truck into a Michigan synagogue on Thursday killed himself during a firefight with security guards, after his vehicle became lodged in a hallway during the attack, law enforcement officials said on Friday.

The vehicle was loaded with fireworks, and the engine apparently caught fire during the gunfight, Jennifer Runyan, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I. office in Detroit, said at a news conference on Friday evening.

The attacker, identified by federal officials as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon, lived in Dearborn Heights, Mich., which is home to a large Muslim community about 20 minutes from the synagogue in West Bloomfield Township. Both towns are suburbs of Detroit.

Mr. Ghazali lost four relatives in an airstrike in Lebanon last week, according to a Lebanese official, who said he knew the family. A Dearborn Heights mosque held a memorial for Mr. Ghazali’s slain family members on Sunday, according to its imam, Hassan Qazwini of the Islamic Institute of America.

The attacker had “no criminal history and no registered weapons,” and had never been the subject of an F.B.I. investigation, Ms. Runyan said, refusing to speculate about his possible motives. He sat in his vehicle that was parked outside of the synagogue, Temple Israel, for about two hours before driving into the building.

He was still in the vehicle when he exchanged gunfire with at least two security officers inside, she said. “At some point during the gunfight, Ghazali suffers a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head,” she added. No one else was killed, and some 140 students and their teachers were evacuated from the building without injury.

Ms. Runyan is a blockhead.  The motivation is almost certainly hatred of Jews and Israel prompted by the death of the attacker’s family.  And note how the NYT gives almost equal sympathy for Jews and Muslims in its article:

The episode heightened fears among Jews in Michigan and across the United States. A wave of rising antisemitism in America has been exacerbated by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which has extended into attacks by Israel on Lebanon in an attempt to root out the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

It also prompted anxiety for members of the area’s large Arab community, who braced for extra scrutiny after they learned that the attacker was from Lebanon. “This tragedy comes at a time when communities everywhere are confronting rising hate and senseless violence,” said Mayor Mo Baydoun of Dearborn Heights, where the attacker worked at a popular Mediterranean restaurant.

Listen, NYT, extra scrutiny is not the same thing as shooting people.  And so far there have been far, far more attacks on Jews than on Muslims, so yes, the FBI should be looking harder at the Muslim community than at Jews if they’re trying stave off terrorist attacks.

*This trial was the first of its kind: in Texas there were convictions for most of the nine Americans accused of terrorism for shooting a police officer at an ICE facility last July 4. (Article is archived here.)

A jury delivered a mixed verdict Friday afternoon in connection with the shooting of a police officer at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility last summer, convicting most of the nine members of an alleged “antifa cell” for supporting terrorists and one of the group for attempted murder. The landmark verdict was seen as a win in the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on left-wing protesters that it has branded as an organized network of “domestic terrorists.”

“These verdicts make clear that those who choose violence over lawful expression will face the full force of the American justice system,”said ICE Director Todd M. Lyons.“Those who target federal officers with intimidation, ambush tactics or political violence will be investigated, prosecuted and held accountable.”

Attorneys for the defendants cast the verdicts as defeats for free speech.

“I feel like the U.S. lost here with this verdict and what it means for future defendants,” said Christopher Weinbel, an assistant federal public defender. He added that he was especially dismayed by the verdict as a U.S. Army veteran who deployed six times. “I feel like it turned its back on justice with this.”

. . .The charges stemmed from what the defendants’ attorneys called a “noise demonstration” July 4 outside Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Center in nearby Alvarado, Texas, that left a police officer shot and wounded.

The nine defendants, indicted by a grand jury collectively last fall, include alleged ringleader Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist; Savanna Batten; Zachary Evetts; Autumn Hill; Meagan Morris; Maricela Rueda; and a couple, Elizabeth and Ines Soto. The accused included a middle school teacher, a college student, a mechanical engineer and a UPS worker.

They faced a combination of charges, including attempted murder, rioting, providing support to terrorists, conspiracy to use and carry explosives and conspiracy to corruptly conceal documents. One of the nine, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, was not at the scene and was accused of later trying to hide a box of “anti-government propaganda.”

Eight of the defendants (except Sanchez-Estrada) were convicted of providing support for terrorists, riot and explosives charges (fireworks). Only Song was convicted of attempted murder for shooting the officer. Sanchez-Estrada was convicted of concealing documents and conspiracy to conceal documents (his wife, Rueda, was also convicted of the conspiracy charge). Hill, Evetts, Morris and Rueda were acquitted of attempted murder and discharging a firearm charges.

. . . All pleaded not guilty and did not testify at the two-week trial. Most faced potential life sentences. Sentencing has been scheduled for June 18. Prosecutors said Song now faces 20 years to life in prison; Batten, Evetts, Hill, Morris, Rueda, Elizabeth and Ines Soto each face 10 to 60 years; Sanchez Estrada faces up to 40 years in prison.

This was an antifa-like attack, if not by an antifa organization itself. In fact, one of the items the jury asked to see during its two-day deliberation was Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.  And no, it isn’t freedom of speech if there was a conspiracy that led to immediate violence during the protest.

*Quillette has an interview with Dr. Schmeul Bar, a former Israeli intelligence officer who prognosticates about Iran’s future (article archived here).  A bit of the long exchange:

Q: People are trying to figure out the potential scenarios at hand. Trump is determined to avoid a long war of attrition, while Netanyahu might insist on continuing until all stated goals are met. Is the primary aim of both parties to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities?

SB: First, Iran could develop a destructive capability against Israel even without nuclear weapons. Israel will not accept this. So Israel had to take advantage of Iran’s weakness to eliminate Iran’s conventional capabilities. Second, the Iranian economy is in hyperinflation, people in big cities like Tehran, Isfahan, and Mashhad have about two or three hours of water a day. When you buy bread, the shop can’t buy a new loaf because the price of tomorrow’s bread has already gone up by twenty percent. There simply isn’t the money so the stores are empty.

So what are Iranians going to do if they don’t go out on to the streets to protest the state of the economy? They are saying, “Look at what you’ve done to us, you are throwing your money into Hamas and nuclear missiles instead of feeding us.” You have a deteriorating economy caught in a downward spiral, and a situation where Israel has a vested interest in getting rid of your missiles. And the June 2025 war showed that Israel knows a thing or two about what’s going on in Iran, and how to take out its senior figures.

As for Trump, it is probably best to avoid newspaper-like analysis that asks what he is doing today or tomorrow. Trump is saying, “Iran is weak and the Iranian people want to get rid of the regime, so all I have to do is push.” Let’s not forget that the regime has been chanting “Death to America!” for 47 years, and that it has murdered Americans. So from Trump’s point of view, he is taking revenge for all that and getting rid of a regime that the Democrats before him failed to remove. The way he sees it is: “In the end, I will have destroyed the most anti-American regime and made the Arab countries beholden to me as a result.” That is a win-win for Trump.

. . . Q: What does the future hold for Iran?

SB: The regime will start to crumble as the people within the IRGC and the army start to ask themselves, “What exactly are we doing here?” These are historic times. We’re talking about the emergence of a new world order. We don’t always realise when we are in the middle of that sort of change, but such a change is happening right now. The new world order is spearheaded by a combination of things, including the terrible condition of the Iranian economy and the huge mistake of launching the 7 October massacre. In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, Muhammad Bin Salman is looking to forge a more Western-oriented and less religious country.

Well, this is just one man’s opinion, but a man who was in IDF intelligence for many years and has a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern History as well as a ton of other credentials. Right now, in the middle of a war whose  outcome is undertain, it’s worth listening to him, if for no other reason than to get an informed viewpoint.

*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan shows us the darker (to me) side of James Talarico a devout Presbyterian who just became the Democratic nominee for the 2026 U.S. Senate election in Texas.  Sullivan’s piece is called “The Christianism of the Left,” and is subtitled: “Meet James Talarico, the next generation’s religious crusader for woke liberalism.”

 the fusion of Christianity and politics isn’t exclusively right-wing. You can invoke God to defend anything, after all. And a new left-Christianism has emerged in the 21st century that is a mirror image of the right’s. Left-Christians have come to adorn their churches with transqueer and BLM flags, treat NPR as the Holy Office, adopt language — “white supremacy,” “cis-heterosexism,” “patriarchy” — directly from critical theory, and interpret Scripture to mandate higher taxes, DEI, abortion on demand, and open borders. I find that Christianism just as toxic to faith and politics.

. . .Which brings me to James Talarico, the Christianist running for Senate in Texas. After defeating the race-baiting Jasmine Crockett, the MSM is framing him as a “moderate”. To be sure, I’d vote for Talarico in an instant if I were a Texan (restraining the mad king is vital this fall). He’s also a clear speaker, a man of real faith (Democrats need more like him), and a man rightly revolted by the indecency of Trump. He engages Trump voters, including Joe Rogan, and was one of very few Dems to call out Biden’s disastrous record on immigration. All awesome.

But he is also a defiantly woke Christianist: a man fusing the agenda of the far left with Christian theology. He was brought up in Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, a woke congregation in deep-blue Austin, where the Gospel about Peter’s denial of Jesus last week was followed thus:

The preacher … spoke of her own experience living in denial, both in 12-step programs and — due to her internalized homophobia — as a lesbian in a cisgendered, patriarchal world. She then made a sudden switch to talking about Germany in the Thirties, and the parallels with modern America. She performed all the classics: Hitler, Trump, the patriarchy, Pastor Niemöller, the threat of Christian nationalism and, at the end, threw in a bit of “No Kings” for good measure.

This is not atypical in many liberal churches, where prayers for an end to “white supremacy” are routine. So it is no surprise to find that Talarico went to seminary “because I had a pretty big crisis of faith in our political system.” (My italics.) Nor is it surprising that when asked to offer an invocation as a pastor in the Texas legislature, he began:

“Holy mystery, you have so many names.” He cycled through the monikers for God in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism before arriving at the New Testament’s declaration that God is love.

And in Talarico’s church of woke, Jesus’s teachings are identical to that of a left-wing Democrat of precisely March 2026:

Christ is the immigrant deported without due process. Christ is the senior deprived of their Social Security benefits. Christ is the protestor kidnapped in an unmarked vehicle by plain clothes officers.

It goes on, and I don’t like this Left-wing Christianism at all, for, like Right-wing Christianism uses religion to boost a political agenda. Yes, I’d vote for Talerico over his racist opponent, but he’s now being touted as a Presidential candidate, and I can’t stomach his arrant fusion of politics and Christianity. Please, dear Ceiling Cat, let Pete Buttigieg be the Democratic nominee in 2028!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili dumps on progressives:

Hili: I see a dangerous escalation of progress.
Andrzej: In whom exactly?
Hili: In the progressives.

In Polish:

Hili: Zauważam niebezpieczną eskalację postępu.
Ja: U kogo?
Hili: U postępowców.

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

From Things with Faces (look at the rock at 6 o’clock):

From Give me a Sign:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Masih, who tells us that three of the six Iranian women soccer players/staff have withdrawn their request for asylum in Australia and will be heading home. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why (this morning I see that there are now four):

From Emma Hilton; Malcolm Gladwell says that if men aren’t allowed to compete in women’s sports, then, in some bizarre act of repayment women should have to give up some other space they occupy to make things “right”. He’s also a blockhead.

From Luana; a good point:

From Colin; another science journal goes off the rails vis-à-vis biological sex:

One from my feed. Sassy!

One I retweeted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, Marco Rubio in clown shoes:

hmm

— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) 2026-03-11T09:02:35.635Z

. . . and look at the head on this spider!

A funky Pholcid from Mexico. I had no idea that there were Cellar spiders with weird heads. Weird heads are one of my favourite features a spider can have. Modisimus sp.#Pholcidae #CellarSpider #iNaturalist

— Thomas Barbin (@thomasbarbin.bsky.social) 2026-03-09T17:17:19.570Z

Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 14, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, March 14, 2026.  Our ducks are still here, and it’s shabbos for those two Jewish ducks, Armon and Vashti, who arrived on Purim and for all Jewish cats.  It’s also National Potato Chip Day, a snack that everyone loves (I like the rippled sour-cream-and-onion version).  Here’s how they’re made at the Lays factory:

It’s also Celebrate Scientists Day, marking the birth on March 14, 1879 of Albert Einstein in Ulm, Germany, Learn About Butterflies Day, National Reuben Sandwich Day (not kosher), National Save a Spider Day, and of course Pi Day (it’s 3/14). Our local grocery store, apparently science aware, has a sale on apple pies, and here’s an appropriate pie from Delft University:

GJ, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*More war news. First, “Secretary of War” has announced the the new leader of Iran, Mojtabi Khamenei, is in hiding, likely wounded and probably disfigured. Here’s his strong statement on the issue.  From the BBC:

Hegseth says Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is “wounded” and “likely disfigured” (as our international editor wrote earlier, we do not have proof this is the case).

Referring a written statement from Mojtaba read aloud on Iranian state TV yesterday, Hegseth questions why there was no footage or audio of him.

“I think you know why,” he adds.

The defence secretary says Motjaba is “scared” and “injured”, claiming he is “on the run” and “lacks legitimacy”.

The announcement:

And a U.S. refueling tanker crashed in Iraq, apparently after colliding with another such plane. Four people died in one plane, while the other landed safely.

All six service members aboard a U.S. Air Force refueling aircraft that crashed in Iraq while supporting operations in Iran are dead, military officials said Friday.

The KC-135 refueling aircraft was lost while flying over friendly airspace Thursday in western Iraq, U.S. Central Command said, in an apparent midair accident with another aircraft.

Centcom’s announcement brought the death toll of the crash from four to six, after earlier saying that rescue efforts were underway for the last two crew members. “The circumstances of the incident are under investigation,” the Centcom statement said, adding that the identities of the deceased personnel would be withheld for 24 hours while next of kin were notified.

Hegseth acknowledged the loss of life approximately 10 minutes into his opening statement, after making disparaging remarks about the news media. “War is hell,” he said. “War is chaos. And as we saw yesterday with the tragic crash of our KC-135 tanker, bad things can happen.” Hegseth called the tanker crew “American heroes.”

Centcom disclosed the incident in a brief statement on Thursday, saying the second aircraft landed safely. Three officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation, said the second aircraft was also a KC-135.

The KC-135 Stratotanker carries a minimum crew of three — a pilot, co-pilot and boom operator, the person responsible for overseeing the aircraft refueling other planes. It can also carry a navigator or other additional crew members, depending on the mission.

It sounds as if two refueling planes crashed into each other. Refueling is a complicated and difficult operation at best, but someone wasn’t looking around, or the radar wasn’t working, if there was a midair collision.

*Although we already know the answer, the NYT answers the question, “Why is Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz?”

The United States vowed to thwart Iran’s attempts to block the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, as the Trump administration worked to ease an energy crisis stemming from the Middle East war.

A day earlier, two oil tankers were attacked and left burning off the Iraqi coast, and Iraq and Oman shut down oil terminals.

Iran has taken responsibility for several of the strikes on merchant ships in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil output normally flows. Tehran has said that it would not allow oil shipments that benefit the United States and its allies to pass through the strait.

Oil prices have surged to trade around $100 per barrel, forcing dozens of countries to release emergency reserves to stabilize their economies. Experts say the crisis is the biggest disruption to oil supplies in history.

The strikes on shipping have given Iran a strategic success, putting economic pressure on the United States and its allies even as Iran is under heavy attack. Tehran’s actions have also raised questions about whether the United States planned for a lengthy shutdown of the strait.

“The lever of blocking the Strait of Hormuz must continue to be used,” said Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, on Thursday.

Here’s a satellite image of the Strait from Wikipedia, with the caption below:

More details

The rugged, barren mountains of the Musandam Peninsula jut into the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow throughway between Iran (north) and Oman and the United Arab Emirates (south) where the waters from the Gulf of Oman enter the Persian Gulf. Khasab, Oman, the main city sitting on the tip of the Musandam Peninsula, sits only 65 km (40 mi) from the Iranian city of Bandar Abbas. The rocky limestone mountains of the peninsula rise as high as 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level and create fjord-like inlets along the coast. Musandam is an exclave of Oman, separated from the rest of the country by the United Arab Emirates. Fishing, agriculture and ship building are the primary industries in this part of Oman. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a stunning true-color image of the Strait of Hormuz and the Musandam Peninsula on December 6, 2018.

Wikipedia notes that the Strait has never been closed for an extended time during any Middle East conflicts. That is now changing.

MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the last two weeks, 16 ships of various stripes have been struck trying to get through the narrow Strait of Hormuz.

At least 16 oil tankers, cargo and other commercial ships have been attacked in the Persian Gulf since the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran began nearly two weeks ago, a New York Times analysis shows.

Iran has claimed responsibility for several of the attacks. On Thursday, two Iraqi tankers were ablaze at sea, some of the latest visible examples of how attacks have increasingly focused on oil and energy infrastructure as the war has sprawled.

. . .Amid growing concerns about international trade, projectiles hit three vessels on Wednesday in or near the strait. Hours later, the two Iraqi tankers were struck off the country’s coast. Iraq and Oman closed oil terminals in the wake of the attacks.

The reports of the attacks, and their locations, were compiled from company releases, announcements by official country agencies, shipping industry data companies and satellite tracking firms.

At least eight people have been killed, and one remains missing, following the attacks on these vessels, which included a tug boat that came to help one of the struck container ships, according to the International Maritime Organization.

From the NYT article, captioned, “The paths of ships struck in and near the Persian Gulf.”

Iran is of course being clever in its strategy, but in the short-to-middle run it will simply peeve all the countries trying to get oil–or other stuff–between the Persian Gulf and the open sea. I don’t think Iran has mined the Strait yet, but I have no doubt they’ll try.  It’s a nice try, but it won’t work, as the U.S. and other countries will strike Iran even harder and there are ways of getting rid of any mines.

*Elliott Abrams has a long career in foreign policy serving under Republican Presidents. He also was “the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela from 2019 to 2021 and as the U.S. Special Representative for Iran from 2020 to 2021.”  He thus has the chops to call for democracy in Venezuela, which he does in the Washington Post’s op-ed, “The game is up, Delcy Rodriguez.”

Ten weeks after the capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration is moving forward with its plans to rebuild that country’s economy and link it to our own. Almost invisible so far is any progress toward a democratic transition.

President Donald Trump has dispatched to Caracas Energy Secretary Chris Wright to talk oil, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to talk minerals and U.S. Southern Command’s Gen. Francis L. Donovan for reasons that are less clear. More Venezuelan oil is landing at Gulf ports, under new Treasury Department licenses and new contracts with the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela.

With the Strait of Hormuz in effect closed, additional oil on the world market would be salutary. But increased production from Venezuela will take time. Chevron estimates that increasing its current 250,000 barrels a day to 375,000 may take two years. There’s no bonanza around the corner. Still, revenue from increased production and from oil sales without discounts, an end to U.S. sanctions and the beginnings of new investment will help the Venezuelan economy. There’s also money to be made by U.S. investors, including some who lobbied the administration to allow them to do business there.

But what about the promise of a political transition? Trump doesn’t seem much interested. In January he called Delcy Rodríguez “a terrific person.” This week he added that she’s “very respected” and doing a “great job” as the “president” of Venezuela. According to whom?

. . . Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, cannot legitimately be president any more than Maduro could. He stole the 2024 election, and her status derives solely from his. The “great job” she is doing involves hardly any political opening. Venezuela’s Foro Penal human-rights group says more than 500 political prisoners remain jailed more than two months after Maduro’s fall, when the number should by now be zero. At least one poll shows that far from being “very respected,” Rodríguez would lose a free election to Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, 67 percent to 25 percent.

. . .Referring to the regime’s “interim authorities” is a good sign. So are the terms “political reconciliation” and “democratically elected government.” But if there have been any moves toward these goals in the past two months, they’ve not dented the regime’s complete control of Venezuela. Meantime, diplomatic relations will lend increased legitimacy to Maduro’s heirs. Those representatives will take over the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, allowing them to work in the capital, lobbying Congress, NGOs, business groups, the media and the administration for less pressure and more time.

What should be demanded of Caracas to make a transition possible? As of today, no exiled political leaders have been allowed to return home. When Machado — Venezuela’s most popular politician — met with Trump on March 6, the message was apparently “patience.”

A more just course would require that all political prisoners be released immediately and that the return of exiled leaders start now. Other steps: Demand that Venezuela’s democratic political parties be permitted to elect their own leaders, replacing those illegally appointed by the Maduro regime. Establish an independent national electoral commission to run elections freely and fairly. Start the planning and mechanisms that will permit the millions of Venezuelans who fled during the Maduro years to vote in the countries where they now live. Agree on a plan for transitional justice that will make people account for their crimes during the last two decades but give whatever degree of amnesty is needed.

I find it offensive that Trump is treating Rodriguez as if she’s the legitimate head of government in Venezuela.  Abrams’s recommendations in the last paragraph, designed to create a democratic and non-oppressive regimes, are absolutely on the mark. And remember, Abrams served Republican Presidents before, and now he’s criticizing one.

*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column at the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Smoking jars of metal.”

→ Grand Theft Auto presidency: The White House is making pro-war propaganda using clips from the video game Grand Theft Auto spliced with video of Iranian targets exploding. Boys at Eton used to memorize great war poems so that they knew how to speak to their nation. Today we have memes of video game characters going Ah shit, here we go again cut with real war footage of something going BOOM, then Ah shit, here we go again, ANOTHER BOOM. Once ruled by boarding school boys, now by summer school boys.

Here’s the tweet—from The White House!

→ Antisemitism in America updates: Well, one of America’s most popular podcasters (yes, Candace Owens) now regularly writes things like this: “It was not a mistake. Israel is required to mass murder children because they worship Baal. Trump does as he is instructed to by Jared Kushner and Bibi Netanyahu.” It’s weird that she’s accusing the original monotheists of being pagans? I don’t even know this kind of antisemitism. Control of Hollywood. . . I’m not with you but I can understand where you’re coming from, you know? Jewish people didn’t invent money, no, but I see how you got there.

But Baal worship? Who is Baal? You’ve lost me, Candy. Also this week, she says of Ben Shapiro: “This right here is the behavior of a maggot rotting on a corpse. . . . How do you guys sleep at night allowing this tapeworm to feast off Charlie’s legacy.”

Oh, and a man drove a truck into a Michigan synagogue—one of the largest Reform synagogues in America—where a preschool was in session. Thankfully, security acted fast and no children were killed. Don’t worry, TV talking heads are already justifying it: “This situation, it was an Israeli temple. It was aligned with Israel.” The armed attacker was found dead inside his vehicle. Not to get too personal, but our preschool fundraiser was entirely to raise money for more (you guessed it) security. The colored markers are all dry, the blocks are from the ’90s, but there are so many men standing at attention outside ready to throw their bodies on IEDs. And for that, we are grateful.

→ Teachers want to retire at 55 again: New York public employee unions are pushing Governor Kathy Hochul to roll back pension reforms by lowering the retirement age from 63 to 55 and eliminating employee contributions, a move that policy analyst Ken Girardin estimates could cost taxpayers over $100 billion. Public school teachers unions are incredible. They want to be able to retire at 55 years old with full pensions, the whole thing. And they frame any skepticism of this as “devaluing” the work of hardworking teachers, the backbone of society, the most underappreciated group of people in history. Listen, I agree teachers have it rough, but can’t we make things better for them without treating them to an all-inclusive Sandals Jamaica lifestyle? Here’s the flyer they’re sending around:

→ The answer is yes:

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I was a little flattered by this one. First, he called me a writer. Second, my name is in the headline, which means I’ve still got it. Third, I’m on a list of American Writers, and potentially at the top! Being the worst at anything is a feat. It’s not as easy as it looks to be the best at being bad at something.

I love Nellie! She manages to make a joke of a nasty headline. She’s chill.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s worried about the lodger’s d*g:

Hili: Tell me when this dog matures to the point of normal social contact.
Andrzej: Patience, it might take a lot of time.

In Polish:

Hili: Poinformuj mnie jak ten pies dojrzeje do normalnych kontaktów społecznych.
Ja: Cierpliwości, to może zabrać sporo czasu.

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

From CinEmma:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Things With Faces, the world’s happiest stump:

From Masih: she was on CNN with Jake Tapper, discussing the “wounded regime” without an obvious leader. This is about 7 minutes:

This is pretty much what the NYT reported yesterday, but it’s from the Babylon Bee. First, the NYT:

An attacker is dead after plowing his vehicle into a synagogue on Thursday outside Detroit and then exchanging gunfire with security guards in what the authorities described as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.”

Federal officials said the attack was carried out by 41-year-old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali. Officials were still searching for a motive.

Now from Da Bee:

From Emma:

Two from my feed. First, two small but talented Irish dancers:

I am so tired of this arrant ignorance, throwing around “apartheid” and “genocide” without knowing what they mean.

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, my beloved Joni (I was one among millions):

Joni Mitchell, Laurel Canyon, 1969 singer, songwriter, musician, painter….. genius #WomensArt(Photo G.Nash)

— (@womensartbluesky.bsky.social) 2026-03-13T05:52:21.189Z

An adorable but also sad tweet from Matthew:

George Stubbs painted Godolphin the Arabian stallion, with Grimalkin the stable cat, whom he loved very much, maybe in the 1740s. When the cat died, Godolphin was inconsolable (this was remarked in the Stud-Book). Godolphin died in 1753 abd was buried within the stable block at Wandlebury.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-03-12T18:06:57.198Z

Friday: Hili dialogue

March 13, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, March 13, 2026: another Friday the 13th.  It’s Donald Duck Day, celebrating the pantsless mallard who first appeared in a cartoon in 1934.  The link says this:

In a 1941 biography of Donald Duck, Walt Disney’s The Life of Donald Duck, it says that Donald was born on a Friday the 13th. The 1949 short film “Donald’s Happy Birthday” celebrates his birthday on March 13. The license plate of his car is the number 313, likely a reference to his birthday.

Here’s the cartoon, from my birth year. It will keep playing over and over again as you read this post, so press the “stop” button if you’ve seen it or don’t want to hear it, but I recommend your watching, as it’s classic Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, with his nephews conspiring to buy him a box of cigars on his birthday.

It’s also K-9 Veterans Day, National Chicken Noodle Soup Day, National Coconut Torte Day, National Ginger Ale Day, National Riesling Day, and World Sleep Day (oy, could I use some!)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

**Breaking news. From the Everyone Hates the Jews Department, there was an attack on a synagogue in Michigan. A guy drove his explosive-packed ehicle into a synagogue and then exchanged fire with security guards. He was killed. Apparently he tried to ignite the explosives, but they failed to go off.

An attacker is dead after plowing his vehicle into a synagogue on Thursday outside Detroit and then exchanging gunfire with security guards in what the authorities described as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.”

Federal officials said the attack was carried out by 41-year-old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali. Officials were still searching for a motive.

Give me a break!  Fox News says this:

He reportedly targeted the Jewish community after suffering family losses in Lebanon during the country’s conflict with Israel, Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun said, adding that Ghazali was a resident of the city.

The NYT doesn’t like to deal with “motives” when it comes to synagogues.

And there was another terrorist attack in Virginia that left the attacker, an ISIS supporter, dead, but also one ROTC candidate:

When a convicted ISIS supporter stepped into an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University on Thursday and opened fire, the group of students inside barely hesitated before leaping up to subdue their attacker.

By the end of the struggle, the shooter was dead, but so too was one of their peers.

The FBI is now investigating the Thursday morning attack as an act of terrorism, identifying the shooter as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a former Virginia National Guard member who has served prison time for attempting to aid the Islamist militant group a decade ago.

Before the attack began, FBI Special Agent In Charge Dominique Evans said Jalloh shouted “Allahu Akbar” — or “God is greater.”

The religion of peace my tuchas.

*War news from the WSJ.  Mojtaba Khamenei, the next target Supreme Leader of Iran, is keeping a low profile because he knows that he’s the Most Likely Iranian to be Targeted now. But yesterday he issued a public statement that shows that the new boss is the same as the old boss.

Iran’s new supreme leader, in his first official message since he took over from his slain father, said his country would keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. Shipping on the crucial oil route and nearby waters suffered a rise in attacks.

Mojtaba Khamenei also raised the possibility of opening new fronts in a war that the International Energy Agency said is causing the biggest-ever disruption to oil supply, according to a written statement attributed to him.

The U.S. military has turned down requests to escort tankers or other civilian ships through the strait, with defense officials saying it won’t do so until the threat of Iranian fire has eased. The head of U.S. Central Command said its focus remains on destroying Iran’s missiles and drones.

. . . Khamenei said Iran would open new fronts in the war. Iran has responded to U.S. and Israeli strikes by broadening the conflict, including hitting civilian infrastructure and energy facilities in Arab nations across the Gulf. He said Iran sought good relations with its neighbors, but that they over the years had allowed the U.S. to establish bases on their soil.

Buckle up: this fight is going to take longer than we thought. I can’t imagine what it would take to cause regime change and give freedom and democracy to the beleaguered Iranian people, who totally deserve it. That seems no longer to be a goal of the American/Israeli attack.

*The NYT reports that the frequency of Iran’s “retaliatory” strikes is slowing.

Nearly two weeks of U.S. and Israeli strikes have battered Iran’s arsenal, and now, the pace of Tehran’s retaliatory attacks appears to be slowing.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday that Iran had fired the lowest number of missiles in a 24-hour period since the war began.

“Our strikes mean we’ve made significant progress in reducing the number of missile and drone attacks out of Iran,” he said.

Across the Gulf countries alone, Iran has launched more than 2,100 drones, 500 ballistic missiles and 20 cruise missiles since the war began on Feb. 28, according to a New York Times tally of reports from defense ministries and regional officials. More strikes have hit Israel, but the government is not sharing data about the quantity of weapons coming in.

But there are mounting signs that Iran has had to curb its attacks, according to experts, either because of depleted stockpiles or to conserve weaponry in case the war is prolonged.

Here’s what we know about Iran’s weapon capabilities.

Signs grow that Iran’s weapons are degraded. 

In the first two days of the war, Iran launched about 100 attacks on Israel, according to data compiled by the independent Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. That number has since fallen to a handful each day, the data shows.

The slowdown is reflected in figures from some Gulf countries, which Iran has targeted for their alliances with the United States and, in some cases, for hosting American bases.

“Ballistic missile attacks continue to trend downward 90 percent from where they’ve started,” Mr. Hegseth said in his remarks on Tuesday. “And one-way attack drones have decreased 83 percent since the beginning of the operation, a testament to our air defenders and our air-defense systems.”

There are more figures, and of course an alternative explanation is that Iran is simply hoarding its reserve of missiles and drones in case the U.S. should actually put boots on Iranian ground. If this period of U.S./Israel attack doesn’t do what Trump wants it to do, I wouldn’t put it beyond him to actually invade the country.  Such an idea would require careful consideration, for there’s nothing like dead U.S. military to turn both Congress and the American public against this incursion.

*In a post called “The heretics list“, the LGB Courage Coalition website reports about petition in which a group of scientists summoned up their own courage to sign a statement saying that women produce eggs. (h/t Loretta). The statement itself and its signatories was apparently the work of our own Emma Hilton with help from Colin Wright. Emma reports on “Project Nettie” on her Beetlebomb website.  Here’s the statement on Emma’s site:

Male and female are scientific descriptions of the two sexual reproductive functions evolved to produce two specialised types of sex cells: small, mobile gametes (e.g. sperm or pollen) and large, immobile gametes (e.g. eggs).

In humans, there are two classes of individuals, each with a molecular and anatomical developmental pattern corresponding to adult reproduction via either sperm or eggs.

This division of the two reproductive functions across two classes of individuals is a simple outcome of our species’ evolutionary history.

In humans, anatomical developmental patterns are fixed during early embryonic development, and sex does not change throughout the individual lifespan.

While (rare) individuals have medical conditions that affect their anatomical reproductive development and/or function, not one of these individuals represents an additional sex class. One’s inability to produce gametes (e.g. those who are infertile or post-reproductive) does not change sex from that defined by reproductive anatomy.

Attempts to recast biological sex as a social construct, which then becomes a matter of arbitrarily chosen individual identity, are wholly ideological, scientifically inaccurate and socially irresponsible.

The project is explicitly modeled after “Project Steve“, in which scientists named Steve were asked to affirm their acceptance of evolution. In this case the model is Nettie Stevens (1861-1912) the American woman geneticist who discovered sex chromosomes.  Emma is thinking of reactivating it; if you’re an academic or biologist and would sign it, put that in the comments and I will see what I can do.

From the website:

The signatories

The list of signatories found on Hilton’s Substack is worth reading in full, not for the prominence of those who have signed (although some names are well known), but for the depth of their professional commitment. These are not retired academics with nothing left to lose; they are active clinicians at the peaks of their careers. The list spans emergency medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, endocrinology, pathology, and general practice.

Notable signatories include:

William Malone, an endocrinologist at the forefront of the debate over the use ofcross-sex hormones and puberty blockers on children and adolescents

Melanie Newbould, a pediatric pathologist and Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists

David Curtis, a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists with a PhD in genetics from Cambridge

Ryan Clark, a consultant in emergency and pediatric emergency medicine

Lord David Triesman and Lewis Moonie, both members of the House of Lords with backgrounds in epidemiology and psychiatry.

These are not fringe figures. They are credentialed experts in fields where misdefining biological sex has direct, negative consequences for patient care.

. . .The existence of such a list is a symptom of an ailing scientific community.

Such declarations do not appear in healthy environments; they emerge only when institutional capture by ideologues and frauds is so near-total that stating the most basic of biological truths requires a formal act of defiance. This list is not merely a record of consensus, but a map of the resistance—a ledger of those willing to tether their professional reputations to material facts within an environment threatened by enforced delusion.

That courage has costs. Hilton herself has faced professional hostility for her public positions on biological sex. Others on the list have faced similar treatment. The signatories know what they’re doing when they add their names, which makes the list more than a record of who believes what, but who also had the courage to step forward.

In observance of Women’s History Month, it is imperative to reclaim the legacy of the woman who provides this project with its name and its moral anchor: Nettie Stevens.

There are more signers; the ones above are just the “notables.”  I wasn’t asked to sign it at all (an oversight, I’m sure).

*A WaPo op-ed by writer/reporter James Kirchick describes how two Representatives were guilty of false accusations in the wake of Epsteingate, “How Ro Khanna turned a sex trafficking scandal into a campaign stunt.”

Last month, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-California) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) held a news conference outside the Justice Department. Co-sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, they had just reviewed a collection of unredacted documents from the FBI’s investigation into the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and were assailing the government for withholding the names of six men who appeared in a collection of mug-shot-style photographs. “There is no reason in our legislation that allows them to redact the names of those men,” Massie declared. If the department would not release the names, the pair said, they would do it themselves.

The following day on the House floor, Khanna made good on that threat, reading the names of “six, wealthy, powerful men” into the congressional record “to hold the Epstein class accountable.”

It took the Guardian three days to discover that four of the men Khanna named had “no ties to Epstein.” A car mechanic from the nation of Georgia, an information technology specialist, the owner of a home improvement store in Queens and a man Massie later admitted to misidentifying who shares a name with an Italian former member of the European Parliament — none of them are “wealthy” and “powerful.” A more accurate description was provided by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who referred to them as “completely random.”

Rather than apologize to the public he deceived and to the men he smeared, Khanna blamed the Justice Department. Acknowledging that the innocent men “were just part of a photo line up and are not connected to Epstein’s crimes,” Khanna said that the department nonetheless “failed to protect survivors.” Less than two weeks later, having evidently learned nothing, he claimed that the files showed that Epstein had visited CIA headquarters. A Washington Free Beacon report demonstrated that Khanna was likely referencing a photo of Epstein at a Hermès design studio. (When asked for comment, Khanna acknowledged that “the photograph which had online buzz about being at CIA headquarters was apparently at Hermes.”)

Ever since appointing himself chief congressional inquisitor in the Epstein investigation, Khanna has been deceiving the American people with conspiracy theories. Last summer, the FBI released a memo debunking the two primary components of what independent journalist Michael Tracey, who has done more than anyone to expose the mainstream media’s sensationalist coverage of this story, refers to as the “Epstein mythology.” According to the bureau, there’s no evidence that Epstein possessed a “client list” of people he subjected to sexual blackmail, nor is there any information “that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” Nothing in the 3.5 million files that the department released in January at the urging of Khanna and others changes that assessment.

It’s a shame, as Khanna has many stands I agree with, and I used to consider him a viable dark-horse Democratic for President, though I’m not keen on this (from Wikipedia):

In November of 2025, Khanna was one of 20 Democratic congress members who cosponsored a resolution introduced by Representative Rashida Tlaib to officially recognize Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

Aligning with Tlaib on this is inexcusable, as is the dumb “genocide” accusation.

*Finally both the AP and UPI’s “odd news” features a red fox that crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway.  This is from the UPI:

 This stowaway truly was sly as a fox.

A red fox somehow slipped onto a cargo ship that traveled from Southampton, England, to New York, where the animal is now in the Bronx Zoo’s care.

The zoo said Wednesday that the 11-pound (5-kilogram) male fox appears healthy after early examinations.

“He seems to be settling in well,” Keith Lovett, the zoo’s director of animal programs, said by phone. “It’s gone through a lot.”

It’s not clear how the animal got on the ship full of automobiles, which left Southampton on Feb. 4, according to the zoo. The ship arrived Feb. 18 at the Port of New York and New Jersey, and officials brought the fox to the zoo the next day. He’s estimated to be 2 years old.

Zoo representatives weren’t sure how and when the fox was discovered. Messages seeking those details were sent to government agencies involved with the port.

The species, formally named Vulpes vulpes, is widespread in Europe, Asia, North America and parts of Africa. A long-term home for this fox will be found once he clears some more health screening.

For now, he’s in the zoo’s veterinary center. Being an omnivore, he’s getting a diet of produce, proteins and some biscuit-like items.

Here’s a new report on the fox. I want to know if his “new home” will be in England versus America. It’s an illegal immigrant, and should be deported:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili are both carping the diem (but Hili wants beef, too):

Hili: Carpe diem, my dear, time is running away.
Andrzej: You are right, I will have some wine, and I will give you some cream.
Hili: There are more interesting options as well.

In Polish:

Hili: Carpe diem, mój drogi, czas ucieka.
Ja: Masz rację, ja napiję się wina, a tobie dam śmietanki.
Hili: Są również ciekawsze opcje.

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

First, yesterday’s NYT front page is still giving all negative news about the war. Again, I swear it wants the U.S. to lose, and isn’t hiding it. Click to enlarge:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Stacy:

From This Cat is Guilty:

From Masih, more warning from Iranian authorities that protesting equals death:

From Luana. I had forgotten that the mayor of Seattle is the daughter of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. Looks like she’s going the way of Zohran Mamdani in NYC.

From Barry. Sound must be up on this one!

My cat sleeps all day and then keeps me awake all night so this gave me a good laugh. Credit – @dagnylill on Instagram

— Brian Gormley D7 (@bgormley.bsky.social) 2026-03-11T20:52:12.668Z

From Cate; animals having fun in the wild (see the scientific paper here):

One from my feed; Elica is reliable:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial: a grim fate for this priest:

This Polish priest, in his early thirties, met a grim fate: he was severely beaten and then drowned in a barrel of fecal matter because he refused the Nazi order to step on a rosary. He was beatified by Pope John Paul IIen.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3…

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-03-13T10:24:37.371Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a dad joke (he loves those, but of course he’s a dad):

 

Does this surprise you? I can’t wait for the next polio epidemic. . .

This is RFK, Jr.'s MAHA Institute's recent meeting in D.C.Slide presentation titles:“The Polio Fraud” and “The flu shot has given 1,900,000 Americans Alzheimer’s,” and “VACCINES ARE GREATEST SCAM IN MEDICAL HISTORY.” (capitals, theirs)www.notus.org/health-scien…

— Jan Kirsch, M.D., M.P.H. (@drjanicekirsch.bsky.social) 2026-03-11T03:23:20.547Z