Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, May 12, 2026, and National Odometer Day. My 2000 Honda Civic, now 26 years old, has only about 83,000 miles on it, as I’m a little old man who drives it only on weekends. Feel free to give us your own odometer reading, especially if it shows your car has been intrepid (give the year and model).

It’s also International Nurses Day and National Nutty Fudge Day. Here’s a short but mouthwatering video about how chocolate-walnut fudge is made in one store on the Jersey Shore:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Iran has publicized Trump’s demands for ending the war—demands that the Islamic Republic deems unacceptable (article archived here).

Iran defended its demands in negotiations to end the war with the United States and Israel on Monday, hours after President Trump had denounced the latest Iranian position as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE” on social media.

Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters that Iran did not “demand any concessions” but rather asserted the country’s “legitimate rights.” He added that Iran’s proposal would have ensured safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively blockaded since the U.S.-Israeli attacked Iran in late February.

Mr. Baghaei’s said that Iran had made “generous” and “reasonable and responsible” requests. But Iran’s own state broadcaster recounted a series of uncompromising conditions on Monday.

According to Iranian state media, Iran had called for the U.S. to pay “war damages” to Tehran and recognize Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Both are likely non-starters for the United States, which has called for an end to Iran’s grip over the strait, a critical passage for oil and gas.

Mr. Trump had initially conditioned the ongoing temporary cease-fire with Iran, which began last month, on free transit for ships through the strait. But Iran still insists that any ships that traverse the Persian Gulf waterway do so in coordination with its forces, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly pulled back from his threats to attack Iran in protest.

Last week, Mr. Trump announced a U.S. military effort to free ships trapped in the maritime bottleneck by the war, dubbed “Project Freedom.” But roughly a day later, the effort was abruptly suspended to allow for further negotiations and has not resumed.

The Iranian counterproposal also demanded that the U.S. end its punishing economic sanctions against Iran, Iranian state media said. Analysts said that it was unlikely unless U.S. officials received major concessions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange, compromises which Iran has so far ruled out.

The U.S. will not pay reparations to Iran, nor will they recognize Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz—sovereignty it didn’t have before. As for the U.S. offering major concession on Iran’s nukes, I don’t see that happening, either, despite Americans’ lack of support for the war. In the meantime, Iran is suffering big time inflation and other economic damage, so we’re seeing a game of political chicken going on. And, as usual, I’m not going to prognosticate about this one.

*Will Rahn at the Free Press analyzes Trump’s latest dump of UFO data, and finds it a big nothingburger.

Will the Trump administration’s release of secret UFO documents prove more soap opera than space opera?

The first tranche of materials landed with a thud on Friday, with UFO believers and skeptics alike claiming to find support for their respective positions. True believers, underwhelmed though they were by the actual contents, called Friday’s files an important first step on the road to full disclosure. That road, however, appears to be a long one, stretching beyond the horizon and perhaps, as skeptics argue, leading nowhere.

The 162 released files are housed on a Defense Department website with a minimalist and vaguely cyberpunk aesthetic reminiscent of The X-Files. They include dozens of testimonials from civilians, federal agents, diplomats, and astronauts who reported seeing UFOs. Much of the material comprises redacted information. But there is some interesting stuff: What, for example, was the “bogey” Gemini VII astronaut Frank Borman reported seeing during his space flight? Or the “Eye of Sauron” witnessed by several federal agents in 2023 somewhere in the Western U.S.? (The files offer no conclusive answer.)

Well, was there anything in them? Nothing substantial, as far as I can see:

. . .Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, one of the leading lawmakers pushing for disclosure, said the release proved that Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), is “a documented liar” because he has said he never found proof of aliens. Kirkpatrick, who many UFO believers see as an agent of a massive cover-up, responded by telling reporter and UFO skeptic Steven Greenstreet that Luna should “stop inflicting her willful ignorance on the rest of us.”

We’ll see if future disclosures give us the long-promised hard evidence that we are not alone. But for now, we are where we’ve been all along: just guessing and groping for answers in the dark of the cosmos. The aliens may very well be out there. They might even come here on occasion. But for the time being, anyway, the ongoing saga of mainstream governmental UFO intrigue remains a distinctly human drama characterized by sweeping claims and few hard facts.

. . .If there’s one person holding this ragtag band of UFO boosters together, it’s probably the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. When he isn’t teaching science in Cambridge, Loeb searches for alien technology through the sensors and telescopes of his Harvard-sanctioned Galileo Project.

The project’s list of affiliates includes everyone from Gallaudet, a sincere believer in extraterrestrial visitation, to Michael Shermer, the country’s leading UFO skeptic. He counts Luna, of whom he always speaks highly, as a comrade of sorts, but has also co-written a paper with her nemesis, Dr. Kirkpatrick, on the need for hard evidence before we believe UFOs are visitors from somewhere else.

So what did Loeb find in this latest release? He told me he and his team took Trump’s advice and had fun with it. Always an optimist, he said, “The best is yet to come, because higher quality data will take more vetting by layers of government bureaucracy before it is released.”

“The biggest impact of today’s release is psychological: This topic deserves to be within the mainstream of public or scientific discourse,” he told me. “Like any detective story, the mystery can be resolved with high-quality evidence.”

But of course we’re still waiting for that high-quality evidence to emerge, as Loeb freely admits.

There’s a Yiddish word for the contents of this report: bupkes. And supposedly the “high-quality evidence” already exists, in the form of wrecked UFOs and even bodies of aliens, sequestered somewhere secret in the northwest U.S. Or so the conspiracy theorists say.

*I’m quoting at length below from Amit Segal’s new post on It’s Noon in Israel, as I haven’t posted much on the West Bank. Here Segal talks about “the myth of settler violence,” which isn’t really a myth but, according to Segal, an exaggeration:

Ask 100 people to name the primary accusation leveled against Israel, and “genocide” would likely top the list, with “settler violence” a close second. Much like the first, it is a shame that an issue of such weight is so often defined by mistruths and exaggerations.

Before proceeding, it is important to state clearly: settler violence does exist, it is a serious problem, and it must be dealt with accordingly. However, as with much in the region, the reality and the narrative are simply miles apart.

Let’s begin with the data. The most often cited number comes from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which recorded 2,047 incidents of violence against Israelis and 6,285 against Palestinians between April 2023 and January 2026. A closer examination of these numbers reveals that the majority of the latter do not actually involve violence, and many don’t even include settlers.

Of the 6,285 alleged incidents against Palestinians, 1,704 occurred in Jerusalem, not in settlements. Another 1,361 relate either to Jewish visits to the Temple Mount or to clashes there between security forces and rioting Muslim worshipers. Neither settlers nor violence feature in these instances. Yet, in the UN’s ledger, a Jewish visit to Judaism’s holiest site is automatically classified as settler violence.

Of the remaining 3,220 reported incidents in Judea and Samaria, many consist of generalized complaints—such as “trespassing” during tours or hikes—involving no assault or damage to persons or property. Another 96 cases relate to state projects, like road and infrastructure construction, which involve neither violence nor settlers. 2,039 of the complaints allege property damage or assault without bodily harm; while unacceptable, this hardly aligns with the violent image frequently depicted in the media.

Beyond these questionable classifications, there is a fundamental problem with how data on these incidents is collected. This was highlighted in a 2024 defamation case involving the left-wing NGO B’Tselem. According to the testimony of a B’Tselem field researcher with 20 years of experience, the organization operates under a protocol where Palestinian accounts are not independently verified beyond a site visit and discussions with additional “eyewitnesses” (who may or may not have actually seen the event). In the specific episode at the center of the case, the “facts” published by B’Tselem were directly refuted by the victim’s medical files and contemporaneous IDF reports.

In this regard, B’Tselem is not unique. Most NGOs and UN agencies claiming to perform fact-finding in the Arab-Israeli conflict operate similarly. They frequently base their publications on hearsay and second-hand accounts without properly verifying the allegations. (Even if they intended to, these NGOs generally lack the tools, expertise, and access required for rigorous verification.)

Israel Police data shows that between 2014 and 2024, approximately 1,356 complaints of “Jewish violence” in Judea and Samaria were filed. Only about 40 percent (roughly 537 cases) met the threshold to open an investigation. Furthermore, a substantial share of these cases involved property offenses, vehicle theft, drug possession, and other criminal incidents entirely unrelated to nationalist violence.

A clear example of a false complaint generating headlines occurred in February 2026 regarding a fire in a sheep pen. The media widely reported that “settlers burned a sheep pen, killing dozens of animals,” and politicians leveraged these reports to make serious accusations that were amplified internationally. Within a day, Israel Police released its findings: the fire was actually caused by an illegal electrical connection installed by the owner himself.

Similarly, in 2024, the central investigator for Judea and Samaria testified that in the South Hebron Hills, roughly 90 out of 191 cases filed since the start of the October 7 war (nearly 50 percent) were found to be false complaints. In the Jordan Valley, a comparable half of all complaints proved to be false.

When exaggerations eclipse the facts, we sacrifice truth for impact. This does not solve the issue; it merely weaponizes it. It alienates those in the middle seeking practical change, while handing extremists on the fringes the perfect excuse to further entrench themselves. Ultimately, we cannot address a problem if we are fighting a narrative instead of reality.

As I always say, I don’t keep up with West Bank stuff, simply because I don’t have time. Unprovoked attacks against Palestinians are unconscionable, and clearly some occur. Segal above says they’re exaggerated, and the figures can be looked up.  All I can say is that some Israelis are behaving abhorrently, and I am not sure how much of this, if any, is promoted by the government.

*On the debit site, the Times of Israel reports that a mother of one of the three Jewish hostages shot by the IDF while carrying white flags said this: the IDF was ordered to “open fire on sight.” This is in contrast to what the IDF itself says, calling the deaths a “tragic accident.”

When three Israeli hostages were killed in Gaza by Israel Defense Forces gunfire in December 2023, the military described it as a “tragic accident.” But in a recent interview, the mother of one of the hostages said the troops involved were given orders to shoot on sight, which ultimately resulted in her son’s death.

Speaking to Channel 13, Iris Haim, mother of Yotam, 28 — who was killed alongside Alon Shamriz, 26, and Samar Talalka, 25, during “intense fighting” in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood — recounted conversations she had with soldiers involved in the incident. She was interviewed for Channel 13’s investigative program HaMakor (The Source), which broadcast an hour-long documentary, “The truth behind the shooting of the hostages,” on Thursday.

“I heard this from every soldier who spoke to me… They received an unequivocal order: Everything you see — and you will not hesitate, even if they’re civilians — you shoot to kill,” she told the television station.

According to one of those soldiers, Talalka, an Arab hostage from the Bedouin town of Hura, had led the group of three in approaching Israeli forces.

“The moment you recognize an Arab face in Gaza, the first intuition is that these are Hamas terrorists trying to carry out an attack,” the soldier said in a recording published by the news outlet.

The soldiers then opened fire on the three, despite the fact that they were shirtless and one was waving a makeshift white flag.

Haim recounted a conversation with another soldier, in which he said he shot and wounded Yotam after Talalka and Shamriz had already been killed by gunfire from other troops, before his gun jammed. At that point another soldier shot and killed her son.

The soldier who spoke with Haim told her that he suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the incident.

This is clearly a “tragic error,” almost certainly reflecting the IDF’s experience that apparent Israelis might be either Hamas people under cover or real Israelis being used as bait by Hamas. Still, given the white flag, and the hostages speaking Hebrew, the soldiers should have held their fire. I think we can understand why they were scared, but it was a tragic mistake and certainly not an order by IDF to kill hostages, which would be something the IDF would never order. Saying “these things happen” will provide no consolation for the families and loved ones of the Israeli hostages, but yes, show me a war in which nobody is killed by friendly fire.

*Did you wonder, like I did, what happened to Spirit Airlines’ airplanes after the company went belly-up? I thought they’d be sold to other airlines, but the WSJ says that REPO MEN took them!

The first call came to Bob Allen’s phone at 6 p.m. ET on a Friday. The message: Get the repo men ready.

Spirit Airlines was still in operation and planes were in the air. But the aircraft leasing firms that own dozens of its bright yellow jets were getting anxious as Spirit barreled toward liquidation. They wanted their planes back.

“I had six hours to find 20 pilots,” Allen said.

Nomadic Aviation Group, his company, had been standing by for months as Spirit teetered closer to the brink. Allen and co-founder Steve Giordano quickly assembled a roster of pilots, most of whom had worked for Spirit. They made a WhatsApp group, which swelled to 40 pilots. One had just landed.

“He said, ‘can I fly in shorts?’” Giordano recalled. Not a problem. “We generally go khakis and polos, but you know, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” he told him.

By 9 a.m. the next day, with Spirit’s death now official, they were ready to go. Pilots had fanned out to airports in South Florida, Charlotte, Houston and Columbus, Ohio, to go pick up the stranded jets. Some were still at the gates where they’d parked after their final flights.

. . . . Nomadic operates like a miniature airline that ferries jets around the world for aircraft lessors, so it’s in high demand when airlines are both expanding and shrinking their fleets. In 2024 Giordano flew to Harbin, China—known for its ice festival—to collect a plane for a client who wanted its engines. The trip took over 24 hours on commercial flights. Their route to deliver the plane in Wales included stops in Calcutta, Muscat and Cairo.

“When things are bad we’re extremely busy,” Giordano said. “When things are good we’re extremely busy.”

ChatGPT says that even major airlines lease some planes (the bot’s bolding):

Major airlines like United Airlines and American Airlines use a mix of owned aircraft and leased aircraft. Most large airlines do both.

Here’s the basic picture:

• Owned planes: The airline buys the aircraft outright (usually financed with debt). These become assets on the airline’s balance sheet.
• Leased planes: The airline rents the aircraft from a leasing company for a long period, often 6–12 years or more.

Today, leasing is extremely common. Globally, roughly half of commercial airliners are leased rather than directly owned by the airline. Large leasing firms such as AerCap, Air Lease Corporation, and SMBC Aviation Capital own huge fleets and rent them to airlines.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, neither Hili nor Szaron have any use for the upstairs d*g:

Hili: Beautiful day, and there’s a dog in the garden.
Szaron: Maybe someone will finally take pity and shut him in a cage.

In Polish:

Hili: Piękna pogoda, a w ogrodzie pies.
Szaron: Może ktoś się zlituje i go wreszcie zamknie w klatce.

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

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

Masih talks about her mom on Mother’s Day. She hasn’t seen her mom in ages, but there’s some video of them together here:

My illiterate mother has been my role model. The regime forced her to disown me on state TV. She refused.
I haven’t seen her in more than a decade. Not because I committed a crime. Because I spoke.
Happy Mother’s Day 🌻💔

https://t.co/8ogwaqMwpG

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 11, 2026

From Luana; two examples of the moral arc bending upwards. Be sure to watch the video in the first tweet:

Arguably the 2nd most pic.twitter.com/XdeT2o7VwJ

— Hunter📈🌈📊 (@StatisticUrban) May 10, 2026

From Bryan: I read this easily, but I don’t understand why the younger folk can’t:

fun fact nobody born past 1995 can read this
it’s basically cryptography to them pic.twitter.com/EDYtZOIhin

— Heart (@heart_) May 9, 2026

Larry the cat disses America, and he should, at least where holidays are concerned. The standard American two-week vacation is simply ludicrous.

A good question for all Europeans to ponder at some stage during five weeks of paid holiday https://t.co/iaUrAGpxRb

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) May 6, 2026

Ricky Gervais posted about a white donkey foal in Israel named after him:

Beautiful foal Gervais, named after comedian Ricky Gervais, says hello from our sanctuary in Israel where she was born to Deborah, rescued when heavily pregnant. Thank you for helping our donkeys have a safe home for life! pic.twitter.com/Bm0hZkSsFs

— Safe Haven for Donkeys (@safehaven4donks) May 11, 2026

From my feed; I particularly love this one:

💙 pic.twitter.com/XqV4w6drSA

— VixenInTheCity (@NikitaCatSpeaks) May 10, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was fourteen years old. https://t.co/pjuCmFPw57

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) May 12, 2026

. . and one from Doctor Cobb; note that there’s no audible sound here but see the seismograph recording below. This was taken by a drone.

Wait for it …. 11 seconds and BOOM! Some breathtaking footage from Fuego 🇬🇹 and @boisestate.bsky.social scientists in this great science update on infrasound sensors. eos.org/science-upda…

— Eos (@eos.org) 2026-05-10T17:59:38.341Z

And buy request of the first commenter below:

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Jum il-Ħotob” in Maltese): Wednesday, April 29, 2026 and National Zipper Day.  It’s time to think about the marvelous zipper: an invention that many of us use daily.  Here’s a short introduction to the zipper. It didn’t really become practical until 1916:

Here’s a gif of how it works:

It’s also Denim Day (read the link to see why it’s today), International Rugelach Day, and National Shrimp Scampi Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 29 Wikipedia page.

I have not yet gotten over the loss of my duck brood, and posting may be desultory, splenetic, or lame for a while. Is anybody reading this any more?

Da Nooz:

*It’s Noon in Israel reports that “Iran is Drowning in Oil“. (See this similar article in the WSJ.)

It’s Tuesday, April 28, and Iran is beginning to crack. Vindicating Donald Trump’s Saturday claim that Iranian officials could “come to us, or they can call us,” Iran has reportedly presented a new proposal, offering to “reopen” the Strait of Hormuz and end the current hostilities, provided that U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations are postponed to a later date.

Iran’s inability to export its oil is strangling the regime financially, and keeping that oil onshore is posing a growing existential threat. According to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. blockade has pushed Tehran to the brink of desperation, forcing officials to stockpile crude in makeshift “containers” and disused oil tanks in poor condition. This reporting aligns with an April 12 estimate indicating that Iran had only about 13 days of onshore storage capacity remaining. Once that critical threshold is crossed, Tehran will have no choice but to initiate the drastic step of shutting down domestic oil production entirely.

Shutting down an oil well is far worse than merely pausing operations or stranding valuable resources; it is a death sentence for the industry. When a well is “shut in,” the delicate pressure required to push crude to the surface permanently dissipates. Worse, stagnant oil cools and solidifies, permanently clogging the porous rock, rendering it inaccessible. Oil production is strictly a game of “use it or lose it.”

Loss of future production isn’t the only risk. Around one to two percent of the Iranian workforce is directly engaged in oil extraction, with an even larger number employed in downstream petroleum products and related industries. Lose the wells, and you immediately have that many more angry, desperate and unemployed Iranians on the streets.

All this is to say: time remains on Trump’s side.

From the WSJ:

The blockade has sharply reduced the amount of oil that Iran, a net energy exporter, has been able to load on tankers, commodity analytics firm Kpler said. Iranian crude oil and condensate loadings averaged 2.1 million barrels a day between April 1 and April 13. Only five cargoes have been observed since the blockade, bringing the average down to 567,000 barrels a day between April 14 and April 23.

In February, before the war, Iran exported on average 2 million barrels a day.

We have a game of global economic chicken: will the U.S. and the West demand economic relief before Iran makes major concessions so it can restart oil exports?  Don’t ask me—I’m not a pundit.

*Tired of the restrictions imposed on their oil production, the United Arab Emirates are going to quit OPEC.

The United Arab Emirates said it would leave OPEC, dealing a heavy blow to the oil cartel as the war in Iran scrambles alliances and investment priorities among the world’s top oil producers.

The sudden departure of OPEC’s third-biggest producer further weakens a bloc that despite producing up to four out of every 10 barrels of oil pumped worldwide has been hobbled by internal disunity and the rise of American oil output.

*Both Donald and Melania Trump have asked ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel for a tasteless remark he made while pretending to be a speaker at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Remember that Kimmel was suspended previously for remarks about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.)

irst lady Melania Trump on Monday called on ABC to punish late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel for a joke he made last week on his show. President Donald Trump also weighed in, saying the comedian should be fired.

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” the first lady wrote on X. “His monologue about my family isn’t comedy — his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.”

She was seemingly referring to Thursday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in which Kimmel parodied the upcoming White House correspondents’ dinner and noted that Donald Trump would be attending for the first time as president.

“And of course, our first lady, Melania, is here,” Kimmel said, pretending to be the host of an “alternative” correspondents’ dinner. “Look at — so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”

President Trump called for the comedian to be axed in a post on Truth Social on Monday.

“I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence, and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said but, this is something far beyond the pale,” the president wrote. “Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”

Here’s the joke, for which Kimmel has an explanation not involving assassination, but death due to poor health and/or old age.  Regardless, it’s pretty tasteless, though many anti-Trumpers will like it. It’s sort of funny, but I still wouldn’t have said it myself:

Kimmel has said that this reference didn’t have anything to do with assassination, but only with the age difference between the President and First Lady. And that rings true; after all, nobody guessed that there would be an assassination attempt at the dinner.  At any rate, this is free speech—mockery of our leadership—and in my view there should be no punishment of Kimmel. But of course ABC doesn’t want to alienate some of its viewership, so, as a profit-making corporation, it’s ultimately their call.

*The Free Press has a profile of Dartmouth College’s President Sian Beilock, a hard-hitting, plain-speaking administrator whose college was the only Ivy League institution not to be investigated by the Trump Administration for antisemitism. The title: “Can Dartmouth Save the Ivy League?”

Beilock, now 50, didn’t choke this time. Two hours after Dartmouth students pitched an encampment on the Green in May 2024, she called in the police. Eighty-nine people were arrested.

In an interview earlier this month in her office overlooking the same spot, Beilock told me without even a hint of equivocation, “Setting up an encampment on a shared space and declaring it for one ideology, where certain people can’t be or walk through—that’s disrupting someone else’s free speech.”

While other university presidents were preoccupied with campus agitators and either fending off or capitulating to investigations by the Trump administration, Beilock used her power to keep the peace at Dartmouth. That has given her the credibility to articulate a vision of reform for American colleges and universities that she hopes will restore the public’s trust in them.

As other university leaders are sounding the alarm about what they see as a federal assault on higher education, Beilock is focused on what colleges can do to fix themselves.

She has railed against “groupthink” and a lack of “ideological diversity,” complained that university presidents “lost our mission,” and accused Wesleyan University’s president of “name-calling” the Trump administration. In a January op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Beilock wrote that colleges “must demonstrate to students and families—and to the broader public—that we’ve heard their criticisms and will address them.” She proposed five major changes, from ending “political posturing” to emphasizing “equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.” The essay went viral.

“I really believe in American higher ed,” Beilock told me. “If we as leaders can’t take responsibility for what we’re doing and be held accountable for outcomes, I worry someone else will try and do it for us.”

For the most part, the Dartmouth campus seems to reflect Beilock’s vision. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Dartmouth highest in the Ivy League for free speech—and up from one of the 10 worst colleges in the entire U.S. in 2023, when Beilock started as president. Students in the government and Middle Eastern studies departments told me that their professors do a good job teaching multiple viewpoints and staying neutral. A program called Dartmouth Dialogues, launched by Beilock, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bringing in high-profile speakers with a wide variety of political views.

It also helps that Dartmouth has an atmosphere that is less progressive and less confrontational than, say, Columbia’s Barnard College, where Beilock was president for six years. “I’m sure you’ve noticed the difference,” she said. At Dartmouth, “you can’t yell at someone and disappear into the city. You have to see them at the dining hall.”

Bravo for Dr. Beilock!  Her WSJ essay is very good (archived here) and includes this:

Third, re-center higher education on learning rather than political posturing. Too often, colleges and universities have participated in the culture wars. The result is an environment in which students and faculty feel they must toe an ideological line rather than explore ideas that fall outside prevailing norms.

Dartmouth was also one of the first schools that reinstated SAT tests for applicants after many schools, worried about equity, made them option or prohibited scores from being submitted.  It’s even better than the University of Chicago, which waited a week before dismantling the encampment, didn’t punish students or faculty who violated university regulations, and since 2018 has been “test optional,” with the stipulation that they will use SAT/ACT scores only if they help your admission. So it goes.

*It is ironic that the NYT hired Peter Beinart, a Jewish writer, as a columnist specializing in Israel, for the man is an anti-Zionist who wants the Jewish state to disappear. “What Tucker Carlson means when he talks about Israel.”

Wikipedia says this about him:

As of 2012, Beinart lives in New York City with his wife and two children. He keeps kosher, regularly attends an Orthodox synagogue, and has sent his children to a Jewish day school.

And when I asked Grok about his views on Israel, I got what I already knew:

He has been explicit and public about this for years. In a widely discussed 2020 New York Times op-ed (and a longer piece in Jewish Currents), he declared: “I no longer believe in a Jewish state” and advocated a one-state solution in which Israel as a Jewish-majority state with special obligations to Jews would end in favor of a single binational state granting full equality to Jews and Palestinians.

He has reiterated this view repeatedly, including in his 2025 book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, arguing that Jewish ethics and safety require rejecting Zionism as currently practiced. He is editor-at-large of the left-wing, anti-Zionist magazine Jewish Currents and frames his position as coming from within Jewish tradition and concern for both Palestinians and Israelis.

Bret Stephens, it’s turned out, is the only pro-Israel columnist at the NYT, whole Beinart regularly disses Israel, it’s “genocide, and its right to exist, as he does in the new column about Tucker Carlson. Beinart’s take:

Now, as many Americans sour on Israel, [Tucker Carlson] in the vanguard once again. Over the last year or so, he’s become a leading champion on the right for abandoning America’s long-held support for the Jewish state. “Hopefully the first thing we do when and if this war is resolved is detach from Israel,” he told his audience in early April.

Mr. Carlson’s worldview hasn’t fundamentally changed. Like other prominent figures on the anti-Israel right, he still sees the West as menaced by alien civilizations bent on its destruction. He has just turned his attention towhat he sees as the alien civilization that populates the Jewish state. And he’s done so with the same penchant for conspiracy theories that has long marked his public commentary. Now he is using a destructive, ill-defined and unpopular war to give those theories even greater reach.

While some of Carlson’s conspiracy theories are deemed ridiculous, Beinart seems to agree with this one:

[Carlson] is at the forefront of a cohort of right-wing commentators who don’t merely condemn Israel’s manifold crimes against the Palestinians and others in the Middle East. They also suggest something far more troubling: that Israel’s crimes stem from its Jewishness, which they claim threatens the Christian West.

And s0, while Beinart says that we can’t attribute Israel’s perfidies to Jewishness, we can still attribute them to—Israel.

Combating the anti-Israel right’s conflation of Israel and Jewishness is made harder by pro-Israel American Jewish organizations that have conflated those two things as well.

But progressives must not blur the distinction between viewing Israel as a state, which practices forms of oppression and aggression that can occur in states of every ethnic and religious type, and viewing Israel as the product of a peculiarly Jewish pathology. It is understandable that some progressives, who are rightly eager to end America’s support for Israel’s human rights abuses, might be tempted to see figures like Mr. Carlson as allies. But the struggle for Palestinian freedom should not indulge bigotry of any kind. That includes the bigotry of figures like Tucker Carlson, who blame Israel’s crimes on its Jewishness so they so they can pretend that America and Christianity are morally pure.

Here we have a man who emphasizes Israel’s crimes (e.g., opposing the “struggle for Palestinian freedom”) and says that we should not indulge in bigotry while at the same time favoring a “one state solution” that would result in war and the death of gazillions of Jews.  I remember Malgorzata used to dismiss Beinart as a “self-hating Jew.” I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s palpably clear that he’s an “Israel-hating Jew.” But is there a difference?

*The WaPo reports that former war correspondent Jonathan Ledgard is setting up bank accounts for wild gorillas to help pay for their conservation (both species are critically endangered).

Now the bill is coming due. Species are vanishing at rates of tens to hundreds of times faster than before modern humans arrived on the scene, a crisis some scientists call the sixth mass extinction.

Fixing this has become the mission of former war correspondent and novelist Jonathan Ledgard. He now works as a financier opening bank accounts in the name of nonhumans.

His nonprofit Tehanu recently gave bank accounts to gorillas to spend on their own survival. Ledgard ultimately wants to give far more plants and animals financial safety nets of their own to safeguard their future and the ecosystems that sustain all of us.

“It’s truly insane that we’ve built these economic systems without … understanding that we also have to reward nature for its services,” Ledgard told me in a video interview from his home

In August 2024, Tehanu logged its first interspecies transaction, a payment of 5,000 Rwandan francs ($3.42) to a local ranger for removing a snare from Gisubizo, one of the roughly 350 mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, according to the digital receipt. Other micropayments followed, including for tree planting, path clearance, anti-poaching patrols and veterinary observation. The gorillas’ spending was funded by the Rwandan government and private donors

For the first time, the primates weren’t a charity case, but paying clients.

Wild gorillas and other nonhuman species can’t tell us exactly what they need. But wildlife biologists, combined with artificial intelligence trained on hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers on mountain gorilla biology and behavior, identified the animals’ priorities.

Whenever someone took action to advance the gorillas’ interests, they were eligible to receive micropayments in Rwandan francs via their mobile phone. (All actions were verified by human experts, but Tehanu plans to automate this with AI and cameras in the future.)

Each gorilla in the project received a digital identity based on their unique set of nose wrinkles, known as “nose-prints,” and was tracked through the park using motion-activated camera traps.

This is a great idea–if it works. It’s working for gorillas, but Ledgard wants to extend it to other endangered species, including plants.  Who would fund that? Well, there’s an interview with Ledgard where he explains where the dosh will come from, and it’s something to be considered!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili offers a corrective to Szaron’s optimism:

Szaron: The world is beautiful.
Hili: Yet it can be dangerous.

In Polish:

Szaron: Świat jest piękny.
Hili: Ale bywa groźny.

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

From Stacy:

From Things With Faces; a happy loo:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Masih; a protestor wiping his eyes with cuffed hands. He’s already been executed.

With his hands cuffed, he wipes his own tears…Because he was forced to confess to a crime he never committed. And then, they hanged him in Iran for protesting against Islamic Republic.

His name was Erfan Kiani.
But we only heard his name after his execution.

His family stayed… pic.twitter.com/oqFZG1AXp8

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 27, 2026

Part of a conversation between Bill Maher and comedian David Cross.  Cross, a liberal, has been captured by gender activism. There’s a video at the bottom.

Bill Maher: “You need to hear that other side. You need to be checked. People need to be checked. Including your little girl.”

David Cross: “F*ck that b*tch. F*ck that little b*tch with her black friends and tr*ns friends and not even understanding.”

Bill Maher: “Tr*ns? Wait,… pic.twitter.com/vBd4nzdSoo

— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) April 27, 2026

From Larry, the #10 Cat. Do Brits steal wine from gatherings?

Not a single British person would bat an eyelid at this. Just hope they thought to take a corkscrew too. https://t.co/wkBoniarJR

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) April 26, 2026

Two from my feed. First, some Tanzanians say their names, which are long and have those hard-to-make clicks:

The children from the Hadza tribe in Tanzania probably have the most difficult names to pronounce in the world.

In addition to vowels and consonants, their unique language contains clicking and guttural sounds, which also have specific meanings. pic.twitter.com/txfYqQuxRD

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 28, 2026

Orange cat wins!

So your game is more important than me huh? pic.twitter.com/ZQ1Pur0yOR

— Cat 🐈 (@CuteCatsMagic) April 27, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was ten years old. She’d be 92 today if she’d lived. https://t.co/DYRiQhlWhT

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 29, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb, still in Chile. The first includes his photos from the Atacama Desert:

Went to the salt lagoons near San Pedro de Atacama (an hour on a v bumpy and dusty desert road). The first lagoon you are allowed to float in (I didn’t). Amazing lunar landscape. Traces of life – dried plants that emerged last time it rained, a fly we probably brought with us, and a lost dragonfly!

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-04-28T12:36:46.590Z

And this gets an “Awww!”:

Welcome to Monday, April 20, 2026 and Big Word Day. My big word is probably the same as last year’s: “ratiocination.” It’s a word I learned from Hitchens and don’t usually remember what it means, so here we go from Merriam Webster:

Ratiocination:

By all means add your big words (and meanings) below.

Today will be a truncated Hili as I have touring to do.

It’s also Boston Marathon Day, Chinese Language Day, National Cheddar Fries Day, National Cold Brew Day (I’ve never had it), and National Pineapple Upside-down Cake Day, one of my favorites sometimes made by my mom when I was a kid.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 20 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The U.S. attacked and then seized an Iranian ship that would not surrender.

A U.S. Navy destroyer on Sunday attacked and seized an Iranian cargo ship that defied an American blockade of Iran’s ports, President Trump said, posing a fresh threat to the fragile cease-fire that is set to expire this week.

Mr. Trump announced the attack hours after a White House official said the U.S. was dispatching a high-level delegation including Vice President JD Vance to peace talks in Pakistan, even as Iranian state media said Tehran had not yet agreed to a meeting.

The guided missile destroyer USS Spruance fired on the cargo vessel in the Gulf of Oman, Mr. Trump said on Truth Social, “blowing a hole” in its engine room before Marines took possession of the vessel. The president said the ship was under U.S. sanctions because of a “history of illegal activity” and that U.S. forces were “seeing what’s on board!”

Mr. Trump did not say whether there had been any casualties. Iran’s semiofficial Mehr news agency reported that U.S. forces had fired on an Iranian merchant vessel, but said naval units from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had forced the Americans to retreat.

The attack occurred in the Gulf of Oman, south of the Strait of Hormuz, the economically vital waterway that has become a flashpoint in negotiations. Iran imposed a blockade on the channel itself, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil normally travels, and the U.S. countered by blocking traffic to Iranian ports. On Saturday, Iran attacked two Indian vessels attempting a transit, acts Mr. Trump described earlier Sunday as a “total violation of our cease-fire.”

The fate of the strait is top of mind for American negotiators who Mr. Trump said would travel to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, this week for talks. The stakes for the negotiations, should they happen, are high: failure would risk reigniting the fighting and extending the global economic upheaval wrought by the war.

Here’s a tweet from Jay showing how it was done:

https://t.co/SdInnL4ZW8

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) April 19, 2026

*From It’s Noon in Israel: a split in the Iranian regime:

It’s Sunday, April 19, and according to Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei, “The statements by American officials are filled with contradictions and lies”—a sign, he claims, of their “desperation and helplessness.” Israel and the U.S. must have eliminated all the adults in the Foreign Ministry, because Baghaei is effectively playing a geopolitical game of “I know you are, but what am I?”

Despite Foreign Affairs Minister Abbas Araghchi’s announcement on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” to commercial traffic, the IRGC Navy attacked several commercial vessels the very next day, declaring that no vessel of “any type or nationality” is permitted passage. This jarring disconnect may be a sign of something more serious than desperation: a coup d’état.

It is quite the allegation, but let’s look at the evidence. Beyond the strait’s schizophrenic travel regulations, the Foreign Ministry confirmed that new talks will occur, even though a date has not yet been set. Meanwhile, IRGC-affiliated media simultaneously announced that Iran has refused to participate in another round of negotiations with the United States due to “excessive” U.S. demands.

Furthermore, the institutions of the Iranian state seem to be picking sides. The Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters—roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—has released a statement defending the IRGC attacks in the waterway. The Supreme National Security Council joined the chorus, declaring that Iran will control the strait until the war ends.

The split runs along a well-trodden divide: On one side, the political leadership, represented by President Masoud Pezeshkian, Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf; on the other, the men with the guns, led by an IRGC firmly under the control of Ahmad Vahidi.

. . . If there is a coup underway, its most immediate effect will be on the negotiations. Despite his denials, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf is the official on the phone with the Americans. But even if he agrees to terms, the current power struggle does not bode well for his ability to hand over regular Iranian dust, let alone the nuclear enriched powder.

I’m not a pundit, so all I can do is report this speculation.

*The NYT reports that Hamas is ready to hand over some of its weapons, but only a small allotment, and not near the total disarming demanded by the ceasefire:

Hamas is ready to relinquish thousands of automatic rifles and other weapons belonging to its police force and other internal security services in Gaza, according to two officials of the group.

Such a step would be a remarkable concession from Hamas, which until now has publicly resisted giving up any of its arms.

The officials said Hamas would be willing to turn over these weapons to the Palestinian administrative committee that has been set up to govern Gaza by the Board of Peace, the international organization led by President Trump to oversee the cease-fire.

Hamas has said previously it is willing to turn over the burden of providing public services in Gaza to the U.S.-backed committee. But the group has not disbanded its battalions of armed fighters, suggesting it wants to maintain influence in the territory despite Israeli and American opposition.

The proposal from the two officials falls well short of the full disarmament and demilitarization of Gaza — a core demand by Israel and a pillar of Mr. Trump’s peace plan for the territory. That plan would also remove Hamas from power and bar it from any role in governing.

Asked whether the committee would also be able to confiscate weapons belonging to Hamas’s military wing, the two officials did not provide a clear answer.

This is not nearly a “disarmament,” and Hamas remains firmly in command of southern Gaza. And it has expanded its influence into areas supposedly controlled by the Palestinian Authority, namely the West Bank. Remember that among all Palestinians, Hamas is far more popular than is the PA, which is one reason Israel is worried about the West Bank. If that area becomes a Hamas-run enclave, then we have another terrorist Gaza situation, but one embedded within Israeli territory.

*And another mass killing, this one especially bad because a man killed seven of his own children, and one not his own before he died in a shootout with the cops (it’s not clear whether he killed himself:

Later Sunday, police identified the gunman as Shamar Elkins. Public records show that Elkins was a 31-year-old Shreveport resident. Elkins served in the Louisiana Army National Guard from August 2013 to August 2020, according to an Army statement. He did not deploy while with the National Guard and left the Army as a private, an entry-level rank.

Elkins’s brother-in-law, Troy Brown, who lived with him, said Elkins’s wife had recently sought a divorce. Brown said Elkins acted normally on Saturday, the last time they saw each other, but had been distraught in a recent conversation about his marriage breaking up.

“After the first argument about the divorce, he acted like he was losing his mind,” Brown said late Sunday after leaving a Shreveport hospital where he had visited Elkins’s wife and two of his own family members who were injured in the shooting. “He was upset about it. I would talk to him and he would tell me, ‘Bro, I don’t want to lose my wife.’”

Police said the gunman stole a car after the shootings, leading to a police chase into neighboring Bossier City that ended with his death.Louisiana State Police are investigating Elkins’s killing.

A whole family and their futures wiped out.  Another day in America.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is playing Pinker, and Hili his critics:

Hili: I dream of the return of the past.
Szaron: I can smell the present.

In Polish:

Hili: Marzę o powrocie przeszłości.
Szaron: Czuję zapach czasu teraźniejszości.

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

From Stacy:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Masih: the regime killed an Iranian nurse who tried to help wounded protestors, and then tortured her husband, both psychologically and physically. He tried to kill himself:

After killing her, Iran’s security forces stormed the morgue, sexually abused, and sent the images to her husband as a weapon of terror.

Today in a deeply disturbing case, Ahmad Khodaei, husband of Salehe Akbari, an Iranian nurse who secretly helped wounded protester during the… pic.twitter.com/2g2djU8ctv

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 19, 2026

From Luana; I haven’t checked whether this “miracle drug” is really a cure for cystic fibrosis. It does appear to produce amazing results in 90% of patients–the ones with the right mutations.

Trikafta is one of the most inspiring medical advances in decades.

Approved in 2019, the drug at first makes cystic fibrosis patients vomit up mucus for a few days.

But while they lose those days, they gain a lifetime–a healthy, *normal length* lifetime.

It’s a miracle drug. https://t.co/2suefbewRP pic.twitter.com/W3CtTaZllU

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) April 20, 2026

From Simon on the Strait of Hormuz:

They should change the name to “Strait of Schrödinger”. It’s both open and closed at the same time.

— Brian Willott Farms (@BrianWillott) April 18, 2026

From my feed: a nice man:

A woman transporting rescue cats to their new homes had no choice but to put some in cargo. When the plane landed in Athens, Greece, she watched nervously through the window as luggage came down the ramp. Then she saw a baggage handler pick up each cat carrier slowly, crouch… pic.twitter.com/U630tODJMY

— Dr. Lemma (@DoctorLemma) April 20, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This ten year old Dutch Jewish girl was sent to Auschwitz with her parents and older sister. None of them survived. https://t.co/v10LWQwaZ8

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 20, 2026

. . . and one from Matthew. Translation:

A soft little chirp, a gentle glide,
through waves that stretch the bounds of yesterday.
One brown heartbeat, eleven tiny hearts—
how beautiful pure existence can be.

Ein leises Pieps, ein sanftes Gleiten,durch Wellen, die das Gestern weiten.Ein Herzschlag braun, elf Herzen klein –so schön kann pures Dasein sein. 🤗

— Ellen (@ellenisback.eurosky.social) 2026-04-19T18:06:23.223Z

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Середина недели” in Russian): April 15, 2026, and for American’s it’s Tax Day (also known as Income Tax Pay Day), when your federal and state income taxes are due.

It’s also Anime Day, Jackie Robinson Day, honoring the first black player in major league baseball, who was neither born nor died on April 15, McDonald’s Day, celebrating the first McD’s, opened in Des Plaines, Illinois on this Day in 1955), National Banana Day, World Art Day, and Titanic Remembrance Day (the ship sank on this date in 1912).

Here’s a world map showing al the countries that have a McDonald’s (colors indicate the date the first one opened); gray countries lack McD’s, and black ones, like Russia and Iceland, have apparently ditched them. Africa and the Middle East are also bereft, though South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco have the cheap burger.  But McDonald’s is not the world’s largest chain restaurant. According to Wikipedia, that honor goes to the Chinese chain Mixue Ice Cream & Tea, with 45,000 stores!

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

Posting may be light for about ten days as I’m going out of town for a week on Saturday; I have tasks to do before that, and there’s an imminent duckling hatch. Persistent insomnia is impeding my ability to write. Bear with me; I do my best.

Da Nooz:

*The U.S. blockade of Iran has begun, but it seems pretty leaky, as some ships from Iranian ports appeared to have gone through the Strait of Hormuz.  The U.S. stipulation was that all ships would go through freely save Iranian ships or any ship that was headed for or leaving Iranian ports.

Questions over the status of the U.S. military blockade in the Strait of Hormuz persisted on Tuesday, as tracking data showed that several ships had passed through the waterway, including some that had departed from Iran.

The blockade, which began Monday afternoon local time, applies to all maritime traffic entering or exiting Iranian ports and coastal areas, the U.S. military said. It remained unclear how American naval forces would enforce the prohibitions, which are aimed at cutting off Iran’s oil income after the United States and Iran failed to reach a deal to end the war. The two sides are observing a two-week truce set to expire April 21.

Some of the vessels that passed through the strait on Monday — both before and after the 10 a.m. Eastern deadline when the Trump administration said the blockade had gone into effect — had departed from Iran, were carrying Iranian products or were under U.S. government sanctions, according to the trade analysis firm Kpler. It was not immediately known whether the ships that had departed from Iranian ports fell within a “grace period” around the deadline, had gained permission to pass or had somehow bypassed the blockade.

Christianna, a Liberia-flagged cargo ship, exited the Persian Gulf through the strait on Monday night, after leaving the Iranian port city of Bandar Imam Khomeini, Kpler said. It said the ship was not carrying any cargo.

Elpis, a methanol carrier, traversed the strait roughly around the time that the U.S. blockade began, according to ship-tracking data. Kpler said that the vessel had been at the Iranian port of Bushehr. The United States had placed sanctions on the ship last year under an earlier name, Chamtang, over its connections to the Iranian oil trade.

Ship tracking data from Bloomberg and Vesselfinder shows movements of several other vessels in and around the strait over the last two days.

I’m curious why the blockade is leaky. On the one hand, we can totally blockad an entire island–Cuba–but aren’t successful in this narrow strait. Why? And how do we enforce a blockade if a ship refuses to obey it. Are we going to shoot it? Board it? Details are missing here, but inquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE: The NYT’s report still does not clarify if the blockade is working as planned:

The U.S. military said early Wednesday Iran time that it had completely stopped all commercial trade to and from Iranian ports less than 36 hours after implementing a naval blockade.

President Trump had ordered the Navy to stop any ships from transiting the Strait of Hormuz after weekend peace talks in Pakistan ended with no agreement. But ship trackers showed that several Iran-linked vessels had traveled through the strait after Central Command began its blockade operation on Monday. It was not immediately clear from independent sources if there was any Iranian shipping traffic in the region on Wednesday morning.

*Saudi Arabia, which I believe urged the U.S. to finish the job with Iran, is now telling the U.S. they should back off the Iran blockade lest Iran block other vital shipping routes.

Saudi Arabia is pressing the U.S. to drop its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and return to the negotiating table, fearing President Trump’s move to close it off could lead Iran to escalate and disrupt other important shipping routes, Arab officials said.

The blockade is aimed at raising the pressure on Iran’s already crippled economy. But the officials said Saudi Arabia has warned Iran might retaliate by closing the Bab al-Mandeb—a Red Sea chokepoint crucial for the kingdom’s remaining oil exports.

The pushback is a sign of the risks and limitations of U.S. efforts to pry open the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran shut early in the war by attacking ships in the waterway, cutting off around 13 million barrels a day in oil exports and sending futures prices above $100 a barrel.

Time for a geography lesson. First, from Wikipedia, the nature of this strait: “The Bab-el-Mandeb acts as a strategic link between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Most exports of petroleum and natural gas from the Persian Gulf that transit the Suez Canal or the SUMED Pipeline pass through both the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz.”  Here’s an enlarged bit of a map from the same article. The blue dot shows the Bab al-Mandeb, with the Strait of Hormuz to the right, off the map.  Wikipedia adds this:

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is 26 kilometres (14 nautical miles) wide at its narrowest point, limiting tanker traffic to two 2-mile-wide channels for inbound and outbound shipments

Back to the main article:

Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen control a long stretch of coastline near the Bab al-Mandeb and severely disrupted the waterway for much of the war in the Gaza Strip. Iran is putting pressure on the group to close the chokepoint again, Arab officials said.

“If Iran does want to shut down Bab al-Mandeb the Houthis are the obvious partner to do it, and their response to the Gaza conflict demonstrates that they have the capacity to do it,” said Adam Baron, an expert on Yemen and fellow at New America, a policy institute in Washington.

Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency, which is close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian paramilitary group that now controls the Strait of Hormuz, said a blockade could lead the country to close the Red Sea gateway.

Gulf states don’t want the war to end with Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, their economic lifeline. But many including Saudi Arabia are pressing the U.S. to resolve the issue at the negotiating table and are scrambling to restart talks, regional officials said. Despite the public hard line from both sides, the two combatants are actively engaging with mediators and open to talks if each shows enough flexibility, the officials said.

It’s a damn shame that there are these quirks of geography that happened to be controlled by Iran or its proxies.  Every day there’s a new cause for anxiety, and no clear resolution.

*At It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal summarizes the talks between Israel and Hezbollah:

“We’re not about to release the peace doves,” an Israeli official told The Times of Israel. As Israel prepares for its most senior in-person engagement with Lebanon in its 78-year history, expectations are being managed.

There is one problem preventing the flight of those doves—the actor that would inevitably attempt to shoot them down, and its continued ability to do so: Hezbollah. The threat the terror group poses was summarized well by a BBC headline this morning: “Lebanon seeks peace, but Hezbollah needs to be convinced first.”

Almost a year and a half after Israel agreed to a ceasefire on the condition that Hezbollah disarm, and three months after the Lebanese Army declared “mission accomplished” in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah remains very much a threat. The Lebanese government still lives in the shadow of its civil wars, fearing that a confrontation with the Shiite terror group would fracture Lebanon’s delicate ethnic coalition.

Whether the negotiations will succeed depends on one question: Is Lebanon entering these talks wishing to reclaim its sovereignty, or is it merely looking to avoid the consequences of having surrendered it?

The talks are a consequence of the latter. After escalating Israeli airstrikes in the country, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun made a public appeal for talks, and with some pressure from a U.S. administration wishing to avoid the disintegration of the ceasefire, Israel accepted. Yet, short of lending these floundering discussions a few more days of life, the bilateral talks will achieve nothing unless a solid plan and an ironclad commitment are made to disarm Hezbollah.

The UN Security Council Resolution 1701 demands that Hezbollah disarms itself. There are several thousand UN forces in Lebanon tasked with enforcing it. They do nothing. Hezbollah broke what cease-fire there was by firing missiles at Israel.  The UN should do its job and envorce 1701.

Also, yesterday Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day:

It’s Tuesday, April 14, and Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day. For the past two years, the wail of a siren has signaled a frantic scramble for shelter in Israel. This morning, however, the nation froze. In their cars, on bustling street corners, and within the quiet of their homes, Israelis stood in absolute silence for two minutes to honor the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Here’s a video showing everything coming to a stop:

*Health and science reporter Benjamin Ryan has an informative article in the Free Press: “The medical establishment is tearing itself apart over youth gender surgeries.” It’s a long ‘un, but here are a few excerpts (article not paywalled):

Does the American Medical Association (AMA) support or oppose the medical gender transition of minors? An ambiguous statement from the prestigious group in February has set off a firestorm of accusations within the AMA and prompted threats of an investigation for consumer fraud by Republican state attorneys general.

The uproar began on February 3, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) became the first major U.S. medical association to issue a policy statement recommending against gender-transition surgeries for minors. The surgeons’ statement cautioned that there is little quality research on the long-term consequences of performing transition surgeries on young people, such as double mastectomies and genital alteration. The society cited “emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms” of such interventions.

In covering this development, The New York Times reported that while the AMA continued to support treatment for minors seeking gender-related care, it also endorsed the plastic surgeons’ position: “In the absence of clear evidence, the AMA agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood,” read the AMA statement.

For the two months since The New York Times published the AMA’s statement, no matter what the medical society has done—stay silent, deflect, deny, reiterate—the controversy has multiplied.

. . . In the U.S., advocates for medical gender transitions for minors have long cited the mantra that such interventions are supported by every major medical organization. But now two major medical societies have expressed serious concerns about the practice. This comes at a time when some Western countries have sharply restricted medical transition of youth, after first ardently embracing it.

It also comes at a time when the Trump administration is seeking to end this medical practice and has threatened to cut access to federal funds to hospitals that perform such transitions. In response, gender clinics and programs at multiple major children’s hospitals have closed recently.

The ongoing controversy at the AMA over what exactly their position is demonstrates how divided the medical field has become over this issue. According to internal video and documentation obtained by The Free Press, the organization’s own top brass can’t even align on its official public stance.

. . .On March 29, Aizuss wrote on the group’s message board that he had addressed the matter “with senior management” and would be discussing it further at the April board meeting. He said that “there continues to be a discrepancy between what the New York Times states they were told and what our communications people say they said.” He added: “If our spokesperson said that the AMA agrees with the ASPS, that was a clear error and was not authorized by the board. He unfortunately does not recall if he used those words.”

For now, as politicians and medical professionals from both sides of the political spectrum are pushing the AMA to take a declarative stand on gender care for minors, the medical society remains in limbo on the matter.

This is a mess, and a mess for one reason only: gender ideology.  The AMA statement about deferring interventions until adulthood is based on evidence—or rather, the lack thereof. The controversy at the AMA is ginned up by gender ideologues who simply must have transition surgeries approved for minors, even if the long-term results aren’t in.  Is there a mensch in the AMA?

*The WaPo reports that the world’s oldest gorilla has turned 69. (Wikipedia says that “Gorillas tend to live 35–40 years in the wild,” but this is a captive animal, living in the Berlin Zoo.) And there are two species; Fatou is a Western Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), and, moreover, a member of the Western Lowland Gorilla subspecies, which is Gorilla gorilla gorilla. 

The world’s oldest gorilla in captivity turned 69 on Monday, celebrating with a vegetable feast and a shoutout from Guinness World Records.

“In human age, she would be more than a hundred,” said Philine Hachmeister, a spokesperson for Zoo Berlin, where Fatou has lived for more than six decades, becoming a mother and grandmother.

Legend has it that Fatou, a western lowland gorilla, was brought from Africa to the port of Marseille in France in the late 1950s by a sailor who traded her to settle a bar bill. She ended up with a French animal trader, who sold her to the Berlin zoo.

“She’s one of the very few and very old animals that still came from the wild,” Hachmeister said. ​“Nowadays we send the animals back to the wild and not the other way around.”

While the zoo has been unable to confirm the stories about Fatou being traded in a tavern, they said she arrived at the zoo in what was then West Berlin when she was around 2 years old in 1959.

Decades ago, she was already one of the oldest gorillas in the world, so zookeepers picked a date to celebrate her birthday: April 13. Fatou was first recognized by Guinness World Records as the World’s Oldest Gorilla in 2019, and her story was highlighted again on her birthday.

Hachmeister noted that Fatou has some health challenges in her old age. Her eyesight is weaker, though she can still hear well. She has arthritis and no longer has teeth, so her food (mostly vegetables) is cooked to make it easier to eat. She can no longer eat some of her favorite snacks (blueberries, raspberries and strawberries) because the fruit is too high in sugar.

Fatou’s health is closely monitored by a team of veterinarians and caretakers who have worked to keep her comfortable and happy decades beyond the typical life expectancy of a gorilla in the wild, according to the zoo.

These days this critically endangered species would never be removed from the wild, and I suppose the gorillas in zoos are now bred in zoos. That’s a shame, because these are highly intelligent and social animals whose genes are all about living in the wild.  I’m glad they’re taking good care of her, but nowadays these animals should not be on display, even if, as the Berlin Zoo argues, seeing them and their closeness to humans will promote their conservation. That’s bushwah.

Here’s a video of Fatou on her birthday:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron appear to be at odds, even though they’re friends:

Hili: You’ve stepped over the red line.
Szaron: Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize it was there.

In Polish:

Hili: Przekroczyłeś czerwoną linię.
Szaron: O przepraszam, nie zauważyłem jej.

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

From Give Me a Sign:

From The Language Nerds:

From This Cat is Guilty:

From Masih; Maryam Tahmashi has now been arrested. pending deportation hearings:

On one side:
Maryam Tahmasbi, daughter-in-law of a Madoumeh Ebtekar a U.S. embassy hostage-taker, living in America, enjoying freedom of choice, freedom of dress, freedom of everything.

On the other side:
Arezoo Badri, shot by morality police for refusing compulsory hijab,… pic.twitter.com/mXjBTjyRz3

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 12, 2026

From Luana, but it’s a sin to wake up a sleeping duck. Remember the story of Muhammad and his cat Muezza!

Hyper relaxed sleepers are very common in the feathered families. pic.twitter.com/ux92Qv6Rdg

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 14, 2026

From Malcolm; cat vs. black swan:

Cats.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/3TnlgcsaN3

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 5, 2026

Two from my feed. The first one is from Turkey, of course:

At Istanbul Airport, a cat got on an escalator going the wrong way and no matter how hard it tried, it couldn’t reach where it wanted to go 😂 Luckily, a kind man noticed, picked it up, and placed it on the correct escalator . pic.twitter.com/JmYfahxn3p

— Dailymeow (@Dailymeoww1) April 14, 2026

I have no idea if this is AI, but it’s cute:

😂 One groundhog has already accepted his fate and calmly endures the nail trim.
The other… the other is still in denial. Every clip sends his soul straight to his feet.
Waiting for a nail trim is a whole new level of thriller. pic.twitter.com/k2pQ5b7uyr

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) April 13, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Polish Jewish man arrived at Auschwitz in 1942 and was dead 12 days later. He was 29 years old. https://t.co/VPyXYlgcz8

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 15, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, a palindrome:

No lynxes in unisex nylon.#palindrome

— Anthony Etherin (@anthonyetherin.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T13:59:41.633Z

I’m too dumb to understand how this was taken:

The NASA live stream is terrific but low on visuals for the mo (nearly 600k ppl watching and the audio is fab). So great to see this brief image of an iphone picture of the moon taken by one of the astronauts.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T20:52:41.976Z

Welcome to Thursday, April 9, 2026, and National Chinese Almond Cookie Day. These are good, but I’ll digress a bit and show what’s inside their partner: fortune cookies. BuzzFeed has a page showing 41 funny fortunes, and here’s one:

It’s also Appomattox Day, marking the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia in 1865, Jenkins’ Ear Day (look it up), National Gin and Tonic Day, National Pimento Cheese Day, and National Winston Churchill Day (Churchill was neither born nor died on April 9, and nobody likes him anymore, either, I suppose because he’s considered a white supremacist and a defender of the British Empire).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Everything in the Middle East is a dumpster fire this morning. First, a short summary from It’s Noon in Israel:

It’s Thursday, April 9, and Operation Roaring Lion is over. For the last time, here are the latest developments while you were asleep:

• President Donald Trump ordered U.S. naval, air, and ground forces to remain deployed around Iran, describing the posture as “armed monitoring” and warning of a “bigger, and better, and stronger” response if the ceasefire is breached.
• Vice President JD Vance will lead the US negotiating team in Islamabad this Saturday, joined by envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Iran is said to prefer Vance at the table, having accused Witkoff and Kushner of misrepresenting Tehran’s positions in previous rounds.
• Hours after a two-week ceasefire with Iran came into effect, Israel launched its largest wave of strikes against Hezbollah, codenamed “Eternal Darkness”—50 fighter jets dropping 160 bombs on 100 targets across Beirut, the Beqaa Valley, and southern Lebanon within ten minutes. Targets included command centers, intelligence headquarters, rocket and naval units, and assets of the elite Radwan Force.

*Iran kept the Strait of Hormuz closed in response to Israel’s continuing attacks on Hezbollah, which tells you that Iran still bolsters terrorism: they want to protect Hezbollah, which by UN mandate is to lay down its arms (UN Security Council Resolution 1701 from 2006).

The cease-fire between the United States and Iran entered its second day on Thursday despite confusion over the status of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway that Iran has effectively blockaded, and over Lebanon, where Israel continued attacks against the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah.

On Wednesday, Iran said Lebanon was included in the cease-fire and accused the United States of not upholding its end of the deal. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said Washington had to choose between a cease-fire or continued war via Israel. Pakistan, which mediated the truce, said the deal covered Lebanon, a claim disputed by the White House.

Israel, which said that the cease-fire did not extend to Lebanon, attacked more than 100 targets there on Wednesday, and Lebanese officials said 180 people were killed and 900 were injured. Hezbollah said on Thursday that it had targeted Israel with a rocket salvo in retaliation, and that it planned to continue attacking until Israeli aggression against Lebanon ceased.

Late Wednesday, President Trump wrote on social media that the U.S. military ships, aircraft and personnel would stay near Iran until a “REAL AGREEMENT” is reached between the two countries. If not, he said, fighting would resume “bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has seen before.”

Peace talks hosted by Pakistan were scheduled to begin in Islamabad on Saturday morning, and Vice President JD Vance was expected to travel there with a group that includes Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.

. *Elliott Abrams gives his take at The Free Press:

Well, there is a ceasefire. Or perhaps not. It includes Lebanon. Or it doesn’t. Iran’s 10-point plan is an acceptable working document for the United States. Or it isn’t the one U.S. negotiators saw. The Strait of Hormuz will be open. Or passage requires Iranian approval and a toll.

All this confusion is unsurprising, because the only meeting of the minds between President Donald Trump and whoever is ruling in Tehran was that the United States would stop attacking Iran. In return, Iran would stop attacking all its Arab neighbors and Israel—though not immediately, we soon learned. My own guess is that at the end of two weeks allotted for negotiations, two more weeks will be allotted, and then two more. There may never be much more than a ceasefire agreed, given the distance between Iranian and American demands. (A random thought: Trump could never have done this if Iran had captured the second crew member. It would have been a display of weakness of the kind that he’s avoided.) A simple ceasefire may be far from the worst outcome, because it avoids U.S. concessions that might be part of any detailed bilateral agreement.

An accounting of gains and losses for the United States is therefore temporary and incomplete. If the ceasefire really breaks down (for instance, because Iran insists that Israel stop responding to Hezbollah attacks, which Israel will not do) the president will have to do something more than the air attacks of last week. That will mean a broader bombing campaign which, though it will not destroy Iranian civilization, will destroy a number of bridges and power plants. That should not be surprising or unacceptable, because Iran spent the first hours after the ceasefire announcement attacking power and desalination plants and oil sites in the Arab Gulf countries. Or, Trump might decide the time has come to seize some islands in the Gulf. This would all be unwelcome for Trump, who wants the war over, the stock market up, and oil prices steadily (if slowly) descending. He will only do it if the Iranian regime leaves him no other choice.

They might. We know little about how decisions are being made in Tehran, except that they are not being made by the new Supreme Leader, who may be in a coma. Until Mojtaba Khamenei speaks to the nation, it’s fair to assume that every word issued in his name is a product of the opaque group running the country. And that group may at some point decide that another round of fighting would be useful—to head off an internal uprising, for example.

Whatever we may say about the ruling group, it consists exclusively of hard-line regime survivors, mostly from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or closely tied to it. Trump’s and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s claims that there has been regime change because new thugs have replaced older ones are absurd, and this lie undermines everything else they say about the war. The new group of top apparatchiks overlaps with the older one—the one that killed over 30,000 unarmed fellow citizens in January.

The last paragraph shows how duplicitous–and Nineteen Eighty-Fourish—the administrations claims of “regime change in Iran” are. The New Boss is the same as the Old Boss.  Given the Iranian demands (see next item), Abrams is probably right that we should prepare for a long series of extended American deadlines.  As of right now, the only goal the US has met is to destroy much of Iran’s military, which can be rebuilt.

*The WSJ lists Iran’s ten demands for a ceasefire. When you read them, you’ll see that if Trump accepts them, we’ll have lost this war.

President Trump said Iran has put forward a 10-point peace plan that, in a social-media post, he said “is a workable basis on which to negotiate.”

Nour News, an Iranian publication backed by Iran’s Supreme National Supreme Council, published this list:

1. The U.S. must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.

2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.

3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear program.

4. Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.

5. Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions.

6. End of all United Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.

7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program.

8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.

9. Withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region.

10. Cease-fire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Right off the bat I can see several items that the US should not accept, or, if they do, it’s dire: items 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (depending on what they mean by “the region”).  I have a sinking feeling, as I write this on Wednesday afternoon, that the war will end leaving Iran damaged but pretty much where it was before: a center for terrorism, oppressing its people, and busily working to enrich uranium to bomb Israel.

The NYT discusses the basic demands in the list above, item by item, though their list has the ending of fighting in the Middle East, including Lebanon. (their item #3)

Note that the Times of India has a different list, most notably involving stipulation #1, given by the paper as this:

1. Complete cessation of the war on Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.

It is this that has kept the Strait of Hormuz closed, as Israel is still at war with Hezbollah—not the government of Lebanon. Nobody seems to be sure whether Lebanon is part of Iran’s demands; Iran says it is, the U.S. says it’s not.

*More information on the deal comes from the Associated Press, and it’s not propitious.

Trump has suggested there has been “regime change” in Iran after U.S. and Israeli strikes killed the 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war and a slew of other top officials and military leaders thereafter.

. . . The political class devoted to maintaining Iran’s Shiite theocracy remains intact. Many Iranians are angry at their leaders, but there has been no sign of an uprising since authorities crushed mass protests in January, before the war.

. . . All of Iran’s highly enriched uranium remains in the country, likely entombed at enrichment sites bombed by the U.S. during a 12-day war last June. Iran hasn’t enriched since then but maintains it has the right to do so for peaceful purposes and denies seeking nuclear weapons.

. . .Before the war, ships freely passed through the Strait of Hormuz, in the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. Since the war, Iran reportedly has been charging as much as $2 million a vessel to allow them to pass.

Iran and Oman are working on a proposal to split fees in the waterway, and Tehran insists it will maintain military control there, potentially granting itself a new source of revenue in the face of international sanctions.

Trump says America will be “hangin’ around” to ensure traffic passes. The U.S. and other countries are likely to oppose the new system, setting up a potential flashpoint.

. . .Gulf Arab nations can’t be happy about how the war has turned out.

Iranian attacks caused widespread damage to oil and gas facilities, airports and other sites, piercing their carefully cultivated image as stable business and tourism hubs. Qatar, one of the world’s top natural gas producers, has said it will take years to restore its output.

Gulf countries’ distrust of Iran has never been deeper and their faith that the U.S. will defend them has been shaken. U.S. bases across the region suffered direct strikes, but there’s no indication of any American withdrawal, as Iran has demanded.

It’s a right mess; I tell you that!  I don’t see any satisfactory conclusion to the war that doesn’t involve U.S. boots on the ground, as that’s the only way I can see to effect regime change. But that solution will not be satisfactory to the American people who already oppose the war by a substantial majority.  I still see this as a just war to eliminate terrorism, but it’s turned into a quagmire.

*Over at the Free Press, Eli Lake extols the ceasefire, claiming that “Trump’s madman act delivers in Iran.”

President Donald Trump just saved his war in Iran. On Tuesday evening, he announced that the planned bombing of Iran’s power plants and bridges would be called off for at least two weeks after the regime’s envoys had agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

. . . Now that Trump has postponed his threat to end Iranian civilization, America has won twice. First, the Iranians agreed to end their attacks on shipping through the Strait if the U.S.-Israeli military campaign stopped, according to a statement from Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. That will greatly diminish the prospect of an oil shock and help keep markets calm. More importantly, Trump will not go forward with an insane atrocity against the people he promised to liberate.

As I wrote on Sunday, bombing Iran’s power grid would be an act of unspeakable cruelty. Aside from being a war crime that would almost certainly lead to the diplomatic isolation and censure of America and Israel, it would also kill the prospect for a color revolution down the line. People do not organize demonstrations when they are deprived of the basic necessities for life.

. . . . All of that said, Trump’s threat just may have worked. His high-stakes brinkmanship—an update to Richard Nixon’s strategy to persuade the Soviet Union and China that he was a madman—forced the Iranians to blink.

To be sure, Iran’s rulers are presenting their capitulation as a victory. The AP reported that Oman and Iran would begin collecting fees from ships passing through the Strait. As of this writing, Iran was still firing missiles at Israel and its neighbors.

And yet, if this is the deal, Iran didn’t get much. Trump did not accept the terms of their vaunted 10-point proposal, which would have enacted a permanent peace deal, lifted international sanctions, and ended Israel’s war against Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy. Trump merely agreed that the Iranian proposal, along with a 15-point U.S. plan, would be the basis for future negotiations. In other words, Iran is opening the Strait for two weeks in exchange for a maybe.

. . .On Tuesday, China and Russia vetoed a watered-down UN Security Council resolution demanding Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But last month, Iran’s two most important allies abstained from a resolution that condemned its attacks on Gulf allies. China also pressured Iran to accept the terms of the ceasefire in negotiations brokered in Pakistan this week.

All of this leaves Iran’s battered regime in a difficult position. It has survived for now. But it’s never been poorer, weaker, or more isolated. Trump’s domestic critics may crow that he has once again chickened out. But that barb doesn’t sting. Considering the alternatives, TACO Tuesday has never been sweeter.

Nope, not a maybe; as of Wednesday afternoon, the Strait is still closed. Lake’s ebullience is unwarranted. If Taco Tuesday is so sweet, why do I feel so sour?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two downstairs cats are worried about the upstairs d*g:

Hili: You’re also not certain whether that dog is shut in.
Szaron: No, but all signs point that way.

In Polish:

Hili: Też nie jesteś pewny, czy ten pies jest zamknięty.
Szaron: Nie, ale wszystko na to wskazuje.

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

From Now That’s Wild:

From My Cat is an Asshole:

From The Language Nerds:

:Masih must be going nuts what with all the rapidly-changing news about the war. Here’s a tweet from yesterday, in which she talks about a ceasefire inside Iran (there isn’t one):

There is no real ceasefire inside Iran.
This is Mohseni Ejei, the head of the judiciary. He has ordered courts to accelerate execution sentences, especially for protesters.

Hundreds of professors are on the death row, waiting to be hanged.
Do not stop talking about Iran. pic.twitter.com/h3jAyMEgsN

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 8, 2026

Two from Luana. If you want to know the dangers of affirmative therapy, read this account.  The upshot: kids don’t get enough information, but are pushed onto the one-way treadmill ending in puberty blockers, hormones, and perhaps surgery:

“The result is I’m a 23-year old gay man who’s never had an orgasm and may never experience one. Let that sink in.”

Jonni Skinner tells the California legislature’s judiciary committee how he was puberty blocked, dosed with estrogen and rendered anorgasmic as a minor by gender… pic.twitter.com/PhuanejirX

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) April 7, 2026

And the poor guy testifies himself:

“I’m a 23 year-old gay man who’s never had an orgasm.”

Sen. Wiener, a leading advocate for sex rejection procedures, comes face to face w/the human cost.

I’ve never seen him squirm like this.

It took immense courage for @JonniSkinner to be public about this issue. 🙏 ❤️‍🩹 pic.twitter.com/bM1zo2na3a

— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) April 8, 2026

And two from the Number Ten Cat

I knew I heard something https://t.co/NpyoAG8T5l

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) April 7, 2026

This was in response to someone’s cat named Miles whose watching of the Artemis launch came to the attention of NASA, which responded with the “pspsps.”

he’s screaming with joy at this response and wants to know if he can join the next mission 😝 pic.twitter.com/FsA0UmCyMW

— mariah ✷ (@alltooriah) April 7, 2026

One from my feed; cats will be cats, and cats have always been cats.

A medieval manuscript that was peed on by a cat while writing.

Monk was forced to leave the rest of the page empty, drew a picture of a cat and cursed the creature with the following words:

“Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be… pic.twitter.com/JJuYoMdNMH

— DaVinci (@BiancoDavinci) April 8, 2026

One I retweeted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Jewish boy was gassed to death along with his mother upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was one year old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T10:17:34.266Z

And two from Dr. Cobb. He says of this first one “Some pecksniffs say it’s AI but the reasons they give don’t hold for me. Notice the carpet moving slightly under the dogs feet at the end.”  Sound up!

I couldn't breathe because I was laughing so hard. That bird's an asshole! 😂😂😂😂😂Best with volume up.

— Fergi Jo Lisa 🏳️‍🌈 (@lolafaglana.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T01:50:28.551Z

Sound up for this one, too:

Common loons call out in the morning quiet: 🔊 #AGoodPlaceSource: http://www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFu…

— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T10:59:51.588Z

Welcome to the cruelest day: Tuesday, April 7, 2026, and National Beer Day, celebrating the day that Prohibition (of beer) was ended in 1933. FDR was elected with the promise to repeal Prohibition, and he did. In December all alcohol was legalized.  But weak beer was okay on April 7, and here ar e the good things that happened:

The Abner-Drury Brewery sent a guarded truck to the White House at a minute past midnight with two cases of beer for Roosevelt, though when it arrived, it became apparent he was asleep. The Marine guarding the beer opened the first bottle and drank it, allowing the press to photograph him. Roosevelt later sent the cases of beer to the National Press Club. People across the country gathered outside breweries on April 7, some of whom camped outside the night prior. An estimated 1.5 million barrels of beer were consumed,  with an estimated $5 million of beer being sold in Chicago alone. Hundreds of breweries, bars, and taverns could reopen and expand again, hiring workers and buying new equipment, while restaurants could sell alcohol again. In the four months that followed, manufacturing grew by 78%, automobile and heavy equipment sales by almost 200%, the stock market by 71%, and approximately four million people found employment, with approximately 500,000 more jobs being created in related industries. Prohibition officially ended on December 5, 1933 with the passage of the 21st Amendment.

Banning alcohol is a dumb thing to do and also cannot be enforced.

It’s also International Beaver Day, Metric System Day, National Coffee Cake Day, and World Health Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 7 Wikipedia page.

And here’s an old Jesus and Mo cartoon that reader Peter found and sent along. It’s about mythicism, the view that Jesus was one of many people claiming to be a savior:

Da Nooz:

*The astronauts successfully made it around the Moon yesterday, and Artemis II is on its way back to Earth.

On the sixth day, 248,655 miles from Earth, four people ventured farther from home than any human being who has ever lived.

Embraced by the moon’s gravitational pull, four astronauts accelerated Monday afternoon on a path to swing around the lunar far side, five days after launching on the Artemis II mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“Today, for all humanity, you’re pushing beyond that frontier,” said Jenni Gibbons, a Canadian Space Agency astronaut who was the main point of contact for the crew at mission control in Houston.

In response, Jeremy Hansen, a fellow Canadian who is a member of the Artemis II crew, hailed the space pioneers who had preceded them.

“We most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,” he said.

A few hours later, Mr. Hansen, along with Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of NASA, became the first humans in more than half a century to slip behind the moon.

At 6:44 p.m. Eastern time, video transmission from Artemis II blinked out, and the astronauts were cut off from the world’s other eight billion people. As the spaceship they named Integrity passed over the far side of the moon, they reached their greatest distance from Earth — more than a quarter-million miles — and their closest proximity to the moon at a bit over 4,000 miles.

After 40 minutes of silence, the astronauts reconnected with humanity. From their windows, they watched as a thin crescent of sunlit Earth reappeared.

There’s a lot of emotionality (and some God talk) being emitted on the radio from both Houston and Artemis: more than I remember in previous space shots.  The Christian emissions come mainly from pious astronaut Victor Glover, but we also heard this from commander Jeremy Hansen in his Easter address:

“No matter your faith or religion, for me the teachings of Jesus were always a very simple truth of love, universal love. Love yourself, and love others.”

Do we need this stuff broadcast from space on a trip funded by people who don’t think Jesus was a messiah? Can’t they keep their faith to themselves? And why didn’t Glover add that the teachings of Jesus included an admonition to follow him lest you be damned to a fiery eternal torment in hell?

*War news from yesterday’s edition of It’s Noon in Israel:

It’s Monday, April 6, and the thirty-eighth day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $108, down less than a percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments that occurred while you were asleep:

• A source told Reuters that Pakistan’s army commander spent the night in direct contact with U.S. Vice President Vance, envoy Witkoff, and Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi. The emerging proposal calls for an immediate ceasefire and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, followed by direct talks in Pakistan within 15–20 days to reach a broader agreement. An Iranian official responded to the report, saying they are reviewing Pakistan’s proposal, but Iran would not agree to open the Strait of Hormuz for a temporary ceasefire.
• Four bodies were recovered from the rubble of a Haifa residential building struck by an Iranian ballistic missile yesterday, with rescue teams still searching for two additional missing people, including a child and an elderly person. An 82-year-old man who was seriously wounded has undergone surgery and remains sedated and ventilated; his 78-year-old wife is hospitalized in good condition. A 10-month-old baby was among the lightly wounded.
• Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have confirmed the killing of Major General Majid Khademi, head of the IRGC’s Intelligence Directorate, in a U.S.-Israeli strike. Khademi, who had served in Iran’s intelligence and security apparatus for nearly five decades, was responsible for surveillance of Iranian citizens and for orchestrating attacks against Jews worldwide.

And one news item (there’s more at the site):

Donald Trump has issued a 24-hour extension, giving the regime until tomorrow at 8 p.m. ET to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The extension appears to be tied to the prospect of negotiations. According to sources familiar with the talks in Islamabad, the United States and Iran are discussing terms for a potential 45-day ceasefire (though Reuters puts it at 15–20 days) that could lead to a permanent end to the war.

The mediators are discussing a two-stage framework:

• Stage One: A 45-day ceasefire during which negotiations would take place to end the war.
• Stage Two: A final agreement to officially end the conflict.

This proposal strikes a somewhat dissonant tone. For the past two weeks, reports of negotiations have spanned from outright denial to thoroughly unenthusiastic. Apart from Trump’s triumphalist rhetoric claiming Iran is begging for peace, there has been very little indication that a deal is actually forthcoming. The sources familiar with the talks are largely in harmony with previous statements: according to them, the chances of reaching even a partial agreement in the next 48 hours are low.

So far there is no movement towards agreement between the U.S. and Iran (see next item).

*Iran has rejected Trump’s cease-fire plan ahead of the deadline for opening the Strait of Hormuz (8 p.m. tonight):

Iran on Monday rejected a 45-day ceasefire proposal and said it wants a permanent end to the war, even as Israel attacked a major gas field and U.S. President Donald Trump’s ultimatum to open the Strait of Hormuz loomed.

“We only accept an end of the war with guarantees that we won’t be attacked again,” Mojtaba Ferdousi Pour, head of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Cairo, told The Associated Press. He said Iran no longer trusts the Trump administration after the U.S. bombed the Islamic Republic twice during previous rounds of talks.

Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency said Tehran conveyed its response through Pakistan, a key mediator.

And yet a regional official involved in talks said efforts had not collapsed. “We are still talking to both sides,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door diplomacy.

Ferdousi Pour said Iranian and Omani officials were working on a mechanism for administrating the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped in peacetime. Iran’s grip on it has shaken the world economy. Tehran has refused to let U.S. and Israeli vessels through after they started the war on Feb. 28.

Iran’s rejection came after Israel struck a key petrochemical plant in the South Pars natural gas field and killed two paramilitary Revolutionary Guard commanders.

The gas field attack aimed at eliminating a major source of revenue for Iran, Israel said. The field, the world’s largest, is shared with Qatar. It is critical to electricity production, but the strike appeared to be separate from Trump’s threats.

An earlier Israeli attack on the field in March prompted Iran to target energy infrastructure in other Middle East countries, a major escalation.

Trump has warned Iran that the U.S. could set the country “back to the stone ages.”

Word of Iran’s rejection of the ceasefire proposal came while Trump addressed an Easter event on the White House lawn, and it was not clear whether he was aware. But he also was scheduled to hold a news conference later Monday.

“If they don’t cry uncle, no bridges, no power plants, no anything,” Trump said of Iran. “But they will.”

He also threatened to go further. “If I had my choice, what would I like to do? Take the oil,” he said, suggesting it could be done easily, but “unfortunately the American people would like to see us come home.”

Asked if Tuesday at 8 p.m. Washington time was his final deadline for Iran, Trump replied simply, “Yeah.”

I doubt that a permanent end to the war can be cobbled together before tonight, and so the bombing will go on. I can’t believe that Iran doesn’t want an end to the war, but the U.S. wants the Strait opened and nuclear material destroyed with a promise that Iran will stop making bombs. And how will we guarantee that Iran stops exporting terrorism? I don’t think we can, and I don’t really see any agreement that will make the U.S. successful in its aims, which at one time including regime change to free the Iranian people. But that was then. . .

We should not be destroying the infrastructure that the Iranian people depend on—the very people to whom Trump promised freedom.

*The Jerusalem Post reports that a U.S. court has reinstated  $655 million judgement against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization for damages to American citizens during the second intifada.

The federal Court of Appeals in New York has reinstated a 2015 judgment that ordered the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority to pay $655.5 million in damages to victims of terrorism from the period of the Second Intifada.

Last week, a federal Court of Appeals judge ruled to reinstate the original 2015 decision of Sokolow v. the Palestinian Authority.

This reverses the decisions of the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in August 2016, which ordered the $655.5 million terrorism case to be dismissed, saying that the court system had no jurisdiction over the PA or its sister organization, the PLO, and the US Supreme Court in April 2018.

Since then, Shurat Hadin – Israel Law Center, which led the legal charge and hoped the US Supreme Court would uphold the original district court decision, has been fighting to have the original decision reinstated.

Their central argument is that the PA’s ‘pay for slay’ policy, which rewards Palestinians terrorists and their families for crimes against Jews, incentivizes terrorism and makes the Authority responsible for such acts.

If you don’t know about the “pay for slay” policy, you should read Wikipedia’s euphemistic article, “Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund, which describes all the goodies Palestinians and their families get if they attack or murder Israelis.

The PA spends nearly $350 million per year on ‘pay for slay’, but just $220 million for its other welfare programs for the rest of its citizens.”

While under Trump the U.S. has cut its aid to the Palestinian Authority so that no money will go to this fund, in reality U.S. aid can readily be redirected to the fund.  This means that we’re still supporting terrorism.

The award to the victims is about three times the annual budget of the Pay for Slay program, but there is no mechanism I can see for the PA to pay off this judgement, and so it remains symbolic.

The Sokolow case started in 2004, when the families of victims of the Second Intifada filed a lawsuit against the PLO and PA, led by Shurat Hadin.

Among the victims were members of the Gritz, Coulter, Blutstein, and Carter families, who lost their children in the bombing of the Hebrew University Cafeteria in 2002; the Goldberg family, which lost the father in the bus No. 19 bombing in Jerusalem; and victims including Shaina Gold, Jonathan and Alan Bauer, Shaul Mendelcorn, and Mark Sokolow, who were injured in various attacks on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem.

The basis for the Sokolow case was the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), which was passed by Congress in 1992. In it, the families argued that the PLO and the PA financed and orchestrated seven separate attacks, and that these specific organizations were responsible for the terrorist attacks between January 2001 and February 2004.

. . .Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat Hadin, said the ruling marks a “historic turning point in the fight against terrorism.”

“Not only does it restore the ability of American victims of terrorism to obtain compensation after years of struggle, but it also changes the rules of the game: from now on, US courts will be able to hear cases that previously could not even be brought before them,” she said. “This is a day of great victory in our determined fight to cut off the financial lifelines of terrorist organizations.”

Again, largely symbolic.  The PA will not lose a shekel because of the judgement.

*More Jew news, this time highlighting a big but somewhat amusing foulup, and I’ll put up the headline below (click on it to see the article; h/t Norm):

An excerpt:

When readers of the Atlanta Jewish Times opened their Passover edition last week, they saw something surprising: a fluffy challah.

The leavened bread, forbidden for Jews to consume during the holiday, appeared in an ad placed by Nathalie Kanani, a candidate for state Senate in a Metro Atlanta district.

“Have a blessed Passover,” the ad said, over an image of a challah draped in an Israeli flag alongside two towering candles. “Wishing you a Passover rich in divine love and blessings.”

The ad quickly drew ridicule online, particularly after Greg Bluestein, a Jewish Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, tweeted about it on Saturday, writing, “It’s the thought that counts, I guess.”

That night, Kanani issued an apology, calling the inclusion of challah in the ad “an oversight that should not have happened” and saying that her campaign was instituting new processes to prevent similar snafus in the future.

“My intent was to honor our Jewish neighbors and friends. We are all human, and even with the best intentions, honest mistakes can happen,” she wrote. “I believe in meeting those moments with grace and using them to bring people of different cultures together, not tear them apart.”

Kanani added, “While this content was created by a consultant working with my campaign, I take full responsibility for everything shared in my name. We are implementing stronger review processes to ensure this does not happen again. As always, my campaign stands for inclusion, respect, and bringing all people together.”

The incident is also spurring potential reforms at the Atlanta Jewish Times. “The ad should not have passed proofing checks,” Michael Morris, the newspaper’s owner and publisher, wrote in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two cats are plotting against Andrzej:

Hili: He has already gone to bed.
Szaron: We will start tormenting him in a moment.

In Polish:

Hili: On już położył się do łóżka.
Szaron: Zaraz zaczniemy go dręczyć.

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

From Stacy:

From The Language Nerds:

From CinEmma:

Masih announces the execution of another Iranian protestor by the government—the government that Trump says has undergone “regime change”:

We wake up every morning to the news of another execution.
They are traumatizing an entire nation.
This morning the Islamic Republic executed Ali Fahim, another detainee for protesting.

With this execution, the number of political prisoners put to death in Iran’s prisons over… pic.twitter.com/uhN4vE6RZ4

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 6, 2026

From Luana. It’s unbelievable that murals of the murdered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska are being defaced, and the vandalism must surely involve “reverse racial differences”, since she was white and her killer was black (but also mentally ill).  I presume that’s what the “Hmmm” means.

• She’s a woman
• She’s an immigrant
• She’s Ukrainian

She’s everything that the left loves.

So why do they vandalize her murals?

Hmmm 🤔 pic.twitter.com/Txbk3OQTxq

— Amiri King (@AmiriKing) April 5, 2026

I might have posted this before, so sue me if I did. It’s a new genre: Irish cowboy dancing:

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

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

Larry the Number Ten Cat really doesn’t like Trump:

Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea, especially at Easter https://t.co/Pus0WaAVyt

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

One from my feed; another Gem from Science Girl:

Look how this lovebird strips the leaves removing each midvein to tuck amongst its feathers for safe keeping

rather than taking each piece home separately, this is a more efficient way of gathering and transporting nest building material pic.twitter.com/frSDAeH6cS

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 6, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Yugoslavian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was three years old. https://t.co/GMWIMQDZmp

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 7, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb. He calls these mantas “Gentle giants unless you are plankton”:

Take a break from doomscrolling with a coupla giant mantas flying in formation. 🦑 🤿

— Joshua Holland (@joshuaholland.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T02:22:51.215Z

A tortoise scam tweeted by Matthew (Jonathan was falsely declared dead. He’s 144 years old, blind from cataracts, and has lost his sense of smell, but he still gets around.)

Amazing that he could come up with such a scam, but I guess he’s had a long time to think about it.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-04-02T07:00:44.341Z