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Duck doings #1: Brood of unnamed duck vanishes the day it came down; miscellaneous stuff

June 11, 2026 • 10:45 am

I believe I’ve mentioned before that we’ve lost two broods of ducklings in Botany Pond this year: Vashti’s brood of 7 and then an unnamed duck’s brood of 12.  I was in Savannah, Georgia when Vashti’s brood came down on Sunday, April 19, and several people fed her and her brood, though of course the brood doesn’t each much at first because they’re still going on residual egg yolk.  There was a storm, and then, on Tuesday, April 21, the brood vanished some time in the afternoon. We don’t know what happened, but I have a good idea based on watching the brood of the second duck (see below).

Here’s the only picture I have on hand of Vashti’s first brood, taken by a member of Team Duck with an iPhone. There were seven; I think one is out of range or behind her.

Nobody saw what happened but she was gone.  On May 1, a hen returned to the pond, and she clearly knew me, coming for food on my whistle and consorting with Armon, her spouse, who had patiently abided in the pond the whole time.  Bill photos (not shown) matched her with 100% accuracy to the Vashti who left. She’s shown below. As for what happened to the ducklings, well, it’s best not to think of it.

Below: Vashti returned! After about two weeks she re-nested, using exactly the same first-floor nest she had last time. But more on that in a later post.

That was it for a while, and then, on the afternoon of May 22, someone reported a lone duckling on the other side of the building from the pond side where Vashti had nested. I rescued it at great effort with the help of another Team Duck member; the rescue was hard as it ran into a tangle of vines and leaves at the bottom of an adjacent building, but we got it and I took it to the Chicago Bird Collision monitors for rescue, where it would be taken to rehab. It was clearly a newly-hatched duckling, as it still had its “egg tooth.”

Suspecting that it might have fallen out of a nest somewhere on that side of the building, I went back early next morning, and, sure enouogh, I found yet another newly-hatched duckling on the ground near the same spot. I took it upstairs and put it in a box with soft teeshirts near a space heater (they need to be kept warm). I was fairly sure by then that there was a nest up above on the non-pond side of the building, and, sure enough, when I went back, there was a mother duck with about five babies in tow, trying to get to the pond. The problem was that she was trying to go on the north side, which required going up stairs, across a breezeway, and then going down. The ducklings couldn’t jump that high, so I had to shoo the brood around the south side of the building, through the vegetation and a fence, and into the pond.

But wait! There’s more! After the unnamed hen (I’ll call her “UH”) was in the pond, I went back to the spot where I saw her, and, sure enough, there were six more babies milling about, peeping piteously, and looking for mom.  Several got stuck in a window well. I got them all, put them in a fly net, and walked them back to the pond.  Picking up two at a time, I put them on a rock in the pond. The mother heard their peeping and swam to them immediately. I did this three times until there were eleven ducklings with UH. Then I went back upstairs, got the early-morning straggler, and put it on the rock. Sure enough, UH came back and retrieved that one, too.  Now, with mom and all twelve babies together in the pond, I was happy—and quite proud of myself of retrieving them in the morning all by myself (this was at about 6:30-7:30 a.m.).

Here they are (or rather, were). The mother started, as always, giving them the obligatory tour of the pond.

After the circumnavigation I was glad that Mom took them out of the water to dry off, sitting on a rock and then squatting on the ducklings to dry them off and oil them:

I sat on the benches nearby, for several drakes in the pond (I don’t think Armon was one of them) began harassing the brood; they wanted to mate with the mother. She would fly away and then return to the brood—over and over again.  Sadly, the harassment continued, and I was there until about 11 a.m. when the mother, followed by her entire brood, walked south through the fence into dense vegetation.

That was the last time I saw them; I didn’t want to go tramping through the bushes and weeds lest I squash somebody or scare them. I was sure they’d return, but they didn’t. (Mom later came back, like Vashti did, and she’s still here, but so far didn’t renest.) Every day for four or five days I would scour the area around the pond, including adjacent buildings near the quad, looking for the brood, but they were gone. Like Vashti’s first brood, it is certain that all the ducklings perished. I was—and still am—heartbroken.

In the next post, which I’ll write in a day or two, I’ll relate how Vashti produced seven eggs, and how with the help of Facilities we devised a scheme to capture the whole family before they could get to the pond and be harassed out of existence. But more on that later. How about some brighter topics now?

Turtles are also a perennial favorite, and we have five red-eared sliders (or rather, four red-eared sliders and one yellow-bellied slider; all are members of  two subspecies of the same species, the pond slider Trachemys scripta.)  Here are some photos:

Here are all five sunning on a rock; only rarely do we see them all together like this. You can see that one has more melanin than the others; Greg Mayer, who has visited, calls it “Mel”:

More usually we see two, three, or four.  Everybody who walks by them stops to look, and many people whip out their phones to take photos:

They are cold-blooded (“poikilothermic”), and so to warm up enough to swim and metabolize, they love to lie in the sun, stretching out their limbs and necks to expose as much of the blood-containing tissue as possible. We call this “turtle yoga”, and I always explain to people by the pond what is going on, as they don’t understand the stretching:

More turtle yoga. Look at those stretches!

Head shots:

But I don’t tend the turtles, save for tossing them an occasional pellet of duck food. I just make sure that nobody bothers them (and believe me, people try). With no ducks to play with, I engage with the three resident squirrels by the Pond, two of which are fairly tame and the other one skittish. The tame one will crawl up my pants to get a nut; I give them entire walnuts in the shell, and roasted unsalted peanuts in the shell (I have to worry about their blood pressure!).  Here’s one who climbed on me while I was watching the ducks with binoculars (it’s early in the morning and I’m dishevelled):

The tamest one (I have not given them names):

Look at that adorable face:

That one has, besides being tame enough to know me and crawl up my body, finally allowed me to pet her, which is not something you want to do to a squirrel you don’t know. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!  I had to get her (it’s a lactating female) to get used to being touched and now I can gently place my hand on her back while she positions a nut in her mouth:

Saturday, June 6 was graduation day at the University of Chicago. By that time Vashti had been back nesting for about three weeks (I calculated that she began sitting on a new batch of eggs on May 15, but I was off a bit, as you’ll see in the subsequent post.

Entering the Quad from the street:

Marching to the Quad.  I didn’t go to graduation, but I didn’t hear of any disruptions this year. Congrats to the grads; it’s a hard slog here!

More on Vashti’s second brood in the next post.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 9, 2026 • 8:15 am

I forgot to post part 2 of Abby Thompson‘s latest batch of California intertidal photos, so here they are (the first batch is here). Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and, as always, you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The stars of this set, improbably enough, are two flatworms.   The first two pictures are of the elegant Eurylepta californica, which I think of as the “art-deco flatworm”.  It’s rare up here; I’ve found it once before.  The next flatworm (Family Euryleptidae) is an undescribed species.   It’s been recorded several times, almost all in the Monterey Bay area.    This is its third sighting (as recorded on inaturalist) this far north.  There isn’t agreement on the genus. It’s a beauty, and it’s unusual to have such a striking animal remain undescribed.   Both worms are about ¾” long.

Eurylepta californica (striped polyclad flatworm) Art deco flatworm:

Eurylepta californica:

Family Euryleptidae (Yellow frilly flatworm):

The starfish plague of several years ago was devastating along the coast, and several species (like the incredible sunflower stars) have not recovered, but the ochre stars are back with a vengeance.     I see many more of them than of the bat stars, but the next picture is one of each buddying up on a rock above the low tide line.

Patiria miniate and Pisaster ochraceus (bat star (red) and ochre star (yes, purple)):

The next three pictures are a slightly deceptive series.    I’m not sure that the first two pictures really are otter tracks, but the alternative is probably raccoon tracks, and otter is a better match.   They did not, in fact, end on the beach right next to the where I saw the otter in the third picture.   But at least the third picture below is definitely an otter.   This almost surely is a river otter, not a sea otter, as are most seen around here.

Otter tracks:

Close-up of otter tracks:

Lontra canadensis (North American river otter):

Finally, the roof of a cave, with sea anemones (green and pink– Anthopleura xanthogrammica and Anthopleura elegantissima) and sponges (the bright red-orange, not possible to ID from a photo):

The reported benefits and dangers of chiropractic

May 21, 2026 • 10:40 am

“Chiropractic” (a name that in my mind should really be “chiropracty”) is a form of treatment for various disorders in which the cure supposedly comes from mechanical manipulation of the body, especially the spine. It is considered “alternative medicine,” and, as Wikipedia says, is of dubious efficacy for everything:

Many chiropractors (often known informally as chiros), especially those in the field’s early history, have proposed that mechanical disorders affect general health, and that regular manipulation of the spine (spinal adjustment) improves general health. A chiropractor may have a Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) degree and be referred to as “doctor” but is not a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) or a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.). While many chiropractors view themselves as primary care providers, chiropractic clinical training does not meet the requirements for that designation. A small but significant number of chiropractors spread vaccine misinformation, promote unproven dietary supplements, or administer full-spine x-rays.

There is no compelling evidence that either primary or maintenance chiropractic adjustment is effective for any symptoms or diseases, including low back pain. A 2011 critical evaluation of 45 systematic reviews concluded that the data included in the study “fail[ed] to demonstrate convincingly that spinal manipulation is an effective intervention for any condition.” Conclusions about cost-effectiveness are limited by low-quality studies, uncertainty about efficacy, and insufficient evidence.

There is not sufficient data to establish the safety of chiropractic manipulations. It is frequently associated with mild to moderate adverse effects, with serious or fatal complications in rare cases. There is controversy regarding the degree of risk of vertebral artery dissection, which can lead to stroke and death, from cervical manipulation.Several deaths have been associated with this technique  and it has been suggested that the relationship is causative, a claim which is disputed by many chiropractors.

Here’s the meta-analysis article referenced by Wikipedia, click to access:

Part of the paper’s abstract:

Results Forty-five systematic reviews were included relating to the following conditions: low back pain (n=7), headache (n=6), neck pain (n=4), asthma (n=4), musculoskeletal conditions (n=3), any non-musculoskeletal conditions (n=2), fibromyalgia (n=2), infant colic (n=2), any medical problem (n=1), any paediatric conditions (n=1), carpal tunnel syndrome (n=1), cervicogenic dizziness (n=1), dysmenorrhoea (n=1), gastrointestinal problems (n=1), hypertension (n=1), idiopathic scoliosis (n=1), lateral epicondylitis (n=1), lower extremity conditions (n=1), pregnancy and related conditions (n=1), psychological outcome (n=1), shoulder pain (n=1), upper extremity conditions (n=1) and whiplash injury (n=1). Positive or, for multiple SR, unanimously positive conclusions were drawn for psychological outcomes (n=1) and whiplash (n=1).

Conclusion Collectively these data fail to demonstrate convincingly that spinal manipulation is an effective intervention for any condition

Based on the reports of fatalities associated with this procedure (see here for one study of 26 deaths from arterial dissection associated with neck manipulation), I would avoid this therapy: as the paper says, “The risks of this treatment by far outweigh its benefit.”

A new article in the NYT, however, while warning people of using chiropractic for most things, says that it can be useful in alleviating lower back pain.  Click below to read it and you may find it archived here (I can’t access it). We thus have a contradiction between the paper and the analysis above.

 

From the article:

While chiropractors often refer to themselves as doctors, their degree is different from medical doctors.

To practice in the United States, chiropractors typically attend a four-year program where they take courses in basic science and lifestyle and nutrition counseling. They also learn how to perform manual adjustments, which involve putting pressure onto the joints and creating a deep stretch in the tiny muscles that connect the spine’s vertebrae, said William Lauretti, a professor of integrated chiropractic therapies at Northeast College of Health Sciences and a spokesman for the American Chiropractic Association.

(The popping sound heard during this adjustment is a result of gas being released from the fluid that surrounds your joints. While satisfying, Mr. Lauretti said the sound is not the goal of the adjustment.)

After training, chiropractors must pass a national board exam to be eligible for state licensure.

What chiropractors can and can’t do depends on where they practice. For example, in Oregon chiropractors are legally allowed to deliver babies (though they do so rarely) and perform very minor surgery, like stitches and removing skin tags. New York, which has stricter laws for chiropractors, requires them to focus to spinal conditions.

Many insurers will cover many services offered by chiropractors, including adjustments, nutrition counseling and X-rays. Medicare coverage is more stringent, often only covering adjustments, though chiropractors are lobbying Congress to change this.

The paper does say that they’re of some use for lower back pain, in contrast to the Wikipedia article, but I would still consult a genuine M.D. for any pain. As for neck pain, I myself would stay far away:

Chiropractors advertise their services for a wide range of conditions: back pain, arthritis, diabetes, asthma and ear infections. But what the research says chiropractors are effective at treating is doesn’t necessarily match up.

There’s robust evidence that shows chiropractic adjustments can be mildly to moderately effective at managing lower back pain, said Christine Goertz, a professor of musculoskeletal research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute and a licensed chiropractor. An analysis of 47 randomized controlled trials — often considered the gold standard of scientific evidence — determined that manual manipulation was equally effective as treatments like acupuncture or massage therapy.

The article referenced above is from the British Medical Journal, and you can find it here. Back to the NYT:

And the risks of side effects are low compared to some other common interventions, like anti-inflammatory medications and corticosteroid injections. Fractures or other serious complications from spinal manipulation are possible but rare, occurring in roughly 1 per 2 million manipulations, according to one study.

For that reason, spinal manipulation is often recommended as a first line of treatment for low back pain, including in guidelines from the World Health Organization and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“It is at least as good as, or maybe a little bit better than, other care options for low back pain,” Dr. Goertz said. (Though, as skeptics note, treatments for lower back pain are not very effective in general.)

There is less evidence supporting the use of chiropractic treatment for neck pain. A review of six studies found that chiropractic adjustments did improve acute neck pain. However, the researchers noted that more research was needed to draw any firm conclusion, since many of the studies had only a small number of participants and other limitations.

Some doctors advise against manipulating the neck because of the potential risk of arterial dissection, in which vessels that supply blood to the brain are torn. This can lead to stroke or death. Some analyses have suggested an association between neck adjustments and this injury, but it’s not clear there is a causal link.

I don’t know of a causal link between the spine’s position and stuff like diabetes and ear infections, so I would never go to a chiropractor for anything. But I’m sure some readers have, and perhaps they’ve been helped, though there’s no blind test with individual readers’ cases. If you have experience with chiropractic, describe it below. Note: I am not touting this therapy; use your own judgement. As I said, I will never use it myself.

The article ends with a section on what you should look for if you’re shopping for chiropractors, but I’ll let you read that yourself.

Nicholas Kristof claims widespread sexual abuse of Palestinians by Israelis, including rape by trained dogs

May 13, 2026 • 9:45 am

A new Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children report, released Tuesday [The organization is Israeli, but some of the “principal contributors” were not], includes a 298-page pdf called “Silenced no more: the untold atrocities of October 7 and against hostages in captivity.” It includes description after description of horrific sexual violence enacted against the attendees at the Nova Festival, as well as on Israelis living near the border, and is hard to read. (You can see the Daily Mail summary here).  The Civil Commission is an independent Israeli investigative body, and investigated reports of assaults over a period two years

Nearly simultaneously with the report’s release—some say this is no coincidence—Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed for the NYT called  “The silence that meets the rape of Palestinians“, with the subtitle, “Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators”. (His article is archived here.)  It is very long (it took up eight pages of 10-point type in Word when I printed it out) but is filed under “op-ed” rather than “news” or “news analysis”, though it is more a news piece than anything else. Kristof very briefly mentions his own views, but if his data were sound, I think the Times should have run some of his allegations as a separate news piece, for those allegations are startling.

But that’s no reason to dismiss Kristof’s claims. The sources need to be checked and verified, and any allegations that turn out to be true should be punished by Israel, as they have been before. (Of course Hamas doesn’t punish sexual brutality against Israelis, but in fact encourages it.)

Kristof says that Israel has been guilty of systematic sexual abuse against Palestinian men, women, and children, abuse that was known to but ignored by both Israeli and American officials. He also mentions a Euro-Med report on the same subject, which is linked in the comments below.

The question, then, is are Kristof’s allegations true? The Israelis at least had and photographed the bodies of victims for corroboration, but Kristof bases his evidence on hearsay, and he sought out the victims by asking around (something he later ignores when drawing conclusions). And there is no shortage of criticisms of his report, which I’ll link to below; many question the accuracy of the sources and/or accuse Kristof of being credulous. But first, read Kristof’s allegations. A summary:

. . . . in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

. . . It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.

. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.

Some examples of abuse (Kristof himself found 14). :

The Palestinians I interviewed recounted various kinds of abuse beyond rape. Many reported that they often had their genitals yanked or were beaten on the testicles. Hand-held metal detectors were used to probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according to the Euro-Med monitor.

One reason these abuses don’t receive more attention is threats by Israeli authorities, who periodically warn prisoners on release to keep quiet, according to Palestinians who have been freed. Another reason, Palestinian survivors told me, is that Arab society discourages discussing the topic for fear of hurting the morale of prisoners’ families and undermining the Palestinian narrative of defiant and heroic detainees.

. . . Most of the rape and other sexual violence has been directed at men, if only because Palestinian prisoners are more than 90 percent male. But I spoke to one Palestinian woman who was arrested at the age of 23 after the Hamas attack in October 2023. She said that the soldiers who arrested her threatened to rape her, her mother and her young niece. Her prison ordeal began with a strip-search conducted by female guards, “but then a male soldier came in, when I was completely naked,” she added.

For the next few days, she said, she was repeatedly stripped naked, beaten and searched by teams of male and female guards alike. The pattern was always the same: Several guards, men and women together, would come to her cell, forcibly strip her naked, handcuff her hands behind her back and bend her forward at the waist, sometimes forcing her head into the toilet. In this position, she would be beaten and groped all over, she said.

. . . “Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

If those photos still exist, they can be used as evidence.Some of the most shocking claims involve dog rape:

. . . .Some of the worst sexual abuse appears to have been directed at prisoners from Gaza. A Gaza journalist shared with me his account of the abuse he suffered after he was detained in 2024.

“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.

On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”
Kristof has defended his allegations of dog rape on X, but the articles he cites appear to be examples of bestiality involving people using dogs for sexual satisfaction.  Here are some screenshots:

And according to Kristof, Palestinian children were not spared, either:

Multiple accounts indicate that sexual violence has been directed even at Palestinian children, who are typically imprisoned for throwing stones. I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused.

One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do this or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”

There are claims that the sexual violence was systematic:

“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized,” said Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who is the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”

Another Israeli lawyer, Ben Marmarelli, told me that based on the experiences of the Palestinian detainees he has represented, rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”

Why Kristof finds the allegations credible:

Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched, because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to, and they were reluctant to speak. Yet there is some evidence that Israel’s sexual abuse has become so frequent that norms are changing and Palestinian victims are becoming a bit more willing to speak out.

Note, though, that he said earlier, “I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves.” Thus they didn’t really seek him out to tell their stories, but were volunteered by organizations or individuals who knew of allegations.  These claims can’t both be true.

Sexual violence is especially horrible as humans, especially women, have evolved to choose with whom they mate, and forcible rape is a form of not only traumatizing physical violence, but also an odious abrogation of mate choice. And of course for men, who are embarrassed to admit they were sodomized, it can be equally humiliating.  The abrogation of choice in this manner is to me one way of understanding why sexual violence is considered more horrific than other types of physical violence.

At the end, Kristof gives his take, but it’s short compared to his recounting of the incidents:

Hamas has indeed brutally violated human rights. Israeli officials should look to their own violations as well — in particular at what a 49-page United Nations report last year called Israel’s “systematically” subjecting Palestinians to “sexualized torture” committed with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership.”

Think of it this way: The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?

Although I’ve been generally sympathetic to Israel (as opposed to Hamas), I can’t simply dismiss Kristof’s report as made up.  Any Israeli committing sexual violence on others needs to be punished to the full extent of the law. I expect Israel will investigate Kristof’s claims, though that will be hard as many sources are anonymous or unwilling to go public.

In contrast, other news venues have sharply criticized Kristof’s report: Here are some links, though I can’t quote from all the articles:

The Israeli government responds in theTimes of Israel c

The Free Press

The National Review

The Hollywood Reporter (by Hen Mazzig)

A video by Haviv Rettig Gur

NGO Monitor

The Jerusalem Post

aish

And

the NYT stands by its report/

I’ll quote two: Eli Lake in the Free Press and the National Review article. First, though, a tweet sent me by Maarten Boudry.

If rape by trained dogs isn’t credible, what does that say about Kristof’s other claims? Did he not investigate the biology of his dog-rapist claims? There’s more below in Eli Lake’s piece:

And now quotes from Lake’s Free Press piece:

But Kristof engineered his piece to lend the scandalous claims more credibility than they deserve. He purported to have shared the abuse allegations with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and sought his reaction. “Do I believe it happens? Definitely,” Kristof recorded Olmert as saying. “There are war crimes committed every day in the territories.”

Yet Olmert later said that Kristof misrepresented their conversation. In a statement sent to The New York Times and obtained by The Free Press, Olmert said: “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims. I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”

The story of trained rape dogs does not hold up. Let’s start with what is known about the biology of male dogs. Their penises are small and thin. They become erect only when they smell the pheromones of a female dog in heat. Brandon McMillan, the three-time Emmy-winning host of CBS’s Lucky Dog, who has spent 25 years training animals, told me he had never heard of a dog who was trained to rape a human being and doubted this was possible.

“When a female is in heat, the pheromones released carry it to the male canine,” McMillan said. “That’s how they reproduce and the miracle happens. I don’t see how you would train a dog to do that. The dog has to get turned on, for lack of a better word.”

Kristof claimed on X on Tuesday that “at least three different medical journal articles discuss rectal injuries in humans from anal penetration by dogs.” He did not provide links to those studies. There is one historical claim of a dog trained to rape prisoners. A German shepherd named Volodia was allegedly trained to rape female prisoners during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile at the Venda Sexy torture facility. This was reported by a Chilean truth-and-reconciliation commission based on the testimony of victims. These reports, however, do not account for how Volodia became erect in the absence of female dogs in heat.

Lake alleges that some of Kristof’s sources are connected to Hamas, but he does mention the credible story I mentioned above about the sexual abuse of a Palestinian prisoner. Unfortunately, the victim returned to Gaza and the IDF dropped the charges.

More:

Another problem with the report is that Kristof cites the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which amplified the dog rape claims in April. The Switzerland-based organization purports to be a neutral human rights group, but it has a history of spreading libel against Israel, such as a November 2023 report that raised “concerns” that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was harvesting the organs of Palestinian corpses.

In 2013, Israel designated Euro-Med’s founder and current chairman Ramy Abdu as a Hamas operative in Europe. On the day after the October 7 massacre, Abdu posted on X: “In this battle, Palestine offered the elite of its youth and men on the path of freedom and dignity. Succeeding generations will remember you, and history will immortalize you as knightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory untainted by the mud. Preserve their names well, and teach the tales of their immortal valor to your children and grandchildren.”

. . .Was Kristof’s “journalist source” an example of a militant using a press affiliation as cover to advance his side in an information war?

To be sure, Kristof does include interviews with named victims who claim to have experienced sexual torture, which has been documented in Israel and many prisons throughout the world. Israel was rocked last year by the scandal of an alleged sexual torture at a detention facility known as Sde Teiman. Grainy and inconclusive video emerged in 2024 that appeared to show guards abusing a Palestinian prisoner.

Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me that he thinks the allegations that guards sexually abused a prisoner at Sde Teiman were credible. The problem, according to Conricus, is that the victim and witness to this abuse was allowed to return to Gaza, after which the IDF dropped the charges against the guards.

. . .“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Conricus said. “So many terrorists infiltrated Israel on that day, there were too many to process, and reservists without the right training were called up to be prison guards.”

Conricus, however, said there was no evidence that sexual abuse was a systemic practice in Israeli jails as Euro-Med and Kristof claim. “There is no comparison to be made between terrorists who invaded a country, who raped, killed, and mutilated people, and the heavy-handed treatment by some Israeli guards against Palestinian terrorists who have been caught,” he said.

That is a vital distinction. Israel faces an enemy that filmed its atrocities on October 7 and celebrated the barbarism as an act of resistance. Now that same enemy is trying to persuade the world that Israel is no different than Hamas. Woe to any journalist credulous enough to believe them.

Finally, from the National Review‘s article by Brittany Bernstein: “Kristof’s extraordinary claims about Israeli rape require extraordinary evidence. The Times doesn’t have it.”

But media watchdogs have now raised questions about the integrity of the sourcing in the reported opinion column, which relies predominantly on claims from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and several individuals with checkered backgrounds.

.. . . Euro-Med’s bias is obvious — it has “documented links to Hamas and a long record of extreme, unverified accusations against Israel,” according to HonestReporting, a pro-Israel media watchdog.

. . .Those unfounded accusations include that Israel was stealing organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians, that Israeli soldiers were executing patients in cold blood at al-Shifa Hospital, and, perhaps most notably, that Israeli forces have trained dogs to rape prisoners.

While Euro-Med first published the claim about dogs in 2024, the group issued a new report last month containing new detainee testimony making the same allegation, through the same unverified methodology, as Eli Kowaz writes in his own criticism of the Kristof piece.

And canine behavior expert Michael S. Gould tells National Review that the suggestion that dogs could be trained to rape prisoners is “absurd.”

“I’ve trained dogs to do a lot of things in my life. But no, that’s absurd,” said Gould, who began working with dogs in 1982 as one of the first members of the New York City Police Department’s Canine Unit and later went on to become a canine forensics expert and consultant. “It’s absurd for many reasons: the sexual instincts of dogs, their anatomy, the actual physical concept of it.”

. . .Kristof, in his piece, further writes that, “Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”

But questions remain about the stories told by the few named sources in Kristof’s article.

Sami al-Sai, whom Kristof describes as a “freelance journalist,” says he was arrested because Israeli authorities hoped to pressure him into becoming an informant. “Because he prided himself on his journalistic professionalism, he said, he refused” to become an informant, Kristof reports.

However, al-Sai had previously been jailed in 2016 for incitement, the same charge he faced under his 2024 arrest. The charge is a criminal offense related to the publishing of material intended to encourage, support, or provoke violence or terrorism.

And al-Sai’s social media offers blatant evidence of his celebration of terrorism [Examples are given.]

. . .Kristof says it was another source, Issa Amro, who first sparked his interest in reporting on alleged sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners. He says Amro, “a nonviolent activist sometimes called ‘the Palestinian Gandhi,’” told him that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame.

But Amro initially said in February 2024, according to the Washington Post, that he was threatened with sexual assault during a ten-hour detention on October 7, 2023 — not that he was actually assaulted.

However, Kristof’s column describes Amro as a victim of sexual assault.

And the Israeli response (so far) as given in Bernstein’s article:

. . .Israel’s prison service told the Times it “categorically rejects the allegations” of sexual abuse.

And the Israeli Foreign Ministry called Kristof’s column “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”

“In an unfathomable inversion of reality, and through an endless stream of baseless lies, propagandist Nicholas Kristof turns the victim into the accused,” the statement from the foreign ministry adds.

“Israel – whose citizens were the victims of the most horrific sexual crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, and whose hostages were later subjected to further sexual abuse – is portrayed as the guilty party,” the statement concludes. “This publication is no coincidence. It is part of a false and well-orchestrated anti-Israel campaign aimed at placing Israel on the UN Secretary-General’s blacklist.”

The ministry further accused the Times of purposefully timing the release of Kristof’s column to pull attention away from the findings of Israel’s Civil Commission to investigate Hamas’s systemic violence during, and since, the October 7 attack. The ministry said the commission approached the paper “months ago” about the planned release of the 300-page report, and that the Times “was not interested” in reporting it.

The report was released on Tuesday morning, one day after Kristof’s column was published. It found Hamas militants and their allies raped, assaulted, and sexually tortured their victims during and after the October 7, 2023, terror attack on southern Israel “to maximize pain and suffering.”

I don’t know if the timed publication of Kristof’s “J’accuse” column and the Civil Commission report were coincidental or planned, and I don’t much care. What happened are claims about reality, and should be verified, as far as they can, with evidence. And witnesses should be credible and not have given contradictory statements.  These are early days, and no doubt Kristof’s allegations will be investigated. For now, just read the allegations and the responses, and weigh in below if you have any thoughts.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 6, 2026 • 6:08 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Latha a’ Chnuic” in Scots Gaelic): May 5, 2026, and Great American Grump Day. Here’s one—posted right now, and before coffee:

After coffee (note Hili on the cup drinking milk from a mug that her picture is on):

It’s also National No Diet Day, National Beverage Day, National Crêpe Suzette Day, and World Carnivorous Plant Day. Here are some scenes from the 1986 movie about mutated carnivorous plants, “Little Shop of Horrors“:

@cinephileshaven

The moment the beauty stepped inside, a 3-meter-tall man-eating plant wrapped her up in an instant! The man-eating plant apocalypse has arrived. #film #fyp #usa_tiktok #oscars2025 #comedies #apocalypse #love #horror #littleshopofhorrors

♬ original sound – Cinephile’s Haven – Cinephile’s Haven

Only a few people appear to be reading these dialogues, at least judging by the comments on Monday’s Hili.  This is sad.

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

Da Nooz:

*The war with Iran is back on, though Trump denies it. Here’s the latest from It’s Noon in Israel:

It’s Tuesday, May 5, and yesterday, shortly after news broke that the UAE was attacked by Iran, Jerusalem shook with a massive sonic boom as a squadron of Israeli Air Force fighter jets tore overhead. Naturally, the exact same thought popped into every head in the city at once: “Looks like the war is back on.” After 20 minutes of mentally inventorying the supplies needed for a return to the bomb shelters, the IAF finally issued a clarification. This wasn’t a combat sortie heading east; it was just a rehearsal for the farewell flyover honoring outgoing IAF Chief Tomer Bar. Apparently, the IAF takes going out with a bang quite literally.

But the Jerusalemites’ fear of regional escalation is well-founded, especially after yesterday’s events. As part of “Operation Freedom,” U.S. destroyers successfully guided commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz—sinking six Iranian fast-attack craft that attempted to interfere in the process.

This left the regime in an incredibly awkward position: its threats of a blockade had just been exposed as empty. Unable to pierce the defenses of the U.S. convoy, Iran immediately pivoted to softer targets. They struck the UAE’s oil infrastructure in Fujairah, a South Korean cargo vessel, and impacted Oman.

So, is the war back on? Not exactly.

President Donald Trump indicated that these most recent Iranian attacks did not constitute a ceasefire violation, stating there was no “heavy firing” involved. Welcome to the “Israel Club,” UAE—sometimes your immediate security needs are subordinated to a larger U.S. strategic goal.

The larger goal here isn’t the collapse of the Iranian regime; it’s the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. While Operation Freedom was ostensibly a humanitarian mission to extract trapped ships, it was also a test of a classic naval strategy: the convoy escort. The mission proved to both Trump and the Iranians that if the U.S. wants to, it can forcefully reopen the strait by escorting international shipping.

It’s a powerful strategy that becomes even more potent under a continuing ceasefire. It transforms what was previously a two-way street of passive economic pressure into a one-way street aimed directly at Iran. Any economic ticking clock that might have been pressuring Trump to withdraw freezes, while the clock measuring the lifespan of the regime just keeps ticking.

And from the NYT:

The United States and Iran made competing claims over which side controlled the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, adding pressure to their shaky cease-fire after the U.S. Navy launched an effort to protect vessels through the vital oil shipping route.

The strait itself remains effectively closed: Only two ships were known to have passed through the waterway on Monday, and none had made the trip on Tuesday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. effort to free trapped vessels is ongoing, adding “We’re ensuring that we have control of that strait, which we do.” Iran’s state broadcaster dismissed the U.S. effort as a failure and said Iranian control over the strait had “intensified.”

Of course the Iranian attacks were a ceasefire violation. Trump is pretending that there is peace when there is no peace: both Iran and the U.S. say they’re controlling the Strait.  I’m appalled by the pretense, but also curious about how this whole thing will turn out.

*You may have heard that a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean (now off the Cape Verde Islands in Africa) has had some passengers infected with a deadly hantavirus, a virus that’s normally spread by rodents and not human-to-human contact. Several passengers have already died, and they’re not letting anybody off the ship, which probably means that everybody is locked in their cabin and is being brought some kind of sterile food. I saw a video last night that a passenger made, and boy, was he anxious and ready to go home. But the ship was described as floating with its cargo of live and dead passengers. (They didn’t mention whether the dead had been evacuated.)  Now the WSJ reports that this virus may ineed be transmitted by humans:

The World Health Organization said it is possible there was human-to-human transmission of hantavirus on a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean, a rare way the virus typically carried by rodents can spread.

“We do believe that there may be some human-to-human transmission that’s happening among the really close contacts,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s director for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, said Tuesday morning.

“We don’t have a full picture yet,” she said, “but we have some working assumptions.”

A suspected hantavirus outbreak aboard a ship carrying 147 passengers and crew has led to three deaths and four other infections, according to the WHO. Two of the seven total cases have been confirmed in laboratories as hantavirus, and the five others were suspected cases, the WHO said.

The passenger-cruise ship called MV Hondius was traveling in the Atlantic Ocean, said the vessel’s operator Oceanwide Expeditions, and is currently off the coast of the West African nation of Cape Verde.

Officials are preparing to evacuate two sick people on board to the Netherlands, Van Kerkhove said. After they are evacuated, the ship will go to the Canary Islands, where Spanish authorities will welcome the ship and work with the WHO to do a full epidemiological investigation, Van Kerkhove said. Oceanwide Expeditions said Tuesday discussions related to the ship’s next steps for disembarkment “are ongoing.”

The MV Hondius departed from Ushuaia, a city in southern Argentina, in early April and made stops in Antarctica and the British territory of St. Helena before anchoring off Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, on Sunday. Local health authorities chose not to allow the ship to dock in Praia due to public health concerns, according to a statement from Cape Verde’s health authority.

Health workers getting off the MV Hondius after a suspected hantavirus outbreak. Qasem Elhato/Associated Press

Hantavirus, a family of viruses carried by rodents and spread to humans through contact with infected urine, droppings or saliva, doesn’t typically spread between humans. But one strain of the virus found primarily in Chile and Argentina, known as the Andes virus, has shown limited evidence of human-to-human transmission.

While epidemiological assessments and testing are still under way, Van Kerkhove said the WHO is operating under the assumption that this hantavirus virus is the Andes variant. A Dutch man who died on the ship on April 11 and his wife who died later that month were both infected with hantavirus.

I’ve been to Ushuaia on previous trips to the Antarctic and am going again when I travel to the island of South Georgia.  I was on one trip where there was a Covid infection aboard, and as “crew” (a lecturer) I was tested every day. Passengers were tested, too, and those who were positive were confined to their cabins with a chair put in front of the door as a warning. A hantavirus outbreak on a small Antarctic cruise ship is about the most horrific travel situation I can imagine.

*The 2026 Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded. The ones for journalism are hardly worth mentioning (see here if you must), but here are the awards for Books, Drama & Music. Click on the titles to see something about the work. Links go to the Pulitzer’s description of the work and why it won.  I’ve added a description of a few:

Fiction

Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus (Atria Books)

A breathless novel of World War I, a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence. [JAC: this is one I want to read.]

Drama

Liberation, by Bess Wohl

History

We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, by Jill Lepore (Liveright)

Ms. Lepore won the prize for “a lively and engaging narrative that investigates why the Constitution is so difficult to amend, including a review of noteworthy failed amendments proposed by marginalized groups,” the committee said.

Biography

Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution, by Amanda Vaill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A lively and detailed biography of two daughters of wealthy and influential Dutch landowners who colored our nation’s history, using present tense to tell their story and past tense to chronicle the dramatic sweep of the American Revolution.

Memoir or Autobiography

Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A writer’s deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life. [JAC: Another one I want to read.]

Poetry

Ars Poeticas, by Juliana Spahr (Wesleyan University Press)

General Nonfiction

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, by Brian Goldstone (Crown)

A feat of reportage, analysis and storytelling focusing on the issues that have created a national crisis of family homelessness among the so-called working poor.

Music

Picaflor: A Future Myth, by Gabriela Lena Frank (G. Schirmer, Inc.)

*ScienceDaily reports on a paper in eLife about the sideways walking of crabs. It turns out that the sidewayswalk evolved only once, and was inherited by all its ancestors that now walk sideways. Some crabs still walk forward, though. (h/t Barry).  The phylogeny below, taken from the eLife paper, shows the sideways walkers in blue and the straight walkers in read. You can see that all the modern sideways walkers are descendants of a species that lived about 200-150 million years ago. Before that, the ancestral condition was walking straight. It also shows that some species, like those in the genera Lybia, Arcania, and Dorippe, reversed their walks, coming from a sideways walking ancestor but evolving back to the ancestral condition of walking straight.

(From the paper). Ancestral state reconstruction of locomotion in crabs under the all-rates-different (ARD) model.

From ScienceDaily, which addresses the question of why some crabs do walk sideways:

A new study, released as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife, brings together the largest dataset yet on how crabs move. By comparing many species, the researchers traced this unusual walking style back to a shared ancestor that lived roughly 200 million years ago. Editors at eLife describe the findings as valuable and supported by largely convincing evidence, with broad relevance for scientists studying how animals move.

Sideways walking is a hallmark of ‘true crabs’ (Brachyura), the largest group among crab decapods. This unusual way of moving may offer important advantages. For example, it can help crabs escape predators by making their direction harder to predict.

“Sideways locomotion may have contributed significantly to the ecological success of true crabs,” says senior corresponding author Yuuki Kawabata, Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Integrated Science and Technology, Nagasaki University, Japan. “There are around 7,904 species of true crabs, far exceeding that of their sister group, Anomura, or their closest relatives, Astacidea; they have colonized diverse habitats around the world, including terrestrial, freshwater and deep-sea environments; and their crab-like body shape has evolved repeatedly over time in a phenomenon known as carcinization.

“Despite the rich information available on true crabs, data concerning their locomotor behaviors are sparse. Although most true crab species use sideways locomotion, there are some groups that walk forwards, which raises some interesting questions. When did their sideways locomotion originate, how many times over the years did it evolve, and how many times did it revert?”

. . . Out of the 50 species studied, 35 primarily moved sideways, while 15 moved forward. When the researchers mapped these behaviors onto the evolutionary tree, a clear pattern emerged. Sideways walking appears to have evolved just once, originating from a forward-walking ancestor at the base of Eubrachyura, a group that includes more advanced crabs. After that point, the trait remained largely unchanged across true crabs.

“This single event contrasts starkly with carcinization, which has occurred repeatedly across decapod species,” Kawabata explains. “This highlights that while body shapes may converge multiple times, behavioral changes such as sideways walking can be rare.”

The researchers suggest that this one-time shift to sideways movement may have played a major role in the success of true crabs. Moving laterally allows crabs to travel quickly in either direction, making it easier to evade predators. At the same time, this type of locomotion is uncommon across the animal kingdom, possibly because it can interfere with other important activities such as burrowing, mating and feeding.

According to the authors, sideways walking may represent a rare evolutionary innovation seen mainly in true crabs, and possibly in a few other groups.

There you have it.  You’ll be the life of the party if you ask people about what evolutionary advantages may come from crabs walking sideways.

*The speaker for the University of Michigan’s Spring Commencement deviated from the topic on which he said he’d speak and instead spoke about. . . . well, guess. You will undoubtedly be correct. The University apologized:

 The University of Michigan has issued a formal apology after its faculty senate chair went off-script to praise anti-Israel student protesters during last weekend’s commencement address.

Derek Peterson, who also praised the memory of the school’s first Jewish professor in his speech, had drawn criticism from Michigan Hillel and from major organizations, including the American Jewish Committee.

Now, a growing chorus of faculty members have signed a letter pushing back on the school president’s apology. On the right, Florida GOP Senator Rick Scott has urged the federal government to stop funding the public university over the incident, writing, “If this is what Americans are paying for, it’s time to cut them off COMPLETELY.”

“At today’s U-M spring commencement ceremony, our outgoing Faculty Senate Chair made remarks regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict that were hurtful and insensitive to many members of our community,” Michigan’s interim president, Domenico Grasso, wrote in his letter on Saturday. “We regret the pain this has caused on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment. For this, the university apologizes.”

Peterson, a history and African-American studies professor who is finishing a stint as faculty chair, had structured his commencement speech around pioneers in university history.

. . .Peterson’s comments, Grasso said, “were inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position,” which he said was “institutional neutrality.” (Many universities have adopted a stance of neutrality in recent years as they have sought to navigate tensions around Israel.)

Grasso added, “Commencement is a time of celebration, recognition and unity. The Chair’s remarks were expected to be congratulatory, not a platform for personal or political expression.”

Here’s a video clip of his remarks, provided by Peterson himself. He first touts the admission of Jewish and black students and professors, but then, at 4:30, he segues into the part where he praises the pro-Palestinian activists who “opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza” (note the loud cheers from the students; there was an encampment at this University). You might say that by simultaneously calling attention to past Jewish and black “pioneer” students, Peterson’s remarks about Gaza weren’t so bad, but it’s clear that his real aim was to slip in praise for the pro-Hamas students. Or do you think it was okay? After all, while he’s touting minority students and faculty who were hired, he’s touting activists, not Gazans who were admitted to the school.

From CBS News: Here’s how Peterson defended his remarks:

“I would however urge Regent Hubbard to review the comments I actually made at yesterday’s commencement. It should not be controversial to have one’s “heart opened to the inhumanity and injustice of Israel’s war in Gaza”, which is what I credited activists with doing. Having an open heart to other people’s suffering is a fundamental human virtue. It is a quality that I hope we teach our students, whatever their political posture might be.

“So I am mystified about what I have done to earn Regent Hubbard’s ire. I have – like many of us here in Michigan – been convicted by the evidence of human suffering in Gaza; and I credit my awareness of that to pro-Palestinian activists. That is why I gave the speech that I did. On a day meant to honor students for their accomplishments, I thought it important that we would honor the student activists who have, over the course of time, pushed the institution toward justice.

He can say what he wants, of course, but should stick to the speech he gave in advance to the administration, which he knew was a lie.  I would object to pro-Israel remarks just as vehemently as to these, particularly if a lie was also involved. Pushing an ideological point of view is inappropriate in a nonpolitical speech.

You can find the President’s apology here.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s pessimistic about the weather.

Szaron: I smell full spring in the air.
Hili: It will be over sooner than you think.

In Polish:

Szaron: Czuję zapach pełnej wiosny.
Hili: To minie szybciej niż myślisz.

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

From The Language Nerds:

From CinEmma:

From Funny and Strange Signs:

*Iran has executed three more detained protestors. This is of course on top of the 30,000 that were shot in the streets, but this doesn’t get as much attention. Masih makes sure it gets some:

From Luana: geneticist David Reich on the “freezing” of interbreeding between northern and southern populations in India:

Larry the Cat doesn’t like Boris Johnson:

Two from my feed. I hope the first one is real. That horse is getting the strings out of tune! (Sound up, of course.)

A free simian shampoo. Translation from the Turkish: “A woman who went to a park in China shared the moments when she had a monkey clean her hair.”

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. If Wikipedia is making a joke here, it’s a lame one:

famously the only joke allowed on Wikipedia is, in their List of Whales, any entry that is missing a photo says [cetacean needed] apparently some unfunny losers have made it their job to find public domain images of whales to eradicate this jokeonly one instance of [cetacean needed] remains

— Ian Danskin (@innuendostudios.bsky.social) 2026-05-02T16:43:47.775Z

And one of a thread by SMBC on theodicy:

Brought to you by the All Theodicy compilation of SMBC, coming 2035.COMIC ◆ http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/infini… PATREON ◆ http://www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm…STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

— SMBC Comics (@smbccomics.bsky.social) 2026-04-15T22:30:09.398Z