Friday: Hili dialogue

April 10, 2026 • 6:45 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Rhododendrites, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

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

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is nosing about:

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

In Polish:

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

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

From The Language Nerds:

From CinEmma:

From Things With Faces; a distraught melon:

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

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

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

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

From my feed: interspecies love:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four—count them, four—turtles

April 9, 2026 • 12:30 pm

It was a rough morning on Botany Pond. Two undocumented drakes invaded this morning, and I must have spent 45 minutes chasing them around with my squirt gun. They would leave (along with Armon, who always returns), but then come back again. When they are around they will harass Vashti, even driving her off the nest, and that’s not good.

Finally Armon and Vashti were left alone, but I don’t want the undocumented ducks coming back.  Also, when chasing the errant drakes away, I accidentally spooked the wood duck pair, who have taken off.  I was sad because I love them so much, and I hope they return. (They’re clearly not yet nesting.) Armon goes after invaders, but not with great vigor: he’s a bit of a wuss.

But now all is quiet, and we had an epochal event a few minutes ago: four of the five red-eared slider turtles we put into the pond last fall (retrieved before Botany Pond was renovated) showed up, and all were competing for space and sun on a small rock.  There are other rocks they could use, but they like the one below.  I suspect the fifth turtle wandered away from the Pond at some point. This is the first time I’ve been able to see more than three turtles.

I’m exhausted: duck tending is no picnic!

Australia puts fostering “indigenous knowledge systems” as its first priority in developing marine biology

April 9, 2026 • 11:45 am

As always, an Aussie who wishes to remain anonymous sent me this link, and noted that New Zealand isn’t the only country in the Antipodes that tries to make science (again “Western science”) coequal with indigenous knowledge.  Clicking on the screenshot below will take you to the strategy developed by the Aussie government: the “Australian Marine Science Strategy 2026-2036”

It begins on p. 2 with a land acknowledgement:

. . continues with a mission statement on page 4:

The National Marine Science Strategy 2026–36 sets out the research and development needed to realise the socioeconomic opportunities and benefits that come from enabling a thriving ocean economy while effectively minimising, mitigating and adapting to the critical challenges facing Australia’s ocean and coasts over the coming decade. It recognises that responding to challenges such as climate change and extreme events, biodiversity collapse and competing ocean uses will not only help ensure a healthy ocean, conservation and national resilience, but also unlock new opportunities for sustainable industries and innovation that deliver long-term environmental and economic prosperity for Australia.

. . . and then sets out seven “national ambitions” for improving our knowledge of marine science, all of which (save one) involve conservation, mitigating climate change, and fostering marine “industries.” The exception is the very first ambition:

Embed First Nations knowledge, innovation and leadership in marine science to ensure sustainable and equitable marine policy and management.

Finally, after going through the ambitions, continuously paying homage to the “knowledge systems” of the First Nations people (i.e., the Aboriginal Australians and Melanesian Torres Strait islanders), the report gives its recommendations. Here’s the very first recommendation (p. 33):

Now there’s nothing wrong with ensuring that the two groups that constitute the First Nations People get equal opportunity to do science and contribute to science. And insofar that the indigenous people have produced knowledge that can be verified by modern science, by all means give them credit and fold that knowledge into modern science. But, as usual, they do more than that. First the program argues, again with a dearth of examples, that “We also have much to learn from the integration and application of Indigenous knowledge systems and Western knowledge systems.” (p. 28). How do they know that? Where are the improvements in marine biology that have already come from “indigenous knowledge systems”?

This is not science or technology, but a drive for scientific equity: making indigenous knowledge coequal with modern science. And that is not even politics, but the sacralization of the oppressed. As we’ve seen so many times before from Canada and New Zealand, it is virtue signaling on a national scale.

Ruy Teixiera warns Democrats not to get too sure of political victory after Trump’s screwups

April 9, 2026 • 10:30 am

Most readers here (and I) are keen on getting a Democrat elected as President in 2028, and it would be nice as well if the Democrats took over both houses of Congress this fall.  And, indeed, with Trump’s ratings in the dumpster, that may well happen.  But Ruy Texiera is worried that that is not enough: he thinks the Democrats feel that they don’t have to do more than sit back and let Trump self-destruct.  His thesis in this Substack article (the last one in the five years the site has been going), is that the Democrats are jaded and have failed to learn the lessons of the last few years—lessons about what the public wants. This obtuseness, he says, will eventually come back to haunt them, and may even affect Democratic chances for victory in the next few years.

I recommend that you read this article: the message may sound old, but Teixeira expresses it in detail and writes extremely clearly.  The sub-message for Democrats is this: “Don’t let the ‘progressives’ take over the party!”

If you don’t know Teixeira. here’s from his Wikipedia bio (he seems to be pretty much of a centrist):

Ruy Teixeira born December 15, 1951) is an American political scientist and commentator. He is a senior fellow at the centre-right think tank American Enterprise Institute and co-founder and politics editor of the Substack newsletter The Liberal Patriot, along with John Halpin.

He is known for his work on political demography, particularly for the book The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), which he co-wrote with John Judis. In it, they argue that the US Democratic Party is demographically destined to become a majority party in the early 21st century, a thesis that he later disavowed, citing the rise of the progressive movement in the United States.

. . . Since 2020, Teixeira has written critically about a leftward shift within the Democratic Party.  He has argued that the progressive movement in the United States is over and finished after the 2024 United States elections, positing that Democrats still do not realise it as of 2025.

Click the screenshot to read for free (it’s the lack of money that has apparently killed the site, but it’s too late to subscribe):

Last year he wrote a related piece about Democratic obtuseness, “Is our Democrats learning?“, which gets its ungrammatical title from a G. W. Bush query, “Is our children learning?”.

On to the present piece; my comments are flush left; Teixeira’s quotes are indented.

The problem 

Posing this question again in early spring 2026, it is my sad duty to inform you that our Democrats continue not to learn. If anything, they are increasingly adamant that such learning is not even necessary. Their mantra now might be, paraphrasing that old joke about the British: “No learning please, we’re Democrats.”

The proximate reasons for this complacency are not hard to discern. Trump and many of his administration’s actions are very unpopular and voters’ views on the economy, their most important issue, are dire. Consistent with these sentiments, Democrats did well in the 2025 elections, continue to clean up in special elections, and appear poised to have a very good election this coming November.

These favorable political winds have made it a great deal easier for Democrats to ignore the need for change. Surely the American people have now woken up, are rejecting Trump and Trumpism once and for all and will never be seduced by right populism again.

. . . Currently, the desire for change seems to be hovering around zero, as more and more Democrats have convinced themselves that their problems have essentially been solved. Here at The Liberal Patriot, we know all about that. Funding for our modest enterprise, always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has neither solved its problems nor is even very close to doing so has tanked our appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-oriented ones, who now tend to regard us with suspicion. A little heterodoxy is fine but there’s a limit! Hence: no money.

Teixiera then singles out five areas in which, he argues—convincingly—that Democrats haven’t learned. Immigration and trans rights are the most thorough areas he analyzes (though economics will be more decisive), but of course I can’t quote the whole piece. A bit of each:

The culture problem. This is a big one. The yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working class voter is screamingly obvious. One approach to this problem would be to actually change some of the Democratic Party positions that are so alienating to those voters.

Nah! That would be way too simple plus would create fights within our coalition plus…we’re on the right side of history aren’t we so why the hell would we change our correct, righteous positions? Democrats have instead chosen a different path, aptly summed up by Lauren Egan:

It didn’t take long after the 2024 election—in which their party lost the White House and the Senate—for Democratic leaders to identify the problem: The party had drifted too far to the left on social and cultural issues.

It also didn’t take them long to come up with a solution: simply to shut up about it…

The working-class and rural voter problem. This brings us to the Democrats’ working-class and rural voter problem, also screamingly obvious from long-term trends and the results of the 2024 election. Of course, Democrats take comfort from the copious evidence that many of these voters are now having second thoughts about their support for Trump and the GOP. This can be seen both in low Trump approval and future Republican voting intentions relative to those voters’ 2024 levels of Trump support.

But there is little evidence that declining enthusiasm for Trump has been matched by increased enthusiasm for the Democrats among these voters. Indeed, a careful recent study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams for the invaluable Center for Working-Class Politics finds that “waverers”—those Trump supporters who now say they are not planning to vote Republican in 2028—are overwhelmingly not supporting the Democrats but rather supporting neither party or generally disengaging from politics.

The trans “rights” problem. Every once in a while, some Democratic politician ventures a mild dissent from the trans activist agenda. Without exception, they are met with a brick wall of intense intra-party opposition which typically results in a hasty retreat by said politician. It is truly a litmus test issue.

This is remarkable. Perhaps nothing would surprise a Democratic time traveler from the 20th century as much as the incorporation of transgender “rights” into the Democrats’ 21st century project. Going far beyond basic civil rights in housing, employment, and marriage, Democrats have uncritically embraced the ideological agenda of trans activists who believe gender identity trumps biological sex, and that therefore, for example, transwomen—trans-identified males—are literally women and must be able to access all women’s spaces and opportunities: sports, changing rooms, bathrooms, jails, crisis centers, institutions, etc. . . .

. . . . In reality, sex is a binary; males cannot become females and females cannot become males. Transwomen are not women. They are males who choose to identify as women and may dress, act, and be medically treated so they resemble their biological sex less. But that does not make them women. It makes them males who choose a different lifestyle.

As noted, the remarkably radical approach of trans activists and gender ideologues has been met with little resistance in the Democratic Party. But as evidence mounts that the medicalization of children is not a benign and life-saving approach, but rather a life-changing treatment with many negative effects, and voters stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea that biological sex is just a technicality and more and more strongly oppose the trans activist agenda, Democrats’ identification with gender ideology has become a massive political liability.

Indeed, for many, many voters the Democrats’ embrace of radical transgender ideology and its associated policy agenda has become the most potent exemplar of Democrats’ lack of connection to the real world of ordinary Americans. For these voters, Democrats have definitely strayed into “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes” territory. And if they’re not realistic about something as fundamental as human biology, why should they be trusted about anything else?

Of course trans people deserve those “basic civil rights,” but the clash among the Left is about the “ideological agenda of trans activists.”  I am not aware of any Democratic politican being asked outright by the press, “Do you think that trans women are actually women, and should, for example, be able to compete in women’s sports or be confined in women’s jails?” The press is not doing its job here; after all, part of its duty is to make Americans aware of where their politicians stand. But the mainstream media, being pretty “progressive” itself, is loath to even pose these questions.

Here’s another example of where the press has failed to do its job:

The immigration problem. The immigration issue has been a total disaster for the Democrats. They encouraged mass immigration through lax border and interior enforcement and porous asylum systems that effectively legalized illegal immigration and made a mockery of controlled, legal immigration. Over time, the intense unpopularity of these policies has contributed hugely to tanking Democrats’ working-class support. But to this day where are the Democratic politicians who are willing to unapologetically proclaim the following fundamentals of a realistic immigration policy?

There follows a list of ten reasonable propositions about immigration that no Democrat will touch.  Teixeira rightly sees the Democrats as effectly espousing an “open border” policy, with the possible exception of immigrants who have committed crimes in their home country or have done so after illegal entry into America.

But so far what has happened? Clearly Democrats are much happier denouncing ICE (including calling for its abolition) and Trump than they are grappling with the immigration issue and making clear, unambiguous commitments to radical reform. Noah Smith rightly sums up the situation:

I have seen zero evidence that progressives have reckoned with their immigration failures of 2021-23. I have not seen any progressive or prominent Democrat articulate a firm set of principles on the issue of who should be allowed into the country and who should be kicked out.

This was not always the case. Bill Clinton had no problem differentiating between legal and illegal immigration in 1995, and declaring that America had a right to kick out people who come illegally.

I have seen no equivalent expression of principle [JAC: remember, he’s talking about the Democrats] during the second Trump presidency. Every Democrat and progressive thinker can articulate a principled opposition to the brutality and excesses of ICE and to the racism that animates Trump’s immigration policy. But when it comes to the question of whether illegal immigration itself should be punished with deportation, Democrats and progressives alike lapse into an uncomfortable silence.

Every Democratic policy proposal I’ve seen calls to refocus immigration enforcement on those who commit crimes other than crossing the border illegally. But what about those who commit no such crime? If someone who crosses illegally and then lives peacefully and otherwise lawfully in America should be protected from deportation, how is the right-wing charge of “open borders” a false one?

Why can’t a reporter ask Elizabeth Warren or AOC this question: “Do you favor unrestricted immigration into America, and, if not, who would you exempt?”

And a big problem that’s only going to get worse:

The economic program (or lack thereof) problem. Democrats seem to think that the well-documented discontent with the Trump administration’s economic management now makes the economy “their” issue. In a thermostatic, opposition party sense that may be true, but it remains the case that Democrats do not have an advantage over Republicans on handling the economy.

This makes sense since voters viewed the previous Democratic administration quite negatively on economic management. They may not like what Trump has done, but they have not forgotten what Democrats did.

And let’s face it: the current Democratic economic program is quite thin; voters can reasonably question whether Democratic plans for the economy would be much of an improvement over what the previous Democratic administration delivered. Take energy.

. . . Rounding out the hit parade of Democratic economic policy ideas is that old favorite, “tax the rich.” There are now several versions in circulation whose policy defects we will pass over in charitable silence. But if this is what now passes for an innovative Democratic economic policy idea, they are perhaps in more trouble than I thought.

Feel free to agree or disagree below, but I recommend reading the whole article. I’m not only worried about the Democratic prospects in the next two years, but also about whether if Democrats do get in, it will be “progressive” Democrats or disguised progressives like Kamala Harris.

Here are Teixeira’s last words ever on this website:

Looking over this list of problems, one thing that stands out to me is that Democrats have never come to terms with how profoundly mistaken many of their priorities have been. These haven’t just been minor errors in implementing an otherwise fine program. Much of the program was simply wrong and, arguably, not even progressive.

It’s time—past time—for Democrats to discard the conceit that they are on the right side of history and that therefore their positions are, and have been, noble and correct. Until they do so, I do not expect them to develop the dominant majority coalition they seek and vanquish right populism. Indeed, it could be the other way around. That’s a sobering thought.

I’m not as pessimistic as Teixeira, but it’s time for liberals to speak out against illiberalism in their party, and demand that their candidates listen to their constituents.

Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 9, 2026 • 6:45 am

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:

u/JessLovesNaps / Via reddit.com

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):

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:

And the poor guy testifies himself:

And two from the Number Ten Cat

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.”

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

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

The last Nazi newsreel before the end of WWII, with the last video of Hitler

April 8, 2026 • 10:30 am

This video showed up as a “suggestion” when I was watching YouTube (no, I’m not a Nazi), and I was curious to see what the last German propaganda newsreel of WWII showed. Among other things, which are explained in the 12½-minute clip, is the last video taken of Hitler, showing his left hand shaking violently (5:34), a symptom medical historians have attributed to Parkinson’s disease. (This bit wasn’t shown in the final video.) Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945—just five weeks after this newsreel appeared in German cinemas.

The footnotes show the direct translation, but there’s English narration of what’s going on in the video beginning 48 seconds in.

There’s a Wikipedia article on the newsreel series called, Die Deutsche Wochenschau, and here are two paragraphs from it:

Die Deutsche Wochenschau (German for ‘The German Weekly Review’, lit. ‘The German Weekly Look‘ or ‘The German Weekly Show‘) is the title of the unified newsreel series released in the cinemas of Nazi Germany from June 1940 until the end of World War II, with the final edition issued on 22 March 1945. The co-ordinated newsreel production was set up as a vital instrument for the mass distribution of Nazi propaganda at war. Today the preserved Wochenschau short films make up a significant part of the audiovisual records of the Nazi era.

. . . Among the many notable scenes preserved by the newsreel are the Nazi point of view during the Battle of Normandy, the footage of Hitler and Mussolini right after the 20 July plot, and the last footage (No. 755) of Hitler awarding the Iron Cross to Hitler Youth volunteers in the garden of the Reich Chancellery shortly before the Battle of Berlin. Its last documentary, Traitors before the People’s Court, depicted the trial of the accused in the 20 July plot, and was never shown.

It’s fascinating to see how, with the Russians closing in on Berlin, the German people were not told of it but instead were misled to think that they might successfully resist the enemy.

Ducks (and turtles) at Botany Pond

April 8, 2026 • 9:00 am

Please allow me to show you pictures of my children, which this year comprise a pair of mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) and a pair of wood ducks (Aix sponsa). The latter don’t seem to be breeding here as they’re on the pond most of the day, and because female wood ducks nest in tree holes, and we ain’t got any.

The female mallard, named Vashti, is nesting nearby, but I’m keeping her nest location as secret as I can as I don’t want people disturbing her while she’s incubating her clutch of seven eggs. I expect a hatch about April 19 or so.  The male mallard, named Armon, patiently awaits Vashti, who comes down to the pond once a day to have a big feed and a bath and preening session. Those sessions last about 15 minutes, but Armon, a lovesick drake, patiently patrols the pond for about 23 hours and 45 minutes per day.

The wood ducks are absent in the mornings but then are at the pond most of the rest of the day, which tells me that the wood duck hen is not sitting on eggs.

But have a look at these gorgeous wood ducks: feathered jewels. I’ve added a few photos of our resident turtles, red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans). Of the five we put in last fall, I’ve seen two or three. The other turtles must have either died during hibernation or simply walked away from the pond.

Below: the wood duck pair, whom I haven’t named as no names suggested have seemed appropriate. This is an example of extreme sexual dimorphism, as you can clearly see. Why females chose males with those patterns, colors, and a crest is something we don’t understand. But it’s clearly another example of sexual selection in birds, something that ultimately devolves to the difference between the sexes in gamete size and investment. (Yes, there are two sexes in all of these animals.)

Do click on the photos to enlarge them.

The male.  I can’t get enough of seeing him and marveling at his beauty. The only other wild duck to rival this phenotypic glory is that of the male mandarin duck (Aix galericulata), a species found in East Asia. Wood ducks, however, are natives here.

He has satanic red eyes, but really is very gentle (also quick and much smaller than a mallard):

Here’s a video of the male and female wood duck having their lunch at Botany Pond:

Wood ducks seem quite romantic to me. They are always very close to each other and sometimes the male nuzzles the female.

I need names! The hen:

They are quite plump, as I ensure that they never go hungry.

Armon doesn’t really like the wood ducks, but somehow knows to chase them halfheartedly, as you see him chasing the male wood duck here.  When an undocumented drake flew into the pond last Saturday, and began chasing Vashti off her nest (he was clearly eager to copulate), Armon went after him big time.  With the help of Armon, a lot of running and yelling, and my trusty Super Soaker, I finally managed to expel the intruder. Here Armon goes after the male wood duck, who is much faster and more agile.

This is my favorite picture of the pair. They both have their heads cocked, probably looking at something above like a hawk.  Ducks have eyes on the sides of their heads, and so must cock them if they want to see above. It’s very cute when they do that, and rare to see a pair do it simultaneously:

The hen has iridescent feathers, too, but they’re less conspicuous and usually covered by the wings. They are probably byproducts of the colors that are exaggerated in males. You can see some of them below:

Have another picture of my boy:

The male woodie standing on one leg, doing his flamingo impression. (Ducks do this to conserve heat, and this was a chilly day.)

As I said, Vashti is incubating her eggs, but she comes down to the pond for about 15 minutes per day for a nosh and a bath. Here’s part of her preening session, which is quite vigorous. Shortly thereafter she flew off to her nest. Note that Armon stays nearby, as he gets only a few minutes per day with his mate and lady love.

And we mustn’t forget the turtles! On warm days they come out of the water to soak up sun on the rocks, extending their limbs to get as much heat as possible. We call this “turtle yoga.”

The long claws tell us that the one below is a male (they use the claws in courtship):