Tuesday: Hili dialogue

March 3, 2026 • 6:45 am

Today is the cruelest day: Tuesday, March 3, 2026, and National Pancake Day (free pancakes at IHOP). Here are two versions I’ve had: a blue-corn blueberry pancake with piñon nuts served in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a cherry pancake with sour cream I ate in Gdańsk, Poland. The world has a great variety of pancakes!

It’s also 33 Flavor Days, celebrating the anniversary of Baskin-Robbins, Canadian Bacon Day, National Cold Cuts Day, National Moscow Mule Day (an excellent drink when made properly), National Mulled Wine Day (ditto), World Wildlife Day, National Anthem Day (“The Star-Spangled Banner became America’s official anthem on this day in 1931), and Purim, the Jewish holiday commemorating the saving of the Jews from annihiliation by Queen Esther (you may remember our last pair of ducks named Esther and Mordecai, who produced a brood of six that fledged last year). Here is the pair. As I posted yesterday, we have a new pair of mallards that are not Esther and Mordecai.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Trump is sending more U.S. troops to the Middle East and now predicts a more extended war: a month or more.  (Article archived here.)

The Pentagon said on Monday that more U.S. forces were headed to the Middle East, amid reports that President Trump declined to rule out sending ground troops into Iran and promised that still bigger waves of airstrikes against that country were coming, in further signs of an expanding, lasting war.

In his first public event since the strikes in Iran began on Saturday, Mr. Trump predicted the attacks against “this sick and sinister regime” would go on for at least a month. “Right from the beginning we projected four to five weeks, but we have the capability to go far longer than that,” Mr. Trump said at the White House. “We’ll do it.”

Listing his objectives, Mr. Trump said, “We’re destroying Iran’s missile capability, and we’re doing that hourly.” He added that the strikes were “annihilating their navy” and ensuring that Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon,” and that the country cannot continue to sponsor militant groups across the Middle East.

Internationally, he claimed, “everybody was behind us, they just didn’t have the courage to say so.”

Qatar’s ministry of defense said its air force had shot down two Su-24 bombers coming from Iran, the first report that Iran, which has fired missiles and drones at its Gulf neighbors and Israel in retaliation for the Israeli-U.S. assault, had also sent warplanes into their airspace. President Trump spoke about the war at the White House in his first public event since the strikes began.

Jake Tapper of CNN reported that Mr. Trump had told him in a phone call on Monday that the huge U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran that began early Saturday could soon intensify. “We haven’t even started hitting them hard, the big wave hasn’t even happened,” Mr. Trump said, according to CNN. “The big one is coming soon.”

And the New York Post reported that the president had said in an interview: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it.”

Now in his objectives he doesn’t even mention the Iranian people or regime change, while his announcement of the attack added that the Iranian government was now there for the people to take. He may now have realized that the other objectives are easier to attain.  He also apparently remarked that he’s not ruling out U.S. “boots on the ground.” That would thrown American opinion wholly against the war—once body bags start coming back to the U.S.  At least he has listed a few attainable objectives, but preventing a nuclear weapon for all time? That would require regime change.

*Over at the Free Press, Elliot Ackerman makes “The case against the war.”

. . . President Trump’s strategy of regime change relies on Iranian citizens returning to the streets. Once our air strikes cease, Trump has urged those everyday Iranians to “take over your government,” telling them in a video on Saturday that “this will be probably your only chance for generations.”

We’ve seen regime change before, but not like this. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, then–Secretary of State Colin Powell evoked what’s sometimes called the Pottery Barn Rule: You break it, you own it. Trump’s strategy rejects that logic. Trump’s rule is: We break it, you own it. His message to the Iranian people is clear: Our obligation does not extend past the opportunity we’ve provided for you to topple your regime and replace it with something better.

Trump has already employed a version of this strategy in Venezuela—except in Iran, he’s pushing this strategy to the limit, using it in a high-stakes region, one with a longer and deeper history of resentment toward the United States. In an interview on Sunday, the president said that he would be open to talks with Iran’s post-Khamenei leadership. Perhaps he’ll cut a deal with the ayatollahs, much as he’s done in Venezuela with the government of Delcy Rodríguez. If Trump and the new Iranian regime fail to strike a deal, that leaves only one pathway for success. The regime must topple.

But will the ayatollahs go quietly? Will it be possible for popular street protests to displace violent regime hard-liners? The specter of further American air strikes makes it unlikely that the regime can again repress its people through slaughter on a scale like in January. But what if a significant number of Iranian citizens reject the demands made by protesters? What if the regime still maintains real, durable support? The Arab Spring offers several dire examples of popular protests for democracy mutating into deadly civil wars, chief among them the decade-long civil war in Syria. A civil war in Iran on the scale of Syria would be catastrophic.

. . .If the operation in Iran remains limited, swift, and successful, like the operation in Venezuela, these objections may amount to little. But the enemy always gets a say in war. Already, three U.S. service members have been killed as a result of our strikes. Should the Iranian regime continue its fight against the United States, a key part of their strategy will be to inflict maximum U.S. casualties. This could quickly erode an already fragile base of support for the war.

Trump has made himself particularly susceptible to such a strategy. He has yet to really sell this war to the American people. He didn’t seek congressional approval for the war or make his case in a national address as presidents have often done. Likely, Trump would say this was because he wanted to maintain the element of surprise, but interacting with Congress and the American people aren’t niceties. They are necessities. War is fundamentally a political act. A president who doesn’t wage politics while also waging war may find himself quickly losing a war on the home front, particularly in a republic.

Yes, these are good questions and valid concerns. Civil war, or war of the people versus the military, would be horrific. All this is in the air. Do these considerations mean that the U.S. and Israel should not have attacked Iran? How can we know without a crystal ball?

*Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has started up again (Hezbollah broke the cease fire, agreement which it’s been doing sporadically), and Lebanon has pledged to stop Hezbollah’s fighting after Israel killed a big Hezbollah official. From the Times of Israel:

Israel said Monday that the head of Hezbollah’s intelligence arm was killed in an overnight strike and Beirut said it would ban the terror group’s military activities, hours after the Iran-backed organization fired rockets and drones at Israel, leading to major retaliatory strikes.

The IDF confirmed that the overnight strike in the Lebanese capital killed Hussein Makled, whom it called “the head of Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters.”

The military said Makled was responsible for “forming the intelligence picture using various intelligence collection tools to provide the Hezbollah terror organization with intelligence assessments regarding IDF troops and the State of Israel.”

“He also closely cooperated with senior commanders in Hezbollah who planned and advanced terror attacks against Israel and its citizens,” the military added.

The terror group’s overnight attacks — which it said were in retaliation for the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei in the opening minutes of the joint Israeli-US assault on Iran on Saturday — led to waves of Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon, including in the capital.

. . . In a statement after a cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said Lebanon rejected any military actions launched from its territory “outside the framework of its legitimate institutions and affirmed that the decision of war and peace is exclusively in its hands.”

This “necessitates the immediate prohibition of all Hezbollah’s security and military activities as being outside the law, and obliging it to hand over its weapons to the Lebanese state,” he said.

Salam ordered the military and security agencies to take “immediate measures” to implement the cabinet decision and prevent “any military operation or the launching of missiles or drones from Lebanese territory.”

Can the government of Lebanon stop Hezbollah? Not bloody likely. Hezbollah is now violating a UN Security Council resolution, too, and there are also UN soldiers (UNIFIL) on the ground in Lebanon—around 10,000 of them—but they have not done a single thing to stop Hezbollah, which they are ordered to do. As usual, the UN has been spineless here, and Israel will once again have to take care of itself.

 

*There are now twelve countries involved in the Middle East conflict, and Iran seems to have made a big misstep in attacking its Arab neighbors.

The Iranian regime, decapitated in the first hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign that started on Saturday, has responded by striking at least nine countries across the Middle East, unleashing a truly regional war.

The apparent calculation was that, by targeting rich Persian Gulf monarchies that hold sway with the Trump administration, Tehran could force Washington and Israel into a rapid de-escalation.

Iran’s expectation was that, by squeezing oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting air traffic, it would cause unbearable pain to the Gulf nations that depend so much on expatriate workers, tourism and overseas trade.

So far, this calculus seems to have backfired. Gulf states, rattled by volleys of Iranian drones and missiles targeting their hotels, ports and airports, are concluding the Iranian peril must be confronted. Rather than seeking an offramp, the prevailing mood in the Gulf—at least for now—is that the Iranian regime can’t be allowed to get away with this unprecedented onslaught on its neighbors.

“Iran is coming to the countries and people of the Gulf and saying: ‘You know, I am actually your number-one threat.’ This has long-term implications, regardless of whoever is actually in power in Iran,” Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the United Arab Emirates president, said in an interview. “Targeting Gulf states is completely irrational, and very shortsighted.”

Iran has struck all six of the oil-rich Gulf Arab states, including Oman, which had mediated nuclear talks between Tehran and the Trump administration. It also hit Jordan, Iraq and Israel. At first, all the Gulf states publicly opposed the U.S.-Israeli assault on the Iranian regime, which has already resulted in the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the killing of many Iranian military and intelligence commanders.

The mood changed quickly once the brunt of the Iranian response targeted cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the U.A.E., Doha in Qatar, and Manama in Bahrain, inflicting widespread damage to infrastructure and civilian casualties. In the U.A.E. alone, Iran killed three people and injured 58 after firing 165 ballistic missiles and 541 drones, most of which have been intercepted, according to the Defense Ministry.

“Many people in the Gulf woke up Saturday pissed off at the United States and Israel, and went to sleep pissed off at Iran,” said William Wechsler, director of Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council in Washington and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense.

Reading the news about the Middle East is an emotionally exhausting experience, as news like this seems good: Iran has alienated neighboring Islamic countries, and hasn’t advanced its aims by attacking them. I wondered what the deuce was going on when Iran started bombing civilian targets in those states, a blatantly stupid move.  But of course the people of Iran remain under the thumb of the theocracy, and there’s no sign that they’ll “take control” of their government (how could they?), nor that the regime will stop its drive to get a bomb.  This is an emotional roller-coaster for many of us Jews, but imagine how distressed and confused the Iranian people are!

*Finally, a small WaPo poll (1,003 people texted) show that Americans generally oppose the strikes on Iran.

More Americans oppose the strikes than support them, the flash poll found. Perceptions of Trump’s goals vary widely, though a clear majority say his administration has not clearly explained them. Still, about half think the U.S. military’s actions will contribute to long-term U.S. security.

The survey was conducted Sunday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern, coinciding with reports that three American soldiers were killed and five others were seriously wounded.

The results (note the potential bias: only people with cellphones that can accept texts could answer:

There are several questions; here’s one more:

Three-quarters of Americans are concerned about the possibility of a full-scale war with Iran, including 40 percent who are “very concerned.” Those worries are similar to a Post poll after the U.S. and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in June. Today, about half of Republicans (51 percent) say they are at least somewhat concerned about a full-scale war, rising to 80 percent of independents and 93 percent of Democrats.

I’m in the “somewhat” column here:

Trump needs to keep in touch with the American people more often and more explicitly.  I think he should hold a press conference in which he actually responds to questions. If he keeps his own counsel or keeps changing the timeline, he’ll lose much more support from America.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili needs her body fed before her soul. And Szaron shows that he is clearly an educated cat.

Szaron: Have you read Plato’s “The Symposium”?
Hili: No, but I could eat something too.

In Polish:

Szaron: Czytałaś „Ucztę” Platona?
Hili: Nie, ale też bym coś zjadła.

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

Fromn Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices; short people closure!

From Stacy, whose caption is: “Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. It’s been going on all day. The boulevard was shut down. Notice the flags. ❤️“

From Masih: Two Iranian women blinded by the regime, and still defiant! Kudos for the brave women of Iran.

Also from Stacy, a sarcastic post put up by Peter Boghassian:

But Cenk gave some plaudits to the late Ayatollah. Oy!

Yep, the Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago is back—not just supporting Iran, but celebrating its striking a U.S. base.  As usual, they are without a moral compass.  They are merely against America and the West.

From my feed: Cuteness quadrupled. I visited this breeding center when I visited Chengdu.

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, an amazing proto-whale skeleton (a transitional form) found in Egypt. See the video in the original post.

37 million years old whale spine found in the hot dunes of Egypt. This is a complete skeleton, the first-ever find for Basilosaurus, a large, predatory, prehistoric archaeocete whale uncovered in Wadi El Hitan, preserved with the remains of its prey.Original post

— Massimo (mirror) (@rainmaker1973-m.bsky.social) 2026-03-01T15:47:35.478Z

Juvenilia from the bollard site:

Grow up.#WorldBollardAssociation

— World Bollard Association™️ (@worldbollardassoc.bsky.social) 2026-02-28T22:27:16.478Z

We have ducks!

March 2, 2026 • 11:45 am

This morning a friend who works in the department office called me and said “there are two ducks in the pond.” I instantly knew that this would be a male/female pair of mallards scoping out the pond as a potential nesting and rearing site. Within one minute I grabbed my camera and my container of adult duck food (I saved it from last year; I have plenty and it’s still good), and ran down to the pond.

Sure enough, there was a pair of mallards at the far (south) end.  Moreover, then swam near me when I whistled, though they didn’t come right up to me. This suggests that these are the mallards knew me, though, based on bill patterns in the hen, I don’t think they are Esther and Mordecai from last year.

Those ducks were named because they arrived on the Jewish holiday of Purim, and, sure enough, that holiday is tomorrow.  These are again Jewish ducks and will have to be named accordingly.

I am so happy. There is no guarantee they’ll stay, but food is thin on the pond, and I am making sure they know it is a place to get a nice meal. After filling their tummies, they retired back to the south end for a rest.

Photos. First, the pair (name suggestions welcome, especially Jewish-themed names—but not Mordecai and Esther):

The hen:

The hen eating (out of focus). They were hungry!

The drake, dripping water from his bill after having eating a food pellet (I give them only the best):

The hen’s bill:

This is Esther from last year. The bill pattern of today’s hen is clearly different, so the hen we have now is not Esther. But there’s no guarantee that this one will breed here (remember, Esther was our first ground-nesting female). Note that today’s duck lacks Esther’s black markings on the top and tip of her bill, and those should have remained over a year.

Stay tuned for 2026 Duck Adventures.

The New York Times highlights faith again

March 2, 2026 • 10:45 am

Originally I was going to call this post “The New York Times coddles faith again,” but there is not all that much coddling in this review of Christopher Beha’s new book Why I am not an Atheist. 

What puzzles me is that the review is on the cover of the NYT’s latest Sunday book section. That position is usually reserved for important or notable books, but Timothy Egan’s review doesn’t make the book seem that interesting. Could it be that the cover slot came from the book being about . . . . God? At any rate, given that Beha’s book came out February 17, the fact that its Amazon ranking is only 1,562 (very low for a new book on the benefits of faith), and there are only 8 reviews (all 5-star reviews, of course), is not a sign that this is a barn-burner that will fill the God-shaped lacuna in the public soul.

Beha has previously given an excerpt of his book in the NYer, which I discussed in my recent post  “A New Yorker writer loses faith in atheism.”  I found Beha’s arguments lame, and I summarized the book this way, as well as provided information on the author.  From my post:

Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive, which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortened to simply this:

“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning. This is why I became a theist.”

So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could?  But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism.  The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.

Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine,  is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book

You can read the Sunday NYT review by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived for free here.

Here’s the cover highlighting the book (thanks to Greg for sending me a photo of the paper version he gets).  Stuff like this roils my kishkes:

Reviewer Tinothy Egan is somewhat lukewarm about the book, even though he avers that he is a believer and had his own search for faith as well as an inexplicable faith epiphany. The NYT identifies him this way:

Timothy Egan is the author of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith,” among other books, and a winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction.

So both author and reviewer, as well as the MSM (including the NYT), are rife these days with either promotions of religious books or softball reviews of them.  And all this manages to center on the search for meaning in these dire times, a search for meaning that always winds up filling the “God-shaped hole” in our being. That is something Egan apparently documents in his own book and is, of course, the subject of Beha’s book.

As I noted when reviewing Beha’s New Yorker piece, he went back and forth from a youthful Catholicism to a materialistic atheism and then found his way back to God again, always tormented by the fact that he saw an angel who spoke to him when he was 15.  As reviewer Egan says:

As someone who also saw something inexplicable (a long-dead saint opening her eyes from a crypt in Italy), I preferred the teenage Beha who was filled with religious wonder. Not to worry. By the end of the book, he returns to the angel with an expanded view. It was both miracle and real. “I know what ‘caused’ these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused — a lifelong journey that I am still on.”

Not to worry! That statement alone speaks volumes. But Egan continues:

In between are several hundred pages that make up that journey, almost all of it through the mostly atheistic philosophers of the Western canon. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, this book is an odyssey of the mind. Beha debates the old masters: Descartes, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Camus, Nietzsche and many, many others, but he starts with a poke at the “New Atheists” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the like — all of them now passé, in his view.

This tells you two things: the reviewer is soft on spiritual experiences, since he himself had one (see the link three paragraphs back), and that the author bashes the New Atheism as being “passé”, a cheap shot which doesn’t at all give New Atheism credit for pushing along the rise of the “nones” and making criticism of religion an acceptable thing to discuss.

But Beha is still somewhat critical of the scholastic tenor of the book, so it’s not a totally glowing review:

Beha is not a stone thrower or even much of a picker of fights. He reveres the great minds, to an obsessive degree. He’s the guy you wanted as your college roommate in the pre-A.I. era. Or maybe not. He’s done all the reading and even wrote a memoir about it, “The Whole Five Feet,” recounting the year he consumed all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics series. Just looking at the list makes most of us tired.

He climbed that mountain, so we don’t have to. But, alas, at times in his new book he gets lost in the clouds. Here’s a sample, discussing Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher: “Kant is here invoking two binaries we’ve already discussed. The first is that between a priori and a posteriori truth; the second is that between analysis and synthesis.”

But Beha is sincere, honest and likable on the page. I found his personal story more engaging than his intellectual one. He started to doubt his faith at 18 when he nearly lost his twin brother to a car accident. He suffered from depression and life-threatening cancer, drank too much and took too many drugs. (He was an atheist for a long time.)

But as for the things I highlighted in my own take on Beha’s NYer article—things like the “faith in science” that we supposedly have, and the “romantic idealism” that is coequal to science in its inability to apprehend universal truths—of these things Egan says nothing. Nor does he point out that many people (I’m one) have found satisfaction without God, though many of us don’t have a God-shaped hole nor are actively looking for meaning.  Instead, Egan’s take is anodyne, for one simply cannot get away with pushing nonbelief in the New York Times. What you can do is bash atheism in general and New Atheism in particular.

Egan:

Ultimately, atheism failed [Beha], as it did some in the French Revolution who briefly converted the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the spiritually barren Temple of Reason. The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?

I have to interject here to note that “nonreligion”—atheism—is not religion, in the same way that not drinking is a form of alcoholism.  The trope that atheists have “faith” is simply ridiculous. What they have is a failure to be convinced of a phenomenon when there is no evidence for it. But I digress. Egan continues his review’s peroration:

Beha is not interested in trying to sway those who’ve given up on God. He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.” There’s no Road-to-Damascus conversion. He’s not blinded by the light. It’s more about his often miserable life getting better with the right woman, a Catholic confession, regular attendance at Mass. And that woman — “she was the reason I believed in God” — isn’t even a believer. She’s a lapsed Episcopalian.

If Beha doesn’t necessarily win his argument with Russell, give him credit for following the imperative of all sentient beings — to deeply consider the mystery of ourselves in an unknowable universe.

“I don’t believe I will ever see things clearly; not in this mortal life,” he concludes. “The best we can hope for is to be looking in the right direction, facing the right way.”

The proper response to this conclusion is “meh”.

Iranian women: 1970 vs. 2020

March 2, 2026 • 9:30 am

I put something like this up years ago, but it’s a good way to see, with just a few clicks, what happened to Iran after the “Revolution”. Let’s taken women’s dress, a touchstone of misogyny and theocratic oppression.  Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it was a pretty free country in that respect, and everyone could dress how they wanted.

To see that, do a Google Image search for “Iranian women, 1970”. I’ve done it for you: click here.  And this is the first images you see (click photo to enlarge):

And the “after” page. Click “Iranian women, 2000” (again, just go here).  This is 21 years after the “Revolution.”  You’ll see this.

I didn’t manipulate the search in any way save put in what’s above, and I’ve used the first four rows of photos for both.

I don’t think I need to comment on the change, which speaks volumes about the oppression of women in that country.  Oh, and why the cry for change is “Women, Life, Freedom.”

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 2, 2026 • 8:15 am

This is the last full batch I have, though I’m saving singletons and the like for a melange post. But today is our first post (as I remember) that features carnivorous plants, from reader Jan Malik. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

A few species of carnivorous plants grow in New York and New Jersey, primarily in swamps or bogs where it is difficult for plants to obtain nitrogen and phosphorus. Compounds of both elements are highly soluble in water and are poorly retained in waterlogged, low-pH soil. So far, I have found two species, each using a different strategy to catch its prey.

  • Sundew (likely Drosera intermedia).
    “A small plant growing in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. While there are other Drosera species in the Eastern USA, this one has leaves spaced along a short stem rather than a ground-hugging rosette. The plant must receive a rich payoff for the resources spent producing mucus and protease enzymes, as the remains of digested victims were obvious on many leaves. Research suggests that nitrogen from captured invertebrates can account for 30% to 70% of the plant’s total uptake, depending on prey density.”

  • The “Expensive” Glisten.
    There must be something in the glistening droplets of mucilage on these tentacles that attracts insects. It looks like a lavish investment, but mucilage is mostly water with a small amount of polysaccharides to provide stickiness. The “expensive” enzymes are only produced after a victim is captured. I wonder if this secretion occurs only in the leaf where the victim is immobilized or systemically throughout the plant. In this shot, it even looks like the plant accidentally produced a web of sticky mucilage strands (on the right), mimicking a spiderweb.

  • Digestion in Progress.
    An example of a fresh victim: a species of crane fly being digested. By plant standards, this process is quite fast; in a couple of days, little will remain except for fragments of chitin.

  • Purple Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia purpurea).
    Photographed in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, NY, this species is a less “active” predator than the sundew. Both plants form traps from modified leaves, but pitcher plants form jugs that fill with rainwater. When small invertebrates (or occasionally small salamanders) fall in, they drown. Unlike the sundew, the pitcher plant generally doesn’t produce its own enzymes (except in very young pitchers); instead, it relies on a micro-ecosystem within the water—protozoa, mosquito larvae, and bacteria. These organisms decompose the victims, eventually releasing nitrogen and phosphorus for the plant to absorb through the leaf wall.

Carnivorous plants have a dilemma: how to capture invertebrates but let the pollinators live and do the job. The Purple pitcher plant soles it in the most logical way, by extending stems of its flowers so that they are far away from entrances to the pitchers. Apparently, that is the investment that pays off for the plant.

  • Durability vs. Chemistry.
    Pitcher leaves are green in June but eventually turn deep purple. These plants are more cold-hardy than sundews and are likely the most northern-reaching carnivorous plants in North America. In the Adirondacks, they survive harsh winters buried under snow for half the year, and their leaves can remain active traps for several seasons. While Droserainvests in “biochemical weapons,” Sarraceniainvests in durable structures. Nutrient uptake is slower in pitchers but comes at a lower metabolic cost.

  • The Downward Path.
    A close-up of the barbs on the lower lip of the pitcher trap. These guide victims downward, aided by scent and secreted nectar. Because they are downward-pointing, a victim has a difficult time climbing out, especially given the waxy, slippery surface of the leaf. Functionally, these barbs serve the same purpose as the sundew’s mucilage—preventing escape—but they are much “cheaper” energetically since they are part of the permanent leaf structure.

Monday: Hili dialogue

March 2, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the first Monday in March, March 2, 2026 to be exact, and, like “yesterday” (because I mixed up dates), International Rescue Cat Day. But that just gives me an excuse to show another cat rescue video. ‘This wonderful woman rescued five kittens from under a gas tank as well as their mom outside.  The kittens are being adopted out, though it’s not clear what happened to Mom:

It’s also all the days I said it was yesterday, as I screwed up with the dates:  Casimir Pulaski Day, honoring the Polish man who helped the colonies during the Revolutionary War, but was neither born nor died on this day, and National Banana Cream Pie Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Lots of news about the conflict in the Middle East: several Israelis and Americans have now been killed by Iranian strikes, and the Iranian regime has now appointed an interim leader. Meet the new boss: same as the old boss. (Pretty much the same as in Venezuela.)

Iran unleashed deadly retaliatory strikes on Sunday against Israel and the countries of the Persian Gulf, home to several U.S. military bases, in a conflict that has drawn in much of the Middle East and that critics say has no clear endgame.

Three U.S. troops were killed in action, the Pentagon said on Sunday, the first Americans to die in President Trump’s war with Iran. United States Central Command did not say where the troops were killed. At least nine people were killed in Israel, and amid fears of a wider conflagration, at least four people were killed in attacks across the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, according to official reports tallied by The New York Times.

Iran’s top national security official, Ali Larijani, announced that an interim committee would run the country until a successor to the ayatollah was chosen. He also said the death of the ayatollah would not deter Iran, which he said would hit Israeli and American targets “with a force they have never experienced before.” The supreme leader was killed in his home office in the U.S.-Israeli attack on Saturday, Tasnim, the Iranian news agency, reported.

As the United States and Israel pressed on with their high-risk military campaign, the Israeli military said on Sunday that its air force was again bombarding “the heart of Tehran.”

. . .In total, at least four people were killed and more than 100 others were injured in the attacks across the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, according to official reports tallied by The New York Times.

Many of the most shocking episodes played out in Dubai, the largest Emirati city and the business and tourism capital of the Middle East. Five-star hotels caught fire, explosions shattered the windows of apartment towers and the emirate’s bustling international airport was damaged, injuring four people. Social media influencers and terrified migrant workers shared videos of fiery projectiles in the night sky, streaking past the city’s iconic skyscrapers.

And there are reports of a strike on a girls’ school, though there are some reports that this was a misfired Iranian missile:

The death toll from a strike on a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran rose to at least 115 people on Sunday, according to Iranian state and state-affiliated media. It appears to be one of the worst mass casualty events of the American-Israeli bombing campaign so far. The strike hit Shajarah Tayyebeh school on Saturday, the start of the workweek in Iran, after many Iranians had already dropped their children off there. The school in the southern town of Minab appears to be adjacent to a naval base belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to satellite imagery.

Asked to respond to reports of the strike, a United States Central Command spokesperson said that the United States was “aware of reports concerning civilian harm resulting from ongoing military operations. We take these reports seriously and are looking into them.” The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Given Iranian news blackouts and restrictions on outside journalists, the strike could not be independently verified, but is sad if true, especially because it would involve girls being educated something against many Islamists’ views. However, a school should not be located next to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base, which is pretty much like protecting the basis with a human shield.

And this morning the NYT announced gleefully that the war had widened (they want nothing more than a Trump failure), but the main widening is that Hezbollah, breaking the truce, struck Israel, and Israel retaliated. Trump also announced that the war could last several weeks. I am getting antsy: how can the Iranian people depose a regime with weapons that is dug in and about to create a successor conservative theocracy?

Here are two maps by Daniel Wood in the NYT, showing where Israel and the U.S. attacked and where Iran attacked in response:

*From the weekly Times of Israel summary, more news:

Large crowds of Iranians took to the streets, cheering with joy and playing celebratory music, Saturday night and early Sunday as reports spread that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed.

Internet and phone service are almost entirely down in Iran, making accounts hard to verify and causing difficulties in assessing how widespread the celebratory sentiment was.

Celebrations in Tehran began shortly after 11 p.m., even before Iranian state television confirmed the killing of Khamenei, who brutally ruled over the country for 36 years.

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The New York Times, citing video calls with three residents of Tehran, said that “loud Persian dance music filled the streets. Many residents, from their windows and balconies, joined in a chant of ‘freedom, freedom.’”

The newspaper also published videos — with some individuals’ faces blurred — of celebrations in Abdanan, a Kurdish city where many protesters were killed in January — showing men and women cheering and honking their car horns in the middle of the street upon hearing the news.

Here’s a BBC video purporting to show celebrations of Khamenei’s death, including fireworks. First, the English translation:

These images, showing the joy of citizens in Dehgelan, Mehrshahr, and Memseni following the publication of reports on the killing of Ali Khamenei, have been released. After the announcement of the news of Ali Khamenei’s killing, videos published on social media depict the celebrations of citizens in various cities across Iran.

. . .US President Donald Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury against Iran after Washington received intelligence indicating that the Islamic Republic would deploy its ballistic missiles either preemptively or simultaneously with any American action against Tehran, a senior US official said on Saturday.

For their part, Iranian officials have asserted that they would only deploy the country’s arsenal if attacked, which is what ended up happening.

“The president decided he was not going to sit back and allow American forces in the region to absorb attacks from conventional missiles,” the senior US official said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity.

*If you’ve followed the saga of the unauthorized use of cells derived from Henrietta Lacks (“HeLa cells”, read the story in Rebecca Skoot’s great book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I reviewed very positively for Barnes and Noble).  At that time the family of Henrietta, a young black woman who died of that cancer, was incensed that her body material had been taken and given or sold to in labs all around the world (her cancer cells did very well in cell culture). Now Novartis has settled with her surviving family for what I assume is big bucks.

The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken from her without her consent in 1951, when she was dying of cervical cancer in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Ms. Lacks’s cells were the first to reproduce in a laboratory, outside the human body, and have been used in groundbreaking research, including to develop vaccines for polio and Covid-19 and treatments for cancer, Parkinson’s and the flu. The National Institutes of Health found the use of her cells, which were known as HeLa cells, was cited more than 110,000 times in scientific publications between 1953 and 2018.

In August 2024, more than 70 years after Ms. Lacks died at age 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave, her family filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland that accused Novartis, which is based in Switzerland, of amassing substantial profits through the use of the HeLa cell line.

It’s been a long time coming, but hospitals, due partly to Skloot’s book and partly to lawsuite and partly to reconsideration of ethnics, now ask patients to give consent to use any material derived from their bodies. That is how it should be.

I believe this is the only picture of Lacks as an adult.

Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

*Over at the Heterodox STEM website, reader Coel Heller has a piece called “Why do people still not know about genes,” subtitled, “Even right-wing commentators seem oblivious to the role of genetics in human behavior.”

The Blank Slate, the idea that differences in human personality and behaviour are entirely the result of that person’s experiences earlier in life, is utterly dominant in swathes of the social sciences, including sociology, criminology, and anthropology. Left-leaning academics adhere to the blank slate because it implies that humans are fully malleable. If a person’s behaviour, good or bad, is entirely the result of how they have been treated, then one can fix all of society’s problems by re-engineering society to give everyone an idyllic upbringing and so produce a utopia. Indeed, the failure to have done that already can only be attributed to the iniquity of the capitalists who thus need to be overthrown and deposed.

We’ve known for decades that this is utterly wrong. By far the biggest influence on a person’s personality and behavioural traits is their genes [1]. Twin studies, corroborated and supported by adoption studies and other types of study, tell us that about 50% of the variation in behavioural traits is attributable to differences in genes. Everything else – including biological randomness in embryonic development, the influences of families, schools and communities, and all the other influences and experiences specific to each person – only adds up to the other 50% [2].

The heritability of criminality is about 40–50%, which means that whether or not a child is likely to grow up to have a criminal record depends primarily on the genes he was born with, and less than that on his upbringing and childhood environment [3]. So why is this totally ignored in most discussions of the causes of crime?

I was mulling that question while listening to a podcast involving Rob Henderson, Rafael Mangual and Theodore Dalrymple. The 90-minute discussion about “the real drivers of antisocial behavior and crime” is well worth listening to, but not once did they mention genes, and there was only one passing reference to innate biological factors. I would have expected as much in a discussion among left-wing academics (for whom crime is always explained by “poverty”), but this podcast was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank, and none of the three participants could be described as “left wing”.

To answer my own question, it’s because in today’s universities the arts, humanities and social sciences are completely dominated by left-leaning academics, who either don’t know about biology or have an ideological aversion to genetics when it comes to human personality and behaviour. And since nearly all opinion formers, and nearly everyone in the media, all studied the arts, humanities or social sciences at university, they were never taught about the actual science. And so even those critical of left-wing analyses also end up discussing the topic in Blank Slate terms.

This is one of many examples where people object to what seems to be scientifically true because it’s ideologically unpalatable. (See “The Ideological Subversion of Biology” by Luana and me.) But such genetic studies are becoming increasingly common, and publishable. The research is still largely taboo, however.

*One of the people objecting to the attack on Iran (and to Israel in general) is Andrew Sullivan, whose Weekly Dish column, “The Last War for Israel,” refers to Israel’s participation as “The last gasp of a country that is losing America.”

Why are we on the verge of another regime-change war in the Middle East?

No one really knows. The US already “obliterated” or deeply damaged Iran’s sites that were aiming to build nuclear weapons capacity. The beleaguered Iranian regime currently poses little threat to the US, is not close to having a viable nuke, is nowhere near to constructing ICBMs that can reach America, has a wrecked economy, tattered legitimacy, and has seen its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, devastated by Israel to a staggering degree.

How on earth do they pose a threat significant and imminent enough to justify a risky, expensive war of choice?

Beats me. The American people don’t see it either: opposition in the polls ranges from 50 to 70 percent. Trump, for his part, was elected precisely not to do this kind of war, and MAGA could (and should) erupt if he does, especially if it drags on. Trump already pushed his luck with his base with the 2025 attack. And if you thought a State of the Union might be the time to make the case in full, you’d be shocked by Trump’s brief, vague comments toward the end. There was no case made. Because there is no case to be made.

Even the usual pro-Israel suspects have come up empty. Bret Stephens, for example, has spent much of this century calling for war on Iran (you have to admire the energy and consistency), but even he has to concede that everything I wrote above is true:

The [Iranian] regime has lost much of its nuclear infrastructure; watched its regional proxies be overthrown, decimated and incapacitated; presided over the implosion of its economy; and lost whatever domestic and international legitimacy remained to it.

. . . The war the Israelis want is therefore not a war to make the Middle East a nuke-free zone, which might be a legit US aim; it’s a war to ensure Israeli nuclear exclusivity in the region, allowing them to routinely attack their neighbors with relative impunity. Why should we enable that?

Sullivan then gets in a few licks at Israel’s behavior in Gaza (what would he have done differently?) and ends this way:

The only reason we may be on the brink of war is because Netanyahu knows this could be his last chance to leverage the might of the United States for his own ends: unchallenged Israeli supremacy in the region alongside more aggressive ethnic cleansing at home.

This is, in other words, the last chance for the tail to wag the dog. Get ready for the fallout.

He doesn’t dwell on the Iranian people crying for freedom, but entirely on whether Iran posed a danger to the U.S. (he doesn’t mention Islamic intervention, like plots to kill people like Masih.)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants a little lie-down:

Andrzej: History is interesting.
Hili: Yes. But sleep is more important.

In Polish:

Ja: Historia jest ciekawa.
Hili: Tak. Ale sen jest ważniejszy.

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

From the Unitarian Universalist Hysterical Society:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Masih. I love that first tweet:

This is Masih’s time (i.e., Iran’s time), so let’s have another. She is SO happy (I’ve been featuring her tweets first in this section for YEARS):

From Luana (sound up if you want to hear the cheering and ululation:

Grok tells us what biological sex is. From Emma:

Two from my feed:

Evolution!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

. . . and two from Emeritus Professor Matthew Cobb. First, his comment on the one below is “Here’s a caterpillar I didn’t know existed.”

The tiny Ramshorn Bagworm moth Luffia lapidella caterpillar in its case on a lichen covered gravestone, Alphington Church Exeter, Devon today.

— John Walters (@johnwalterswildife.bsky.social) 2026-02-24T18:50:26.872Z

I didn’t appreciate that escaping squid could squirt their ink in blobby, squidlike patterns:

All ink, no stink!Squid ink is a natural, dark-viscous fluid primarily composed of melanin pigment, mucus & water — like a deep-sea smoke screen for a hasty getaway. These ink-blob shapes are called pseudomorphs. Filmed during #OBVI #LivingBioreactors expedition w/@schmidtsciences.bsky.social.

— Schmidt Ocean Institute (@schmidtocean.bsky.social) 2026-02-27T22:15:34.92700215Z

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 1, 2026 • 9:30 am

We’re back again with readers’ photos, but this is only one of two batches I have left. Please send ’em if you got good photos.

Today we have plants (and one video of flamingos), and different views of one species of plant from reader Eric Cabot. Eric’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Following Wallace Stevens, I’d call this “Eleven Ways of Looking at a Lotus.”

Here is a series of photographs featuring the American Lotus (Nelumbo lutea), taken at a roadside pond in Middleton, Wisconsin,  in mid-August, 2018    There are few things as comforting as a quiet boardwalk-stroll through a flotilla of this beautiful plant towards the end of a fine day.

I was unsure of the plants’ identity until I found this statement on an informative website (https://www.wisconsinwetlands.org/):  Lotus leaves are circular but do not have a notch/sinus—they are continuous all the way around.

Unfortunately, the pond and the paths and boardwalks associated it were completely washed away by a deadly flash flood the following spring.  The pond has since been rebuilt, but not the boardwalk.  I haven’t gone back to see if the site has any lotuses. For now the images will have to do.

Here a video of pink flamingos the I recorded in “Cabo” a few years ago. [JAC: Keep watching for the displays and weird cries.]

 

Camera: NIKON S9300