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Several readers astutely mentioned in comments on today’s Hili Dialogue that a primary goal of the American attack on Iran wasn’t to democratize the country, but to remove Iran as a Chinese proxy.  As Haviv Rettig Gur, a journalist who writes for the Times of Israel, argues in the piece given below, a mutualistic relationship between Iran and China has developed, with Iran providing China with cheap oil that allows the People’s Republic to build a strategic petroleum reserve (nobody else will buy that oil), and China providing Iran with missiles and sophisticated weapons to go after Israel and the West. As Gur says:

Iran is to America what Hezbollah is to Israel—the smaller second-front proxy you have to take out to have a clean shot at the main foe later on.

This is also why President Trump seems to be pursuing a strange sort of regime change—something very different from what George W. Bush or the neocons meant by the term. Trump doesn’t care one whit about democratization, or, as Venezuela showed us, about changing any element of a regime that doesn’t stand in America’s way. He’s interested in regime change in Iran only because it is fundamentally, in its founding theology, unswervingly anti-American. It is thus not swayable from the Chinese orbit by any other means.

He doesn’t need a democratic Iran, he just needs a not-anti-American Iran.

Why are we so worried about China? Because, says Gur, a potential conflict with China is in the offing—over Taiwan:

The picture that emerges from all of this is of a Chinese forward base, a linchpin of the country’s naval architecture; cyber efforts; an economic Belt and Road influence program—every element of Chinese power projection and empire-building—positioned at the throat of the global oil supply, armed with weapons designed to penetrate advanced American defenses and kill American sailors, and embedded in a strategic architecture whose explicit purpose is to constrain American military freedom in any future conflict over Taiwan.

When Iran began to look like that, it stopped being Israel’s problem and became America’s.

Click below to read, but only if you have a subscription to TFP.  They don’t allow their articles to be archived.

Gur begins by noting that this is not one war but two: America’s on the one hand and Israel on the other, with Israel having existential worries as opposed to America’s concern with China:

. . . across the world, from Brazil to Beijing, London to Karachi, the argument is the same: America is fighting Israel’s war.

But this isn’t true. And the confusion matters, because if you misread what this war is actually about, you will misread everything that follows.

This is not a war about Israel. This is not a war for Israel’s sake. Israel is a beneficiary, a capable and willing local partner, but it is not the reason America is in this fight. America is playing a much bigger game, about more than what happens in the Middle East. The subtext, that Israel exercises outsize influence or “drags Americans into wars they don’t want,” borders on the conspiratorial.

This isn’t one war, but two. There is a regional chessboard, on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the other Gulf states all play. Iran’s proxies, its drones and ballistic missiles, its nuclear ambitions, its funding of Hezbollah and the Houthis: All of that belongs primarily to this smaller game. Israel has always understood this board. So have the Saudis. So has everyone in the neighborhood.

But there is a second chessboard, vastly larger, on which the United States and China are the primary players. On this board, the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out: whether the American-led global order survives, or whether China displaces it. Every significant American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars to the posture in the Pacific, is ultimately a move on this board.

Of course dodos like me (I never claimed to be a pundit) have missed all this, but Gur gives reasons why the U.S. decided to attack now (remember that China has said it will go after Taiwan within seven years):

. . . Reports emerged in late February of a near-finalized deal to supply Iran with supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3 and engineered to evade the Aegis defense systems deployed on American carrier strike groups. China was replacing Iranian government and military software with closed Chinese systems, hardening Iran against CIA and Mossad cyber operations. Joint naval exercises between China, Russia, and Iran in the Straits of Hormuz were becoming regular events, building real-time operational familiarity between the three navies. Iran had switched from the GPS system to the Chinese BeiDou system. And Iran was providing China with the port at Jask, as part of China’s “string of pearls” base system in the Indian Ocean.

The picture that emerges from all of this is of a Chinese forward base, a linchpin of the country’s naval architecture; cyber efforts; an economic Belt and Road influence program—every element of Chinese power projection and empire-building—positioned at the throat of the global oil supply, armed with weapons designed to penetrate advanced American defenses and kill American sailors, and embedded in a strategic architecture whose explicit purpose is to constrain American military freedom in any future conflict over Taiwan.

Gur adds that the U.S. has had a hard time articulating this, but I can understand why they would not want to, even if that articulation would lessen America’s opposition to the war (more than 50%).  But it wouldn’t, since the American public doesn’t think much about China.

Now the first thing I asked myself why I saw Gur’s thesis was this: What is the evidence that this is the real American strategy?  Here is what counts as evidence:

The Americans went to war together with the Israelis because that’s the best way to fight a war like this. Having a capable and loyal local ally willing to deal damage and absorb blowback lowers the costs to America and increases the chances of success. If America ever finds itself in a kinetic fight with China, it presumably expects Japan and Taiwan and South Korea to play a similar role in the fighting. It’s one hell of an operational advantage.

To Gur, the targets give away Trump’s intentions:

. . .In the first 24 hours of the war, American strikes, as confirmed by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), focused on Iranian naval vessels, submarines, ports, and anti-ship missile positions along the southern coast. The port of Bandar Abbas, headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, was hit. So was Jask, which China had hoped would become a permanent naval foothold on the Indian Ocean. Isfahan and Tabriz, hubs of ballistic missile production and drone assembly, were struck. The goal, explicitly stated by American officials, was not merely to degrade existing stockpiles but to destroy the industrial base from which those weapons are produced, so that China cannot spend the next few years quietly rebuilding it.

President Trump announced the operation in terms that could not have been more direct, explicitly mentioning all those elements of Iranian power—the navy, the missile production sites—that would serve as that second front in a war with China.

Many of these targets so central to CENTCOM’s efforts are no threat whatsoever to Israel.

So far from China: crickets. It’s been silent and has left Iran hanging. In truth, there’s little that China can do save join the war itself—and it’s clearly not keen to do that. As for Trump’s notable omission of words about freeing the Iranian people, or creating a democracy in Iran, Gur says “He doesn’t need a democratic Iran, he just needs a not-anti-American Iran.” Finally, as to why the U.S. has remained mum about what are supposedly its real goals, Gur says this:

So why can’t Secretary Rubio say it? Why hem and haw and offer half-hearted non-explanations to a question that has set the conservative movement aflame?

One obvious answer: They don’t want to push the Chinese to more overt responses. One should always give one’s enemy an excuse not to respond in kind, on the off chance that they don’t want to. It’s a sensible ambiguity on the world stage, but it’s causing damage at home. It may be time for the administration to speak clearly on its grand strategy—not in policy papers, but in clearly articulated statements that actually answer the good-faith questions of a great many Americans.

America went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon. It didn’t need to do this, to invest so much of the administration’s political capital and of the military’s firepower, just to shore up a second-run Israeli operation. This isn’t about Israel. Iran has been a growing threat to Israel for decades, and yet Trump has always resisted intervening.

As I said, I’m no pundit, and although this all sounds plausible, it hasn’t convinced me completely. Gur makes a good argument, and one that several readers agree with. Perhaps they’re right, and if so kudos to them. But I’m depressed at the thought that if Gur is right, Trump doesn’t give a fig for freeing the beleaguered Iranian people, or about creating a democratic regime. The Iranian people are hoping for that, and perhaps we’re deceiving them.

And if we ever go to war with China, Ceiling Cat help us all!

Andrew Doyle, the creator of both Jonathan Pie and Titania McGrath (both of whom some people still take seriously), has taken out after wokeness in the article below from his own site (free to access).  It contains 20 short but inadvertently funny videos documenting the “woke era”—an era that Doyle sees as circling the drain. (I wish!). Here’s his intro:

There is little doubt that historians of the future are going to look back on the ‘woke’ era with utter bafflement. How is it that intelligent people were suddenly caught up in this identity-obsessed hysteria? Why did they forget that free speech mattered? Or that human beings cannot change sex? Or that judging people by the colour of their skin rather than the content of their character was a bad thing?

The lunacy was so intense that these same historians will probably have to be persuaded that any of it happened at all. So I thought it would be helpful to compile some of the more ludicrous and shocking video clips from this recent culture war. A kind of digital time capsule, if you will, for the sceptics of the future.

Woke may not have ended, but with any luck we are over the worst of it. With that in mind, here are my top twenty snapshots of this bonkers period of our history. Enjoy!

Here are the 20 topics; I’ve put asterisks next to my favorites. Some of the topics include more than one video.  Do watch them all; it’s a good summary of how crazy things have gotten.

1.  The homophobic horses
2.  The no-no square*
3.  Gay conversion therapy goes mainstream
4.  The abolition of history
5. The alphabet soup (starring Justin Trudeau)
6. Queers for Palestine*
7. Problematic allies
8. “Progressive” racism
9. Pronoun lunacy, starring Kamala Harris and Jeremy Corbyn*
10. Student meltdown (the Christakis incident at Yale about the Halloween-costume fracas. It’s worth finding the whole thing on YouTube.)*
11.  You ain’t black
12.  Humza Yousef’s own goal
13.  Childhood indoctrination
14. Male breastfeeding*
15. Politicans forget about biology
16.  Thought police*
17.  Misogyny becomes “progressive”
18. Everyone is a Nazi*
19. Osama bin Laden gets some new fans (his “Letter to the American people” that the young wokesters so admired was removed from the Guardian, but can be seen here (and read about it here).
20.  The sancification of drag

I suppose my overall favorite is #2: the “no-no square”, described this way:

In Finland, Oulu city council established a €2.5 million project to address the rising cases of sexual assaults by migrants. It was called ‘Safe Oulu’, and this was the official dance.

This performative “dance” is supposed to reduce sexual assault, as if people don’t already know where are the parts that shouldn’t be touched.

 

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “alps2” is “A resurrection. . . from 2008”.

And Mo is basically right on the etymology, at least according to this NPR site:

Cretin is a word derived from an 18th century Swiss-French word meaning “Christian.” The connection is basically pious, asserting that a mentally innocent person so-labeled is possessed of a Christian soul by way of baptism and is worthy of our mercy and pity.

As for “rug-butter,” I couldn’t find it but assume it is a derogatory reference to Muslims worshiping on prayer rugs, touching their heads to the ground.  But no, Jessus is not literally a cretin as he’s neither deformed nor hails from the Swiss Alps.  But I guess Mo literally butts rugs, though I’ve never seen him kneeling in prayer.

We have a few more batches in the queue now, but it’s never enough.

And today we’re featuring lovely bird photos from Ephraim Heller. I had no idea this gorgeous creature existed! Ephraim’s ID and captions are indented, and, as usual, you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I never had a favorite bird. Oh, sure, I’ve seen plenty of bewitching bee-eaters, mesmerizing manakins and motmots and macaws, plummy pigeons, parrots and pheasants, and tangy toucans and tanagers, but they never held my attention.

In Trinidad I first met a tufted coquette (Lophornis ornatus):

My coquette is 6.6 centimeters (2.6 in) long and weighs just 2.3 grams (0.081 oz) – much smaller than my thumb! My coquette doesn’t eat at hummingbird feeders with the big boys – its bill is too short:

Its food is nectar, taken from a variety of flowers, and some small invertebrates. Across hummingbirds, specialization often involves bill length and curvature for particular flowers; my coquette is relatively unspecialized in bill morphology. My coquette often must sneak nectar from the territories of other hummingbirds. With its small size and steady flight, my coquette resembles a large bee as it moves from flower to flower:

Many hummingbird genera have territorial males, but the combination of extreme ornamentation, very small body size, and intense aggression is a hallmark of Lophornis.

There are 11 species in the genus Lophornis, all as beautiful as my coquette. The name Lophornis combines Greek for “crest” (lophos) and “bird” (ornis), calling out a shared trait of all the birds in this genus:

Per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a coquette is “a woman who endeavors without sincere affection to gain the attention and admiration of men.” But I forgive my coquette. The females are more subdued than the males, but still marvelous:

In French my coquette is called “Coquette huppe-col,” which literally translates to “tufted collar coquette.” That sounds lovely in French. In German it is called “Schmuckelfe,” which combines the literal terms “jewelry or ornament” and “elf or fairy.” To my ear, “jeweled fairy” sounds more pleasant and less insulting than “schmuckelfe”:

I find it wearisome to have to say, each time I criticize the Democratic Party, that yes, I am a Democrat and have never in my life voted for a Republican. I also find it wearisome to repeat that I detest Trump and think he’s a terrible President. But what I cannot say is that everything Trump’s done, without exception, is bad, and that he’s incapable of doing anything good.

I cannot judge all of Trump’s motivations, and cannot agree with some readers who argue that even if he does something that has good results, his motivations were bad, evil, or self-serving.  I will judge an action by its results, not by its motivations.  As I’ve said before, I align with those Democrats who used to lean more Left, but since the entire party, dragged by the donkeys of progressivism, has shifted to the Left, I now find myself in the center—but still a Democrat.

The video below by pro-Israel activist Lizzie Savetsky, expresses some of this sentiment. I can’t find her party affiliation, but again I don’t care much, as what she says should not be judged by whether she’s a Republican or a Democrat.

Which brings us to our attack on Iran. Savetsky calls out the Democrats for now supporting Iran and criticizing Trump for his attack on the country. Given how the attacks have played out, generally support them, hoping for a toppling of the terroristic and murderous regime, for the Iranian people to be free of that regime, and for its nuclear program to be abandoned forever. Will that happen? I don’t know. Like many actions, this attack cannot be judged until it’s been over for quite a while, and I have no crystal ball.

Have a listen to the five-minute video.  I agree with much of it, though Savetsky is too hard on the Democrats as a whole. I don’t, for example, think that the entire party is riddled with fraudulent positions (many of us, for example, have not been silent about the oppressive Iranian theocracy).  And Savetsky’s argument that the Party is driven by an “oppressor vs, oppressed” postmodern ideology is incomplete. Those Democrats crying “Hands off Iran,” also see Muslims as oppressed because they are people of color, and the U.S. (and Israel) as odious because we are seen as “colonizers”.

I think Savetsky is right in saying that the Democrats’ position has devolved largely into demonizing one man: Trump. We are not allowed to say he’s taken any action that has good results, for that would be an admission that we agree with some actions taken by Republicans. If something does have a good result, then we must say that it was driven by bad motivations.  That’s what happened when, not long ago—in an attempt to mend some of the American rifts—I asked people to name something good that Trump has done. I still get flak on that one.

But if I put up only posts that don’t get me criticized, this website would become an anodyne mouthpiece for progressivism and wokeism, as some other sites have. And I would be a coward.

I hope that some day the Democrats will become less driven by progressivism and its monomaniacal concentration on Trump, so that I can feel comfortable in the Party.

And I stand with the brave people of Iran, and hope that at the end of the battle they get freedom, and that the government stops its singleminded drive to export terror and build nuclear weapons.

Watch Savetsky below, and weigh in in the comments, remembering Da Roolz.

Today we have some singletons, doubletons, and tripletons from readers: that is, miscellaneous photos. The IDs and captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

From reader Jay, a photo from St. Augustine beach, Florida:

This photo shows two terns (possibly Royal Terns, Thalasseus maximus), in front of four Black Skimmers (Rynchops niger).

From Keira McKenzie:

These photos were taken on a warm afternoon in Hyde Park [Sydney, Australia], sitting beneath the plane trees at the eastern end of the park.

Here you have Australian White Ibis (Threskiornis molucca,  commonly referred to as bin chickens here—which is a bit rude. In the second picture it’s with an Australian wood duck (Threskiornis molucca; there is quite the family here in all their regimental delight), both birds roosting on the island in the eastern pond in the park. While most of the undergrowth was cleared, these birds still manage to find somewhere to roost. The ibis lost their favourite tree in the clearing process, but they have found others. The wood ducks seem happy as well and I love watching the family being marshalled for the march up to the lawns to either graze or look for beetles or whatever. When they come back to the ponds, they fly in a ragged formation careless of persons what might be sitting there chatting and drinking coffee!

And the egret: it’s a Great Egret, either Ardea alba (the western Australian one) or the equally common Ardea modesta: the Eastern Great Egret (subspecies modesta) . The reason I can’t decide is their are supposed to have black legs, but my photos all have them having yellowish legs which doesn’t come up in any descriptions.

I’ve added a pic of the little Baba Yaga in her outside tiger pen just to make you smile (she is currently yelling at me to come to bed!)

And Daniel Baleckaitis, who works for both our department and Organismal Biology and Anatomy, sent three mallard pictures (Anas platyrhynchos)—taken in Botany Pond! I don’t know the ducks but the pictures are great (and clearly taken a few years back when the pond was full of vegetation):

Ducks in action:

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.

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”.

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.”

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.

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

The Hili dialogue will be shortened today as I was preoccupied with the war between Iran and every other country.

Welcome to the first day of March: Sunday, March 1, 2026, and International Rescue Cat Day. Here’s the rescue of a kitten in Malaysia, and of course it ends well (the woman who rescued him had nine cat!). Click “play on YouTube” or go here:

It’s also 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.

Here’s the March entry from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1412-1416), showing plowing and other spring planting activities at the Château de Lusignan. Almost nothing remains of the castle, château, and town.

Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

I’ll feature the latest on the war today, but concentrating on opinion beside the news. First, though, an update from the NYT and the Times of Israel.

First, the NYT headline, which affirms that the Supreme Leader was taken out. Click on headline to read, or find it archived here:

An excerpt:

The Iranian government vowed on Sunday that it would retaliate for the attacks that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s longtime supreme leader and an implacable enemy of Israel and the United States, as attacks on the country entered a second day.

The Iranian state news agency confirmed the ayatollah’s death on Sunday morning, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a powerful institution answering to the supreme leader — said that Iran would avenge him. Ali Larijani, a senior leader and Khamenei confidant, vowed that Iranian forces would fight even harder.

The ayatollah’s death prompted a range of reactions within Iran on Saturday. Large crowds poured into the streets of Tehran and other cities to celebrate the toppling of a leader who had ruled with an iron fist for nearly 37 years. Others mourned him.

The killing is a seismic political shift that raises the prospect of chaos and a power vacuum in an already turbulent region.

The United States and Israel said overnight that they were still attacking Iran. President Trump said on social media that U.S. strikes would continue “throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”

In Israel, where the authorities reported one death on Sunday, air-raid sirens warned of further Iranian missile launches. Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for the initial strikes. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait — all of which host U.S. military bases — said they had come under attack, as did Jordan.

Of course Iran is already retaliating as hard as it can, and I’m not sure how they’ll retaliate even harder.  I am shedding no tears for the death of Khamenei; as he really was a guiding force of Iran and its use of proxies. The council of theocrats he appointed will of course choose a replacement. Iran should have given up its nuclear program, but of course that was never in the cards.

From the Times of Israel:

An excerpt:

US President Donald Trump threatened early Sunday morning to hit Iran with unprecedented force after Tehran warned it would step up attacks in retaliation for the killing of its supreme leader and fired successive volleys of rockets at Israel for a second consecutive day Sunday.

In Iran, the Israel Defense Forces continued to carry out strikes on military sites, including a massive blast in Tehran. The army announced that it had dropped over 1,000 pieces of munition in just over 24 hours of attacks that kicked off Saturday morning with a strike that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials.

“Iran just stated that they are going to hit very hard today, harder than they have ever hit before,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social social network. “THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!”

His comments came just a few hours after the Iranian regime confirmed that its longtime leader Khamenei had been killed in a strike on his office early Saturday morning.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said Sunday morning in a video carried on state TV that Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have “crossed our red lines” and “will suffer the consequences.”

The elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps vowed in a statement Sunday that Iran’s armed forces would soon retaliate again with the “most ferocious offensive operation in history” against US bases and Israel.

“The hand of revenge of the Iranian nation for a severe, decisive and regrettable punishment for the murderers of the Imam of the Ummah will not let go of them,” the IRGC said in a statement.

Waves of sirens rang out repeatedly across much of central, southern and northern Israel on Saturday night and Sunday morning as Iran fired ballistic missiles at the country, sending millions of Israelis to shelter. Iran’s state broadcaster said 27 US bases in the region, as well as Israel’s military headquarters and a defense industries complex in Tel Aviv, were among the targets in the new wave of strikes.

There were no reports of impacts in residential areas or direct injuries following the salvos, medics said. Magen David Adom said it treated people lightly hurt by falling while running to bomb shelters.

Police said they received reports of missile and interceptor fragments that landed in the Jerusalem area, and the Fire and Rescue Service said it was responding to a gas leak caused by falling shrapnel in the West Bank.

In contrast to the large barrages fired at Israel during the 12-day war with Iran in June, most salvos Saturday and Sunday have consisted of small number of missiles, usually three at a time, with breaks of a few minutes between each launch, according to the IDF.

There has been one Israeli killed, a remarkably small toll for a supposedly big reprisal:

The attacks have caused only a small number of injuries, aside from a particularly large barrage of some 20 missiles toward the Tel Aviv area Saturday night in which one projectile managed to evade air defenses, hitting near a residential building and killing a woman.

The slain woman, a foreign caregiver for an elderly woman, did not manage to reach a shelter in time, the military said Sunday after an initial investigation. The woman she was caring for was extracted by rescue workers from the rubble alive.

According to the NYT, the CIA helped locate the Ayatollah, which led to the attack taking place when it did:

Shortly before the United States and Israel were poised to launch an attack on Iran, the C.I.A. zeroed in on the location of perhaps the most important target: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.

The C.I.A. had been tracking Ayatollah Khamenei for months, gaining more confidence about his locations and his patterns, according to people familiar with the operation. Then the agency learned that a meeting of top Iranian officials would take place on Saturday morning at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran. Most critically, the C.I.A. learned that the supreme leader would be at the site.

The United States and Israel decided to adjust the timing of their attack, in part to take advantage of the new intelligence, according to officials with knowledge of the decisions.

Another NYT piece (archived here), summarizing world reaction, says that most governments in the West, save Australia, have urged restraint in the attacks, and few (save Spain, Turkey, and some Arab states) have outright condemned the attack on Iran.  I’m surprised by the mildness of the reaction, but it seems to come from Iran’s position as a promoter of worldwide terror, combined with the reported killing of up to 30,000 of its own citizens who protested the government.

Those protesting the attacks include the MSM, including the New York Times. whose op-ed yesterday was called “Trump’s attack on Iran is reckless.”

Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. He has failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome. He has disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare.

. . .A responsible American president could make a plausible argument for further action against Iran. The core of this argument would need to be a clear explanation of the strategy, as well as the justification for attacking now, even though Iran does not appear close to having a nuclear weapon. This strategy would involve a promise to seek approval from Congress and to collaborate with international allies.

Mr. Trump is not even attempting this approach. He is telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.

The Washington Post is a bit milder, but also faults Trump for having no clear endgame and not getting Congressional approval:

It’s hard to see how “freedom for the people” can be accomplished in any meaningful sense without some U.S. boots on the ground, at least for a time. Yet Trump appears to lack any appetite for doing so. That might give pause to civilians trying to decide whether to risk their lives by rising up.

Whether Trump has made the right call will hinge on factors now beyond his control. No president has ever intended to get drawn into a quagmire.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Short of that, the War Powers Act ensures the legislative branch will get a say on this war of choice. It’s essential that the people’s elected representatives get to vote on whether these strikes are justified. A comprehensive case has yet to be made, and better late than never.

Most of the NYT op-eds are critical of Trump and say the attack either was useless or conducted incorrectly. Here’s a screenshot of some the paper’s op-eds (there is at least one pro-attack one, see below):

But then there’s Bret Stephens, whose take on the war seems to be sensible (i.e., it resonates with mine). His column yesterday was called “The case for striking Iran” (archived here). An excerpt:

It’s happening. On Saturday, the United States and Israel jointly launched what President Trump has described as a “massive and ongoing” series of strikes on Iran, aiming not only to destroy the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities but also to overthrow the regime itself. The president may rightly be faulted for barely bothering to spell out the reasons for war in the weeks leading to Saturday’s attack. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t a compelling case for action.

There are three, in fact.

Iran poses a threat to global order by way of its damaged but abiding nuclear ambitions, its deep strategic ties to Moscow and Beijing, its persistent threats to maritime commerce and its support for international terrorism.

It poses a threat to regional stability, not just through its support for anti-Israel proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, but also by its meddling in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and (until the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime) Syria.

And it’s a mortal threat to the life and safety of its own people, many thousands of whom it slaughtered last month. There was a time not long ago when Americans, both left and right, cared enough about human rights to believe it could, in some circumstances, justify military intervention.

Why is a military attack crucial? Look at what hasn’t worked to change the regime’s behavior.

He then lists all the sanctions, economic engagements, failed diplomatic efforts that have failed. Those failures would have simply continued without the US/Israel attack on Iran. Stephens concludes this way:

No wonder protests in Iran have resumed, this time among university students who are bravely undaunted by the terrifying risk. Their protests seem connected to the 40-day memorials for the victims of last month’s massacres. But it’s not a stretch to assume those protests are also a signal to Trump that his promise last month to Iranians that “help is on its way” hasn’t been forgotten, and that ordinary Iranians are prepared to join the fight for their own liberation.

If so, then there is at least a reasonable chance that a sustained military operation that not only further degrades the regime’s nuclear, missile and military capabilities — a desirable outcome in its own right — but also targets its apparatus of domestic repression could embolden the type of sustained mass protests that could finally bring the regime down. Even more so if the leaders who give the orders, including the supreme leader and his circle, are not immune from attack.

For all of its willfulness and the evil it has wreaked over 47 years, the regime does not stand 10 feet tall. It nearly fell during the 2009 Green Movement against that year’s fraudulent elections. It nearly fell again in 2022 during the Women, Life, Freedom protests.

The difference on those occasions was the absence of external military support. Donald Trump now has a unique opportunity to provide it. Despite the risk that military strikes entail, the bigger risk, in the judgment of history, would be to fail to take it.

His sentiments are echoed in the short video below  by Elica Le Bon, an Iranian-American activist and lawyer whose parents fled Iran during the Revolution. Here is her eloquent indictment of the Western media and defense of the attack on Iran. She winds up in tears. (If you can’t see this 3-minute video, go to her X page here.)

In my view, now that the attack has commenced, the horse has left the barn. It has to be seen through because the Iranian people need to live free. All the kvetching by the press seems to me like so much pilpul, writen largely because it was Trump who did it. It also seems that the MSM, and my own Democratic Party, would prefer that there would never have been an attack on Iran, and, though they criticize the Iranian regime, would sit on their hands rather than stop its horrors, its nuclear program, its spread of terror to other countires, including the U.S., and above all, the slaughter of its people.  The kvetchers would, I think, prefer Iran to continue as it has (as Stephens notes, no attempts to change the regimes behavior have worked). And if the results are nuclear weapons in Iranian hands, well, too bad.  Of course Trump needs a viable endgame, and he hasn’t articulated one, nor did he have a decent one in Gaza.  But once the attack was begun—and I was ambivalent about that from the start—it has to be carried through. We can’t simply stop and let Iran go back to how it was. And, in their hearts, I think that most Western countries agree, despite their calls for caution or even a ceasefire. I am moved by Le Bon’s words.

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

And we can’t forget The Princess!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is befuddled again.

Hili: I’m trying to understand the world and I’m not sure.
Me: What are you not sure about?
Hili: Whether these attempts aren’t a waste of time.

In Polish:

Hili: Próbuję zrozumieć świat i nie jestem pewna.
Ja: Czego nie jesteś pewna?
Hili: Czy te próby nie są stratą czasu.

 

This is just a short update on the news, as I presume everyone with an interest in this conflict is following what is happening today. Below is the headline in the NYT; click on the screenshot to read or find the article archived here:

Of coure you wonder how Trump knew that. An excerpt:

President Trump announced on Saturday that the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran had killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for almost 37 years and an implacable enemy of Israel and the United States, in a potentially seismic political shift in Tehran and the broader region.

“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had said earlier that there were “many indications” that Ayatollah Khamenei was dead, but stopped short of making a definitive statement.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Iranian government. Earlier in the day Iranian officials had dismissed such claims as bravado or psychological warfare. Later the ayatollah’s official account on X later posted an image rich with Shia religious symbolism, of a faceless clerical figure holding a flaming sword.

It was not immediately clear which country’s forces had killed Ayatollah Khamenei, but either way, the action exhibited a high degree of coordination between the United States and Israel. Israel’s military said it had targeted a gathering of senior Iranian officials in the opening strikes. Satellite imagery showed a plume of smoke and extensive damage at the supreme leader’s high-security compound.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu both made clear that regime change was a goal of the massive waves of strikes on Iran that began around 1 a.m. local time Saturday.

But it is uncertain whether removing Ayatollah Khamenei, who was 86, would result in significant changes to the system he led, as many people in authority owed their positions to him.

The power to choose a new supreme leader rests with the Assembly of Experts, a conservative body of clerics who, given Ayatollah Khamenei’s age and infirmities, have likely given ample thought to potential successors.

In retaliation for the Israeli-U. S. attack, Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles at Israel, while the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait — all of which host U.S. military bases — said they had come under attack, as did Jordan.

So it is not definitive, but surely Israel has spies in Iran that could provide some confirmation. Eventually Iran will have to announce it.

So far there ha been little damage to the countries Iran attacked, and not one death in Israel.

Will there be regime change? I have no idea; it is foolish to predict such a thing so early in the conflict.  Perhaps the U.S. could find an amenable leader in the current regime to do its bidding, as it has in Venezuela, but that seems unlikely: all the rulers are, as it says, conservative theocrats. And the government has all the soldiers and weapons while the people have none.

Every day will tell a new story, but the critics of the attacks are predictable: most Democrats (save the rogue Fetterman) and the mainstream media (save Bret Stephens at the NYT).  We will know if the attack was a good thing only in retrospect.

Everybody knows the famous slogan of the New York Times, here reproduced from a column about it’s 60,000th issue:

And my immediate interpretation is that the paper publishes all the news that is worth knowing. Indeed, the NYT is also known as the American “paper of record,” the paper one reads to see good, solid journalism. It’s still my go-to source though it has its biases.

I hadn’t thought too much about that slogan until I read Michael Shermer’s new book on truth. As I’ve said before, Shermer’s book is well worth reading, though I do disagree with his take on free will (he seems to accept its existence, though I think the discussion is misguided). But there are great discussions of religions, miracle, morality, truth denialism, and especially history and how to interpret it. I do recommend the book.

Last night, as I read his chapter six on history (the last chapter I’ve read, as I skipped around), I saw that Michael quoted the NYT motto, saying that it was shown with “no apparent awareness of self-contradiction”,

But is it self-contradictory? I didn’t see how.  It’s not a great motto, though it’s stood the test of time, but I couldn’t find an internal contradiction. Rather, I found a tautology. Here are the problems with the motto.

a.)  Does it leave out some of the news that’s fit to print? That doesn’t make sense because the motto asserts that the paper prints all the news that is fit to appear. Thus it’s impossible for the motto to be wrong, for if there’s news that doesn’t appear in the paper, it wasn’t worth putting in the paper.

b.) Does it put in some news that is not fit to print? This is a little trickier, for the motto could be construed as saying, “All the news that’s fit to print as well as some news that’s not fit to print.” That is neither contradictory nor tautological.

c.) But the motto could be considered tautological (see “a”). This rests on the fact that someone has to decide what news is “fit to print“.  News does not come with an inherent “print-worthiness”.  In that light, you could consider the motto to mean “We print all the news that we decide to print.” And they don’t put into print the news that they decide not to print. That is tautological.

In the end, the motto, which has appeared since 1897 (it was written by owner Adolf S. Ochs as an assertion of the paper’s impartiality), could be better written as “All the news you need to know,” which avoids the “fit to print” confusion. But it still implies some God-like figure that decides what we need to know. (This is why I object to journalism’s recent use of subheadings on news articles saying, “What you need to know about X.” They seem patronizing, as if I couldn’t myself decide what I needed to know.)

And that’s all you need to know about the motto.

Well, what seemed likely has now happened; here are the headlines in today’s NYT (click headlines to read live feed, article archived here):

Trump’s 8-minute statement, calling for the “elimination of major threats from the Iranian regime”, which endangers the United States troops, our overseas bases, and our “allies throughout the world” (that of course largely means Israel).  He asserts that Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon” and says that, despite negotiations, Iran refused to abandon its nuclear program. He vows to “obliterate” their nuclear program, “annihilate their navy”,  and assure that its proxies can no longer endanger the world.

Importantly, he tells the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand”, asking them, when the attack is finished, to “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations. ”

Do listen to it:

A summary of the ongoing news:

The United States and Israel on Saturday launched a major attack on Iran, with President Trump vowing to devastate the country’s military, eliminate its nuclear program and bring about a change in its government.

Large explosions shook the Iranian capital, Tehran, where people reported seeing smoke rising from the district that includes the presidential palace. Witnesses described chaos in the streets as Iranians rushed to seek shelter, find loved ones or flee the city.

The American-led attack appeared to herald a much broader regional crisis. Iranian news media reported that Iran had targeted at least four U.S. military bases across the Persian Gulf — including in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which said they had come under attack.

Iran also fired multiple waves of ballistic missiles at Israel, prompting booms in the skies as Israeli air defenses sought to repel them. Air-raid sirens sounded across the country, sending Israelis running to fortified shelters.

Mr. Trump vowed that the “massive and ongoing” campaign would target not just Iran’s nuclear program, which was the focus of a U.S. attack last June. Instead, Mr. Trump said the United States would “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy,” arguing that Iran had refused to reach a deal with the United States that would have averted war.

He then called on Iranians to overthrow their government when the U.S. military assault came to an end. “It will be yours to take,” he said. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

Iran’s government vowed “crushing retaliation” against Israel and the United States and said it would not “surrender to their despicable demands.” Internet access in Iran plummeted amid the attack, making communication difficult.

And from the Times of Israel (click for free read):

From the ToI:

After long weeks of escalating regional tensions and burgeoning threats of conflict, Israel and the US launched a major joint strike on Iran on Saturday, with waves of attacks on sites across the Islamic Republic.

Strikes targeted Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian, an Israeli official said. Other top regime and military commanders were also targeted, according to the official. The results of the strikes were not yet clear.

Targets in the campaign also included Iran’s military, symbols of government and intelligence targets, according to an official briefed on the operation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic information on the attack.

Several senior Revolutionary Guards commanders and political officials were killed in the strikes, an Iranian source close to the establishment told Reuters.

US President Donald Trump announced that the US had begun “major combat operations in Iran,” calling the campaign “a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.”

US President Donald Trump announced that the US had begun “major combat operations in Iran,” calling the campaign “a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.”

“We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally… obliterated. We are going to annihilate their navy,” he said in a video statement posted on his Truth Social account. “We are going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.”

Trump indicated that the goal was to topple the regime, and he called on the Iranian people to seize the opportunity and take over their government.

Here are the questions that remain to be answered (my bold; indents from the news). Summaries are as of 5:30 a.m. today:

a.) What is happening to the Iranian people?  The brave people of Iran, many of whom have been killed by the regime in recent protests against the government, are naturally anxious and terrified. They don’t know what is going to happen to their country. From the NYT:

Just as Iranians began their workweek on Saturday morning, U.S. and Israeli strikes sent panicked residents of Tehran into the streets and parents racing back to schools where they had just dropped off their children.

Chaos and uncertainty set in as explosions shook the densely populated city, Iran’s capital, according to witnesses who spoke to The New York Times.

Ali, a businessman from Tehran, said in a text message that he was sitting in his office with many employees when they heard two explosions along with fighter jets streaking over the sky. Employees ran screaming out of the building, he said. He, like several other residents who spoke to The Times, asked not to be identified by his full name because he feared for his safety.

. . .When Israel launched surprise attacks on Iran last June, it targeted mostly military and nuclear sites and strikes in Tehran and assassinated its top military chain of command. The strikes on Saturday appeared far broader, including political targets like the intelligence ministry, the judiciary and the Pasteur gated compound where the president and supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, generally reside, according to residents in the area and local news outlets.

. . . Not all Iranians were angry as they watched the plumes of smoke rising from the blasts, said Arian, a resident of the Ekteban township west of the capital, who said some of his relatives were cheering the strikes. He said he could hear voices outside his building chanting, “Long live the shah,” a reference to Iran’s monarch, who was deposed in the 1979 revolution that brought the Islamic Republic to power.

As warplanes launched strikes across the country, President Trump released a video statement announcing to Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand,” and urging them to rise up gainst the government once the bombing stops.

b.) Did the U.S. strike do substantial damage to Iranian leaders, the Revolutionary Guards, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei? 

From the Times of Israel:

Channel 12, quoting unnamed Israeli sources, says the palace of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has been completely destroyed. It says it is not clear whether Khamenei was present. It also says all of Iran’s key leaders were targeted in the strikes so far today.

Which high officials have been eliminated remains to be seen; information out of Iran is thin because there’s an Internet blackout.

From the NYT:

Israel is still assessing its opening strikes, which hit a variety of targets, including figures considered essential personnel in the Iranian war machine, according to an Israeli military official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, in line with army rules. The official refused to elaborate on the identity of those targets. He said that Iran had fired dozens of missiles at Israel so far.

. . . Satellite imagery shows a black plume of smoke and extensive damage at the secure compound of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, in Tehran, though his whereabouts were unclear. The image, taken by Airbus on Saturday morning, shows collapsed buildings at the complex, which typically serves as Mr. Khamenei’s residence and main premises for hosting senior officials.

c.) Where is Iran attacking?  So far, Iranian missiles have been fired at U.S. bases, at Jordan, at the United Arabe Emirates, and of course at Israel.

From the Toi:

An Iranian missile has fallen on a home in Jordan’s capital Amman, state media reports.

Footage published by Arabic media shows flames and smoke rising from the wreckage.

. . . Jordan’s military says its air force is at work to protect the kingdom and its people while the strikes are ongoing. A military official says that two ballistic missiles targeting the kingdom’s territory “were successfully intercepted by Jordanian air defence systems”.

From the NYT:

The Emirati defense ministry said in a statement that it had intercepted a number of Iranian ballistic missiles and that a person in the capital Abu Dhabi had died as a result of falling debris. “The UAE reserves its full right to respond to this escalation and to take all necessary measures to protect its territory, citizens, and residents,” the statement said.

There is not much reports of damage to U.S. military bases or to other Middle Eastern countries, though missiles have been fired at them:

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, called Iraq’s foreign minister, Fuad Hussein, to inform him that Iran will be targeting U.S. military bases in the region, according to an Iraqi foreign ministry statement published on the ministry’s website. One of those bases is in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region. The Iraqi statement said Mr. Araghchi had “clarified that these attacks were not targeting the countries involved, but were limited to military sites.”

Likewise, Israel is sending civilians to bomb shelters, but not much damage has been reported. From the NYT:

Iran fired a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel, the Revolutionary Guard Corps said in a statement on Telegram.

It also launched missile attacks targeting U.S. military bases in the region, including Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, and the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Fars reported.

Qatar’s ministry of defense said that it had “successfully thwarted a number of attacks” targeting its territory. The attack echoed another strike last June, when Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at an American military base near the Qatari capital, Doha, in response to a U.S. attack on its nuclear facilities.

From reader Jay, who’s following the Israel Home Front Command’s warning system. Jay says that “I have now gotten red alerts for every region in Israel I have alerts set for: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva. Apparently the whole country is under attack by Iranian missiles.”  For example:

d.) How is the world reacting? They are, of course, distressed and worried, calling for the U.S. not to set off a wider war. From the ToI:

Countries in the Middle East and around the world voice fear of a regional conflagration after the United States and Israel launch long-feared strikes on Iran.

Russia calls on its citizens to leave Iran, with former president Dmitry Medvedev saying that talks with the United States had just been a “cover.”

The European Union warns the situation in the region is “perilous” and calls for civilians to be protected in any conflict.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, on X, urges “all parties to exercise restraint,” stressing it is “critical” to “ensure nuclear safety” after the US indicated Iran’s nuclear sites were in its crosshairs.

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas announces the withdrawal of the bloc’s non-essential personnel from the region.

The UK government fears the strikes could blow up into a broader Middle East conflict, and urges its citizens in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE to find shelter.

“We do not want to see further escalation into a wider regional conflict,” a government spokesperson says, adding that the UK’s “immediate priority” is the safety of its citizens in the region.

From the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy / Vice-President of the European Commission. Note the beginning which takes Iran to task:

The latest developments across the Middle East are perilous.

Iran’s regime has killed thousands. Its ballistic missile and nuclear programmes, along with support for terror groups, pose a serious threat to global security. The EU has adopted strong sanctions against Iran and…

— Kaja Kallas (@kajakallas) February 28, 2026

UPDATE from the NYT:

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada and his foreign minister, Anita Anand, backed the American action. “Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security,” they said in a joint statement.

******

Anthony Albanese, the prime minister of Australia, said his government endorsed the U.S. attacks on Iran. “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security,” he said in a statement. He said Iran has been a “destabilizing force” for decades, and pointed to the two terrorist attacks in 2024 in Australia that the Australian government had said had been directed by an arm of the Iranian military. In one attack, men set fire to a Jewish kosher restaurant, and in another arsonists firebombed a synagogue, injuring one congregant. Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador afterward. (Reporting from Washington)

The reaction of the West is surprisingly mild, and even positive, probably because they, too, have put sanctions on Iran, and are not that unhappy about the prospect of regime change in Iran.

I have been ambivalent about this attack, worried that there would be substantial death to civilians should the U.S. put boots on the ground, which I saw as necessary if the U.S. really wanted regime change.  Perhaps change can be effected without a ground war, but it’s early days now, and we’ll see. I am not sure, either, whether Iranian civilians truly can, in the face of the Iranian military, take over their government.  The Revolutionary Guard has substantial weapons; the Iranian people almost nothing.

I am less worried about Israel, which survived a previous Iranian attack without much damage; the Iron Dome and its successor defenses are good at taking down missiles. But they’re not 100% effective, and there could be substantial loss of life as well as destruction of historic sites.

The world has changed overnight, so stay tuned to the news. The outcome right now is completely unclear.

I’ve said several times that the best rock/pop song I know of is “A Day in the Life,” the last track on the Beatles’ 1967 “Sgt. Pepper” album.  As usual, its composition is credited to “Lennon/McCartney”, but in this case the lyrics and melody are mainly from Lennon. But McCartney and also Harrison and Ringo contributed, with important additions by producer George Martin. (I’ve put the released version at the bottom.)

The video below by David Hartley, called “The world’s greatest song that simply shouldn’t exist”, was put up only a month ago. It shows how the song was inspired and constructed, and includes verbal quotes from the Beatles (and George Martin), early takes of the song, and snippets of the final song itself.

Why shouldn’t it exist? You can see how a lot of accidents, both sung and played, found themselves into the song, with sporadic suggestions from Martin and the boys, and yet the song worked together not just as a whole, but as an “organic whole,” looking as if it were planned.

Far from it!  At that time there were only four tracks available to mix for the final version, and a lot of manipulation was needed.  The ending was particularly problematic, and how George Martin helped finish it, using half of a full orchestra at Ringo’s suggestion, is fantastic. (Martin actually wrote all the orchestral parts that sound like random noise.) Likewise for the final extended chord, which began as a sung note but wound up, at Paul’s suggestion, with a long instrumental chord played on three pianos and a harmonium.

If you like the song, this analysis is fascinating.

 

There’s also a breakdown of the song by Rick Beato, which you can see here (unlike wasn’t allowed to play snippets of the song). Beato calls it “the best Beatles song.” He’s right, which means it’s the best rock song ever.

I’ve put below a screenshot from Hartley’s video apparently showing an early take of the song, with Paul on Hammond Organ, John on piano, Ringo on congas, and George on guitar:

Here’s the final released version (official video):

Doug Hayes of Richmond, Virginia, has sent some dance photos (H. sapiens in action). Doug’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The most recent photoshoot with Starr Foster Dance. The company is currently rehearsing new choreography for their upcoming show, “Shouting Distance” which will premiere April 9th – 12th at the Firehouse Theater. Once again, my friend Starrene Foster asked the dancers to perform several leaps, some derived from the choreography that will be performed during the show.

The core company members (L to R) Sarah Carrington, Roya Baker-Vahdani, Madison Ernstes, Molly Huey, Shannon Comerford:

A basic group jump. While it looks simple, it took a couple of tries to get everyone off the ground at the same time:

Roya, Molly and Shannon strike a dramatic pose:

Shannon, Roya and Molly:

Sarah and Madison defy gravity:

Madison makes it look effortless:

Another incredible leap by Madison:

Roya sitting on air:

An aerial split by Shannon:

Molly gives a new meaning to “high kick”:

Floating through air with the greatest of ease:

Molly does an easy leap:

Starr had an idea to photograph Shannon looking into a hallway. The door was featureless, painted dark gray and the floor where Shannon is standing was the same light gray as the hallway floor and walls. Starr asked if I could make the door look like an apartment door and make the floor hardwood. Rather than spend several hours looking for proper flooring and doors, then doing the tedious compositing in Photoshop, I turned to AI. Google’s Gemini AI has a photo editing feature called “Nano Banana” – I’m not making this up. Nano Banana is incorporated into the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, but one has to pay to use it when editing high resolution images. By logging into Gemini AI directly, Nano Banana is free to use unless you need to use some of the more advanced editing features. It only took two prompts to get the result I wanted and only about three minutes to get the final image. There is a second image featuring Shannon at the door, but the AI made two different-looking doors, and the hardwood floor was different in each. It took about three prompts to get Nano Banana to understand that the doors and floors should match, but it finally “understood” and gave me what I wanted. I have been using AI for the past few months to restore old faded and damaged photos. The results have been amazing and saved hours of tedious retouch work in Photoshop. While AI has gotten better, it still requires human input to correct some errors. In the photo of Shannon, the AI put a doorknob and deadbolt on the right side of the door. Sometimes I wonder if the computers are just screwing with us to see if we notice.

Photo information: Sony A1 II mirrorless camera body, Sony GM 24-70 zoom lens, Westcott 400 electronic flash units, Westcott wireless flash controller. Photos edited with Adobe Photoshop and Google’s Gemini AI. The electronic flash units have a “freeze” mode which fires the flash in sync with the camera which is in burst mode – about 15 frames per second or the equivalent of a 1/10,000 of a second shutter speed. ISO 1250.

This week’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “bells,” came with a comment: “Does she think they were born yesterday?”

Wikipedia tells us that another word for “conceptual conservatism” is “belief perseverance,” and characterizes it this way:

Belief perseverance (also known as conceptual conservatism) is maintenance of a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it.[2]

Since rationality involves conceptual flexibility, belief perseverance is consistent with the view that human beings act at times in an irrational manner. Philosopher F.C.S. Schiller holds that belief perseverance “deserves to rank among the fundamental ‘laws’ of nature”.

The data adduced by the barmaid are under the heading “evidence from experimental psychology,” and she’s right, though it doesn’t cite “hundreds of studies”.

Not long ago I was asked by Jason Flores-Williams to contribute to his online/free paper newsletter Alma Asfalto, a Mexican publication (translation: “asphalt soul”) that has English translation. Flores-Williams wanted me to answer a few questions about evolution, and I agreed for two reasons. First, I wanted to help promote the understanding and acceptance of evolution among our southern neighbors. Second, if you click on the first link (to Wikipedia), you’ll see that Flores-Williams is a guy worth helping:

 Jason Flores-Williams (born 1969, Los Angeles, CA) is an author, political activist, and civil rights attorney. He is best known for his legal work on behalf of death row clients, political protesters, the homeless population of Denver, and his suit to have the Colorado River recognized as a legal person. Flores-Williams is an acknowledged expert in conspiracy law and First Amendment cases whose views are frequently sought by media organizations, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. He was also a lead organizer of the protests against the 2004 Republican National Convention. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

How could I refuse a guy who did that? And so I agreed, answering his five questions. These answers appear on pp. 6-7 of the 16-page March edition of the paper, along with interviews and short essays by other scientists and humanities folks (these include author and filmmaker Sasha Sagan, the daughter of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan). I’ll give here the five questions I was asked, but to see my answers you must to the paper by clicking on the screenshot below. (You can also download the whole paper. Warning: the site loads slowly.)  

Here are the questions I was asked. Again, see the answers at the site.

• In the simplest terms, what is evolution—and what do people most often get wrong about it?
• Why does evolution still make some people uncomfortable, even though it’s one of the most well-supported ideas in all of science?
• Does accepting evolution make human life feel less meaningful—or, in your view, more remarkable?
• People sometimes say that evolution promotes selfishness or brutality. What does evolution actually tell us about cooperation, empathy, and morality?
• If you could change one thing about how evolution is taught or talked about in public life, what would it be—and why does it matter right now?

Here are the contents:

Mexico City
March 2026 

Reality is being branded.
Truth manipulated.
Disengagement marketed.
But something real is gathering.

Across science, philosophy, art, and film, the real is now contested ground.

https://almaasfalto.com/marzo/

REALITY

Sasha Sagan
— The Integrity of Uncertainty

Zona Maco
— Art Week, Mexico City

Jerry Coyne
— Evolution and Meaning

Vlatko Vedral
— The Universe Owes You No Certainty

Asya Geisberg
— Necessary Friction

Franco “Bifo” Berardi
— Desertion from the Future

Kevin Anderson
— Against the Illusion

Mariana Rondón
— It Is Still Night in Caracas

Sarah Martinez
— Alchemist of Nothingness (FR/ES)

Printed in Mexico City.
Alma Asfalto circulates in Roma, in the Historic Center, and underground, on Metro platforms.

 

For two reasons I think that Jesse Singal‘s long op-ed (really a “guest essay”) in today’s NYT will mark a turning point in public and professional attitudes towards “affirmative care.”  First, the NYT saw fit to publish a piece showing that many American medical associations have promoted “affirmative care” of gender-dysphoric adolescents, despite those associations knowing that there was little or no evidence for the efficacy of such care.  Indeed, it seems that some of those associations lied or dissimulated about it, all in the interest of pushing a “progressive” ideology. As we know, left-wing “progressives” have been in favor of immediately accepting a child’s self-identification as belonging to its non-natal gender, so that teachers, parents, therapists, and doctors have united to start such children on puberty blockers and, later, surgery and hormones.

The NYT, while it has published pieces questioning the evidence for affirmative care, has been reluctant to come out as strongly as Singal does in the essay. That America’s Paper of Record deems this worthy of publication is news in itself.

For a number of reasons, most concerned with recent evidence (e.g., the Cass Review), the rah-rah affirmative therapy treadmill is grinding to a halt.  As Singal relates, recently two American medical associations—the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) and now the powerful American Medical Association (AMA)—have admitted that we don’t know whether a gender-dyphoric child will “resolve” as gay or non-trans without medical intervention, and also that there should be no surgical intervention aimed at altering the gender of minors.

Singal has long called attention to these problems, and for his troubles he’s been branded a “transphobe,” shunned and blocked on social media.  There was even a petition to ban him from the site Bluesky, though, thank Ceiling Cat, it didn’t work.  Now, at long last, his views are getting a respectful airing, and society is coming to realize that the American zeal for “affirmative care”—not shared so much in Europe—is not only misguided but harmful.

The second reason is that the author ID says this about Singal:

Jesse Singal is writing a book about the debate over youth gender medicine in the United States and writes the newsletter Singal-Minded.

Although he’s already written one book. The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, this is his first book on gender medicine, and if it expands on the theme of this article, it will be a landmark work with the potential to create big changes in gender medicine and how we view it.  Yes, it’s true that gender ideologues will oppose the article and upcoming book, but they have long put ideology over science, a strategy that is a loser, as we know from the failures of creationism and intelligent design.

Click on the headlines to read the article at the NYT, or find it archived for free at this site.

A few excerpts:

It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and that they were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis. Advocates and health care organizations just dug in. As a billboard truck used by the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group GLAAD proclaimed in 2023, “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.” Elsewhere, these and other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, referred to these treatme

. . .The science doesn’t seem so settled after all, and it’s important to understand what happened here. The approach of left-of-center Americans and our institutions — to assume that when a scientific organization releases a policy statement on a hot-button issue, that the policy statement must be accurate — is a deeply naïve understanding of science, human nature and politics, and how they intersect.

At a time when more and more Americans are turning away from expert authority in favor of YouTube quacks and their ilk — and when our own government is pushing scientifically baseless policies on childhood vaccination and climate change — it’s vital that the organizations that represent mainstream science be open, honest and transparent about politically charged issues. If they aren’t, there’s simply no good reason to trust them.

And then Singal documents how organizations representing mainstream science and medicine haven’t been so trustworthy. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has been particularly  vocal—and clueless—in relentlessly pushing affirmative care:

A 2018 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics provides a useful example of how these documents can go wrong. At one point, it argues that children who say they are trans “know their gender as clearly and as consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers,” an extreme exaggeration of what we know about this population. (A single study is cited.) The document also criticizes the “outdated approach in which a child’s gender-diverse assertions are held as ‘possibly true’ until an arbitrary age” — the A.A.P. was instructing clinicians to take 4- and 5-year-olds’ claims about their gender identities as certainly true. It’s understandable why the Cass reviewers scored this policy statement so abysmally, giving it 12 out of 100 possible points on “rigor of development” and six out of 100 on “applicability.”

Policy statements like this one can reflect the complex and opaque internal politics of an organization, rather than dispassionate scientific analysis. The journalist Aaron Sibarium’s reporting strongly suggests that a small group of A.A.P. members, many of whom were themselves youth gender medicine providers, played a disproportionate role in developing these guidelines.

Dr. Julia Mason, a 30-year member of the organization, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, with the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir, that the A.A.P. deferred to activist-clinicians and stonewalled the critics’ demands for a more rigorous approach. Dr. Sarah Palmer, an Indiana-based pediatrician, told me she recently left the A.A.P. after nearly 30 years because of this issue. “I’ve tried to engage and be a member and pay that huge fee every year,” she said. “They just stopped answering any questions.” This is unfortunate given that, as critics have noted, in many cases the A.A.P. document’s footnotes don’t even support the claims being made in the text.

In the face of a lack of studies supporting their preferred ideology, organizations like the American Psychological Association (APA) have waffled, weaseled, and dissimulated, sometimes making contradictory statements.  Here’s one example (the AMA has also changed its stand but wouldn’t give Singal an interview). Bolding is mine:

The A.P.A. presents a particularly striking case of why transparency is important. In 2024 it published what it hailed as a “groundbreaking policy supporting transgender, gender diverse, nonbinary individuals” that was specifically geared at fighting “misinformation” on that subject. But when I reached out to the group this month, it pointed me to a different document, a letter written by the group’s chief advocacy officer, Katherine McGuire, in September in response to a Federal Trade Commission request for comment on youth gender medicine.

The documents, separated by about a year and a half (and, perhaps as significantly, one presidential election), straightforwardly contradict each other. The A.P.A. in 2024 argued that there is a “comprehensive body of psychological and medical research supporting the positive impact of gender-affirming treatments” for individuals “across the life span.” But in 2025, the group argued that “psychologists do not make broad claims about treatment effectiveness.”

In 2024 the A.P.A. criticized those “mischaracterizing gender dysphoria as a manifestation of traumatic stress or neurodivergence.” In 2025 it cautioned that gender dysphoria diagnoses could be the result of “trauma-related presentations” rather than a trans identity and that “co-occurring mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder) … may complicate or be mistaken for gender dysphoria.” It seems undeniable that the 2025 A.P.A. published what the 2024 A.P. A. considered to be “misinformation.” (“The 2024 policy statement and the 2025 F.T.C. letter are consistent,” said Ms. McGuire in an email, and “both documents reflect A.P.A.’s consistent commitment to evidence-based psychological care.”)

Behavior like this should anger anyone wedded to evidence-based medicine and science, especially because the APA simply lies when it says that its stand has been consistent all along. And the APA is not alone in its bad behavior.  Other organizations are digging in their heels, maintaining unsupportable positions in the face of counterevidence—all because of the ideology that people can change sex and we should believe them when they say they are really of a different sex than their natal one. This is wedded to the view that surgery and hormones designed to change gender have been proven to be safe.

I should add here that many adults who have transitioned are nevertheless happy with the outcomes of their treatments. But note that Singal’s forthcoming book is about youth gender medicine. This is the focus of the controversy, and few people (certainly not me) would deny adults the right to go ahead with surgery and hormones, though perhaps the public shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Singal’s conclusion, which I hope is the theme of his book, is short and sweet:

Should we trust the science? Sure, in theory — but only when the science in question has earned our trust through transparency and rigor.

  It looks like most medical organizations should not be trusted until they start speaking the truth.