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

May 13, 2026 • 9:45 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are claims that the sexual violence was systematic:

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

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

Why Kristof finds the allegations credible:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Israeli government responds in theTimes of Israel c

The Free Press

The National Review

The Hollywood Reporter (by Hen Mazzig)

A video by Haviv Rettig Gur

NGO Monitor

The Jerusalem Post

aish

And

the NYT stands by its report/

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

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

And now quotes from Lake’s Free Press piece:

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

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

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

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

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

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

More:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ a double take

May 13, 2026 • 8:15 am

The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called lead, says in one email that it’s new and in another that it’s old.  Well, I haven’t seen it, and the accompanying note says this:

A comparison that has been made before and is hard to ignore.

And consider subscribing or buying a book:

Why not become a patron of Jesus & Mo?:

Books are still available – The latest J&M collection of J&M strips, which has a foreword by Jerry Coyne, is available here:

And the strip, in which Mo is pretty close to having an epiphany:

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 13, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“ថ្ងៃ​ហ៊ុម” in Khmer): Wednesday, May 13, 2026 and Frog Jumping Day, inspired by Mark Twain’s 1865 story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, whose text you can find here.  The Caleveras County still celebrates the story with a competitive frog-jumping contest. You can see a summary below, but it looks a bit cruel, as the frogs have to be scared to jump. (The record, which nabs the yearly $20,000 prize for a first place, is a bit more than 21 feet in three jumps.)

It’s also Cough Drop Day, International Hummus Day, Leprechaun Day, National Apple Pie Day, National Fruit Cocktail Day, Tulip Day, and World Cocktail Day (the Rusty Nail, a mixture of Scotch and Drambuie, was a favorite of Frank Sinatra). Here’s a lovely hummus meal, complete with pita and falafel, that I ate three years ago in Jerusalem:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I don’t know why the rise in inflation is headline news, but it is in both the WSJ and the Washington Post From the WSJ: “Inflation soared to 3.8% in April, driven by gasoline prices.”

There’s a graph from the Labor Department:

An excerpt:

Consumer prices rose 3.8% in April from a year earlier, a clear impact of higher gas prices since the start of the war with Iran.

The Numbers

The figures, reported Tuesday by the Labor Department, surpassed the previous month’s reported increase of 3.3%. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected inflation of 3.7%. The April increase was the highest in three years.

Prices excluding food and energy categories—the so-called core measure economists watch in an effort to better capture inflation’s underlying trend—rose 2.8%. That compared with forecasts for a 2.7% increase, and was a pickup from 2.6% the previous month.

The Big Picture:

High and rising prices have become a flashpoint for Americans, who had expected the steep inflation that hit the U.S. right after the pandemic to be off their plates by now. Price increases have been especially sharp for some items that people buy all the time, like coffee and gas.

Some economists said that the tariffs that President Trump announced a year ago are still slowly filtering through to some goods—but the Iran war, layered on top of that, has presented a much quicker and more obvious shock that could be hard to reverse.

“The American economy has entered a new chapter where inflation appears to have stepped up,” says Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. He predicts the headline rate moving to 4% later this year. “Median American families are going to find it very challenging to adjust going into the second half of the year.”

The 10% is an arbitrary figure for the onset of a “recession,” but the severity of price increases is lower than in 2022-2023. I know I”m entitled and not worried about being poor, but I wonder what the oppressed people of Iran, yearning to breathe free, think when they hear that America may pull out of the war because prices here are too high.

*Speaking of inflation, Trump declares that he wants to pause the federal gasoline tax, which will reduce the price of gas by a huge 18¢ per gallon. The WaPo analyzes what it will mean and who supports or opposes it.

President Donald Trump has proposed pausing the federal gas tax as a form of relief for American consumers as energy prices soar as a result of the war in Iran.

The move — which requires congressional approval to pass — would mark the latest in a string of government interventions to address fallout from the war, which is weighing on Trump’s popularity.

Since the war began in late February, the price of a barrel of Brent crude oil, an international benchmark, has skyrocketed from about $70 to more than $107. U.S. gas prices — now an average of $4.50 a gallon — have reached levels not seen since 2022 and contributed to Trump’s falling approval ratings ahead of the November midterms.

So is a pause on the federal gas tax likely to happen, and would it make a difference to the price you pay at the pump? Here’s what to know.

The answer to the two questions are “probably” and “a little, but not much.”

Prices at the pump incorporate a mixture of federal and state taxes, meaning they can vary sharply between states. The federal tax is 18.3 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.3 cents per gallon on diesel fuel, as well as a “leaking underground storage tank” fee of 0.1 cents per gallon on both fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

State taxes vary, with a national average of 32.6 cents on gasoline and 34.8 cents on diesel, according to the EIA. Factors such as the type of taxes added, where the gas comes from and the ingredients in it can also affect prices, which change daily. The Gulf Coast and southeastern states had the lowest prices in 2024, The Post has reported, partially because of their proximity to refineries.

On Monday, Trump proposed suspending the federal tax for an unspecified period, saying prices would “drop like a rock” once the war ended. Also that day, the Energy Department said it would release 53 million barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The Trump administration had agreed to release a total of 172 million barrels as part of a contribution to the International Energy Agency’s effort to stabilize oil prices, the Energy Department said.

The administration has also lifted restrictions on ships moving fuel between U.S. ports, eased pollution rules regarding ethanol and temporarily waived sanctions on Russian oil. Some states, including Georgia, Utah, Kentucky and Indiana, have moved to suspend or reduce gas taxes in response to rising costs, as have countries such as Canada, Australia and India, according to the IEA.

Ultimately, a great deal hinges on whether or when fuel and commodities resume flowing through the Persian Gulf. If they do, the inflation arithmetic gets easier in a hurry because officials don’t have to worry about second-round effects of higher energy prices and product shortages.
I’m curious to see whether the price cuts will be approved by Congress, or if conservatives of progressive Democrats will balk at the $18 billion a five-month suspension will cost the government (that money goes for highway and transportation improvements). Voting against a temporary reduction won’t help a party in this fall’s elections.

*Reader Norm linked to this tweet in a comment, and calls it “a good analysis that goes against much of the tide about the war. It’s really a long tweet by military expert John Spencer, and worth reading: “Who has the upper hand in Iran?” Some excerpts

One of the strangest habits in modern war analysis is how quickly survival gets confused with victory. Iran has not collapsed overnight. The regime still broadcasts threats, launches missiles and drones, and floods television and social media with declarations of imagined strength. From that surface-level reality, a growing chorus of commentators has rushed to claim that Iran has embarrassed the United States, exposed Israeli weakness, and seized control of escalation through its ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz. Much of that analysis mistakes continued existence for strategic success and ignores nearly every measurable indicator of national power.

Wars are not scored like debates on cable television. They are judged through military capability, economic endurance, political cohesion, freedom of action, strategic leverage, and the ability to sustain power while degrading an opponent’s. By those standards, Iran is substantially weaker today than it was before the war began. The United States and Israel still hold the upper hand because the foundations of Iranian power have been systematically reduced in ways that will take years to rebuild, if they can be rebuilt at all.

The scale of military destruction alone is extraordinary. Much of the senior leadership structure that spent decades constructing Iran’s regional military network is dead. Senior IRGC commanders, missile force leaders, intelligence officials, nuclear scientists, operational planners, and even the Supreme Leader himself have been eliminated. Mohammad Bagheri, Hossein Salami, and other senior figures who represented the institutional backbone of Iran’s military strategy are gone. Entire command relationships were shattered during the opening phases of the war, leaving surviving leaders scrambling to maintain continuity while under constant pressure.

The damage extends far beyond personnel losses. Nuclear facilities that represented decades of investment and strategic ambition now sit buried under rubble after sustained strikes on enrichment sites, underground complexes, centrifuge production facilities, research centers, and supporting infrastructure. Analysts continue to speak as though Iran can simply restart enrichment at industrial scale in a matter of months. That misunderstands what was destroyed. Advanced centrifuge production depends on precision manufacturing, specialized tooling, secure facilities, trained personnel, supply chains, and protected infrastructure. Large portions of that ecosystem no longer exist.

Spencer goes on to sum up the damage Iran has suffered, and then concludes this way:

. . . Many analysts want to simplify a deeply complex war into slogans. Iran is winning. America is losing. Trump is trapped. Those narratives often avoid confronting the measurable destruction Iran has suffered, the years required to rebuild its military-industrial base, and the strategic value of preventing a terrorist regime from reaching a no-turning-back threshold in nuclear weapons capability and missile production. They also dismiss the importance of preserving freedom of navigation, protecting regional partners, and degrading a state that spent decades funding terrorism and destabilizing the Middle East.

No one can predict the future with certainty. No analyst possesses a crystal ball capable of forecasting whether the Islamic regime can survive the long-term political and economic consequences of this war. But based on every serious measure of national power, Iran is weaker today than before the conflict began. Its military has been shattered across multiple domains. Its economy is under severe strain. Its proxies are degraded. Its deterrence credibility has suffered. Its strategic ambitions have been rolled back. The United States and its partners still hold the upper hand because the foundations of Iranian power have been systematically reduced, and rebuilding them may take far longer than many observers are willing to admit.

Yes, but when they rebuild they can still make nuclear weapons, export terror, and oppress the Iranian people.  Is that what we call a “win”?

*In the NYT’s morning newsletter, not on the paper’s website, Sam Sifton discusses the issue who owns the Strait of Hormuz.  The narrowest point of the strait is 24 mi (39 km) with Iran on one side and Oman on the other.

Scholars have argued for centuries that no state can lay claim to the high seas, the ocean common. One jurist from the Dutch Golden Age came up with a term for it: mare liberum, or free sea.

Which is fine out in the middle of an ocean. It gets a little more complicated closer to shore, and particularly with choke points like the Strait of Hormuz. For decades, the United States has argued that it has a right to freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, in contrast, has said that it can regulate traffic there.

By what right? Can a nation declare the waters off its coastline as its own? How far out do those waters extend?

I picked up some light reading: “Legal Vortex in the Strait of Hormuz,” a 2014 paper by James Kraska, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. It could have been written much more recently — like, in February. We spoke yesterday. Kraska has seen this conflict coming for more than a decade.

What’s going on in the strait is fundamentally a legal dispute, he told me. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a kind of international constitution for the oceans, governs passage there. Neither Washington nor Tehran has ratified it, but it reflects “customary international law,” which means it is still supposed to be binding, Kraska told me.

In other words, Iran can claim that its territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from its shoreline, which is permitted by the treaty, but only if it recognizes the right of free navigation through those waters. (Free navigation, Kraska noted. Charging a toll, as Iran hopes to do, would break the law.)

Kraska told me about a similar conflict between Britain and Albania in the late 1940s, over the channel between Greece and the island of Corfu. In an effort to control that strait, Albania fired on Royal Navy warships. Mines in the strait killed dozens of sailors. It didn’t lead to war. The case became the first one adjudicated by the International Court of Justice. It ruled that Britain enjoyed the right to sail through and that Albania had a duty to keep the strait clear of mines.

Albania, a less powerful nation than Iran, complied. The precedent may end there.

It looks like what Iran is claiming is illegal, at least according to the UN’s dicta.  But don’t expect Iran to obey that law.

*Many universities have land acknowledgements, but few do anything more than say they exist on stolen land. But a few have gone further, trying to give reparations to the Native Americans whom they say they displaced (sometimes, though, they didn’t “displace” anyone).  Harvard was one of those that tried, but it turned into a mess, as described in the new FP article, “How Harvard’s reparation plan flopped.”

[In 2019] Harvard University took up the cause when Harvard president Lawrence Bacow convened a faculty committee to excavate the university’s historical involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.

The committee, chaired by Harvard Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, ultimately produced a 134-page report confirming the ugly truth that Harvard, like many institutions in the North, was run by slaveowners—among them four university presidents—and that its professors had advanced so-called race science, including eugenics, to justify the trade.

The report, issued in 2022, called on the school to “take responsibility for its past” and “leverage its strengths in the pursuit of meaningful repair.”

The university then established what it called the “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” which aimed to “remedy harms to descendants, to our community and the nation, and to campus life and learning.” It committed an extraordinary $100 million to the initiative and promoted Sara Bleich, a professor of public health policy, to vice provost for special projects to shepherd the effort.

What followed was a cascade of institutional embarrassments: high-profile resignations, the dismissal of an entire research team, a string of HR complaints, and a rebuke from Antigua’s ambassador to the United States. And so far at least, its signature effort—to find descendants of people Harvard had enslaved and then do something for them, presumably financially—has failed miserably.

Harvard, of course, was hardly unique among universities in launching an ambitious racial justice project in the late 2010s and early 2020s. But in its scope and cost, its undertaking surpassed anything adopted by its Ivy League peers. The nine-figure initiative was billed as “unprecedented.”

And so was its failure. In retrospect, that should hardly have been a surprise. Like other battle cries that emerged in the past decade—Black Lives Matter or Defund the Police, for instance—the idea of reparations, whatever its merits, struggled to offer a defined, achievable outcome. And even Harvard, with its $57 billion endowment, couldn’t square that contradiction.

Not everything that came out of the Harvard initiative was a failure. The 2022 report put forth seven recommendations. The more straightforward ones included forging partnerships with historically black colleges and universities (HCBUs), and developing educational opportunities for marginalized youth. In early 2024, it established the Du Bois Scholars Program, which offers summer research internships at Harvard to students from select HBCUs, and it has funded job readiness programs for unemployed adults in Cambridge and Boston.

Beyond that, positive results were hard to come by.

The problem is that for Harvard there could be 30,000 descendants of slaves held by people associated with the University.

The reckoning that Harvard once promised has since morphed into something the university may not be able to achieve. If the number of living descendants indeed reaches 30,000, Harvard’s $100 million commitment works out to $3,333 per person before a dollar is spent on the rest of the initiative’s ambitious projects. Should the university seriously fulfill its pledge of “engagement,” which includes “educational support,” the math becomes difficult: At Harvard, for example, a four-year degree costs upward of $380,000.

Harvard is “already hedging” its initiative, and any meaningful reparations are not going to happen. Still, there’s a better case for reparations for slavery than there is for reparations for “occupying Native American land” given that we don’t know the entire history of early American tribes or prehistoric settlers. However, I’ve never heard a convincing argument about why people like me, whose ancestors were in Eastern Europe during slavery and had no connection with the odious institution, should pay for what Americans did from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili likes her dinosaurs bite-sized:

Hili: Dinosaurs adorned themselves with feathers.
Andrzej: But thank goodness, they ended up smaller.

In Polish:

Hili: Dinozaury przystroiły się w piórka.
Ja: Ale na całe szczęście zmalały.

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

From Funny and Strange Signs:

From The Dodo Pet; a Limulus costume:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

Masih highlights an Iranian protestor who lost both eyes when the authorities shot her in the face. The video is six minutes long with English subtitles. If you can’t see the tweet below (for some reason it’s unembeddable), go to the site and video here.

From Luana (who got her Ph.D. at Cornell); a group at the school whose sole purpose seems to be causing disruption to further their ideology:

I found this optical illusion on X. Yes, the lines are straight.

From Emma. To be sure, I don’t mind being reclined on without the recliner asking me:

One from my feed:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was not yet one year old, and would have been 83 had she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T10:35:40.545Z

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb. First, sound up to hear this porcupine:

Up-close with Ozzy chomping on a lemon slice and some yams. Sound on! 🔊📹: Prehensile-tailed porcupine by zookeepers Brooke and Elsa

— Zoo Boise (@zooboise.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T14:26:21.665Z

A “sea angel”: a gorgeous predatory sea slug:

Witness the mesmerizing sea angel (*Clione* sp.), a real-life creature gliding beneath the ice of the White Sea. Captured by Alexander Semenov, this beauty is no illusion.

— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) 2026-05-12T06:11:46.000Z

“These people’s takes are absurd”: Rick Beato versus the NYT’s music critics

May 12, 2026 • 10:45 am

A bit more than a week ago, I posted Rick Beato’s video critique of the NYTs list of the 30 Greatest Living Songwriters that you can find here (archived here).  Many of their choices, like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, were no-brainers, but Beato deemed others, like Bad Bunny, as bizarre. I agree.

Here he’s gotten his hands on some podcast footage of NYT staffers—three critics and the project’s editor—who helped compile the list, and for once he discards his geniality to make fun of these people in a nine-minute video. Beato even mocks the way they talk.  They do indeed come off as pompous and largely ignorant: Beato harps on their lack of formal musical education, though he says it’s not essential to evaluate music. (The participants went to Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Princeton; none has a degree in music.)

John Carmanica, the NYT’s pop music editor, is particularly annoying with his definition of a “songwriter” and his dismissal of Billy Joel as “not a hitmaker.”

As a whole, Beato says the NYT group is “Four Ivy League educated people—you’ve got two from Yale, one from Princeton, and Mr. Harvard there—that are the most pretentious, cork-sniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music: exactly what you’d expect from a New York Times music critic.” He adds, “These people’s takes are absurd. All you need to watch them talk about music. It drove me nuts watching it.”

As for Carmanica’s claim that Billy Joel wasn’t a hitmaker but a person who wrote “one or 1.5 kinds of songs,” have a gander at this list:

Piano Man
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
She’s Always a Woman
Movin’ Out
My Life
Uptown Girls
Just the Way You Are
The Longest Time
Only the Good Die Young (This is my favorite of his; it’s extremely inventive and a good critique of Catholic repression of sexuality. The lyrics are a work of genius.)
New York State of Mind

And others. These run the gamut from hard rock to love ballads to biography, and how can you say his range is limited to one to 1.5 types of song? Cork-sniffing pedants!

And it’s great watching Beato blow off steam.

My favorite:

Book take: “Heretic” by Catherine Nixey: a heterodox view of Christianity

May 12, 2026 • 9:30 am

Most of us probably see Christian doctrine as a monolithic set of ideas that emerged within a few decades of the purported death of Jesus.  “Common wisdom” also maintains that Christianity transformed the world for the better, spreading a message of tolerance and love soon after the Roman emperor Constantine began promoting the new religion early in the fourth century A.D. Both of these views are exposed as myths in Catherine Nixey‘s new book Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God (2024; the book appears to be called Heresy in the UK).

This is Nixey’s second book, following the successful The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, a bestseller that was translated into quite a few languages.  Like Darkening Age, which I haven’t yet read, this one dispels myths about Christianity. Wikipedia describes The Darkening Age‘s thesis this way:

In the book, Nixey argues that early Christians deliberately destroyed classical Greek and Roman cultures and contributed to the loss of classical knowledge

Heretic has had mixed reviews, both glowing ones (e.g., here, here, and here), and critical ones (e.g., here and here). The critical reviews often argue that what Nixey says is well known, so she’s simply reiterating the accepted history of early Christianity while pretending she’s forged a new thesis.  That doesn’t bother me too much, as I was unfamiliar with this history and thought it eye-opening regardless of its novelty.  I found Andrew Copson’s review pretty fair; here’s the ending (Copson is head of Humanists UK):

In a way the strange thing is how novel the premise of the book might seem to its readers. Classicists have always known that the mediterranean world was full of god-men, miracles, and magic so why should it be shocking to read this now? A lot is down to a conspiracy of silence (Nixey calls it a ‘gentleman’s agreement’) between theologians and classicists or ancient historians is real. I once asked one of my ancient history tutors at university what he thought about the historical Jesus and he scoffed. ‘That’s myth – not history’, was his view. You might as well investigate whether Vespasian rose to the heavens as an eagle. But he never said that in print to my knowledge and certainly not in his lectures. Nixey’s book breaks an important taboo in a well-crafted and eminently readable combination of scholarship and polemic.

The book describes the many competing sects of early Christianity, some of which saw Jesus as either a magician or sorcerer (sometimes with a wand!), or a figure of fun, and followed alternative scriptures that were very different from the canonical texts we know today. In some, God is depicted as of uncertain sex (sometimes suckling Jesus), female, or even as more than one figure. Creation stories differ, and accounts about how Jesus’s mother got pregnant vary wildly.

What happened over time, as Nixey argues, is that Christianity coalesced around the present version, discarding other “noncanonical” gospels for various reasons. She argues further that there’s been a tacit agreement among Christians and theologians to downplay or erase these earlier versions, pretending that the current version of Christianity emerged sui generis as a monolith after Jesus’s death.

Now we already know that earlier gospels existed (Elaine Pagels has written at length about them), so perhaps there’s some justice in the criticism that Nixey is reiterating what’s already known. But for those of us who don’t know the history of Christianity (and that includes most Christians!), it’s worthwhile to discover how the diversity of Christian faiths has been pruned away to its present form.

Nixey’s other thesis is that the idea that earlier faiths of the Romans and others repressed the rise of Christianity is misguided and wrong. In fact, she says, it’s the reverse. Nixey gives many examples of how Christians themselves repressed other faiths, including torturing and killing their adherents and burning their books. And some sects of Christianity repressed others. Far from Christianity coming to the fore because of its message of love, it dominated via repression and the sword. I’m not a historian, so insofar as what Nixey says is true, I was edified, even if she reprised what’s already known.

One of the best aspects of Heretic is Nixey’s lively and informal prose, something unusual in books of this type. She’s an engaging writer, and I’ll give two examples. The first is in a discussion about how early Christians opposed the idea of a spherical Earth, claiming that people would have fallen off the part that was upside down (p. 246):

. . . However, the idea that a spherical earth is somehow ‘pagan’, and its opponents Christian, crops up in several other authors, too. The fourth-century Christian author Lactantius—a man whose intellect and education were rated highly enough that he was appointed as tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine—also considered the idea of a spherical earth to be pagan bunk. In a typically zesty passage, after Lacantius has laid into Socrates (‘ many of his actions are not only undeserving of praise, but also most deserving of censure’) and had a good go at Plato (his arguments are ‘impossible’ and ‘unjust’), Lactantius turns his attention to the idea of a spherical world.

And from the Epilogue (p. 279):

This is a story about how ideas are born, and how they die. It is also a story about how they survive. It is about how ancient stories linger, and divine whispers persist. It is about how religions change and change again, as they travel, and age, and spread into other lands, and other ages. It is about how long memory is, and how short. It is about what was, and what might have been. It is also about what is. And it is about why, when midwinter falls, and cribs are set out, an ox and an ass stand and watch over the baby Jesus in the manger. (p. 279).

The breezy prose does not denote a lack of scholarship: the book is heavily documented and footnoted.

I’d recommend Heretic for its combination of history and fine writing. You can find the Amazon site by clicking on the cover below. (The title, by the way, refers to the way that the dominant form of Christianity prevailed by deeming adherent to other faith as heretics.)


Here’s Nixey in 2018. She was the daughter of a monk and a nun:

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 12, 2026 • 8:15 am

Reader Ephraim Heller has sent some lovely photos of humpback whales, including their recently-discovered and amazing behavior of bubble-netting.  His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) spend most of the year dispersed across the open North Pacific, but each spring they converge on Sitka Sound to spawn. The 2026 spawning biomass was estimated at roughly 233,000 tons of mature herring. This attracts commercial fishermen, fishing birds, Steller sea lions, gray whales, humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), and… me.

Here’s a humpback whale jumping for joy:

And here is Sitka Sound, with Mount Edgecumbe (a dormant volcano) in the background:

The scientific name of humpback whales is Megaptera novaeangliae, meaning “big-winged of New England,” due to their oversized pectoral flippers and first observations off of New England. These flippers increase their agility and enable their unique behavior: bubble-net feeding. Here are views of the baleen:

Bubble-net feeding is not a fixed behavioral pattern; it is a culturally transmitted skill, and not every humpback population practices it. The behavior has been documented extensively in Southeast Alaska, and a long-term study published in January 2026 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B tracked its spread in the Kitimat Fjord System of northern British Columbia over a 20-year period (2004–2023). Of 526 individually identified whales, roughly half were observed bubble-net feeding at least once, with more than 92% of those events occurring in a group context:

The behavior gained momentum after the 2014-2016 marine heat wave (“the blob”) that reduced prey availability across the northeastern Pacific. Researchers interpret this as whales adopting a more efficient foraging strategy in response to environmental stress, and transmitting that knowledge through their social networks:

The hunt begins when a group of humpbacks locates a school of small prey — herring, krill, or juvenile salmon. One whale, often referred to as the “bubble-blower,” dives beneath the school and begins exhaling air through its blowhole while swimming in a tightening upward spiral. The released air rises as a cylindrical curtain of bubbles. Fish do not readily cross this curtain, so as the spiral contracts, the school is compressed into an increasingly dense ball:

Meanwhile, one or more other whales in the group produce “food call” vocalizations: loud, frequency-modulated cries that vibrate the swim bladders of herring, causing them to clump even more tightly together. The calls also appear to serve a coordinating function among the whales themselves, signaling when to begin the final ascent. I could occasionally hear the food calls on the deck of my observation boat:

When the prey is sufficiently concentrated, the group orients below the net and lunges upward in near-unison, mouths agape, through the center of the bubble column. At the surface, each whale engulfs thousands of fish in a single pass, then strains the water out through its baleen plates as it rolls and closes its jaws. Groups involved in a single feeding event can range from two to around 16 individuals (according to the literature), each surfacing in roughly the same position relative to the others on every lunge. It’s hard to tell exactly how many bubble-netters are in this photo, but I think it is more than 16:

Quantitative work using drone footage and bio-logging tags has found that solitary humpbacks actively adjust the number of bubble rings, net diameter, and the spacing between individual bubbles from one dive to the next. This level of fine-tuning (“manufacturing” a tool and modifying it based on conditions) contributed to a 2024 study’s argument that bubble nets qualify as tools under standard definitions. On average, a well-constructed net can increase the prey density available in a single lunge by roughly sevenfold, without measurably increasing the whale’s energetic expenditure:

No other baleen whale species does this, and biomechanics research suggests morphology is the reason. A 2025 study comparing turning performance across seven mysticete species found that bubble-net feeding humpbacks achieved centripetal accelerations that exceeded the upper limits recorded in comparable maneuvers by all six other species tested. The humpback’s large pectoral flippers generate substantial lift, which helps the animal bank inward tightly and decrease its turning radius enough to close a spiral into a true net. Other whale species, even if they could theoretically attempt the maneuver, would likely burn too much energy to make the strategy worthwhile:

My next post will include photos of other animals that come to Sitka sound to enjoy the herring feast.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

May 12, 2026 • 6:45 am

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the basic picture:

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

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

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

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

In Polish:

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

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

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

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

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

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

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

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

From my feed; I particularly love this one:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

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

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

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

And buy request of the first commenter below: