MK Moshe Saada (Likud) said on Thursday that "an attack against Iran is approaching," during an interview with Channel 14 News.
Saada's comments were made against the backdrop of growing tensions between the United States and Iran, and assessments that an escalation could occur in the coming days.
The channel quickly presented the remarks under the headline, “MK Moshe Saada’s slip of the tongue.” However, this was not the first time Saada had publicly addressed the possibility of an imminent attack.
Over the past week, he suggested on several occasions that, in his assessment, military action could take place within days. His remarks therefore appeared to be deliberate rather than an accidental disclosure.
At the same time, Channel 13 News reporter Michael Shemesh reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office was furious over Saada’s comments on Channel 14. According to the report, the Prime Minister’s Office viewed the remarks seriously.
That was posted at 2223 today Jerusalem time, which was less than an hour ago.
I have seen similar suggestions on Al Jazeera and on unreliable Facebook pages. To see it being openly discussed in Israeli media is another matter altogether, and very worrying, because Trump has been saying that he will decide soon whether to escalate further because of the involvement of the Houthis. IMO putting "boots on the ground" would be catastrophic.
It wasn't that long ago that Photoshop was the top-of-the-line image-altering program. The new AI technology has left the crude tools of Photoshop in the dust. The image above was posted on Facebook with a request: "Could you fabulous and talented artists put my friend's mom doing activities or things she'd never want her mom to do?" I've embedded below just four of the dozens of clever and skillful images posted on the thread.
Yesterday evening I was looking for some distraction from doomscrolling the internet. While wandering around I found the above movie on Amazon Prime (free with ads). The sparse Wikipedia entry described it as a Scottish documentary portrait of an elderly man who has lived for 40 years "off the grid" in a log cabin in the Highlands. The film has received multiple audience awards at festivals and was the Best Single Documentary at the 2022 British Academy Scotland Awards.
Worth a try I thought. In a bad mood because of the obligatory introductory ads on Prime, I at first became frustrated with the film's slow progression and started to click the fast-forward a few times. But then the story started to fill out with some historical context about the earlier life of this remarkable man wandering the Yukon. Within half an hour I was totally absorbed, and by the end I deemed it to be worth recommending to others.
The film will not be for everyone. If someone is Gen Z with a vibrant social and digital life, the appeal of this man's story will be severely muted or absent. For me there was a very strong resonance since I am older than he is and have always treasured time spent in the woods (but I cringed every time I saw him carrying his firewood over irregular rocky ground without even a proper walking stick). I am pleased to offer a "spoiler" by reporting that he is very much alive and well at the end of the film (and today).
My local library system did not have a DVD of this movie, but I did find that he has written a book (The way of the hermit : my incredible 40 years living in the wilderness, by Ken Smith).
I've been enjoying the cryptic puzzles in Harper's for decades. After you figure out the cleverly-constructed clues, entering the answer often involves another step, as in this case.
I've not embedded the entire puzzle, because blogging ethics standards on TYWKIWDBI are to drive readers to the source, not steal from the source. If any wordsmiths out there would like to tackle this very challenging grid, the full puzzle is available in the August issue of Harper's Magazine, available online or in your local library.
Bloomington nurse and mom Roze Mulen poses with her trinket trade box, where people can swap figurines and toys.
(Roze Mulen/Provided)
The trinket trade is taking root thanks in part to America’s trending obsession with blind boxes. The Asian retail craze drives shoppers to gamble on purchases of collectible toys and figurines. But buyers don’t know which item is in the box until they open it.
Roze Mulen, a nurse and mom in Bloomington, said her office is packed full of trinkets, including duplicates she’s unknowingly bought in blind boxes. After scrolling on TikTok and seeing people across the country start trinket swaps, she decided to bring the idea to the Twin Cities suburbs...
Trinket trade boxes have lately been popping up across the Twin Cities and in the suburbs especially, as parents and artists like Ross aim to add more whimsy to their residential streets and subdivisions sometimes known for their sameness.
“I wanted to build an interactive community-wide art piece where everyone gets to feel that childhood magic,” Ross said. “It’s not just about trading items. It’s about trading moments of joy.”
Buying boxes of unknown products on the internet seems to me a chancy proposition, but moments of joy are in short supply these days, so if this variant of the Little Free Library does bring joy to others, good for them. More info at the Star Tribune.
I found the "recent work" that Jonathan Ferro is referring to in his introduction to Jeffrey Currie. Couldn't find a text version to summarize, but here's a longwatch video interview that has extensive details about the matters being discussed:
The essence of the interview is a question about why the price of oil (as reflected by Brent crude and WTI (West Texas Intermediate) has remained (relatively) stable despite the ongoing conflict in the Gulf. Those prices went way up when the "hot war" started, then moderated back down when the "memorandum of understanding" was executed, and now they are heading back up in a gradual fashion.
I have not previously been aware of Jeffrey Currie, but his reply (starting at the 1:15 mark of the second video) is exactly what I've been thinking - so I assume he is a brilliant genius. His Wikipedia page indicates that he is a highly-respected economist at the University of Chicago. Listen to as much of that interview as you have time for. I heard the same arguments presented live to Jonathan Ferro this morning on Bloomber's Surveillance program in the pre-market and I was blown away by the insights.
For the TLDR and TLDW crowd, I'll add some more nuggets. First the definition of "crack spread":
Crack spread is a term used on the oil industry and futures trading for the differential between the price of crude oil and petroleum products extracted from it. The spread approximates the profit margin that an oil refinery can expect to make by "cracking" the long-chain hydrocarbons of crude oil into useful shorter-chain petroleum products.
And before I move on, one note. Any juvenile salacious comments about "crack spread" will be instantly vaporized on review. The comment section here is for serious discussions of the world economy.
Here is an inadequate quick summary for those without the patience to watch the videos. The news media and the general public focus on the "price of oil," but nobody actually uses crude oil. People use gasoline, farmers and truckers and businesses use diesel, everyone uses plastic - but those are all products, not creude material. The only entities that use crude oil are refiners, who are now working at maximum capacity and unable to ramp up further production. The demand for these end products persists [unless demand destruction occurs - a separate issue], so right now the price for the products is huge. His rough example is that while Brent oil is USD70/bbl, the price for the products averages USD140/bbl - that "crack spread" is the highest he has seen in 30 years. Meanwhile, Ukraine has been hammering Russian oil reserves and Russia's refining capacity and the earthquake in Venezuela took out part of their refining capacity. Crude oil prices dropped when the "memorandum of understanding" was signed because a flood of tankers left the Strait of Hormuz, but without a continuing flow the price is edging back up and there is currently no reason for that to change. When this conflict started, the U.S. and other countries started to harvest their strategic petroleum reserves, which are now getting low (some other countries have exhausted theirs or have never had petroleum reserves in storage). If the U.S. continues to empty its strategic petroleum reserve to cover up the shortages of crude exiting the gulf, the potential scenario is catastrophic.
The long video also includes some discussion about how China (allied with Iran) also has control of much of the worlds critical metals, plus they are leading the world in energy storage (batteries) and in wind and nuclear technologies. IMHO the future belongs to China, which staffs their administration with scientists.
Addendum: Markets are now opening in Asia...
Addendum: A nice chart of transits through the Strait of Hormuz, showing the initial "hot war," the MOU period, and the resurgence of hostilities. I'll see if I can find an updated chart of strategic petroleum reserves.
My father's career was as a traveling salesman, driving five states selling electrical equipment to local utilities. So when our family went on vacation, it was by car, not by plane. We drove from Minnesota to visit family in Pennsylvania or Florida or Nevada, and on those seemingly endless days on the highway (most of them in the pre-interstate highway era) we played games, including the "alphabet game" which required one to find the letters of the alphabet consecutively on signs, license plates, etc. Those with similar memories will appreciate this modern billboard posted by the Sign Appreciation Society on Facebook.
At some future time I want to write a post about Burma Shave signs.
Do you ever get the sense that many of the so-called mainstream pop stars whose images you unwittingly encounter dozens of times a day aren’t as “mainstream” or “popular” as you’re told they are? Do you give one eighth of a fuck about Dua Lipa, Zara Larsson, Childish Gambino, Bebe Rexha, or Shawn Mendes? Does your mother? Your little cousin? Your boss? The person delivering your mail? Your barista? Have you (or has anyone close to you) ever spent real money on anything these artists are selling? Do you, or anyone around you, follow them with any interest in what they make or do?...
And Spelman said: “In the past, a label and management team would do a great job getting their artist on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J, post it, and then kind of wait, and the comments would come in: terrible cover choice, voice sounds terrible, all that. What we do at Chaotic Good with our management clients is this: the second the SNL performance drops at midnight, you should post one hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year. The question is how you do that at scale. It takes a lot of work and infrastructure, but controlling the narrative is really, really important.”...
This is precisely how contemporary digital-music marketing operates, less as targeted exposure or coercion and more as the quiet reconstruction of the conditions under which discovery appears to occur. Not by introducing music to listeners but by staging the conditions in which it feels as though it arrived on its own.
More details in the "Getting Shilled" article in the June issue of Harper's Magazine.
I watched this DVD from our library last night and thoroughly enjoyed it (rated it 3.5 on my 0-4 scale, which means "good enough to recommend" but not "worth watching again", which requires a 4.0).
From the trailer it should be evident that the storyline presents over-the-top craziness involving a future dystopic apocalypse - which is oddly enough a pleasant relief from scanning the internet for info re politics and the Gulf war. I was going to call it a "screwball comedy" but that term I will reserve for Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell et al in Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday et al.
The premise here is that the protagonist is in a Groundhog Day loop trying to prevent a worldwide catastrophe triggered by social media and cellphones. If you can roll with that, you can enjoy the movie. Sam Rockwell is joined by Juno Temple (Ted Lasso, Fargo fifth season) and the perhaps underappreciated Haley Lu Richardson (superb in Columbus).
Percentage of Americans who were paid to babysit as teenagers: 56
Who say they would trust a teenager to babysit today: 11
Numbers from the June issue of Harper's magazine. As phrased it's not clear to me whether the 11% is of Americans or of Americans who babysat as teenagers. In either case the discrepancy is striking.
Addendum: interesting comment by an anonymous reader: "Slight twist on the same idea: I don't trust adults not to sue me if my teen makes a mistake while babysitting.'
A radar tower stands alone in northeast Oklahoma City, surrounded by a green field. It is one hundred feet tall and topped with a smooth, white orb. Hidden inside the orb, an antenna rotates while pulsing electromagnetic waves into the distance, waiting for a faint bounce to arrive back in the dish. It is not quite an all-seeing eye. The tower can identify hail, rain drops, a cloud of cicadas, the spiraling debris in tornadic winds from more than one hundred miles away.
[On July 6, 2025] At 9:35 pm, a bearded man approached the radar tower and began to climb the chain-link fence around it. As he reached the top bar, the bearded man paused to rock back and forth and lean his head back, yelling into the night sky some unheard complaint. He gazed around and the lens of a security camera caught his face, retinas glowing back in the dark.
On the other side of the fence, he got to work. With a hammer, he snapped open the latch guarding the radar’s million-watt power supply. There were control panels, switches, meters. He destroyed them all. Content that the tower had been disabled, he walked around the facility systematically destroying each security camera. It is unclear whether he understood that destroying cameras would not destroy the images they had captured of him. On a bicycle, he disappeared back into the night...
The following day, Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, who is the leader of a militia named Veterans on Patrol, contacted media outlets and the Oklahoma City Police Department to take credit for the incident. He claimed that [Anthony Tyler] Mitchell was one of his followers, taking the direct action that Meyer had been threatening for months. The group believes that the latest generation of weather radar towers are “directed energy weapons” that the military have “pointed at the American people.” Meyer claimed that Veterans on Patrol would not stop at disabling one radar tower, that they had plans for taking down at least a dozen more.
In his statements to reporters at the time, Meyer insisted that his crusade was a divine one. The weather was being modified, there were powers out there that could control it, and this was against God.
“When the military plays God with the weather, they’re mocking our Heavenly Father,” he said.
The story about the "battle over weather modification" continues in the June issue of Harper's Magazine.
I've had this pair of stamps in my collection for decades, labeled "ventilator" cancels, which I assumed without research was a form of "disinfected mail."
Today when I checked for more information, I discovered that these "ventilations" were not designed to prevent the spread of contagious diseases, but rather to prevent the reuse of the stamps. Here is some relevant information from the Swedish Postal Museum:
"The "ventilator" cancel (ventilatorstämpel) featured a specialized postmark wheel with built-in, fan-like rotating blades. When the postal clerk pressed the device onto a letter, the wheel spun and physically cut or punctured small, geometric slits directly into the paper fibers of the stamp. If anyone tried to steam or peel the stamp off the envelope to reuse it, the stamp would tear apart along those slits. Because the security incisions resembled the radial slats of an air vent or ventilation fan, philatelists nicknamed it the "ventilator" cancel. Similar mechanical safety trials from that era included the bikupestämpel ("beehive" cancel) and the sågtandsstämpel ("saw-tooth" cancel)."
I have some beehive cancels I can post in the future. Sawtooth ones are apparently exceedingly rare, presumably because they were used only for a short period of time and because anyone trying to remove the stamp to put it in a collection would have wound up with a severely damaged stamp. The green 5o stamp on the right has a small triangular defect best seen when viewed with my digital microscope:
