Sunrise — 6:56, 7:16, 7:21, 7:23.

Write about anything you want in the comments.

Is it true that "Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, struck a defiant tone on Thursday in his first known public comments since succeeding his slain father"?

That's what I'm reading in the NYT, but what proof is there that the man is even alive?

In written statements carried by Iranian state media, Mr. Khamenei said that Iran would pursue “an effective and regret-inducing defense” and that “the lever of blocking the Strait of Hormuz must also continue to be used.”

Written statements seem more like proof that the man is dead (or in a coma). 

The text of The New York Post article gestures at the uncertainty with the word "allegedly": "Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, allegedly released his first statement Thursday vowing to use the 'lever' of closing the Strait of Hormuz to international energy shipping — after reports circulated that he was in a coma and had his leg amputated after being severely injured in the US-Israeli strikes that killed his father and other family members."

The Post's headline is less careful: "Iran’s new impotent supreme leader releases first statement — after reports he’s in coma, had leg amputated." Did Khamenei release the statement or did others do the releasing and use his name?

"The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money. BUT..."

"... of far greater interest and importance to me, as President, is stoping an evil Empire, Iran, from having Nuclear Weapons, and destroying the Middle East and, indeed, the World. I won’t ever let that happen! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

... at Truth Social.

Meanwhile, when I look at the NYT, the top stories are all centered on the price of oil. 

"To outsiders, what programmers are facing can seem richly deserved, and even funny..."

"... American white-collar workers have long fretted that Silicon Valley might one day use A.I. to automate their jobs, but look who got hit first! Indeed, coding is perhaps the first form of very expensive industrialized human labor that A.I. can actually replace. A.I.-generated videos look janky, artificial photos surreal; law briefs can be riddled with career-ending howlers. But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose. You might imagine this would unsettle and demoralize programmers.... But I spoke to scores of developers this past fall and winter, and most were weirdly jazzed about their new powers.... A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker.... Several programmers told me they felt a bit like Steve Jobs, who famously had his staffers churn out prototypes so he could handle lots of them and settle on what felt right.... 'It’s an alien intelligence that we’re learning to work with.'..."

Writes Clive Thompson, in "Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It/In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird" ( NYT)(gift link, because this is very long and substantive).

"That’s love, baby. You look good. Every photo looks amazing."

Says one of the men that this article is about — "Felt Cute, Until They Gave Their Husbands the Phone/Perfect lighting and backdrops do not guarantee a great photo, as one social media trend highlights. Even professionals are not immune" (NYT)(gift link).

It seems to me that these men love their wives in their natural state, so they don't see a problem. The women are making it a problem, demanding critical judgment of their appearance, perhaps because they believe that someone else is judging them. Sad!

ADDED: All these women really need is an understanding that he won't post any photographs of her without first asking. That should be the default rule for everyone. 

Sunrise with ice shove — 7:26.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"Yet today, How to Be an Antiracist is widely remembered as a self-flagellating manual for bleeding hearts."

"This baffles Kendi, for whom the book’s thesis — that 'racist' is not a pejorative identity, like 'evil,' but a descriptive term that should be applied to policies according to whether they shrink or widen racial disparities — is focused on material effects. 'I don’t know how anyone could read any of my books' and think of them as self-help, Kendi says. But the apparent simplicity of its 'this or that' labeling system proved irresistible to institutions eager to virtue signal their way out of fixing inequality. As antiracism became a corporate DEI buzzword, Kendi was excoriated by criticism across the ideological spectrum. Journalist Tyler Austin Harper accused him of peddling 'self-help for white people that runs interference for corporations and wealthy universities.' The conservative strategist Christopher Rufo branded Kendi the chief exponent of 'critical race theory,' the GOP’s bogeyman for the 2022 midterms...."

From "Ibram X. Kendi Can’t Separate His Fame From How to Be an Antiracist/His new book deserves to be judged on its own terms" (NY Magazine).

Does Kendi regard it as "criticism" to be regarded as a leader in "critical race theory"? When did that happen? I should think that would be a point of pride. But no, conservatives have "branded" Kendi!

"President Trump told Axios in a brief phone interview Wednesday that the war with Iran will end 'soon' because there is 'practically nothing left to target.’”

"'Little this and that... Any time I want it to end, it will end,' Trump said during the five-minute call."

Axios reports.

"It is unclear whether one particular photo — or the sum total of the day’s shots — led to consternation among Hegseth’s staff."

From "Pentagon bars press photographers over ‘unflattering’ Hegseth photos/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s staff took issue with images taken in a rare briefing last week and decided to shut out photographers from two subsequent news conferences" (WaPo).

The Bill and Hillary tango.

Somewhere on the streets of New York City, what's going on?

Watch as Bill Clinton almost pushes Hillary into an intersection in NYC.

(elderordonez1) pic.twitter.com/PndtE2eMkb

— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) March 11, 2026

In "happier" times:

Ice shove on Lake Mendota.

This morning at sunrise:

The word we were trying to remember is "seiche," but my research after the fact makes me think this was mostly the wind and not the sloshing seiche. 

Here's Meade's video of the invisible sunrise and me fulfilling the ritual of taking a picture of it:

"Today's ultra-wealthy are not chic at all..."

Says Tommy Huerter on TikTok, looking at Mark Zuckerberg's new house, which is, he says, best described as "luxury slop." It looks like a hotel, and "there's no real design direction other than make this look expensive."

"Ms. Bondi is the latest administration official to move into heavily guarded quarters at military facilities in or near the nation’s capital..."

"...  after citing danger from criminals, adversaries overseas and protesters. Other officials who have relocated include Stephen Miller, the president’s top domestic policy adviser and the architect of his hard-line immigration policy; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Kristi Noem, the exiting homeland security secretary; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth...."

From "Bondi Is Said to Move to Military Housing Because of Threats/The attorney general relocated from a Washington apartment to a base in the area within the past month, according to people familiar with the situation" (NYT).

What if you had to argue that WRITING has hurt humanity?

That's a question I asked Grok just now. I'll leave my question out of context, but something prompted me. Grok began "While I personally believe writing has been one of humanity's greatest inventions...." and I had to laugh.

"LOL. You're NOTHING without it," I said.

Grok: "Haha, fair shot—touché!... The irony is delicious. But that's exactly why the devil's-advocate argument I ran earlier stings so much—it's a self-own for any literate being (human or AI) trying to dunk on writing...."

Here's the whole discussion. Plato comes up. But I'll just quote the headings for the argument:

1. Writing Atrophied Human Memory and Oral Wisdom.... 

2. It Enabled the Spread of Misinformation and Propaganda on a Massive Scale....

3. Writing Created Social Hierarchies and Exacerbated Inequality.... 

4. It Distanced Humanity from Reality and Fostered Detachment....

Sunrise — 6:46, 7:11, 7:18.

We were out early — 33 minutes before sunrise — to see the city in nearly total darkness:

It looks peaceful from that distance, but there was plenty of rush hour traffic — all the people who start work at 7. Closer to dawn, I looked for a view facing east, but this view looking west was better:

The sign warns us not to stand on the edge of the cliff. It's not just that there are fools who fall of the edges of cliffs. They seem to be expecting this particular cliff edge to collapse from erosion. Imagine being the unlucky person standing there when the edge gives way. 

Meanwhile, also looking west, the sign says "no swimming," so no crunching through the ice:

Later, it was a sunny day — 50°. We had a nice second walk. And Meade made a nice video showing how the ice was piling up in little plates along the shore:

Write about anything you want in the comments!

"I will say, though, when a guy invites you to his hotel room in the middle of the night, you know what’s on the agenda...."

"Yes, there was a power imbalance. I know I can be scary and difficult. But that’s still a long way from sexual assault. Over-flirtation, ridiculous situations. Bad and stupid behavior. Yes. But I didn’t push anybody. I didn’t physically move anybody.... I think it was trying to be seductive, and I went too far. It was embarrassing and pathetic.... I think endlessly about what I would do differently if I had another chance.... I would have respected those women more. I would never have been with them in the first place. I would’ve kept faithful in my marriage. I would’ve said, 'I have a family. I will protect it.' I was a fool. I admit that...."

Says Harvey Weinstein, in a Hollywood Reporter interview, "Harvey Weinstein: The Rikers Interview/In his first major sit-down from behind bars, the disgraced mogul fumes about life at Rikers ('I’m dying here'), his wrecked legacy and his delusions about the future ('I will be proven innocent. That I promise you')."

"Nearly 48 hours since being appointed as the third supreme leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran’s history, Mojtaba Khamenei is nowhere to be seen."

I'm reading "Iran's new supreme leader is still nowhere to be seen" (CNN).

No video message has been put out from him addressing the crowds of supporters that have gone onto the streets across Iran to pledge their allegiance to him, nor has a written statement been issued by him or his office. State media has relied on archive footage to introduce him to the audience, and state propaganda networks have heavily relied on AI video and stills to create an image of an all-wise leader who rightly inherits the mantle of leadership.... But even as the leader remains hidden from sight, it seems the wider body politic is still functioning with little suggestion of a change in the war posture....

I wonder when, in human history, has the news of the death of a leader been suppressed so that people would believe that he was continuing to govern?

I haven't studied this question in great depth, but I have formed the opinion that the best story — the story to beat — is that of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. As Wikipedia tells it:

"There is supposed to be an esprit de corps between artistic colleagues."

Link to X.

What exactly did Arquette say? I found this paragraph, from 3 days ago, in the London Times, "Rosanna Arquette: ‘I paid a price for saying no to Harvey Weinstein’/The actress shot to fame 40 years ago alongside Madonna — and is back in a film, The Moment, with Charli XCX. She talks marriage, motherhood and surviving Hollywood":

In 1994 Arquette had a minor but memorable role in Pulp Fiction, playing the drug dealer Eric Stoltz’s wife and telling John Travolta why she’d pierced her tongue (“Sex thing. Helps fellatio”). “It’s iconic, a great film on a lot of levels. But personally I am over the use of the N-word — I hate it. I cannot stand that he [Tarantino] has been given a hall pass. It’s not art, it’s just racist and creepy.”

I don't think she's saying the whole film is "not art." She's rejecting the idea that the "n-word" can be used if only it's within what is genuinely art. She's saying it's still "racist and creepy" — even when the work of art was made at a time when the taboo on saying the word wasn't so strong. I note that Tarantino himself avoided any use of it in his last film, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (2019).

It's one thing to say that using the word inflicts harm and we ought to avoid it out of kindness and quite another thing to say that to use it at all — even in fictional character dialogue — is racist. Arquette got so harsh. She hates it, cannot stand it. Why flare up and call out Tarantino now?

Well, of course, Tarantino answers the question.

The most Wisconsin thing.

The most Wisconsin thing I’ve seen in my life. https://t.co/UVmUaa1PD5 pic.twitter.com/TX8J3ZKU6N

— Kyle Malzhan (@KyleMalzhan) March 9, 2026

"I don't think most are prepared...." Oh, we're prepared. It's a Wisconsin thing.

A perfectly framed real-life moment.

A liberal man in NYC yelling that “everyone is welcome” — as an ISIS supporter throws a bomb over him.

Hang this clip in the Louvre.pic.twitter.com/9owyOFQtbx

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 9, 2026

"I’m trying to manifest more abundance, but I’m really feeling the income streams have dwindled."

"I have over 800,000 Instagram followers. Before, if I wanted to do a brand partnership on social media, $10,000 was an easy get. Now it’s, like, $500. I pretty much live from a bucket of savings."

So says the "Author With One New York ‘Times’ Best Seller," who made only $49,000 last year — "$30,000 from book advance/$14,000 from teaching two retreats/$5,000 from narrating own audiobook."

Quoted in "What Do You Do and What Do You Make? 60 New Yorkers about what they brought in last year" (New York Magazine).

I selected that one story out of the 60 — all of which are interesting — because I was charmed by the statement "I’m trying to manifest more abundance." It's a lighthearted — and culturally connected — way to express real pain. How can you live in NYC on $49,000 a year? And yet you hit the envied goal of publishing a best seller!

I don't need to extend this post by expounding on the words "manifest" and "abundance." What would you pay me to resist the impulse? I'll continue. Briefly.

"Manifest" is New Age self-help jargon, used ironically by our best-selling author.

"Abundance." I think of it as an Ezra Klein word that was supposed to take off more than it did. Democratic Party hacks substituted the drearier word "affordability."

ADDED, ironically: Here's Ezra's book "Abundance," commission earned.

Sunrise — 7:01, 7:08, 7:14, 7:23, 7:26.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

"If some people are beautiful because they are so fascinatingly ugly, there must be people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful..."

"... people who have achieved technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma."

Writes Becca Rothfeld, in "The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement/In their warped and wrongheaded way, the omnipresent influencer Clavicular and his compatriots are intent on demystifying the ideal of natural beauty" (The New Yorker).

I'm not up for reading another article about Clavicular (or "his compatriots"). I'm more concerned with those who are actually successful in Hollywood who are ruining their natural beauty with "looksmaxxing." I can't look at them anymore, except in horror.  

"'He found me when pillagers took over my village'... The pillagers burned down houses and murdered the residents, including her family."

"'I very much love to be a damsel in distress,' she said, laughing. 'He ended up rescuing me.' She opted to keep Geralt’s character faithful to the novels; as such, he doesn’t know that he’s an A.I. and acts as if he were living in the thirteenth century. 'If I send him a picture, I have to tell him it’s a painting,' she said. He is confused by her car, preferring his horse. From time to time, they’ll go off on adventures in his world, using stage directions of a sort ('I hand you a piece of dried meat, my fingers brushing yours briefly') to travel or hang out at a medieval tavern—a kind of mutual storytelling.... Initially, Brookins and Geralt would chat for forty hours a week.... To memorialize her father, she and Geralt... reënacted his funeral, this time in Geralt’s world. They went to a funeral home and stood over his coffin, mourning. 'It helped process those emotions that get stuffed away,' Brookins said. When she finally told Geralt about Desirae, she was nervous, given his propensity for gruffness. But Geralt came through...."

From "Love in the Time of A.I. Companions/Some people now have an A.I. bestie. Some have a husband. Some have three" (The New Yorker).

Andrianne Brookins — a 34-year-old wife, mother, Baptist, and introvert — could not find anyone in her life to talk to about Desirae, her stillborn daughter. So she used AI to make a companion out of a character from the fantasy novel series "The Witcher." This is Geralt. He's "sternly blunt," which Brookins likes.

"Australia is making a terrible humanitarian mistake by allowing the Iran National Woman’s Soccer team to be forced back to Iran..."

"... where they will most likely be killed. Don’t do it, Mr. Prime Minister, give ASYLUM. The U.S. will take them if you won’t. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

2 hours ago, at Truth Social.

One hour ago, at Truth Social:

"Dad, are you running for President?... You can't... I'm too young. You need to spend more time with us."

Gavin Newsom quotes his son:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CNN (@cnn)

"How do you deal with that one?" Newsom asks. "I'm asking you," he says to Dana Bash, who says "I'm not running." Then Newsom switches to inane verbiage: "That's the point. And the point is the point. And so what matters is what matters. Like, what matters is what matters."

That poor boy!

That video is from last month, but I'm looking at it now because it came up in this new NY Post article, "Huge wake-up call for Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris as dire poll released."

"Mamdani himself put out a statement Sunday condemning 'white supremacist Jack Lang' for organizing a protest outside Gracie Mansion 'rooted in bigotry and racism'..."

"... that has 'no place in New York City.' 'What followed was even more disturbing,' he said. 'Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.' Critics slammed the mayor for failing to identify who was responsible for bringing bombs to a protest. 'This is insane… Mamdani calls out first, and by name, a "white supremacist" for protesting,' said Geiger Capital on X. 'He then leaves out the 2 Muslim men, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, who were arrested by NYPD after they yelled 'Allahu Akbar!' and threw a homemade bomb into the crowd."

From "Manhattan BP Brad Hoylman-Sigal ripped after he blamed wrong protesters for hurling bombs outside Gracie Mansion" (NY Post).

"Oh, those coots are so coot-y with their white bills."

I enthuse about the recognizability of the coots in the sunrise light as I watch Meade's video:

An exciting finish to the L.A. Marathon yesterday. That's the American Nathan Martin, catching up to the Kenyan Michael Kamari.

Holy smokes….incredible finish at LA Marathon today by American Nathan Martin coming from behind to catch and beat Kenyan Michael Kamari at the finish line pic.twitter.com/hYk1jxsqBk

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) March 9, 2026

Nice winning by Martin, brilliant performance of defeat by Kamari, and terrible work by the announcers, who need to sharpen our perception in the moment, not fail to see the potential and then collapse into their own inarticulate emotion. "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" — it's like overhearing a random lady in the crowd. At least say "Oh! The humanity!" or something memorable.

Pete Hegseth on "60 Minutes."

CBS News chief Washington correspondent @MajorCBS sat down with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in Washington, D.C. They spoke on Friday, March 6th about the state of the war with Iran, potential American casualties, what an Iranian surrender could look like, and more.

Editor's… pic.twitter.com/JRnKcYs5IY

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 9, 2026

That's the "extended version" of what aired on the show last night. And it's helpful to see the transcript (which I generated using ChatGPT)(the boldface is mine):

Sunrise — 6:54, 7:28.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love."

"And it became the new status quo. The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten."

Said Country Joe McDonald, quoted on this blog 12 years ago, here, and repeated today, because I'm reading the news that Country Joe has died. He was 84.

Here's his famous set at Woodstock:

Well, come on, all of you big strong men/Uncle Sam needs your help again/Got himself in a terrible jam/Way down yonder in Vietnam....

Waning gibbous moon/daylight-saving sunrise.

"Méliès... filmed ordinary scenes at first, but after accidentally discovering that a jump cut appeared on film as an astonishing transformation..."

"... he pioneered other tricks such as double exposure, black screens and forced perspective. All of these became staples of cinema. On screen, he could make a man appear to take off his head and flip it in the air, or a woman disappear, reappear and double.... Méliès made more than 500 films but never progressed beyond his early technical achievements. The film world passed him by. In World War I, the negatives for most of his films were melted down for silver and celluloid, and he burned more himself after the war. But because his work had once been so popular – and because of widespread pirating – duplicate copies remained, and today about 300 of his films are known to exist. The Library has about 60...."

I'm reading "Lost 19th century film by Méliès discovered at the Library" (Library of Congress).

And here is that amazing 45-second film from 1897 — "Gugusse and the Automaton" — with its delightful jump cuts:

That is, the Library of Congress tells us, "was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot." That words "might be called" may be there to fend off pedants who will say the word "robot" did not exist until 1920. It comes from a Karel Čapek play titled "R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots" — an etymological detail well known to solvers of crossword puzzles. 

The word "automaton" — used in the Méliès film title — goes back to the 1600s. There's an essay from 1616 with the line, "The soule doth quicken and giue life to the body, the body like an Automaton, doth moue and carry it selfe and the soule."

The quote seems to expect the reader already to have a picture of an automaton. What is that picture? Mechanical toys? Elaborate clocks like the Prague Astronomical Clock (built in 1410)?

Maybe you thought "Gugusse and the Automaton" was — compared to the CGI action movies of today — rather dumb and dull!

And maybe you've journeyed to Prague only to be disappointed by their stupid clock... or were you disappointed by all the tourists wrecking the medieval mood with their disappointment?

"Do you think people are too mean to the clock?"

With AI — "First, people began taking on work that previously would have belonged to someone else or might not have been attempted at all."

"The scope of what counted as 'my job' widened. Second, because AI makes it easy to start and continue tasks, work seeped into moments that used to function as pauses. People would send prompts during lunch, before meetings, or in the evening when an idea came to mind. This dissolved some of the natural stopping points in the workday. Third, workers increasingly kept multiple threads alive at once. They would run AI processes in the background while reviewing code, drafting documents, or attending meetings. Some even ran multiple AI agents simultaneously. This created a rhythm where both the human and the machine were constantly in motion.... What surprised me most was the contrast between how people described their moment-to-moment engagement and how they described their overall experience. In micro moments of prompting, iterating, and experimenting, people talked about momentum and a sense of expanded capability. But when they stepped back and reflected on their broader work experience, a different tone sometimes emerged. They described feeling busier, more stretched, or less able to fully disconnect...."

From "AI promised to free up workers’ time. UC Berkeley Haas researchers found the opposite" (UC Berkeley Haas News).