Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I was sent the article below I mentioned the ubiquitous claim that there’s a religious revival in America, supposedly because people are experiencing a loss of “meaning and purpose.” The return to religion, as the MSM and some liberals like to say, is because filling the “God-shaped hole” in our souls with religion will help set this cockeyed world aright.
But is there a religious revival? I’ve been dubious. All the evidence for it I can see is the slowdown in the continuing rise of religious “nones” (people without formal affiliation to a church) in the last few years. Here’s a graph showing that as documented by the Gallup organization:
That is not a revival but a plateau, like the one we had in the mid-1980s. And that plateau turned again into a rising cliff. Likewise, the Pew organization found that the fall in the proportion of Americans identifying as Christian has also plateaued:
And again, that’s not a burgeoning of Christianity, unless you count a 1% increase from 2024 tio 2024 as a “revival”. There may be a slowdown in proportion of “nones” (as documented below, atheists seem to be holding steady), but this is hardly reason for religious people to cheer—or confect rah-rah articles and books about how religion is back.
The article below from the ARC News, in fact, argues that there is no revival and that any data supporting that scenario is very thin. Click to read. Note that the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is associated with Jordan Peterson, and is designed to give coherence to modern conservativism. That makes the article even more interesting!
Click to read (the author, Maggie Phillips, writes for Tablet):
The article is rather scattershot in both scope and writing, but it does cast a cold eye on “revival” scenarios. I’ll give a few quotes:
The Harvard Catholic Center wrapped up 2025 with huge news: the number of potential converts coming through its doors had doubled from the previous year. According to TheWall Street Journal “Free Expression” newsletter, the HCC is “booming,” dynamic proof that the kids are looking for something to believe in. The WSJ was only the latest to buy into the hype of a new American religious revival. Vanity Fair says twentysomethings are taking communion at a D.C. dive bar. The New York Post reported that in Greenwich Village, the number of adults interested in converting to Catholicism had tripled since last year. Similarly, the National Catholic Register reported that Newman Centers for Catholic college students are packed, signaling a “golden age of campus ministry.” Christian research outfit Barna says reading the Bible is back, with Millennials and Gen Z leading the charge. And that’s not all—Barna also says Gen Z now leads in church attendance. Over at The Free Press, the “Faith” section is explicitly dedicated to covering what it matter-of-factly calls “the new religious revival.”
But it’s hardly clear that this talk of religious “revival,” while nice wish fulfillment for many, is backed up by the evidence. The Harvard Catholic Center revival consists of eighty students. With Harvard’s graduate and undergraduate population of over 24,000, many thousands of whom are Roman Catholic, that’s a pretty capacious definition of “booming.” The tripled number of conversion candidates in Greenwich Village comes to a modest 130. Now, in the grand sweep of history, eighty new Catholics in Cambridge, Mass., is not nothing. And 130 more practicing Catholics, especially converts in first blush of religiosity, will make a difference to the spiritual life of Greenwich Village, or at least certain apartments there. But is something stirring in the hearts of young Americans outside of college campuses and trendy urban enclaves? Are we actually on the threshold of a new Great Awakening? Probably not. As religion demographer Ryan Burge (who teaches at the Danforth Center, which produces Arc) never tires of pointing out, accounts of America’s great religious revival have been greatly exaggerated.
“About 25 percent of Americans report attending a house of worship on a typical weekend,” Burge wrote recently in Deseret News. “If that rose by even three points—a small but noticeable increase—that would mean 10 to 12 million more people in church today than just six months ago. That’s hard to imagine, given that there are only about 350,000 houses of worship nationwide.”
Here’s a tweet from Burge showing only two changes among the four cohorts: those who believe in “some higher power” have increased 8% from Boomers to Gen Z, while in the same period those who believe in God with “no doubts” (the dark yellow bar on the far right) have fallen a full 17%.
Generation Z is the least likely to believe in God without a doubt compared to any previous generation.
Just 40% indicate certain believe. That’s 8 pts lower than Millennials.
The article also notes that we see a plateau, not a rise, in religiosity:
In fairness, numbers showing both Christianity’s steady decline and the exponential growth of the religiously unaffiliated “nones” seem to have slowed, or even halted, for now. But the same religious outlets with optimistic headlines about the great American youth revival seem to have forgotten their previoushandwringing about the rise of the nones. A leveling-off of decline does not a revival make. After all, across the United States, thousands of churches still appear poised for closure.
In the end, the evidence for a revival happening now is inconclusive:
A national religious revival would suit both the religious, worried about decline and its consequences, and the secular, worried about theological mission creep into politics. And in a tale as old as time, a religious revival also suits grifters and opportunists. But unlike the recent Asbury revival, people can’t even agree that one is happening, at least all that much. It’s Schrodinger’s religious revival, at once happening and not. What it means, if it means anything at all, remains to be seen.
It’s paragraphs like the last that I find confusing. Yes, a religious revival would suit the religious and its touters like Ross Douthat, but why would it suit secular people.? If we’re “worried about theological mission creep into politics,” then why would be heartened by even more religious people?
Still, when you hear someone being gleeful about how America is now becoming more religious, simply ask them for their evidence.
**********
I was just sent this article from Utah’s Deseret News that argues the same thing (click to read):
A couple of quotes from author Ryan Burge (again):
. . . . as someone who looks at data on American religion nearly every day, I can say without equivocation that there’s no clear or compelling evidence that younger Americans are more religious than their parents or grandparents. In reality, many casual observers are overinterpreting some short-term shifts in survey data.
The General Social Survey, for instance, reported a steady rise in the “nones” between the early 1990s and 2020. In 2018, the figure was 23%, rising to 28% in 2021. The two most recent estimates are slightly lower — 27% in 2022 and 25% in 2024. Similarly, the “headline finding” from Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey was that both the decline of Christianity and the rise of the unaffiliated have paused in recent years.
But neither of these surveys suggest any real resurgence in American religion, for one simple reason: generational replacement. Every day, older Americans die and are replaced by young adults turning 18. This process unfolds slowly — almost imperceptibly — in the short term, but over five or 10 years, it can produce profound shifts in the overall landscape.
. . .People of faith will rightly say that true revival can’t be predicted or modeled — that it’s a movement of the Holy Spirit, not a statistical trend. And that’s fair. No regression equation can capture the divine.
Still, as Carl Sagan famously said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” As it stands now, there’s nothing extraordinary in the data, however much we might wish it were so.
As I am out of photos, and readers are withholding theirs, I once again steal the lovely photos of Australian Scott Ritchie from Cairns, whose Facebook page is here. Scott’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. .
I went to Melbourne during the middle of January to visit friends. Of course, birds are my feathered friends. This report cover a visit to the WTP, Western Treatment Plant, at Werribee, Victoria. These names pass mythically from the lips of Australian birders. I’ve been there before and really enjoyed it, but this past trip was wild. WTP is a series of quite large, secondary sewage treatment ponds, and lagoons. These abut along the great Southern Ocean and you get this wonderful interaction of freshwater and saltwater wetlands and associated birds. These are used, particularly in our summer, as overwintering sites for migratory shorebirds. But there’s a lot of resident waterfowl and waders there too. The WTP is so valued that you have to have a key to the gate for access to the site. Fortunately, my friend David was a key-carrying twitcher.
The weather was crazy, with 45 KPH winds. One of the first things I discovered was that strong winds can really mess with a telephoto lens. My lens was being buffeted by the gusty, easterly winds to the point where I had to remove the lens hood to stabilise the camera. But a few interesting things happen because of the wind. It was a great opportunity for BIF shots; birds in flight. Birds generally take-off and land into the wind, and because it was so strong, they were moving quite slowly. So I got nice shots of normally very fast birds such as terns and sandpipers as they came into land. Attached are some fun pics.
The next day I did a short walk through Banyule Flats Reserve, an urban Melbourne wetland. The highlight was to see the oh so cute Owlet Nightjar, as well as a family of Tawny Frogmouths. Shout out to Lyn Easton for leading the tour.
A Black Swan Beach. The high winds packed the east facing beach with seagrass. And the Black Swans [Cygnus stratus] made for the buffet:
A beach of Blacks Swans, necks writhing like snakes:
Amazing!
“Ahh, now that feels good.” An Australian Spotted Crake [Porzana fluminea] enjoys the breeze up its bum:
“Bugger off!” But is not happy with the hordes of shore flies:
Whiskered Terns [Chlidonias hybrida] cruised flew slowly against the wind, providing good views for the camera:
. . . and another:
A Black Kite [Milvus migrans] swings down to pick up a dead little bird that have been by a car:
A large flock of Australian shelducks [Tadorna tadornoides] into the WTP. It was great to see large numbers of waterfowl darken the skies:
I had fun shooting small short birds, as they say, coming into land against the wind at adjacent pool. This is a Rednecked Stint [Calidris ruficollis]:
A family of Tawny Frogmouths [Podargus strigoides] greet the day at Banyule Flats Reserve:
But he poses stoically, “You can’t see me!” Frogmouths sit still, imitating dead branches and stumps:
A bit of a loose feather gives him away:‘
An Owlet-Nightjar [Aegotheles sp.] peaks out of his hole hollow. He stared at all the photographers down below. We must’ve started him because then he just disappeared. But we waited and waited:
“Come on, take your pictures!” He suddenly popped up, posing nicely:
Welcome to The Cruelest Day:Tuesday, February 17, 2026, and Pączki Day, celebrating the rich, filled Polish donut traditionally eaten before Lent. Here are a bunch with different fillings in Katowice, Poland (I ate two):
*The great actor Robert Duvall, who loved the smell of napalm in the morning, died yesterday at 95.
Robert Duvall, who drew from a seemingly bottomless reservoir of acting craftsmanship to transform himself into a business-focused Mafia lawyer, a faded country singer, a cynical police detective, a bullying Marine pilot, a surfing-obsessed Vietnam commander, a mysterious Southern recluse and scores of other film, stage and television characters, died on Sunday. He was 95.
His death was announced in a statement by his wife, Luciana Duvall, who said he had died at home. She gave no other details. He had long lived on a sprawling horse farm in The Plains, in Fauquier County, Va., west of Washington.
Mr. Duvall’s singular trait was to immerse himself in roles so deeply that he seemed to almost disappear into them — an ability that was “uncanny, even creepy the first time” it was witnessed, said Bruce Beresford, the Australian who directed him in the 1983 film “Tender Mercies.”
His chameleonlike skill invited comparisons to the incomparable Laurence Olivier; indeed, in 1980, Vincent Canby of The Times flat-out called him “the American Olivier.” A similar sentiment was expressed earlier by Herbert Ross, who directed “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976), in which Mr. Duvall, barely recognizable yet again, played Dr. John Watson to Nicol Williamson’s Sherlock Holmes. (Olivier himself played Holmes’s archnemesis Prof. James Moriarty in the movie.)
Only Mr. Duvall and George C. Scott, Mr. Ross said at the time, “have the range and variety of Laurence Olivier.”
That Mr. Duvall could become practically whomever he chose was foreshadowed in his first film, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a 1962 classic based on Harper Lee’s novel about racial prejudice in a Southern town. He played Boo Radley, the reclusive, hollow-eyed neighbor who fascinates and ultimately rescues the two small children of the defense lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck).
I didn’t know that Duvall polayed Boo Radley! Here’s a short retrospective of his accomplishments (I haven’t seen “Tender Mercies”):
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a charismatic preacher who became the leading voice of Black American aspirations in the years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and was the first African American to gain significant traction as a presidential candidate, died Tuesday. He was 84.
A statement from his family did not provide cause of death. Rev. Jackson had initially been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2015. Years later, he learned he had progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurological disorder that affects movement.
At the height of his influence, Rev. Jackson was widely regarded as the nation’s preeminent civil rights leader, a ubiquitous presence before the television cameras. He showed up at protests and marches across the country to champion civil rights and social justice. And when civil disorder broke out — as it did after King’s assassination in 1968 and, decades later, after the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 — he urged restraint and nonviolence
In the late 1970s, he began to expand his activities beyond the United States. He thrust himself into Middle East peacemaking, prisoner-release efforts and the movement against apartheid in South Africa, and he was regularly seen in the company of presidents and foreign leaders.
When Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) revealed over the weekend that it had suspended all noncritical operations at Nasser Hospital in January after staff reported armed men moving weapons and interrogating patients, it did something no other major medical or humanitarian organization has done since October 7.
It inadvertently validated what Israel has been saying for years.
According to the organization’s statement, armed individuals had been seen in recent months using the hospital compound for military-related activity.
More specifically, MSF stated that its medical teams witnessed suspected movement of weapons, as well as incidents of intimidation and arbitrary arrests of patients by armed terrorists, noting an uptick in such activity since the ceasefire began.
MSF’s acknowledgment is limited and cautious. It does not mention any terrorist organization by name, and includes a call on “all armed groups, as well as Israeli forces, to respect medical facilities.”
However, its significance cannot be understated.
For the first time during the war, a major international organization has publicly recognized the presence of armed groups operating within a Gaza hospital.
For years, the IDF has maintained that Hamas systematically embedded itself in and beneath civilian infrastructure, including medical facilities. Hospitals across Gaza, including Nasser Hospital, were exploited by Hamas terrorists and used as command centers, weapons storage, and an operational human shield against Israeli strikes, the army has repeatedly said.Some hospitals even served as links in Hamas’s vast tunnel network, which the group poured millions into building, while Gaza’s civilians were left to fend for themselves above ground.
These claims were often dismissed or downplayed by international NGOs and UN agencies, many of which accused Israel of exaggeration or fabrication to justify military action. Now, MSF’s own words echo the IDF’s continued warnings about Hamas’s militarization and exploitation of Gaza’s hospitals.
The reason that MSF systematically ignored all the evidence, including video evidence, that terrorist organizations operated in and under hospitals is, of course, because the organization hates Israel. It is shameful that only now, several years after the war began, does it mention what everybody with a brain knew several years ago.
*I’m no fan of AOC, and the recent talk that she should run for President (or VP) makes my stomach ache According to an op ed by Jim Geraghty in the WaPo, when asked a simple question about the U.S. defending Taiwan against China, AOC emitted a word salad that would do justice to Kamala Harris.(article archived here).
Lest anyone think I am taking the words of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) out of context, here is, verbatim, her answer to a question during an appearance at the Munich Security Conference last week. I have removed the “uh”s and “um”s because even the best of us can utter those when speaking off the cuff. Asked, “Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?,” Ocasio-Cortez replied:
“You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is, of course, a very long-standing policy of the United States. And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.”
This was a yes-or-no question, and Ocasio-Cortez did not answer it. There’s been a lot of speculation about the congresswoman running for president in 2028. The question of what the United States should do if China invades Taiwan is probably one of the biggest and most consequential problems facing the next president — assuming, of course, that China doesn’t invade before Donald Trump’s second term ends. If Ocasio-Cortez has put any thought into this foreign policy challenge, she hid it well in Munich.
For starters, it was a little surprising that the congresswoman asserts that committing U.S. troops to defend Taiwan is a “very long-standing policy of the United States,” because it isn’t.
The author goes on to explain why we should have a formal commitment to Taiwan, but don’t yet, although there are hints.
One reason AOC may believe that the U.S. has “a long-standing” commitment to defend Taiwan is because Joe Biden, at least four times during his presidency, said the U.S. would do this. For example, on August 2021, Biden said, “We made a sacred commitment to Article V that if in fact anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with Taiwan.”
. . .Deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan must be a top five U.S. geopolitical priority, and some might put it at the top of the list. The consequences of an invasion would be catastrophic — a massive loss of life; destruction of Taiwan’s best-in-the-world semiconductor production; disruption of Pacific Rim trade with the potential to do serious and lasting damage to the global economy.
Anyone who wants to be the U.S. president needs to have a well thought-out plan to preserve the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. The question will come up again. If AOC wants to be taken seriously as a candidate, she needs a serious answer.
AOC is not good with questions. I consider her savvy, in that she knows how to push her progressive agenda, but also see her as a disaster for Democrats, for in today’s political climate she would be unelectable. And I think we need to formalize and firm up our commitment to Taiwan, for, believe me, if China invades Taiwan, as it keeps hinting, it won’t be a Ukraine/USSR situation. The island democracy will instantly—and with much Taiwanese blood spilled—be converted into a part of the DPRC’s autocracy. Here’s a video from an MSC townhall. I swear, she sounds just like Kamala Harris.
*The Dispatch joins the ranks of gleeful believers and believers-in-belief in an article by Nick Pompella: “Why New Atheism Crumbled” (article archived here; h/t Reese) It’s the same stuff as usual: ground that has been gone over dozens of times:
America’s oft-discussed “decline in religion” is actually a story about a decline in church attendance; one’s investment in an institutional religious community is separate from belief in a god (or gods) of any variety. The unchurched “nones,” named so because they respond “nothing in particular” when asked about their beliefs by survey organizations, are a fast-growing group, to be sure. But a solid majority of nones still believe in a “higher power”—not often the biblical God, but in some spiritual concept like it. Even 23 percent of declared atheists proclaim belief in some kind of spiritual force, interestingly enough.
The ranks of the truly irreligious, then, appear to have flatlined. And that might come as a surprise to those of us who followed New Atheism, an explosive social trend in the 2000s and early 2010s that was defined by its most popular intellectuals, known as its Four Horsemen: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. At the time, it seemed like New Atheism would never stop growing. So where did all that momentum go, and will the atheist faction in the U.S. ever make a comeback?
Yes, the God- (or spiritual-)shaped hole is the reason. Atheism doesn’t give us satisfaction because it doesn’t give us purpose and meaning:
But if the statistics tell us anything, it’s that this phenomenon has evaporated. People aren’t on the whole very enthusiastic about going to church, but most Americans still believe in some kind of god, and we have not been mass-unbaptized as New Atheists. Davis thinks the reason why is clear: New Atheism’s scorched-earth policy taught people to burn, but not build.
“I think a lot of people experimented with that life going into adulthood,” Davis told me. “I think it left a lot of [them] isolated, feeling confused about why, perhaps, their career wasn’t filling up their soul. So I think it ran out of steam as we experimented with it as a culture.”
New Atheism struggled to even see this missing sense of spiritual purpose as a problem. Most of the New Atheist intellectuals (with one notable exception—more on that in a moment) didn’t take religious and spiritual experiences seriously, leaving the door open for religion to come back into public life once the movement ebbed.
. . . . One consequence of (not necessarily Christian) resurgent spiritual practices often filling in the power vacuum left by New Atheism is that vocal atheists are noticeably more accommodating to spirituality. To his credit, Sam Harris has always made this concession. In the first 10 minutes of the influential “Four Horsemen” DVD, which put the men at the vanguard of New Atheism in the same room in the late 2000s, Harris is the first person to raise the fact of spiritual and mystical experience, and defends the proposition that something out of the ordinary is really happening to the people who have them. His own spiritual practices in various strains of Buddhist meditation have even become a core component of his personal brand, and he is not eager to talk up the influence of New Atheism, referring to it in many places as simply a “publishing phenomenon” that has come and gone. Even Dawkins, maybe the most openly hostile of the four, recently said that he is a “cultural Christian” who can appreciate the religion’s place in British life.
America today, then, seems rife with opportunities for God to seep in. Davis has even suggested that we may have the “Four Horsemen of New Theism” rising up with the likes of Ross Douthat, David Bentley Hart, Rod Dreher, and Paul Kingsnorth all writing to large audiences about religion as the cornerstone of society. Douthat’s book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious hit the top 10 on the New York Times’ bestseller nonfiction list around this time last year. Kingsnorth’s latest book, Against the Machine, later hit No. 11 on the same list, and Kingsnorth recently wrote that it is getting reprinted and translated in new regions. The book is pitched as “the spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age.” Outside of these four, a book entitled Why I Am Not an Atheist: Confessions of a Skeptical Believer—by former Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Beha—will come out on Tuesday. The publisher is Penguin Random House, which means that a book making the case against atheism will be in every major bookseller in the country.
Oh, and I’m in there, too, in a somewhat snarky comment:
A steadystreamof “Hitchslaps” (i.e. videos of Christopher Hitchens supposedly humiliating interlocutors) on early YouTube, combined with a publishing craze that extended beyond the Four Horsemen and gave pop book careers to the likes of Jerry Coyne and Lawrence Krauss, did seem to successfully convert some untold number of young people—at least for a time. Dawkins’ The God Delusion was Amazon’s No. 5 bestseller in November 2006, and a representative from a U.K. bookseller thought that one would have to go back to the famous skeptic Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian in order to find similar bestsellers in this vein. Less than a year later, Hitchens’ God Is Not Great was the No. 1New York Times bestseller. All of this output was tonally similar, even if the substance and angles of attack varied.
Pompella’s conclusion is that all the spiritual “dark energy” floating about America simply needs to be channeled into a coherent religion, and then all will be well:
New Atheism is dead—in fact, hardline atheism in general seems to have stopped in its tracks. But American religions still have to reintroduce people into a fruitful, perhaps even difficult religious life dedicated to one institution, with one internally coherent set of beliefs. They will have to contend with this raw spiritual energy and channel it to the right places. The one piece of good news for the American faithful is that New Atheism isn’t one of their obstacles anymore.
What bullpucky! First of all, while New Atheism is dead in the sense that the in-your-face books by Hitchens et al. are now two decades old, its legacy continues in the rise of “nones”. In fact, “New Atheism” wasn’t really new, it was just different from old atheism in that it was infused with science and pushed by people who were remarkably eloquent; but the arguments against God were the same as those adumbrated by the likes of Robert Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell. It seems as if when journalists runs out of material, they simply phone in an article about how “New Atheism is dead.” Still, it refuses to lie down.
The investigators found that high cruciferous vegetable consumption (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and turnip greens) – cooked and raw – seemed to reduce the risk of at least six types of cancer compared with low consumption, including cancers of the mouth and throat, esophagus, colon and rectum, larynx, endometrium, and ovary. When comparing the highest 20 percent of vegetable eaters, who eat multiple servings per week, with the lowest 20 percent, who may eat less than one serving per week, high intake was associated with a reduced risk of 11 cancers.
High fruit consumption was associated with a reduced risk of seven cancers, including cancers of the mouth, esophagus, stomach, colon and rectum, pancreas, larynx and lymphoma. High intake of citrus fruits in particular was associated with reduced risk of cancers of the digestive tract and larynx, while high consumption of apples and tomatoes appeared to reduce the risk for digestive tract cancers.
Prioritize whole grains
One research review, which included studies that followed more than 2 million people for five to 26 years, suggested that consuming three servings of whole grains daily might lower your risk of dying from any cancer by 6 percent. The cancer-reducing benefits could be due to a few factors, including how whole grains accelerate food transit time through the colon and lower inflammation in a couple of different ways.
Avoid red meat and processed meats
There are more than 800 scientific articles that explore the relationship between meat consumption and cancer. The largest body of data links colorectal cancer with consumption of red meat (think: beef, veal, pork, lamb) and processed meat (bacon, sausage, ham, hot dogs). It shows that for every 100 grams of red meat consumed per day (imagine half a cup, or a piece of meat the size of a deck of cards), the risk of colorectal cancer increases by 17 percent. For every 50 grams of processed meat eaten daily, the risk increases by 18 percent.
Ditch the sugary drinks [JAC: he’s talking about drinks, and the author does eat some sweet foods in moderation]
Sugar does not directly fuel cancer growth. This is a myth. However, raw and processed sugar, corn sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup and other sugars in beverages and fast food or processed food may increase the risk of weight gain and obesity. Any resulting insulin resistance and chronic inflammation can be indirect risk factors for cancer.
What’s the proof? The Iowa Women’s Health Study followed more than 35,000 women for the development of cancer for over 25 years. Women who consumed high levels of sucrose or sucrose-containing foods were no more likely to develop colorectal cancer than women who consumed the lowest levels of sucrose. (Sucrose is the type found in table sugar.) In another study of more than 90,000 people in Japan, total sugar, specific types of sugar and fructose intake also had no association with development of colorectal cancer.
This is a man who has no fun! Seriously, though, if your concern is avoiding cancer, then pay attention to the article. Or, to quote the old saw, “Ask your doctor.”
An injured seabird sought help by pecking at the door of an emergency room at a hospital in Germany until medical staff noticed it and called firefighters to help with its rescue.
The cormorant, a shiny black waterbird, had a triple fishing hook stuck in its beak when it made its presence known at the glass door of the Klinikum Links der Weser hospital in the northern city of Bremen on Sunday.
In a joint effort, medical staff and firefighters removed the fishhook and treated the wound, the Bremen firefighter department said in a statement. The bird was later released back into nature on the grounds of the hospital park.
“When an injured cormorant does approach humans, it is usually an animal in extreme distress that has lost its natural shyness,” the statement said.
A cormorant is a large bird with a long neck, wedge-shaped head and a distinctive sharp beak with a hooked tip. A fishhook in the bird’s beak would be extremely dangerous for the animal. Infections, pain and even starvation are possible, the firefighter department said.
I still find such stories amazing: a bird that is evolved to avoid humans suddenly seeks their help when it’s injured? And at a a hospital? In fact, I find it hard to believe that the bird even knew what it was doing. But all’s well that ends well!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants to relive the life of her ancestors:
Hili: When you finish reading that article, give me a pillow, because it’s hard here.
Andrzej: Then go to the sofa.
Hili: I can’t, I’m thinking about my poor ancestors who slept on tree branches.
In Polish:
Hili: Jak skończysz czytać ten artykuł, to daj mi jakąś poduszkę, bo tu twardo.
Ja: To idź na sofę.
Hili: Nie mogę, myślę o moich biednych przodkach, którzy spali na gałęziach drzew.
From Masih; be sure to look at the picture in the second tweet:
President @realDonaldTrump, Iran’s regime told you that it had stop executions of protesters, a move we believe was designed to ease international pressure and create space for talks. But now, as negotiations continue, young Iranians are once again facing imminent execution.… https://t.co/WoYWCbiIKWpic.twitter.com/nCJnIJ6cMh
. . . and two from Dr. Cobb. First a d*g rescue. Both of these are good boys!
This teenager saved his neighbor's dog from drowning in a freezing pond. This is Bernard. His family contacted emergency services right away, but high school senior Hugh Pinneo got to Bernard first. Hugh said he's "just glad I acted that day and saved the dog's life." We are too. 12/10 for all
A grizzly bear, floating into a school of salmon and about to chow down:
Franzi Schimmer captured this Grizzly bear in Brooks Falls, Alaska just floating along, tippy-tapping down the river, browsing the salmon.Prior to hibernation, up to 40% of a bear's body mass is fat, which is less dense than water (~0.9 g/cm^2), so the murder-monster is also a floaty-boaty.
In this week’s news-and-snark piece, Bill Maher offers a piece that may be controversial, for it’s about how men need to be “men” again. He avers that the loss of masculinity in males is one reason why women are disappointed in men, and why people are having less sex. The data are eye-opening; for example, 44% of Gen Z men say they’ve had no relationship experience at all during their teen years. That means up to age 20! And you might be interested in the new genre of literature he describes: “romantasy”, in which women get involved with animals or half-animals like centaurs.
His solution? Men should “man up”. His example: Taylor Swift being engaged to football star Travis Kelce (“old-school wood”) after writing songs about all the lame men she was once involved with. (He describes songs by other women.) Is he right? I have no idea.
The issue of Jeffrey Epstein has brought up a question that still puzzles me. Granted, the man was a horrible pedophile and sex trafficker (he was convicted of it at least once) who probably deserved years and years in prison after his second arrest, but took his own life to forestall that fate. Granted, Epstein sought out a fair number of intellectuals and individuals, associated with some, flew a subset of them around—sometimes to his private island where bad stuff occurred—and gave other intellectuals money for their research. Granted, some of those who palled around with Epstein should have known better than to associate with a convicted pedophile, take his money, or visit his island. Others were involved in rather pathetic interactions with Epstein, like Larry Summers, who asked Epstein for romantic advice. That’s not a crime, but it doesn’t look so good.
Now it seems that almost every academic of note not only had some connection with Epstein, but also has been denigrated and demonized for it. You can be tarred even if you’re several people removed from Epstein: even I get emails and comments on the website (which are trashed) demanding to know why I am friends with people who had some tangential connection with Epstein (viz., Steve Pinker, Richard Dawkins, etc.).
You can look yourself up on the Epstein files at this site, and of course I did, though I never met or had anything to do with the man. I was amazed to see that my name appears ten times! But every mention has to do with my literary agent, John Brockman, who was one of the people cultivated by Epstein (Brockman is the agent for nearly all popular-science writers.)
Below is one example: an email from Brockman to many of his authors calling our attention to an article about him that appeared in the Guardian. I have no idea why this email is in the Epstein files. Email addresses have been redacted.
What puzzles me is that people whose connection with Epstein was tangential or minimal are nevertheless demonized, sometimes with great glee (P. Z. Myers is a great proponent of such glee, expounded in his frequent “Two Minutes of Hate” posts). I really can’t explain it, except that if you already dislike somebody (perhaps because they’re more famous than you), finding that they’re in the Epstein files gives you even more of an excuse to dislike them, and to flaunt your dislike.
I mentioned Steve Pinker, whose connection with Epstein appears limited to flying on his plane to a conference (not to the island!), being at two conferences where Epstein was in attendance (with Epstein more or less forcing himself to get photographed with Steve and even to sit down at Pinker’s table for a bit), and , finally, for helping Alan Dershowitz when Dersh defended Epstein in his first trial. In that case the “help” was free, and rendered because Pinker knew Dershowitz and wanted to help him out with the proper linguistic analysis of a statute. (See Inside Higher Ed for some tarring.) As you’ll see below, Steve has apologized for that help. But I really don’t think that such an apology is necessary, as even a rich person deserves a good defense. Remember that I was on O. J. Simpson’s defense team (refusing a fee), because I thought that even Simpson deserved a decent defense and because, at the time, the FBI was using “match probabilities” for DNA in a manner I considered prejudicial. (Match probability was my area of expertise.) I make no apologies for that, and was appalled when Simpson was found “not guilty.”
At any rate, Pinker has publicly explained his connection with Epstein on Andrew Sullivan’s site (here and here), and I’ll reproduce Steve’s mea culpa below. Greg Mayer put the entire explanation/apology together for me:
You asked “What was Steven Pinker thinking?” with the implication that I was a willing associate of Epstein. I know the question was rhetorical, but let me answer it.
I disliked Epstein from the moment I met him, judging him to be a sleaze and an impostor. I never sought his company, never solicited or accepted funding from him, was never invited to his mansion or island, and would not have accepted. But as we know, Epstein was an obsessive collector of celebrities, including academic celebrities, and he was tight with an astonishing number of my close colleagues, making it difficult to escape associations with him. These included my Harvard colleague and co-teacher Alan Dershowitz; my PhD advisor, department chair, and dean Stephen Kosslyn; my Harvard colleagues Lawrence Summers, Lisa Randall, and Martin Nowak; my former MIT colleague Noam Chomsky; my literary agent John Brockman; and the Director of the ASU Origins Project, Lawrence Krauss. I am astonished that these smart people took Epstein seriously. On the two occasions when I was forced into his company, I found him to be a deeply unserious and attention-deficit-disordered smart-ass.
Nowak, Brockman, and Krauss were prolific impresarios of academic conferences covertly funded by Epstein, and he would often show up unannounced. At one Harvard conference someone snapped a photo with me and Epstein in the frame; it has plagued me ever since. On another, Krauss begged me to allow Epstein to join my meal table for a chat, and the resulting photo has also been endlessly circulated to smear me. In a forthcoming article in a major online magazine, Krauss publicly apologizes for forcing me into that situation. Epstein was also a donor to other Harvard projects, not all of them public.
It’s also important to keep in mind the timeline. I did join a group of TED speakers and attendees (including Brockman, his wife and agency president Katinka Matson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett) whom Brockman had invited to fly on Epstein’s plane to the conference in Monterey, California. This was in 2002, many years before any of Epstein’s crimes came to light. Nothing suspicious took place on the flight.
My other association with Epstein came when Dershowitz asked my advice, as a psycholinguist, on the natural interpretation of the wording of a statute which, it turned out, Epstein had been accused of violating. Alan and I were colleagues who had just co-taught a course, and he often asked me for advice on the linguistic interpretation of laws and constitutional amendments. Dershowitz is, of course, famous for legally defending odious defendants such as O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson on the Sixth Amendment principle that even the most despised defendants have a right to vigorous legal representation. I was not a paid expert witness but was doing a colleague a favor. Still, I deeply regret this, because while Dershowitz is willing to apply his professional efforts to push this principle to the limit, I am not. (Note, too, that in 2007 the full extent of Epstein’s crimes were not known.)
Epstein was a sociopath and, we now know, a heinous criminal. He also was a maniacal collector of famous people who knew how to slosh around enough money to gain entrée into prestigious circles. Perhaps I was too polite to run away on occasions when I should have, but it was almost impossible for me to escape being associated with his far-flung social web.
This is about as straightforward as you can get, and I can’t see that Steve did anything wrong—not even helping Dershowitz clarify wording of a statue for Epstein’s first trial. Steve says he “deeply regrets this,” and I believe him, but I don’t think he has much to regret. Expert witnesses help all kinds of people, rich and poor (as I did, though I mostly helped indigent defendants for public defenders). Ensuring that the law is administered correctly is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, one could make the case that I was far worse than Pinker, as I helped O. J. Simpson, who was later exculpated for a double murder but, in my view, was almost certainly guilty. I knew there was a substantial chance that Simpson did it, but I wanted to be sure that the prosecution used its DNA data properly, just as Steve gave his best linguistic interpretation of a statute. Remember, the prosecution’s job is not to convict, but to present evidence that is supposed to show the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is not supposed to involve twisting the facts, though it does far too often, which is why poor people, assigned overworked public defenders, don’t get the same justice as rich ones.
The big question today is: why are people in almost a moral panic about Epstein? As I said, he was almost surely guilty of odious crimes (I allow him a benefit of the doubt, as does the law, though his associate Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty, and there is other eyewitness testimony.) And yes, perhaps some people, like Prince Andrew, were complicit in Epstein’s crimes. But others were guilty only of associating with him, some more than others and some, like Pinker, hardly at all. Why the demonization of Pinbker? And why should I also be tarred because I’m friends with Steve?
None of this, of course, is meant to exculpate Epstein, nor to minimize the pain and misery that his victims suffered and suffer now. I simply want to discuss a question about a moral panic and its apparent excess.
Greg Mayer brought all this to my attention, and I called him to ask his explanation for the moral panic affecting some people who didn’t deserve it. Besides my own view that people love to see the mighty fall, Greg had three other reasons:
a.) People tend, in moral crises, to believe ridiculous and palpably false things about those considered guilty. An example is the McMartin preschool trial, in which people were arrested for child molestation despite the most ridiculous and unbelievable accusations, including Satanic rituals and flying witches (see here for some of them). It turns out that nobody was found guilty and the allegations were not substantiated. Much of the childrens’ testimony seems to have been due to prompting by therapists. To Greg, who teaches pseudoscience and related matters at U. Wisconsin-Parkside, this is an extreme example of what can happen to a “believe the victim” mentality even when there’s no good evidence.
b.) People believe what they want to believe, and will believe ludicrous or disproven claims if they buttress what they would like to be true. Greg used the example of “facilitated communication“, in which “facilitators” supposedly helped nonverbal people “talk” by holding their hands near a keyboard. We now know that this process has been entirely discredited. Like using a ouija board, the facilitators were actually guiding people’s hands to specific keys. This relates to Epstein in a way similar to my own thesis: people want to believe that some people they already dislike are guilty, and so rush to associate those people with Epstein, despite the lack of evidence that some of the “accused” had anything to do with Epstein’s crimes.
c.) Greg also said that since the 1980s, as inequalities among Americans began to grow, those who had thinner slices of the pie became eager to blame the rich and elite for their troubles. We see this resentment in many places, including politics. And Epstein, of course, gravitated to the rich and elite, as he apparently thought that some of their panache would rub off on him. This is why, Greg says, there are so many articles about the “Epstein elite” being published these days.
At any rate, Pinker’s apologia prompted me to think about all this, and after reading it I really cannot find him guilty of any missteps—even the help he gave Dershowitz. I know I’ll get pushback from people who dislike Pinker, or think that the acccused should not be given help by experts, especially when the crimes involved are dire. But I stand by my claim: I don’t think Pinker did anything wrong. And that is probably true of quite a few people who are being tarred via guilt by association.
Dean Graetz has come through with a set of images from the outback of Australia. His notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Dean has added links to two videos, one of them his.
And send in your wildlife photos! Once again, this is the last batch I have.
Australian Landscape Images
Being geo-patriots, we frequently travelled and camped in the remote Australian Outback, aka ‘The Bush’, which is about 70% of the continental area. Our interest was landscapes – their vista, and the living and fossil lifeforms they contained. Here is a series of landscape photos chosen by their appeal summarised as one word.
Bliss
Dusk: Site chosen on extensive plain – see horizon. A table set for two, one-saucepan meal on gas burner, and swags (bedroll) to be positioned and occupied last. A near cloudless sky with dry airmass promises a dome of stars all night. Bliss!:
Beginning
It is always entrancing to witness the silent illumination and transient colours of a landscape as our world turns to the Sun. Always, you see detail and colours that you didn’t appreciate during the previous dusk. This is a sandy bed of a large but ephemeral creek – a great campsite. The stark, dead (Eucalypt) trees germinated with the 1974 floods only to be killed by a wildfire some 20 years later. Such is life:
Reboot
A ‘Spinifex’ (actually Triodia) grassland wildfire: hot and lethal, reducing all in its path to ashes. This hummock grassland type covers about 25% of the continent. Ignited by lightning or people, such fires are frequent. With the first rain post-fire, the Triodia regenerates from seed and roots, faster than competing woody plants. So, repeated fires – burning your neighbours – is a sustainable way to persist:
Success
Heavy rains in 2009 triggered a massed pelican breeding. Thousands of birds gathered at one location, mated and successfully bred. More details are here. Success in this time-dependent gamble is shown by the chicks (darker heads) are now as large as the parent birds. All life is a Game: If you win , you stay in the Game:
Bugger
A feral camel (Dromedary [Camelus dromedarius] single hump) enjoying an uncommonly lush grassland. Imported in the mid-1800s, camels facilitated the exploration and settlement of Outback Australia. Displaced by motorized vehicles in the1920s, instead of a bullet, they were abandoned to die out. But they didn’t. Then a couple of hundred camels is now a large feral population of at least 600,000 damaging pests – a significant multi-million dollar problem. In the Southern Hemisphere, a well-intentioned action resulting in a disastrous outcome is widely known as a Bugger, made famous by this Toyota video:
Mute
A rock engraving, a graphic message from a pre-literate time, meticulously pitted on a vertical rock face. What can be inferred from it? In order of certainty, it was done by a male, likely over a working period of 3-5 days, at least 10,000 years ago. In spite of much speculation, we cannot ever really know the message or the audience, a realization that sometimes evokes a puzzling tinge of sadness:
Harsh
The Pilbara region is Australia’s harshest landscape. It is hot –(recorded 160 consecutive days of above 100°F (38°C)), and essentially water- and treeless, and rendered unfriendly by the swarm of small spiny hummocks of Spinifex (Triodia). Yet prospectors and geologists continue to search here for mineral riches. After we found the rocks containing a fossil stromatolite, dated at 3.4 billion years, and then thinking about Deep Time, we forgot about the current temperature and Spinifex spines:
Serenity
Why do we find a slow-flowing river so timeless, relaxing and peaceful? In 1925, two men, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, wrote their explanation as the words of the song ‘Old Man River’. A truly timeless contribution to our culture that you are probably silently singing right now:
Awe
This image captures a mind-stretching contrast in ages between the biological world and the geological world. In the foreground are several species of ephemeral plants – bright, colourful, with a life spans of months to a year or so. In the background, the blood red rocks looking sharp edged and resistant, are dated at more than 2.5 billion years. The smallest units of geological dating, millions of years, are beyond the reckoning of biologists, yet life was present on earth when those background rocks were being formed. The Deep Time of Life is right up there with the Rocks:
Me
A densely painted gallery in Arnhem Land, northern Australia. The gallery contains older figures – devil-devil figures (LHS), a python and several crocodiles (Middle) – all overpainted by numerous, modern (less than 100 years) ‘hands’. The ‘hands’ are not stencils or imprints. They are deliberate drawings infilled with colour. The overall impression of the modern ‘hands’ layer is just exuberant happiness celebrating ‘Me’, ‘Look at Me’, by the many painters who contributed. No deep cultural significance just an expression of the ‘joy of life’ in vivid colour. The longer you scan this image, the more surely you will smile:
Renewal
It was a hurried camp selected in falling light with the best site option being a desert track in the sea of (flowering) Spinifex. All that is forgotten now as you slowly wake in the golden light of a quiet and calm dawn, along with the smell of dew-dampened sand. Life is good!:
Welcome to Monday, Februay 16, 2026, as this month wings by, bringing each of us closer to extinction. It’s Presidents Day, a federal holiday but not one here at the hard-working University of Chicago. Here is Mount Rushmore, Sculpture of Presidents, before and after construction:
Before:
National Park Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And after. I’m surprised Trump hasn’t mounted an initiative to add his head to the monument:
*The Washington Post highlights six Congressional orimaries this coming up that could tell us where the country—and the Presidency—is going politically in the future. The races are in Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Maine, and Illinois (the last one, to fill Dick Durbin’s Senate seat, is reliably Democratic, but there’s a range of candidates from moderate to progressive). Here are two of them (article is archived here). In many places, like Texas, political redistricting could throw things off balance. Here’s a bellwether election in Ohio on May 5:
Rep. Marcy Kaptur(D-Ohio)has fended off everything Republicans have thrown at her over the years.
Kaptur, 79, has represented northwest Ohio for more than four decades and is the longest-serving woman in congressional history. Thanks to her deep connection with her working-class community and the weaknesses of a string of imperfect Republican candidates, Kaptur has managed to hold on as the Rust Belt has moved further and further right in the Trump era.
This time, Ohio Republicans, at Trump’s urging, redistricted the state and changed Kaptur’s from a district that marginally leaned toward Republicans to one that overwhelmingly favors them. “Let the Columbus politicians make their self-serving maps and play musical chairs,” Kaptur said in response. “I will fight on for the people.”
More than a half-dozen Republican candidates are running for the chance to challenge her in November — a crowded, noisy primary that, like past contests, could hobble them in their effort to finally remove Kaptur.
Derek Merrin, the former Ohio state representative Kaptur defeated in 2024, is on the ballot again, along with Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams and Air Force veteran Alea Nadeem. But Republicans are growing more excited about Madison Sheahan, the former second-in-command at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who jumped into the race in January.
Are Republicans determined to field a candidate closely aligned with Trump’s record, like Sheahan, even as polling shows broad disapproval of ICE and immigration enforcement? Or will they turn to more traditional, less MAGA-aligned candidates? Their choice in races like this one may be what matters most in November.
And in Kentucky on May 19
There are probably few people that Trump would be happier to see go down to defeat than a fellow Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of deep-red Kentucky. On issue after issue, Massie has loudly stood up to the president, most notably by pushing the legislation that forced the release of millions of government files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.\
Trump has called the six-term lawmaker a lightweight, a grandstander and a loser. And he recruited and endorsed Ed Gallrein, a farmer and former Navy SEAL, to challenge him.
. . . What could save Massie, he believes, is the effort he has put into establishing his own identity in his home state. “I’ve taken a lot of care to explain my votes when it’s not intuitive that they are actually the conservative positions,” Massie said.
Other Republicans will no doubt be watching the Kentucky primary closely. It could be this year’s biggest test of whether the GOP remains in the iron grip of an increasingly unpopular president, or whether more of them can feel safer charting their own course forward.
I already have my mail-in ballot for Illinois, but will take some time to figure out who to vote for. The problem is that the ads for the Democratic candidates for Durbin’s seat are all identical: Trump, Trump, Trump, ICE, ICE, ICE. Finding views on other issues is going to take a bit of time.
Former hostage Arbel Yehoud revealed in an interview broadcast Friday that she attempted to end her life several times while held captive by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, but ultimately decided not to after her captors showed her video of a protest in Israel where she saw her face on a poster, and she understood that people were fighting for her.
In a separate interview, Yehoud indicated that she had faced sexual assault on an almost daily basis among widespread abuses she suffered while being held alone.
“One of the times, not long before my release, I saw drone footage from Hostages Square [in Tel Aviv]. I saw people holding signs of people I don’t know, and then suddenly I saw signs of people I knew. I saw a sign for Ariel [Cunio] and a sign for me, signs of people from the kibbutz,” Yehoud told Channel 12 news in an interview alongside Cunio.
“From the moment I saw that, I didn’t try to put an end to my own life there.”
Amid the two-year war, tens of thousands of people staged weekly Saturday night protests in Tel Aviv and around the country, demanding that the government reach a deal to bring the hostages home.
“That was the last time I tried,” she continued, noting she attempted to kill herself at least three times while in captivity. “When I saw the drone footage and understood that people who I don’t know are fighting for me as if I were their sister or daughter, I have a duty to return to Ariel and my family, but also to those fighting for me.”
Cunio recalled the terror of their abduction and being torn apart once they entered Gaza.
“I told her, ‘The most important thing is that we stay together. As long as they don’t separate us, we’ll be okay.’ Half an hour later, that is what happened,” Cunio said. “It happened so fast, there wasn’t even time to say ‘I love you, be strong.’”
“I didn’t manage to tell him bye, I didn’t get to see his eyes,” Yehoud added.
While many of the 251 hostages were held together in small groups by Hamas, both Yehoud and Cunio were held by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which kept them separate and alone.
In addition, Yehoud says she endured interrogations, forced conversion attempts and starvation.
There is a lot she says she is still unable to talk about.
“Because it was a very long time, and the things I went through, I went through from beginning to end, so they are in a sealed box,” she told Channel 12.
Nobody ever mentions that kidnapping of civilians and holding them for ransom is a human rights violation, much less rape or assault of woman hostages, nor have the Red Cross or UN paid much attention to the hostages in general. Finally, I’m pretty sure that other women hostages endured sexual assault, but are too traumatized to talk about it. (Remember that women assaulted during the Oct. 7 massacre were killed thereafter.)
*The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) used to be accused of being right-wing because it defended Lefties accused of Wrongspeak, and accused universities of suppressing free expression because of a left-wing ideology. Now, according to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, those accusations are wrong, for FIRE is busy cleaning up after Trump’s depredations. The article is free, and is called “From ‘cancel culture’ watchdog to Trump antagonist,” with the subtitle, “FIRE, the Philly-based free speech organization, is now defending universities it long criticized” (h/t Ginger K.)
. . . . the full power of the federal government is trained on universities and individual students who disagree with it. The stakes have grown exponentially, as became clear early on when federal agents detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University Ph.D. student on a visa, after she cowrote an op-ed in a student newspaper. She then spent 45 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Louisiana. (FIRE submitted an amicus brief in Ozturk’s ongoing federal case, in which a federal judge ruled last month that the administration had no grounds to deport her.)
More recently, federal agents arrested and charged journalist and former CNN anchor Don Lemon with federal civil rights crimes for his coverage of an anti-ICE protest inside a Minnesota church. Of his arrest, the organization wrote, “FIRE will be watching closely.”
The question FIRE faces today is whether it can effectively meet the moment, and overcome skepticism from the left and from other free-speech advocates, some of whom argue the group helped lay the groundwork for an authoritarian crackdown.
Those critics say the present free-speech crisis is partly the predictable result of FIRE stoking a conservative panic over campus politics, effectively handing the federal government a well-crafted rationale for suppressing progressive voices.
FIRE’s leaders say they were not wrong before about cancel culture. Things were bad, they argue. But this is far worse.
“The threats we’re seeing right now, to me, often feel damn near existential,” [legal director Will] Creeley, 45, said in a recent interview. “The incredibly important distinction is that what we’re seeing now from the right is backed by the power of the federal government.”
. . .It can sometimes feel as if FIRE has been involved in nearly every major free-speech flash point of the last year — part of an intentional strategy to build the organization’s profile and raise awareness about speech violations, said Alisha Glennon, 41, the group’s chief operating officer.
Among dozens of ongoing cases, FIRE is suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio in federal court over the administration’s targeting of international students who reported on or participated in pro-Palestinian campus activism.
FIRE has also been outspoken in its defense of Harvard University. After the Trump administration sent Harvard a list of demands this spring — including banning some international students based on their views, appointing an outside overseer approved by the federal government to ensure “viewpoint diversity,” and submitting yearly reports to the government — the university refused to comply. Trump then sought to cut off billions of dollars of federal funding in response.
Harvard sued, and FIRE submitted an amicus brief supporting the university, noting that because of its own “longstanding role as a leading critic” of Harvard as a center of cancel culture, it was not less but more alarmed by the government’s “wielding the threat of crippling financial consequences like a mobster gripping a baseball bat.”
FIRE is also preparing to potentially sue Texas A&M University after the university instructed a philosophy professor in January to remove some teachings of Plato from an introductory philosophy course, citing new rules barring public universities in the state from offering classes that “advocate race or gender ideology.” FIRE wrote to the university, calling the move “unconstitutional political interference.”
Removing Plato from an intro philosophy class is the type of absurd, taken-to-the-extreme free-speech dispute that has long been FIRE’s
It goes on, but FIRE deserves your support if you value the First Amendment.
*The shooter who killed 8 people in British Columbia on February 10 was a trans-identified male, but was initially reported as a woman. The fact that shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar was a male suffering from gender dysphoria is relevant to his story, but, as recounted in Quillette, the press ignores both that and his biological sex in favor of hewing to a gender-activist narrative.
On 10 February, Jesse Van Rootselaar (also known as Jesse Strang) killed eight people in the remote British Columbia mining town of Tumbler Ridge. The first two victims were the killer’s mother and half-brother, whom Van Rootselaar shot at home. Van Rootselaar then went to a local secondary school and murdered six more people—five of whom were twelve- or thirteen-year-old students—before committing suicide. Twenty-seven others were injured. It was the deadliest Canadian school shooting in almost four decades, and the highest-casualty mass-shooting event in the nation’s history.
Nothing I write here can properly convey the anguish that surviving family members must now endure. The population of Tumbler Ridge is only about 2,400. Most residents likely know one or more people connected to the tragedy in some way, and so they will share in the trauma as well. Like Columbine and Sandy Hook, the words “Tumbler Ridge” will now become indelibly associated with senseless violence and unfathomable sorrow.
When news of the tragedy was first reported to Canadians on the afternoon of 10 February, it appeared to include a striking anomaly: The killer, we were told, was a “woman.” There are scattered examples of female killers in the annals of Canadian crime. But this would be the first time in the recorded history of Canada and its colonial antecedents—going back more than 400 years, to the early seventeenth century—that a woman had gone on this kind of murderous rampage.
It soon became clear, however, that Van Rootselaar wasn’t a woman. He was an eighteen-year-old man—a gun-obsessed, middle-school dropout whose many mental-health afflictions happened to include gender dysphoria. The mass murderer called himself a woman. But that doesn’t mean he was, or that the rest of us have to live in the imaginary universe he (literally) built for himself.
According to Royal Canadian Mounted Police deputy commissioner Dwayne McDonald, Jesse was “a biological male” who “approximately six years ago began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly.” In keeping with Canadian policies implemented by Justin Trudeau’s government in 2017, McDonald and other police officials then proceeded to refer to the killer with female pronouns, as if he actually were a woman.
This kind of institutionally mandated misuse of language is dishonest at the best of times. But it is especially offensive when it serves to misrepresent reality on behalf of a murderer (posthumously or otherwise). While Jesse Van Rootselaar’s criminal motive is unknown, he left a trove of digital clues about his identity—all of which paint a picture of a deeply disturbed young man with a stereotypically male fixation on firearms and violence.
Why proper identification and reporting matters:
Needless to say, no one personally affected by the Tumbler Ridge massacre is in a state to care about culture-war arguments over the killer’s identity. But policies that allow male and female criminals to be miscategorised on the basis of self-declared gender identity can actively hinder law-enforcement efforts to identify and monitor future killers before they strike.
Men are more violent than women, which is why they account for more than ninety percent of the world’s prison population, and commit about ninety percent of all homicides. For acts of mass murder, US data puts the corresponding figure at 98 percent. This greater tendency toward violence is rooted largely in male evolutionary psychology, and doesn’t get erased when a man changes his pronouns or puts on a skirt. Simply put, being male (and young) represents one of the most important risk factors that exist when it comes to violent crime. And so a constabulary seeking to prevent the next school shooting, whether in Canada or anywhere else, would naturally focus most of its limited resources on men, whatever their claimed “gender identity.” And yet, Canadian policy since 2019 has been to categorise homicide suspects not according to sex, but rather according to the “gender a person publicly expresses in their daily life,” including “at work” and “while shopping.”
. . .Moreover, the ideological excesses of the gender-affirmation movement actively inhibit dysphoric youth (such as Van Rootselaar himself, though we know little of his case history) from receiving proper scientifically grounded care for such psychiatric comorbidities. This is because it is now ideologically fashionable to imagine that all such conditions will resolve themselves in some mystical way, as if by exorcism, once a patient’s soul-like “gender identity” is aligned with his or her outward identity—a form of magical thinking debunked by Dr Cass.
This is one of the reasons why Britain’s scandal-plagued Tavistock gender clinic was shuttered in 2024: If a troubled child presented at a psychiatrist’s office in England with a list of complaints that included gender dysphoria, he or she would summarily be dispatched to Tavistock, where the single-lane therapeutic focus was on transgender affirmation and rapid transition. Meanwhile, most or all of the child’s underlying psychological problems were ignored, on the conceit that they were mere artefacts of a trapped gender soul crying out for release.
All of this serves to explain why Van Rootselaar’s identity as a man suffering from gender dysphoria is highly relevant to his criminal back story. And journalists are fully justified in noting it plainly in their reporting—much in the way that they might note other significant mental-health afflictions.
As I said, Luana suspected that the shooter was a trans-identified males from the moment the shooter was identified as female. I reserved judgement, but it turned out she was right. As the article says, keeping track of one’s sex and gender are important for keeping accurate records and for sociological/psychological analysis, but, most important, for giving objective therapy that doesn’t necessarily cater to an adolescent’s wishes.
No one, presently, sees the Moon rotate like this. That’s because the Earth’s moon is tidally locked to the Earth, showing us only one side. Given modern digital technology, however, combined with many detailed images returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a high resolution virtual Moon rotation movie has now been composed. The above time-lapse video starts with the standard Earth view of the Moon. Quickly, though, Mare Orientale, a large crater with a dark center that is difficult to see from the Earth, rotates into view just below the equator. From an entire lunar month condensed into 24 seconds, the video clearly shows that the Earth side of the Moon contains an abundance of dark lunar maria, while the lunar far side is dominated by bright lunar highlands.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili was lost again:
Andrzej: I was looking for you everywhere.
Hili: Even a cat needs some peace and quiet sometimes.
In Polish:
Ja: Szukałem cię wszędzie.
Hili: Nawet kot potrzebuje czasem świętego spokoju.
From Masih, a 15-year old shot by the Iranian regime’s police:
Can you read the writings of a 15-year-old and not cry, not act?
“Today, the last day of summer, I feel so excited for the first day of school.
I want to study electronics and electrical engineering.
I hope a bright future awaits me and my family.
In the silent night, the house… pic.twitter.com/0obGMMTqbO
From Simon; the AP celebrates Larry’s 15th anniversary at Downing Street:
Larry the cat, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, is celebrating 15 years as the British government’s official rodent-catcher. The unofficial first feline has served under six prime ministers. pic.twitter.com/f2GIZTO06L
From Luana, who says, “The Democrats are committing suicide.”
BREAKING: Palestinian activist Aber Kawas is running for NY State Senate.
She’s said 9/11 was America’s fault due to “capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia,” is endorsed by NYC DSA and Zohran Mamdani, and has worn a Hamas headband.
This French Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was six years old, and would be 90 today had he lived. https://t.co/aB8JNMLgHv
Two from Dr. Cobb. The first, the cover of “Tapestry” turned 55 years old on Feb. 10. And the cat prominently featured on the cover has surely crossed the Rainbow Bridge. From Wikipedia:
A&M staff photographer Jim McCrary took the cover photograph in the living room of King’s home at 8815 Appian Way, Laurel Canyon, California. It shows her sitting barefoot on a cushion on a bench beside a window, holding a tapestry that she had hand-stitched, with her cat Telemachus, named after the mythological son of Odysseus, near her foot.
55 years ago today one of the greatest and biggest pop albums was released: “Tapestry” by the legendary Carole King. The album won several Grammys and was one of the biggest selling and longest charting in history. She has inspired decades of singer songwriters.@carolekingofficial.bsky.social
Yes, we’re severing ties with the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole, MA. But our ties aren’t that recent. And yes, we so have money woes, as do many schools.
As money woes hit the University of Chicago, the oldest private marine laboratory in the United States is striking out on its own. https://scim.ag/4trAN3l
