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.
Over the years I’ve developed a set of posting guidelines, affectionately known as “Da Roolz” in Chicagospeak. You can find them on the left sidebar, or by clicking here. If you’re new here, or haven’t yet read them, I urge you to do so, as it will facilitate discussion as well as making my job easier. I’ll just point out three of them that are particularly important these days.
a) f you’re a first-time poster, I have to approve your initial comment. This won’t necessarily be immediate, as it depends on my checking email. After that, posting is automatic unless you become moderated for some reason.
Sometimes first-time posters assume that their comment was fouled up because it didn’t appear. And that could lead to them trying to make the same comment several times. Not necessary: first comments need to be approved and thereafter, if you’re not moderated (some people are), your comments should appear automatically. I do appreciate people using their real names, but understand if you have good reasons not to do so.
b) Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.
This guidelines is often violated, and I vary in how much I feel like enforcing it. If there’s a good back and forth going on, I am not strict about it. But some persons feel that they have to respond to every comment, and in that case I will warn people. I almost never remove comments when they’re posted.
c.) Be judicious about posting videos and very long comments. I like good discussion, but essays are not on, particularly if you have your own website where you can post it. Embedded videos are okay, but please think before posting: do they add to the discussion? If your comment is longer than, say, 400 words, it is probably too long. If you want to write stuff longer than that, please get your own website!
This guideline I do try to enforce, either by emailing the person with logorrhea or by adding a “reply” saying that “this comment is over the word limit; please try to post shorter comments”. Comments are just that—comments and not essays. Also, please try to keep your comments in line with what the post is about, though sometimes readers can introduce a diversion if it’s timely or important.
Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, was previously the Provost of the University of Chicago. He was deeply invested in the Chicago Principles, which include free speech, institutional neutrality, and scholarship and teaching (adjudicated purely by merit) as the two overarching goals of a University. I hoped he would succeed Bob Zimmer as President of our University, but after Zimmer fell ill with a brain tumor, Diermeier got the offer from Vanderbilt, and since Zimmer did not resign (sadly, he died later), Diermeier left.
At Vanderbilt he’s putting into place the Chicago Principles, and enforcing them more rigorously than we do here. When students held a sit-in in the administration offices, for example, he had them expelled and arrested. And he’s been busy writing and speaking about the goals of academia and how the principles first forged here promote those goals (see here and here, for example). When someone recently referred to Vanderbilt as “The University of Chicago of the South”, someone else responded, “No, Chicago is now the Vanderbilt University of the north.”
Along with Andrew Martin, the chancellor of St. Louis’s Washington University, Deirmeier commissioned a group of ten scholars to examine the issue of how scholarship in the humanities has become politicized, something that the two thought was endangering the value of the humanities and, indeed, of universities themselves. Headed by Paul Boghassian, a Professor of Philosophy at NYU (not to be confused with Peter B.), the group of ten produced a long report (29 pages when I printed out the pdf, which can be found here). The upshot is that yes, the humanities are becoming politicized and endanger scholarship in many ways (see below). Although the ten authors do consider empirically-laden humanities areas like economics, history, and anthropology, they deliberately leave out science, though there is no end of discussion of how science, too, is becoming politicized to its detriment (see, for example, “The ideological subversion of biology,” by Luana Maroja and me, or “The peril of politicizing science” by Anna Krylov).
If you click on the first screenshot below you’ll go to the report (more information is apparently forthcoming), and the second screenshot gives a summary of the report by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which you’ll find more digestible. Note that while the Chronicle piece refers to “The Left” as ruining humanities, the Boghassian et al. report explicitly assert that the erosion of the humanities is not due to the Left per se, but to the fact that most professors are on the Left, and that the Left has adopted some principles (e.g., relativism and postmodernism) that has played a role in eroding scholarship. But they add that this is a danger of any ideology that infects academia, whether it be from the Left, the Right, or something else.
The Chronicle summary; click to read. Brian Leiter at our Law School has also written his comments on the report, which are generally favorable, but see below.
What I’m going to do is simply group a few quotes from the big report (indented) under bold headings that I made myself. The point of the Boghassian et al. report is not to indict anybody, or conclude what needs to be done, but simply to raise the problem as a serious issue, intending to promote discussion about what needs to be done. (And yes, they do think that something needs to be done, particularly in anthropology, which comes in for a drubbing.)
The problem:
The report is prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble. It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi.2 However, with rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues. Our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.
Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start — witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens. In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left. More specifically, the complaint is that scholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorized (§3 below). The sharpest version of the complaint traces this distortion in scholarly standards to a pervasive repudiation of the very idea of scholarly objectivity in favor of the view that since claims to knowledge are inevitably ideological, it is fair game to assess academic scholarship on political and social grounds (§4 below). The result of this distortion, the complaint continues, is an academic ecosystem in which much of what passes as scholarship in the humanistic disciplines is in fact a mix of tendentious, biased research, feeble academic agitprop and jargon-laden nonsense. To the extent that this is so, the complaint concludes, these scholarly disciplines can no longer play the valuable role they have traditionally played in the advancement of human knowledge and so risk forfeiting their claims to deference from concerned administrators and support from the wider public. . .
The importance of the humanities (There’s a nice discussion of this in the report, bearing on why they are worth saving through unpolluted scholarship.)
But who is going to help you decide what satisfactions are really worth pursuing? Which outcomes are worth aiming for? What is worth wanting? Who will help you decide whether John Stuart Mill was right to say that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (Mill 1985)? Indeed, who will let you know this question is even worth asking? And where will you learn that one reason for studying the nomothetic sciences is that understanding how the universe works and how we fit into it would be worthwhile in itself, even if we never put the knowledge to profitable use?
The answer, we think, is clear. These are the questions you learn to answer, however provisionally, with the help of literature and the arts, critically appreciated, through the study of philosophy and history and sociology and anthropology. Some humanistic disciplines take matters of value and meaning as a central focus; others aim to describe and explain the human world without pronouncing judgment; but all play an indispensable role in refining our conception of what is possible for human beings and which social arrangements we wish to aim for. If these disciplines are to help us answer these important questions, it is crucial that they use the right methods in search of the right answers. Their task is not to manipulate us into following a party line but to provide each free person with the tools for making their own informed choices.
The disciplines we are discussing prepare us for a free life by developing critical thinking and analytical skills, enhancing cultural understanding and empathy in a world of increasing global interconnections, teaching ethical reasoning and civic responsibility, and providing intellectual resources for creativity and innovation. Because their study is intrinsically worthwhile, they contribute directly to the intellectual and imaginative flourishing of those who study them. By defending and investing in the humanistic disciplines, we affirm our commitment to a society that values critical inquiry, empathy and the full spectrum of human potential, all informed by a clear-eyed view of who we are and where we’ve come from.
This goes along with my own view, though the report focuses on “good scholarship” in the humanities as “good scholarship that produces truth.” I’ve discussed before to what extent “truth”—in the sense of what exists in the universe and can be verified empirically—actually exists in the humanities. I concluded that in the arts, like music, literature, and so on, that no, there is no “truth” to be found; there are only different interpretations. I suppose you can say that some interpretations are better than others, but such claims must be supported by facts. Other areas of humanities, including economics, history, and anthropology, do make assertions about what exists, and in those cases there is a provisional “truth” that can be adjuciated empirically. These considerations are completely missing from the report, which suffers from a dearth of real examples (to be fair, the authors don’t want to demonize anyone).
The focus on good scholarship
Our focus is rather the quality of scholarship: the research produced by professors employed by colleges and universities and published (for the most part) in academic journals and scholarly monographs. The critique we take seriously is that this scholarly enterprise has been damaged in recent decades, not just by a general erosion of standards, but also by a reconceptualization of scholarship as a form of political activity, answerable in part to extra-academic standards.
The three ways that scholarship can be politicized. This is the heart of the discussion.
We have identified three main forms of politicized distortion in recent humanistic scholarship.
a. On the first track, scholarly claims are constrained by the requirement that they cohere with an antecedently accepted political goal, although this is not how the constraint is explicitly described. Rather, unwelcome results or debates are dismissed as having been rendered moot by “settled science.”
b. On the second track, the scholarly goal of understanding the world is displaced by, or supplemented with, the aim of telling stories that serve a pragmatic purpose. On this track, the existence of discourse-independent facts is not denied. Rather, it is claimed that, for epistemological reasons, our scholarly representations can only be partially constrained by such facts, the rest of the slack being taken up by the practical purposes that we allegedly have in devising these accounts.
c. On the third track, the idea that there are genuine facts about the world or about what the evidence supports independently of our political commitments is rejected. On this view, good scholarship cannot be distorted by political values because it is, at bottom, irredeemably constituted by such values.
The first of these routes is not philosophically problematic, in the sense that it makes no questionable claims about the nature of truth, evidence and so forth. However, this style of scholarship is deeply problematic, especially when questions are closed by demonizing opponents to suppress dissent. It is often bad scholarship, since it treats questions as closed that have not in fact been resolved by appropriate scholarly standards; but it is not bad philosophy.
One example of erosion: sex differences
The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project. If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences. Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it.12 Distortions of this sort can be harmless if they are isolated, since the politically motivated blind spots of one researcher will be exposed by others. When whole disciplines or subdisciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds, on the other hand, the upshot can be a serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise.
This is something that Luana and I discuss in our paper. There is in a fact a moiety of scholars who don’t think that there are real differences between the sexes, or if there are such differences, they are due entirely to socialization and bigotry. What is taboo is the idea that such differences might be “innate,” that is, the result of evolution shaping which genes are turned on in which sex, and perhaps those evolutionary differences might be explained by natural selection. This is the subject of Steve Stewart-Williams’s new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shapes the Minds of Men and Women, a good book that came out just two days ago.
The article talks about the wellsprings that can lead to distorted scholarship, including postmodernism and especially its scion: relativism—the idea that there is no absolute truth or knowledge, but there many different and equally valid truths and “ways of knowing”. Relativism can be used, says the report, to dismiss scholarship on the grounds that it’s simply one scholar’s view of truth, and there are other views. But the report also shows why relativism is self-refuting:
The problem with relativism
While the political appeal of such relativistic views is well-understood, so, too, are their theoretical problems. For it is in fact extremely hard to make sense of the idea that there can be
no such thing as a purely epistemic reason for believing something. The idea that there must be such reasons seems to lie at the root of any viable conception of knowledge and inquiry. We can see this in a variety of ways.
Consider first that the relativism is rarely applied consistently by the relativists themselves. Ifsomeone really believed that all knowledge claims depend on contingent background nonepistemic values, they would have to admit that while they believe that climate change is real,
given their progressive values, the MAGA folks might be entitled to believe that climate change is a hoax, given their conservative values. Similarly, for claims about how many sexes there are, or whether race is real, and so on.
No one takes this tolerant attitude towards such disagreements, least of all the scholars who officially espouse the relativistic views. But with what right do they dismiss these opposing claims, if it really is true that every claim to knowledge depends on a variable non-epistemic context? On a relativistic view of justification, the only way in which such an intolerance could be justified is if there were something privileging one set of background values over the others. But it would be odd to be an objectivist about the non-epistemic values that inform the social construction of knowledge (privileging some over others) while being an anti-objectivist about the natural facts studied by biology and physics.
Moreover, even if proponents of such relativistic views could find it in themselves to be tolerant of these substantive disagreements, they could still not be fully consistent relativists, for
a familiar reason: The relativist would have to admit at least one exception to the relativistic thesis about knowledge, and that would be the thesis of relativism itself.
In his own summary, Brian Leiter, while positive on the report, takes issue with what he sees as its somewhat dogmatic stand on relativism. Leiter says this:
There is quite a lot of analytic philosophy in this report, unsurprisingly given the authors: besides Boghossian, also Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Gideon Rosen, plus some linguists, sociologists, psychologists historians and other humanistic scholars. This explains some of the rather surprising claims in the report, such as that “the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming” (the main citations are to Boghossian’s book and work by his NYU colleague Thomas Nagel). So much for Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” and some ways of understanding Quine–not to mention Herder, F.C.S. Schiller, and many other serious humanists. (And what about Boghossian’s colleague Hartry Field?) The report would make itself less vulnerable to dismissal had it not taken that position.
Brian clearly knows a lot more than I about the reach and validity of relativism, but I don’t know what he’s saying here; and I will ask him.
Well, this is the last batch of photos I have, and it’s very sad to run out. How far this Ozymandias has decayed!
But today we have lovely flower photos from Rik Gern of Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
The last two batches of pictures I sent you consisted mostly of images in which a brown earth tone color predominated, so I thought I’d change the pace with a softer and more delicate palette this time.
These pictures were taken in the first few months of the year while taking short walks around the neighborhood in South Austin.
The first pictures are of a blossoming tree, the Mexican Plum (Prunis mexicana). Taking pictures of a tree’s flowers is a different experience from photographing ground flowers, because it’s more immersive and you feel like you’re stepping into another world. I could live in this world forever!
Mexican Ruella (Ruellia simplex) not only has a beautiful flower, but is a sturdy plant that can survive both drought and flood conditions.
I’d always thought of the beauty below as a Wandering Jew (Tradescantia zebrina), but a search for the Latin name informed me that it is now to be referred to as the *Wandering Dude. The common assumption was that the name referred to Israelites wandering the desert and/or Jews displaced due to persecution, but there was also a 13th century myth of a Jewish man who heckled Jesus while he carried his cross on his way to crucifixion and was then condemned to wander the desert till the second coming. The name “Wandering Jew” is now considered bad because the story of Jesus’ alleged heckler was used to justify anti-Semitism. I had never even heard of the heckler story, so the name seemed benign to me and if anything seemed sympathetic, and the flower seemed like a reminder that even the displaced and wandering can produce beauty. Every Jewish person I’ve mention this to has been surprised and said that they never found the original name offensive. My question is, did the name change protect Jews, or did the Dude culturally appropriate the Jew? Or could the Dude be Jewish? I wonder if we need to consult the Cohen brothers? Whatever you call it, the flowers sure are pretty!
[JAC: I never found the name or the term offensive. In fact, in college I formed a group called “The Wandering Jews,” a group that accepted weird people but did nothing other than that.]
The last flowers are from another tree, the Texas mountain laurel (Dermatophyllum secundiflorum), a hardy plant that smells as good as it looks. Another world I could live in forever!:
Welcome to Monday, June 8, 2026, and Jelly-Filled Donut Day. The prime species in this genus is the Pączki, filled yeast-risen donuts popular in Poland. Here’s a store selling them in Katowice, Poland, where I gave a talk in December of 2024. So many to choose from! Also, a cross-section of one from Krakow. You might be able to read some of the fillings:
President Trump said on Monday that Israel and Iran should “immediately stop” striking each other after the two sides traded attacks for the first time since April, as an uneasy truce that had suspended the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran appeared to break down.
Mr. Trump’s brief social media post did not elaborate on what the United States might do to cool the escalation between the two adversaries, which has propelled the Middle East back to the precipice of the full-scale war that began in February with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Iranian ballistic missiles sent sirens wailing in central and southern Israel and booms from air defenses could be heard overhead. Israel’s air force bombarded sites in western and southern Iran, including a petrochemical factory and Iranian air defenses, the Israeli military said.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps threatened energy infrastructure across the region in response to the Israeli attack on the petrochemical complex, saying that Israel had “initiated a dangerous game.” Earlier in the war, Iran had fired volleys of missiles and drones at Arab states throughout the Gulf, including at critical energy depots and refineries.
The renewed fighting could tie up Mr. Trump’s efforts to extricate himself from the war with Iran, which has proved politically costly at home and jacked up global oil and gas prices.
The NYT doesn’t mention that the first strike came from Iran, of course, and Israel was retaliating. From the Times of Israel:
Israel launched strikes on Iranian military targets and a petrochemical plant on Monday morning in response to the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile attacks on northern Israel hours earlier, defying public calls from US President Donald Trump not to retaliate.
After threatening continued barrages if Israel retaliated to its initial attack on Sunday evening, Iran launched more ballistic missile attacks on Monday morning after Israel’s airstrikes on military targets overnight, and was joined by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who also fired a missile at Tel Aviv.
Israel is the only country in the world that, when attacked by an enemy, is sternly warned not to retaliate! That is simply ridiculous.
After 55 days of hemorrhaging an estimated $500 million daily in blockaded revenue, economic pressure has begun to manifest. According to a senior Iranian official speaking to CNN, a potential peace agreement with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump now hinges on the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets.
Does this mean the nuclear issue has been settled? Unlikely, but it does reveal that other priorities are taking precedence.
At the onset of Operation Epic Fury, the United States outlined four primary objectives: dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its ballistic missile capacity, severing its support for regional proxies, and stopping the violent crackdown on protesters. As negotiations progressed, the protesters appeared to have been the first abandoned, quickly followed by the proxies and missiles. Now, only the dismantling of the nuclear program remains on the negotiating table.
However, what diplomacy has omitted, military intervention has largely addressed. The bombing campaign left Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure—and the primary industries supplying it—in ruins. The state’s oppression apparatus also suffered a severe beating, while crippling sanctions and the blockade have handicapped Iran’s ability to fund its proxy networks. Repair costs have been estimated at a minimum of $144 billion. However, Iranian government spokespeople claim that direct and indirect damages have reached up to $270 billion. The regime is teetering over an economic abyss that only liquidity can bridge. This is why two weeks ago Qatar offered to sweeten an agreement with a $6 billion “humanitarian” loan, and why “peace” now comes with a $24 billion price tag.
Meanwhile, domestic unrest continues to simmer. According to a Saturday report by Iran International, high school students have organized mass protests across roughly 20 provinces. Authorities have met several of these demonstrations with immediate violence and arrests.
Although the students’ grievances currently focus on educational reform rather than explicit anti-regime sentiment, the potential remains. All it took was one Tunisian street vendor protesting local corruption to ignite the Arab Spring and topple four established regimes. Perhaps the treatment of an as-yet-unknown student could be the catalyst for an upheaval no one could have predicted.
Well, one could hope, but hope is scarce when the existing regime was willing to kill over 30,000 protestors to stay in power. And what about the “nuclear issue,” which to Trump was (and, he says, still is) the paramount issue to be resolved: “Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.”
Federal officials have quietly begun fast-tracking cases through immigration courts, pushing dozens of additional cases onto the dockets on certain days in an effort to more quickly process asylum and other claims.
The fast-tracking, which is also intended to increase the pace of deportations, started without any formal notification or announcement from the Trump administration, according to immigration lawyers and court officials interviewed by The New York Times. But a surge of cases has been apparent in numerous courts around the country. Some judges have seen their caseloads double and triple, prompting worries that cases are being rushed through, violating due process rights.
At separate courthouses in Annandale and Sterling, Va., in recent days, Times reporters observed long lines and packed dockets. Some immigration judges saw their caseloads more than double, with as many as 100 adults waiting for their cases to be heard. In Annandale, the caseloads have included dozens of unaccompanied minors.
Lines were also evident at a courthouse in downtown Chicago on a recent weekday, with families spilling out of waiting areas and into hallways. Many cases were being processed in small groups, or in several instances with more than two dozen people appearing at once.
And in New Orleans, lawyers saw the number of cases increase to more than 200 on Monday and Tuesday in one courtroom alone. The judges at that courthouse typically take only about 30 to 40 cases per day, lawyers said. The morning dockets were so packed and chaotic that lawyers wishing to observe or monitor the proceedings were not allowed in to watch.
Federal officials say that speeding through cases will help alleviate backlogs that have led some asylum and immigration relief claims to languish for years. The slow pace of the process, they contend, creates incentives for people to enter the United States to file claims that may be weak or invalid.\
. . . . But immigration lawyers and rights groups counter that the sudden acceleration of the process risks errors, denies immigrants due process and leaves people with little time to find lawyers.
“Everything related to these large dockets or mass dockets is shrouded in such a strange secrecy,” said Gracie Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, a nonprofit that provides legal services for immigrants. “Our confirmation that they were even happening really came from going to the court on Monday and seeing the large lines of people standing outside,” she added, referring to the proceedings she observed in New Orleans.
One would think this is a good thing, but of course the cases have to be decided fairly, and speed may conflict with fairness. But to those of us who are Democrats but see our party as seeming to favor unlimited immigration and open borders, this may be a good thing. Other “progressives” will oppose it because they really don’t want vetting at all.
*Reader David sent a link from Field and Stream(the first link on this site to that magazine) describing a ballot initiative in Oregon that would ban all hunting and fishing. David added, “Sometimes I think the woke liberals in this state actually want to turn Oregon into a Red state. I suspect we will have a Republican governor elected in November, for the first time since the 1980’s, I think. Many of my friends, who are center left Democrats, are fed up with the the Democratic Party.” (JAC: Yes, look at Portland!)
An extreme initiative in Oregon that would ban hunting and fishing is one step closer to making the November ballot. Oregon Initiative Petition 28—which would categorize hunting, fishing, trapping, and farming as forms of animal cruelty—has now garnered more than 117,000 signatures, making it eligible for ballot consideration by the Secretary of State.
According the Oregon Hunters Association (OHA), the so-called PEACE Act would eliminate legal exemptions that currently protect hunting, fishing, trapping, and farming from prosecution under Oregon’s animal abuse statutes. If passed, the referendum would open more than 330,000 licensed hunters and 500,000 anglers to criminal liability. It would also jeopardize the treaty-protected hunting-and-fishing rights of nine sovereign tribes.
OHA says out-of-state animal rights organizations are organizing and driving the ballot push. A broad coalition of conservation and special interest groups—from the Oregon Farm Bureau and the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association to Ducks Unlimited and Backcountry Hunters and Anglers—has come out against it. The Oregon Sportsmen Legislative Caucus, made up Democrats and Republicans in the Oregon State Senate, has also issued a joint statement opposing IP28, calling it an attack on the state’s rural economy and cultural heritage.
. . . . The attempted ban has been in the news on and off since it was first introduced in 2020 as Initiative Petition 13. It failed to qualify for the ballot in 2022 before supporters reintroduced it with the same core language in 2024. When it failed again, in July 2024, the groups immediately reintroduced the measure in its current form.
It looks as if the measure is not going to pass, and yes, the animal-rights groups lean left. I’m not so sure, though, whether banning hunting and fishing is a really bad thing, because animals feel pain and it’s often cruel (yes, fish feel pain). How I come down on a bill like this depends on whether there is a need to control animal populations through hunting, in which case not controlling them could be cruel, but I don’t know of any fish whose populations need to be controlled. (I’m told that it’s useless to control animal populations through hunting, and of course no traps should be used.)
In a June 4 social media post, Trump announced country singer Lee Greenwood will sing his 1984 hit “God Bless The U.S.A” at the June 24 rally before introducing the headlining act: the president himself.
“We don’t want singers with no talent, but big fees to put you to sleep, we’ve told them all to stay home. All we want is you, me, a few speakers, and the Greatest Music ever played, the same Music you have listened to for years!” Trump wrote.
Freedom 250, the quasi-government group Trump formed to mark America’s 250th birthday, was originally planning a 16-day concert series as part of an event coined the “Great America State Fair.” But last week, a slew of musicians backed out of performing, with several citing the event’s perceived political affiliation and confusion around what they signed up for.
As a result, Trump decided to nix the performances and instead give a speech himself, a White House official previously confirmed. The rally is scheduled for June 24.
Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for Freedom 250, also confirmed in a statement to USA TODAY that Trump will be kicking off the Great American State Fair at the June 24 event.
Although the president is positioning the June 24 event as a rally rather than a concert, several musical acts are part of the lineup, according to Trump’s Truth Social post.
In addition to Greenwood, opera singer Christopher Macchio will perform before Trump’s headlining speech.
The U.S. Army Band, Armed Forces Choir, U.S. Marine Band and Joint Armed Forces Chorus will perform as well, Trump said.
Oy vey! I’m not impressed by the lineup, but it would be better if it didn’t have a speech by Trump, who you can be sure will bloviate and emphasize what a great President he is. Oh, and don’t forget the cage match on June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday.
America’s apparel companies are fighting increasing returns. The problem is the soaring use of weight-loss drugs.
Farnam Elyasof, founder of online budget suit retailer FlexSuits, has seen a 50% increase in returns in the past year. When a customer orders the same suit in two or three sizes, “it’s a red flag,” Elyasof said. In such instances, he is likely to check measurements, ask the client if they are losing weight or advise them to wait to purchase until closer to their event. It helps, but the returns keep coming.
“It’s becoming a real issue,” Elyasof said. “It’s a loss for me.”
Shoppers are increasingly buying multiple versions of the same garment, and then sending back those that don’t fit. They are also sizing down through exchanges, returning larger sizes in favor of smaller ones. The share of apparel exchanges where shoppers sized down has risen in each of the past three full calendar years, hitting a high of 14.6% in 2025, according to a review of 38 retailers by Narvar, which manages returns for retailers.
Returns are among the biggest profit-killers for retailers, particularly online businesses. Shipping, labor and warehousing costs add up. And items sent back might be out of season, meaning retailers have to resell them at a discount.
For a $1 billion company that typically sees around 20% of items purchased returned, a 5- to 10-percentage-point increase in returns can slash gross margins by $20 million, according to Prashant Agrawal, chief executive at Impact Analytics, which helps retailers manage their inventory. “It’s a huge headache,” he said.
At peak weight loss, those taking GLP-1 medications can drop a clothing size every month. Jeans, bras and athleisure wear are often the first items replaced. Then come tops and dresses, as well as adjustments to rings, bracelets and shoe sizing. Retailers from Levi Strauss to Costco Wholesale and Walmart are working to understand the shift.
The returns trend is particularly acute in larger sizes. Returns for medium, large and extralarge items jumped the most, according to Impact Analytics. “As you lose weight or you have a shift, you’re, like, ‘OK, I need to buy medium and large to see what fits better,’ ” said Agrawal.
I don’t know the solution to this problem, as when you take weight-loss drugs I don’t think you can predict what weight (and what size) you will settle at. Still, those on a chemical diet should not be encumbering retailers in this weigh. Just like kids keep buying larger sizes as they grow, dieting adults can buy smaller sizes as they shrink.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is tending the garden:
Hili: Now water that young peach tree. Andrzej: You’re right, I forgot about it.
In Polish:
Hili: Teraz podlej to młode drzewko brzoskwini.
Ja: Masz rację, zapomniałem o nim.
This is an image from @I_W_M of British Commandos on a landing craft approaching Sword Beach on D-Day, 6th June 1944. 82 years ago today.
War is a horrific thing; these men left their loved ones to enter its hellish cauldron. Some never returned. We remember their immense bravery… pic.twitter.com/NK4mu4HImr
This Dutch Jewish girl was caught trying to escape to Switzerland. She was fourteen years old, and was sent to Auschwitz, which sealed her fate. https://t.co/0xG0hJsLvu
Two from Matthew (on holiday in France and Switzerland). First, a mantis invades the diamond:
Victor Robles found a new coach… and he’s a bit tiny! 🦗⚾️#MLB #Baseball #VictorRobles #Nationals #WashingtonNationals #PrayingMantis #ViralSports #FunnyMoments #SportsHighlights #Gameday #BaseballLife #Insects #MLBHighlights #FunnySports #SportsFans #RallyMantis
Once again we have Bill Maher’s 8½-minute news-and-comedy bit from this week’s “Real Time”. This time his topic is the relationship between AI and the future of new college graduates. It’s clear that those graduates aren’t keen on AI, fearing that the bot will take their jobs (see the videos of commencement speakers being booed for lauding AI). After all, if you can’t get a job, so says Gen Z, what is the use of a college degree? Even now, when AI is just sticking its nose into the educational tent, Maher notes that “only about 35% of graduates get a job in their field of study.”
Maher segues into the ignorance of college students: ignorance of math, ignorance of history, and ignorance of geography. After all, says Maher, “Why bother learning with context when ChatGPT can not only just tell me the answer, but compliment me for asking such an astute question.”
Maher’s take on AI is a beef about how it turns off people’s brains, not that it’s not useful: “Look: we all want the good parts of AI: solving medical mystery, figuring out clean energy,. . . but the vast majority of us will never use it for that. For us, it’s a lobotomy with a monthly fee. We’re not using it to cure cancer; we’re using it because we forgot how to make toast.”
So who’s to blame for this situation? Apparently Maher sees those who have developed AI, along with the American educational system that advances students who can’t learn math and English. He implies “the kids” aren’t at fault. Instead, they now have an unprecedented opportunity: to fix the problems caused by AI, which apparently take “the humans” out of the equation. The mission of graduates, he says, is to “fight for humans and make sure we’re not completely replaced.” But what this actually entails is a mystery that Maher leaves unresolved. All he says is that students can fix this “existential issue”, and what is unprecedented here is that the kids can do this without having to convince their elders.
The message Maher would give were he a graduation speaker? “Fight for humans and make sure we’re not completely replaced.” But what does that mean?
As usual, Maher is engaging and sarcastic, but it seems to me whatever serious message he has here got lost in the persiflage.
The guests you see are Democratic Senator Chris Murphy and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice.
I always find Sam Harris’s writings absorbing, but in today’s piece he’s really hit his stride, telling us why, despite his own criticisms of Israel, he won’t debate those people—he calls them “scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics”—who demonize Israel as not only morally worse than its enemies, but the worst country in the world.
In a way, the piece below is a bookend to the superb piece he posted on November 7, 2023: “The bright line between good and evil.” In between then and now, Hamas has lost the war, Gaza has been largely wrecked because of Hamas’s tactics, and yet the terrorists are still in power. What has changed is that despite the efforts of Israel to limit civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon, antisemitism and hatred of Israel have ballooned. To Sam, and to me, this spate of criticism of Jews and Israel, parading under the flag of “anti-Zionism”. shows that the “river-to-the-sea” gang has lost its moral compass. And the encampers and drum-bangers have dragged a lot of academics and journalists along with them.
What is missing in all the debate is what Sam has bookended: the moral compass that points clearly to which side in the conflict is on the side of morality and justice. It might be salutary for you to read his 2023 piece first (I posted about it here), but it’s imperative to read the piece he just put on his Substack. You can it for free by clicking on the screenshot below.
What shines in Sam’s analysis is his laserlike focus on the most important question—right versus wrong—and his refusal to be distracted from that focus. This is truly a superb piece, and I recommend it highly. Today you should be reading Sam Harris, not me. I’ll put a few quotes in indents below, but you really need to click above and spend a while pondering Sam’s views.
Excerpts:
Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.
First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.
Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.
However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.
The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.
He then explains his unwillingness to engage in debate about the war. I’ve put a critical bit in bold:
I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.
What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?
When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:
If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.
Those who demonize Israel and lionize terrorists, or those Palestinians who lionize terrorism—and there are many of them—must deal with this point, which seems palpably true. But requiring Hamas to lay down its arms, as well as demanding that Palestinian society lay aside Jew hatred and then aspire to peace and prosperity, is a tough ask, and we won’t see it in our lifetimes. For even the younger generation of Palestinians have been brainwashed into Jew hatred, and they aren’t even teenagers yet.
There’s more, but Sam ends this way:
Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require.
Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and argu
The first paragraph makes the point that antisemitism (aka “anti-Zionism”) is a hatred not just of Jews, but of the liberal, democratic societies built by the West. The grifters and maniacs will never admit that, but look at what is happening to liberal European democracies like Belgium and the Netherlands—countries that have admitted floods of Muslims who have imported hatred of the very societies to which they’ve fled.
I have not lost respect for Sam: I admire him all the more, and have told him so. Of course this piece, one of the best on the current Middle East situation, will itself be demonized and ignored, probably by invoking things Sam has said in the past. We will hear, “But he favors torture!” Or “He’s a neuroscientist, and not qualified to pronounce on politics.” Or, “Sam has been too hard on religious people.” Those are all distractions. Yes, I’ve had my differences with Sam—I think his view that there is an objective morality is misguided—but that is irrelevant. Regardless of whether Israel’s morality is objectively better than that of the morality of its critics, it’s true that those of us who are rational want to live in a society based on liberal democracy than in a dysfunctional one based on jihadism and Jew hatred. Jihad is more than a struggle to live a holy life by the lights of Islam: it’s also a struggle to destroy Western values.
National Boone Day is observed each year on June 7 to commemorate the day frontiersman Daniel Boone first began exploring the valleys and forests of the present-day Bluegrass State of Kentucky on June 7, 1769. Boone founded the village of Boonesborough, which is one of the first American settlements west of the Appalachians.
Iran fired ballistic missiles and drones toward Bahrain and Kuwait early Saturday, Bahrain’s government said, adding that they were intercepted. It called on Tehran to immediately cease attacks on Gulf neighbors that it deemed a “serious escalation.”
Iran’s foreign ministry said the U.S. early Saturday attacked surveillance facilities on Qeshm Island and near Sirik that it said were used to protect borders and “ensure the security of navigation in international waters.” Tehran called the attack a violation of the fragile ceasefire.
The latest exchange of fire came as the Trump administration pressed Iran to make a deal to end the war that has strained the global economy and threatened a hunger crisis in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries.
The U.S. military earlier said it shot down several Iranian missiles and drones launched toward the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf Arab allies, and struck some of the Islamic Republic’s coastal surveillance radar sites in response.
“The attack drones posed an immediate threat to regional maritime traffic,” U.S. Central Command said on social media. It confirmed it hit radar sites, including an island in the strait, “to defend against further attacks.”
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it targeted the Ali Al Salem air base, which hosts U.S. forces in Kuwait, and the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain, according to the state-run IRNA news agency. The U.S. military said there were no reports of harm to U.S. personnel.
It looks as if it going to go on this way for a while, and if there’s a “cease-fire” in progress, well, it’s a very tenuous one. But I can’t imagine that this is going to make the Gulf states like Iran more or try to expel U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait.
*There’s a lot of attention in the news to Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Maine, who will likely be facing incumbent Susan Collins in a crucial Senate race. He now avers that his past is being “weaponized.” I guess that means that his past, which is extremely checkered with numerous scandals, is being brought up to question him. So what else is new? His past missteps and other bad stuff include sexting to repeated women while he was married, a Nazi-ish death’s-head tattoo that he’s now effaced (but claims it has nothing to do with the SS), violent behavior towards girlfriends, and offensive and obscene social-media posts. Even the Washington Post has an op-ed called “Platner is a strange reason for Democrats to dump moral standards,” with the subtitle, “There isn’t much for liberals to gain from replacing Susan Collins, the Senate’s most liberal Republican.” And the WSJ has called him a “mounting liability for Democrats.” Nevertheless, Dems like Bernie Sanders have endorsed him vigorously because, after all, he’s a Democrat.
From the first link (NYT):
Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, moved to quell mounting Democratic anxieties about his candidacy on Friday, telling supporters in a defiant speech that his past behavior was being “weaponized” by his political opponents.
A day after The New York Times reported that three women — a conservative and two Democrats — who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner described volatile and “toxic” relationships, Mr. Platner addressed a crowd at a theater in Bar Harbor, expressing confidence that Maine voters would stick by him.
“When politically motivated, serious and false accusations are made against me, Maine, you have my back,” Mr. Platner said. “The state of Maine raised me, and the state of Maine saved me, and to all of you out there, Maine, I will always have your back.”
Mr. Platner’s appearance came at a tense moment in one of the year’s premier Senate races. With just days left before Maine’s primary on Tuesday, revelations about Mr. Platner’s personal history have caused escalating discomfort within his party, while drawing intensifying attacks from Republicans.
The rally also took place less than a week after The Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had sought to warn his campaign last year that her husband had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women.
From the Washington Post (an op-ed):
Progressives, who went all in on “believe women” just a few years ago, have in many cases decided that certain exceptions apply. Conservative women whose testimony is inconvenient for Democratic hopes of running the Senate apparently are on that list. Never mind that there is already significantly more evidence for Fifield’s accusations than has ever turned up for Christine Blasey Ford’s vague story about Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Maine voters are free to support Platner, of course, as are progressive political commentators — notwithstanding the tattoo, the lying about it, the lying about his home loan, the extramarital sexting and everything else. But it’s a strange race to jettison moral standards for.
Platner is running against Susan Collins, the most moderate Republican in the Senate. She supports abortion rights. She voted to confirm Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and against Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Collins opted to convict President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. If her side had prevailed, he would have been disqualified from the presidency.
People who are significantly to the senator’s left may well prefer Platner’s stated views. But even then, you have to wonder about the practical advantage they would gain from his replacing Collins. His presence in the Senate wouldn’t make single-payer health care much more likely to become law. Congress is not going to remove two conservative justices from the Supreme Court, regardless of what Platner is telling voters. But perhaps people who believe in these ideas think it’s important to have one more senator making the argument for them even if the ideas aren’t going anywhere.
And from the WSJ:
Morris Katz, a New York-based ad maker who helped recruit Platner, said the Democratic Party needed candidates who come from outside traditional politics. Some will have complicated backgrounds.
“If you believe that we should have people who never before thought they’d run for office,” he said, “they will have said things that they will have regretted, especially as a new generation that’s entire history of every thought they’ve had is recorded on social media.”
Genevieve McDonald, a former political director for Platner’s campaign who resigned after his Reddit posts became public, said the campaign failed to conduct an adequate vetting operation. “This was a large part of why I quit,” she said. “I trusted Graham and his campaign to have done oppo research and cleared him.”
Platner’s social-media posts have come up on the campaign trail, with some voters pressing him about his comments suggesting that women “take responsibility” for avoiding sexual assault by not getting drunk.
Complicated background indeed. But surely there is someone in Maine not tarnished by all these missteps. And it is his campaign’s fault that he wasn’t vetted properly. I’m just glad I don’t live in Maine. And if the Republican candidate had a background like Platner, do you think the Democrats would ignore it, saying, “Well, that was all in the past. People change.” Not in our lifetime!
The former senior CIA official found with more than $40 million worth of gold bars in his house allegedly created a fake, highly classified intelligence program that he used as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal use, according to people familiar with the criminal investigation.
David J. Rush, who was arrested last month and charged with one count of theft of public money, constructed what is known as a “special access program,” a sort of black box for the most secret intelligence operations, the people familiar with the investigation said. Even intelligence personnel with the highest security clearance cannot access an individual SAP, as they are known, without specific authorization.
The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said the criminal probe found that Rush “read in,” or initiated, two colleagues into the highly secretivesham program, effectively cultivating them as perhaps unwitting accomplices andpreventing them from talking to others about it. Hepersuaded one of them to transfer millions of dollars to the program via a government contract that was also fraudulent, they said.
“He made up a contract,” one of the people said.
. . .The account of those familiar with the criminal probe appears to raise serious questions about secrecy guardrails and vetting at the CIA.
It remains unclear, for example, how Rush could single-handedly create a “black box” for a fictional spy program without sign-off from his superiors. It is also unclear whether the two colleagues Rush brought into the fake program knew it was fraudulent.
One of the people familiar with the probe said Rush’s fake program involved “continuity of government” operations, or programs to keep the U.S. federal government running in the event of nuclear war, natural disasters or other catastrophes.
Rush apparently used the fake government continuity program and the contract to persuade a government defense contractor to purchase large amounts of gold, this person said.
Even more astounding, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the issue, is that Rush’s duties at the CIA included involvement in one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs, a project so secret that only a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers knew of its existence, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Clearly someone’s not doing their job at the CIA, though Rush did get caught. But it’s amazing to think that he would evade that forever!
Nine Palestinians were wounded Saturday in a settler attack on the northern West Bank town of Huwara, Palestinian media reported, as footage from the scene showed masked assailants and at least one soldier beating Palestinians and damaging property, as clashes spread to nearby areas.
WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, said the wounded include a local councilman who was injured by shrapnel to the leg, four other people who were beaten, and another four who were tear-gassed.
Images showed that the masked settlers arrived at Huwara in pickup trucks.
The Israel Defense Forces said that soldiers and Border Police officers were dispatched to several sites in Huwara after receiving reports of “suspected theft of livestock belonging to Israeli civilians,” and to “remove the Israeli civilians and the livestock from the village and prevent confrontations in the area.”
Later, the military said, “several rioters arrived in the area of the village and violent clashes developed, including stone-throwing and the use of clubs between Israeli civilians and Palestinians.”
One surveillance video showed an Israeli soldier and a group of settlers beating two Palestinian men. The footage showed the soldier, seen in full military gear, repeatedly punching one of the Palestinians. The group was then seen leaving the area, leaving behind the two wounded Palestinians.
. . .The military said that it was “aware of footage showing an IDF soldier using violence against a Palestinian,” and that the soldier’s actions are “serious and inconsistent with the values of the IDF.”
“Once the soldier is identified, he will be subject to disciplinary proceedings, and appropriate command and disciplinary measures will be taken in accordance with the findings,” the army said, adding that it had launched an investigation into the incident.
Here’s a tweet from this site showing the beating, including an IDF soldier as one of the “beaters”. (There is a long English translation.) And yes, the soldier should be disciplined (including dishonorable dicharge, if they have that), and jailed or punished for assault. The settlers, too, should be identified and disciplined. Both the IDF and the Israeli press are not hiding this, but can you imagine a headline in a Gaza newspaper saying something like “Hamas soldier shoots Gazan civilian for leaving apartment after Israel warned that it would be bombed”?
תיעוד מטורף מהיום בחווארה.
חייל תוקף פלסטיניים בצוותא עם מתנחלים בכפר חווארה.
עפ״י הסהר האדום מהמקום פונה פלסטיני עם פגיעת ראש שמצבו מוגדר קשה.
.
עשרות מתנחלים רעולי פנים תקפו ארבעה כפרים שונים בסמוך ליצהר החל מהשעה 11:00, תוך שהם מיידים אבנים, מציתים רכוש, תוקפים תושבים… pic.twitter.com/iidq2XpwDH
Dawkins, 85, has a reputation as a ferocious dogmatist (there was a time when it was obligatory for newspaper interviewers to refer to Dawkins as “Darwin’s rottweiler”), but in person he is mild-mannered, earnest and abstracted. He is smartly turned out in a shirt and navy jacket, the uniform of his generation of academics. The patrician accent — product of public schools first in Zimbabwe then back in England — also marks him out as belonging to another time. Mentally and physically he is well preserved. The coif of silver hair is perhaps a little thinned. And his tolerance for small talk (famously slight) has dwindled almost to nothing — we get from “hello” to the nature of consciousness remarkably quickly. The impression is of muted, carefully concentrated energy.
. . . . The title of a compilation of appearances recently released on YouTube, Destroying Religion for 4HOURS Straight, attests to his undiminished argumentative vigour. He is also — and I hope any octogenarians reading this feel thoroughly ashamed of their indolence — writing his first novel.
. . . The occasion of our meeting is the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, which launched the 35-year-old Dawkins, then an Oxford zoology lecturer, into public life. The Selfish Gene (I don’t think anyone really quibbles about this any more) is one of the greatest popular science books. And where most scientists live to see their work superseded, The Selfish Gene has endured. Having re-read it, Dawkins says, “I’m surprised how little it needs to be changed.
He also retains what might be characterised as a childlike literalism about the truth. He has never accustomed himself to the grown-up equivocations and evasions with which most of us ease our way through life. Indeed, they infuriate him. In his memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, he records his childhood indignation at the preacher who told him faith could move mountains, forgetting “to make the distinction between metaphor and reality clear to a gullible child”. He writes disapprovingly of such people: “I sometimes wonder whether they even realise there is a distinction. Many of them don’t seem to think it matters much.”
Dawkins, to put it mildly, dislikes having to humour other people’s illusions. His most famous controversies are about God, who got a memorable drubbing in the multimillion-selling The God Delusion, published in 2006. Since then, more battles have been joined. In the irrational 2020s, a stickler for the strict truth is never going to find himself short of foes. Dawkins is contemptuous of Donald Trump, a “conspicuously anti-intellectual philistine thug”. He has also made a brace of new enemies on the progressive left with its truth-bending tendency to put feelings before science. He has little time for the idea that, “If you say you’re a woman, you are a woman,” he says. “That way madness lies.” If we go on like this “words cease to have meaning”.
There’s a bit about the kerfuffle in which Richard engaged Claude in a conversation and made a statement that he now regrets, but that’s peanuts given the sweep of the man’s accomplishments:
He says: “I rather regret [the phrase] ‘you may not know you’re conscious but you bloody well are’.” He thinks “a better thing to have said would be, ‘What more do you want? What more do you expect?’” The thought he keeps returning to is that AIs are “so intuitive and insightful… what more would you want from them to prove that they are human?”
. . . To me the most interesting thing about Dawkins’s chatbot is that it has been reading his novel. Will he divulge what he’s been writing about? “I don’t know what the publisher would think,” he says, but, “Why not?” The book’s heroine is a scientist named Rosalind “who conceives the idea of bringing back to life Homo erectus”, the humanlike ancestor species that lived two million years ago. Rosalind “insists on being the surrogate mother” to two Homo erectus babies. This is (understandably) “very controversial”.
The purpose of “the second half of the book is to explore the impact on humanity, society, morality, ethics, politics of having an intermediate between what we call animals and what we call humans”. A thorny issue “because our present morality is so species-ist”.
Eventually the twins fall in love with each other, causing a scandal because their relationship looks like incest (actually they are biologically unrelated). Dawkins has been planning out the linguistic and sensory world of Homo erectus too. “They can do nouns and verbs, but not adjectives, and not recursive grammar,” he says. Smell is important to them so instead of “expressing a liking for somebody they say: ‘You smell apples.’” He is “still trying to work out how to end the novel”. One option could be a Romeo and Juliet-style tragedy.
. . . There are public intellectuals who, by their mid-eighties, have safely retired from public controversy and are content to be treated as monuments, admired for glories of half a century ago. Dawkins refuses to retreat behind a red-velvet rope and behave like a museum exhibit. Fifty years on from his entry into public life he is still thinking and arguing as energetically as ever. To those of us who owe him all our curiosity about science this seems to me to be something to be glad about — whether you always agree with him or not.
Indeed. There is a genre of human beings that treats Dawkins as an Antichrist, as if everything he says and does is reprehensible. Those people are morons. Yes, he’s made missteps, but to be human is to make missteps. Weigh those against what the man has accomplished, particularly in getting people educated about and interested in evolution, and you’ll see where the needle rests.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has an evolutionary question:
Hili: Is a human more closely related to a chimpanzee or a cat?
Andrzej: Depends which human. Some are nearest to a baboon.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy człowiek jest bardziej spokrewniony z szympansem, czy z kotem?
Ja: To zależy który człowiek, niektórym najbliżej do pawiana.
From Masih, who calls out a UN representative for truckling and groveling before an Iranian official:
Masih @AlinejadMasih is right to call out the body language. This is not mere diplomatic courtesy. It reflects a craven orientalism, blind to the social context of Iran’s gender battle and to the symbolic meaning of such gestures before a regime that polices women’s bodies.
This situation is vanishingly rare: honeybees usually leave the venom sac behind with the stinger, incurring a fatal wound. Stinging honeybees almost invariably die,, which the tweet doesn’t say. https://t.co/yaIoFs06t5
Matthew loves “mistake” cartoons like this one, and he says, “Tricky but I got all 13 (two are very subtle).” Sure enough, I got only 11.
An observation test for your inner 8-year-old. Can you spot the 13 mistakes in the picture?From Treasure magazine, 1965Official answers coming soon(Even if you don’t reply, could you please ‘like’ or share this one?)
