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 have a busy day and can’t brain otherwise, so I’ll put up a video of the entire T.A.M.I. Show, an epochal rock and roll show, with many greats (see below) from 1964.
Why epochal? Well, for one thing, it introduced a white audience (I can’t see any non-whites in it) to black music, and not just soul music, but the blackest of black music: the music of James Brown, also known as the “Godfather of Soul” or “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” (he was). He blew away most of the other performers, who were numerous and themselves good musicians. Chuck Berry also appears twice (see below), and there was also more standard soul music that must have been new to most of the white students, including Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. I would date this show as the beginning of popularity of black rock and roll, though others might differ.
From Wikipedia:
T.A.M.I. Show is a 1964 concert film released by American International Pictures It includes performances by numerous popular rock and roll and R&B musicians from the United States and England. The concert was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 28 and 29, 1964. Free tickets were distributed to local high school students. The acronym “T.A.M.I.” was used inconsistently in the show’s publicity to mean both “Teenage Awards Music International” and “Teen Age Music International”.
In 2006, T.A.M.I. Show was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
. . . T.A.M.I. Show is particularly well known for the performance of James Brown and the Famous Flames, which features his legendary dance moves and explosive energy. In interviews, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has claimed that choosing to follow Brown and the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) was the worst mistake of their careers, because no matter how well they performed, they could not top him. In a web-published interview, Binder takes credit for persuading the Stones to follow Brown, and serve as the centerpiece for the grand finale in which all the performers dance together onstage.
It used to be nearly impossible to see this (I watched it on a rented CD), but now much of it, including James Brown’s performance, is on YouTube—for free. Here’s the set list in the entire concert, in order of appearance (from Wikipedia):
Do NOT miss James Brown, who comes on (with his Famous Flames) at one hour, 17 minutes into the show. As far as I can see, this video incorporates most but not all of the performances, and not in the order listed above. You can scroll through it to see your favorites, but James Brown’s appearance was historic for rock and roll, so don’t scroll past that one. Chuck Berry does a good performance at the start and then again at 13:30.
Posting will be light today as I have three meetings/events to attend. I am supposed to be retired!
Those of you with photos please send them along, as I have about three more batches before Armageddon hits. Thank you!
Today we have the second batch of photos from Sri Lanka contributed by reader MichaelC—and one video (his earlier batch on the flora is here). Michael’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Sri Lankan Fauna!
Unlike the orchids and Angel’s Trumpets, which kindly stayed still for me, most of the animals did not. So few of my critter photos are well focused. Even so, some are interesting.
An Indian Elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) snorkeling its way across a lake! Right behind this fella were two cows and a young one, also snorkeling:
Here’s the big fella coming out of the lake….:
….to join a herd of some thirty other elephants. We were in an open vehicle on a tour of Wasgamuwa National Park. This is a close up showing a newborn calf. There were a number of Sri Lankan biologists there in other vehicles documenting the little one, which they said was only four days old:
These are all wild elephants who are accustomed to gawking tourists. Nevertheless, our guides were very stern about never leaving the vehicle. Elephants tolerate people, but they don’t like us. That’s by design. Sri Lankans value their elephants and don’t want to cull them in order to keep them from destroying crops. They do not kill elephants unless they become a threat to people. So farmers use what are essentially paint ball guns to shoot them. Stings like hell, but does no harm. The elephants learn to avoid people, but the process makes them cranky and unpredictable. Indeed, my soon-to-be-wife and I (and a bunch of other guests) were chased off a dinner set up on a beach in Yala National Park by a cranky bull elephant. The resort had “spotters” positioned around the resort watching for elephants. A familiar, bad-tempered bull decided he didn’t want any humans on his beach, so the spotters came running.
This is a Brahminy Kite (Haliastur indus). They follow the herds and gobble up things they stir from the grass.
Asian Green Bee-eater (Merops orientalis) the birds are welcome visitors to Sri Lankan, migrating in from India (I suppose) part of the year. They are very pretty and have a wonderfully beautiful song:
A Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) with a disappointed Mugger Crocodile (Crocodylus palustris). This was the last in a series of shots of the two. The croc tried to sneak up on the egret, but the bird saw him the whole time. It was hilarious because the croc thought it was being so stealthy but the bird just carried on fishing and was like; “dude, you know I can see you, right?”.:
These Hanuman langurs (Semnopithecus sp.?) are notorious thieves. But this guy was part of a small troop who completely ignored us:
Bengal monitor (Varanus bengalensis). This guy was more than a meter long!:
Lagniappe! A short video of immature bull elephants working out the pecking order. Or maybe just showing off. The young males spent a lot of time jousting like this. Surely it must be important behavior because otherwise, instead of spending their time and energy doing this, they could be eating and growing:
Welcome to Monday, February 9, 2026, and National Bagel and Lox Day, one of the few ways I’ll eat fish. I don’t know who got the idea to put salmon on a bagel with cream cheese, but the idea was, as the kids say, “genius”. Below is a a photo from the Wikipedia “Bagel and cream cheese” page. First, some history:
In American Jewish cuisine, cream cheese toppings (colloquially called “schmear“) of bagels have particular names. For example, a bagel covered with spread cream cheese is sometimes called a “whole schmear” bagel. A “slab” is a bagel topped with an unspread slab of cream cheese. A “lox and a schmear” is a bagel with cream cheese and lox or smoked salmon. Tomato, red onion, capers and chopped hard-boiled egg are often added. These terms are used at some delicatessens in New York City, particularly at Jewish delicatessens and older, more traditional delicatessens.
The lox and schmear likely originated in New York City around the time of the turn of the 20th century, when street vendors in the city sold salt-cured belly lox from pushcarts. A high amount of salt in the fish necessitated the addition of bread and cheese to offset the lox’s saltiness.It was reported by U.S. newspapers in the early 1940s that bagels and lox were sold by delicatessens in New York City as a “Sunday morning treat”, and in the early 1950s, bagels and cream cheese combination were very popular in the United States, having permeated American culture.
Jewish cuisine is pretty dire as ethnic cuisines go, but a bagel with lox and a schmear is surely its glory and apotheosis:
There’s a Google Doodle honoring ice skating in the Olympics (they change the sport every day or so). Click below to go to the AI site explaining figure skating:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 9 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Sports: The Seattle Seahawks crushed the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60 (or LX, as they say), with the final score 29-13. I watched about five minutes and read the Italian novel The Leopard instead, as I wanted to finish it last night. It was superb and I recommend it very highly. All the news about the Super Bowl appears to be Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and I still don’t know who Bad Bunny is, clearly showing that I am ignorant of modern music.
Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, played a substantial role in supporting the creation of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of President Bill Clinton’s signature post-White House endeavors, new documents released by the Justice Department show.
Ms. Maxwell took part in budget discussions related to the first Clinton Global Initiative conference; talked through challenges about it with both Clinton aides and Publicis Groupe, the company that produced the inaugural event; and arranged to wire $1 million to pay Publicis for its work on “the Clinton project,” according to emails in the massive cache of documents collected as part of the government’s investigations of Mr. Epstein.
The source of the money is unclear, including whether Mr. Epstein provided the funds. However, the emails show that he was aware of the payment.
“Ask him to tell you why i million now and where will it be going,” Mr. Epstein wrote to Ms. Maxwell a few days after she received the wiring instructions from Publicis.
Ms. Maxwell’s involvement in the launch of the Clinton Global Initiative took place in 2004, before Mr. Epstein’s 2006 indictment and 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of prostitution with a minor, and long before Ms. Maxwell, a daughter of the media baron Robert Maxwell, was sentenced in 2022 to two decades in prison for conspiring with Mr. Epstein to sexually exploit underage girls.
The emails support an assertion Ms. Maxwell made last year in an interview with the Justice Department that she played a key role in helping set up the global conference.
Mr. Clinton has said he stopped speaking with Mr. Epstein sometime before his 2006 indictment. In a statement, Angel Ureña, a spokesman for the Clintons, said the former president had “called for the full release of the Epstein files” and “has nothing to hide.”
Again, there’s no evidence so far that Clinton participated in any of Epstein’s illicit activities, and this was all before Epstein had been convicted for the first time. Nevertheless, there are allegations that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island, and the ex-President (and Hillary) also refused to testify before Congress, though I think they’ve since agreed to do so. What can I say?—news is scant and papers are touting associations like this that may well turn out to be nothing.
Iran has sentenced the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi to more than seven more years in prison after she began a hunger strike, her supporters said Sunday, as Tehran cracks down on all dissent following nationwide protests and the deaths of thousands at the hands of security forces.
The new convictions against Mohammadi come as Iran tries to negotiate with the US over its nuclear programme to avert a military strike threatened by Donald Trump. Iran’s top diplomat said on Sunday that Tehran’s strength came from its ability to “say no to the great powers”, striking a maximalist position just after negotiations in Oman with the US.
Mohammadi’s supporters cited her lawyer, Mostafa Nili, who had spoken to her. Nili confirmed the sentence on X, saying it had been handed down on Saturday by a court in the city of Mashhad.
“She has been sentenced to six years in prison for ‘gathering and collusion’ and one and a half years for propaganda and two-year travel ban,” he wrote. Mohammadi had received another two years of internal exile to the city of Khosf, about 740km (460 miles) south-east of the capital, Tehran, the lawyer added.
Iran did not immediately acknowledge the sentence.
Supporters say Mohammadi has been on a hunger strike since 2 Februrary. She had been arrested in December at a memorial ceremony honouring Khosrow Alikordi, a 46-year-old Iranian lawyer and human rights advocate who had been based in Mashhad. Footage from the demonstration showed her shouting, demanding justice for Alikordi and others.
Supporters had warned for months before her December arrest that Mohammadi, 53, was at risk of being put back into prison after she received a furlough in December 2024 over medical concerns. While that was to be only three weeks, her time out of prison lengthened, possibly as activists and western powers pushed Iran to keep her free. She remained out even during the 12-day war in June between Iran and Israel.
Mohammadi has had multiple heart attacks, convulsions, and surgery for what might have been bone cancer. But she has a Nobel Prize, and is serving time as a political prisoner. Iran should let her go, preferably overseas where she can get decent medical care. I don’t know if, were she released, she would want to stay in Iran, but she will likely die in prison if they don’t let her go soon.
I majored in English, which baffled many of my friends and, I think, worried my parents. Sometimes, when I’m confronted by the salaries of first-year software engineers and the technical training that such salaries require, I worry I made a mistake.
But I remember, too, the first time I read Paradise Lost and felt that there might be more to the world than I knew. I had always considered myself a bookworm, but it wasn’t until I enrolled in my major that I learned that reading the right books, and reading them with other people, was a different experience altogether. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about the problem of evil, or wondered about the existence of fate, before reading Paradise Lost. But reading John Milton gave these questions force and meaning to a degree that nothing prior had. If angels made by God to live in heaven couldn’t resist temptation, what hope was there for me to try to live according to my own values? In other classes, I learned statistical modeling and facts about recent American foreign policy. But nothing gave my life more urgency than the questions that I found in literature. Studying the humanities, for me, was like replacing a too-dim lightbulb. Suddenly I became aware of what was, and always had been, around me. There is so much to the world that I didn’t (and still don’t) know, and before I began studying the humanities, I had no idea that there was so much I was ignorant of.
Much has been made recently about the decline in reading among young people, especially those enrolled at elite universities known for rigorous humanities programs. Professors fret over declining enrollments. While smaller liberal arts colleges shutter, state flagships cut programs, and elite schools reduce Ph.D. admissions and consolidate departments.
While some of this is the result of decades of academic overproduction, practical degree programs absorbing the time of students, and yes, the Internet-phones-AI tripartite, the crisis of the humanities also comes from a lack of clear understanding of what the humanities are for. So argues Humanistic Judgment: Ten Experiments in Reading, a new book published by Yale University Press. Edited by Benjamin Barasch, David Bromwich, and Bryan Garsten—the latter two are Yale professors—the essay collection examines the current state of the humanities.
In recent decades, Bromwich argues in his introduction to the book, the academy has become less focused on understanding the goal of humanistic study as the cultivation of judgment or the development of self-knowledge or even inquiry into the nature of reality and humanity and the world, but rather focused on understanding texts through the lenses of cultural and political debates.. . .
. . .Humanistic study in the Western tradition has long been taught in seminar-style dialogues, taking after Socrates. Scholars commonly refer to works as “in conversation with one another.” At the center of the liberal arts lies this precept that education cannot be a solitary project. In reading and conversing and debating, the student of the humanities is, ideally, always exposed to one who experiences a text, or a painting, or the world differently. Just as reading might expose one’s ignorance, so too might the classroom. But this humility, in turn, should always lead to a desire to understand reality more deeply. In this vein, Barasch, in his contribution to the essay collection, discusses the work of journalist James Agee, writing, “Agee’s radical humanism is a craving for reality, a desire to live in the world as it is, and as he is. In becoming real to himself he discovers again and again the separateness, and thus the reality, of others.”
The sciences, social sciences, and technical fields are noble, good pursuits. But we do a disservice to young people when we discourage them from pursuing the liberal arts and treat education as the mere acquisition of skills and knowledge. To withstand the challenges posed by scientism and politics and AI and declines in reading, the humanities need positive accounts of their value. They have an excellent one in Humanistic Judgment.
I don’t like the “scientism” bit nor the implication that the humanities helps us “understand reality more deeply” unless that means “subjective reality” or “the fact that different people have different viewpoints.” But, as I said in my Quillette piece, the arts (I’m excluding quasi-scientific humanities fields like economics and sociology), the value of the humanities is to apprehend the diversity of viewpoints of others, and to expand our understanding of how other people view the world.
*I was pulling for Lindsay Vonn to get an Olympic medal in downhill skiing. It was less than two weeks ago that she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, a ligament that stabilizes the knee. You’d think that that would end her plans to ski, but this is one tough woman, and although she’s 41, she was bent not just on competing, but on winning. All that came to a grim end when she crashed painfully in yesterday’s competition. The latest report is that she broke her left leg and underwent surgery to stabilize it.
Lindsey Vonn’s pursuit of a downhill medal in her fifth Olympic Games ended violently Sunday morning here with a gruesome crash that left her screaming in pain and being airlifted from the mountain.
Vonn was the 13th of a scheduled 36 athletes to take to the course under baby blue skies at this stunning resort town in the Dolomites. She was just 10 days removed from a crash that tore the ACL in her left knee, and her comeback for these Olympics had already been made possible by a replacement of her right knee.
But with teammate Breezy Johnson, who won gold in the event, waiting at the bottom, Vonn — who was third fastest in Saturday’s final training run — barely got to evaluate herself against the competition before disaster struck. Thirteen seconds into a run that would have taken more than a minute and a half, she clipped the fourth gate with her right arm.
The contact sent Vonn spinning, with snow flying around her. Her head and shoulder violently drove into the surface of the course before she flipped again, her legs splayed.
Various broadcasts captured audio of Vonn crying, “Oh my God!” The crash occurred at noon local time, and it took just nine minutes for a helicopter to arrive to begin the process of flying her from the mountain.
“Certainly hoping she is okay after that terrible crash,” the public address announcer belted to a once buoyant crowd that had grown essentially silent.
. . . In a World Cup career that extends back more than two decades — and includes 84 victories and three Olympic medals, including gold in the downhill in 2010 — Vonn has been injured countless times. Never, though, in this kind of spotlight.
Her comeback bid that began last season — after the knee replacement allowed her to ski without pain for the first time she could remember — had been enormously successful. She won two World Cup downhill races this season, was the leader in the standings and had not finished out of the top three in five downhill starts. This comeback wasn’t a lark. This comeback was legit.
It’s sad, but you have to give her credit; she knew the danger and skied anyway. And after a knee replacement some time ago! She’ll be ok financially, and she had her medals. I doubt she’ll be back at 45 for the next Olympics, but you have to give her kudos for courage and diligence. Here’s a video of her accident (click on “Watch on YouTube” or here.
I couldn’t stop blinking back tears, and I couldn’t understand why.
I’d just walked out of a movie called “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Lee was the founder of the American Shakers, a tiny utopian Christian sect that started in England in the mid-18th century. Lee brought a small band of followers to the United States shortly before the Revolution.
The Shakers were known for their ecstatic worship (hence the name), their egalitarianism and pacifism, their absolute commitment to celibacy and their furniture. Shakers committed themselves to excellence in all things, and their craftsmanship was impeccable.
I’m not exactly the target audience for a film about chair-making religious extremists. I’m more the kind of moviegoer who’s drawn to Will Ferrell or light sabers or dragons. Also orcs. I find great meaning in superhero movies. But my wife and son were going, and I wanted to hang out with them.
So I went, a bit skeptically, hoping that perhaps I might get to see a new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey.” But then the movie started, and it broke my heart.
. . .In Ann Lee’s case, her radical faith, which mirrored Christ’s and the Apostle Paul’s commitment to singleness and celibacy, also manifested itself in radical love, both for people inside her community and outside it.
In essence, Lee and her followers turned to God and said — as so many believers have — I will do anything for you. And they heard God’s ancient answer to that declaration: Love thy neighbor. And your neighbor includes the enslaved Black man, and the white indentured servant who possessed so few rights, and the Native American who was slowly but surely being driven from his land.
Hours after the movie, I finally realized why I had tears in my eyes. In the final scene, you see Lee’s plain wooden casket sitting alone under a painting of a beautiful tree.
In that moment, you could clearly see the gap between American hope and American reality. And I was reminded once again of one of George Washington’s favorite Bible verses, Micah 4:4 — “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.” In his writings, Washington referred to it almost 50 times.
. . .And so it is with this nation we love. In 250 years, the already of American liberty has expanded. We are a better and more decent nation than the one Ann Lee encountered. But as we see state brutality and state violence spill out across our streets, we know that we are not yet fulfilling the promise of the declaration.
Ann Lee died in 1784. When she was reportedly reinterred in the 1820s, she was found to have a fractured skull. It’s 2026 now, and we still see beatings in the streets. There are still too many caskets under the tree of liberty. But the tree is still alive, and it continues to grow. May we all sit securely in its shade one day.
It looks like the movie broke his heart because it reminded him of Trump’s America. That is a stretch at best. I will see the movie, but won’t go to it looking for analogies between 18th century America and today’s America. I will go to learn a bit about history (the Shakers were celibate, so could grow only through converts) and to admire the artistry.
Here’s the official trailer:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two downstairs cats affirm their pledge:
Szaron: Between us, veganism is not my option.
Hili: Not mine either.
In Polish:
Szaron: Między nami mówiąc, weganizm nie jest moją opcją.
Hili: Moją też nie.
From Masih; the mothers of murdered protestors console each other:
A mother of a sports champion killed in the recent uprising stood at the grave of another grieving mother and held her hands, saying: “Your child is not alone.”
Immediately, other mothers began shouting their children’s names, names the Islamic Republic wants erased.
From Bryan, a long (8-min) clip of Peter Boghossian practicing “street epistemology”. Peter is damned by progressives, but as you see he’s really good at practicing the Socratic method on ignorant youth (and oy! is this youth ignorant!):
@peterboghossian encountered one of the most brainwashed students ever captured on camera. This perfectly illustrates the problem at the center of all of this pic.twitter.com/nr9V5bCyVt
From Matthew, a hilarious Instagram video (sound up) featuring a British t.v. presenter pretending to ask for kitschy items in a British store. Click on screenshot to watch, or go here to see the original. Ms. Welby cracks herself up.
I LOVE the Edwardian fox with a ruff and human hands who plays the cello:
I used to subscribe to the New York Review of Books, which, while sometimes a repository for boring academic cat-fights, often included engaging and illuminating articles—until fabled editor Bob Silvers died in 2017. Now, under the leadership of editor Emily Greenhouse, the magazine, always Left-leaning, seems to have become more progressive.
The article by gender scholar Paisley Currah in the December issue, for example, fully accepts the argument that trans people are fully and legally equivalent to the sex that they transitioned to or think they are, not their natal sex. While for most issues trans people should have the same legal rights as cis people, I’ve argued that in a few cases, like sports, confinement in jails, and right to have a rape counselor or battered-woman’s helper the same as one’s natal sex, trans “rights” conflict with women’s “rights”. Further, an enlightened resolution of those “rights” involves accepting the biological definition of sex, based on gamete type, rather than the self-identification of sex adopted by many gender activists and “progressives.”
You can read the NYRB article by clicking below, or find it archived here.
What’s useful about Currah’s article is its summary of the history of legislation involving both biological sex and self-identified gender, as well as discrimination against women if they stepped outside what was seen as their “proper roles”. What’s not so useful is that Currah swallows the whole hog of “progressive” gender activism, arguing that those who hew to the biological definition of sex are not only endangering feminism (in fact, the opposite is true), but buttressing the Right, including Trump and Team MAGA. Here he is wrong, for he neglects the many liberals who question the view that you are whatever sex you think you are. (Most Americans, for example, do not think that trans-identified men (“trans women”) should compete on women’s sports teams.) Currah further argues, also mistakenly, that legislation accepting that biological sex can matter legally, is really “anti trans”. I would argue that, at least in the cases I mentioned above, it is in fact “pro woman.”
There’s no doubt that much of the legislation involving trans people is meant to buttress a conservative, religious-based agenda, and I disagree with a lot of it (I think, for example, that there’s no good reason to ban transgender people from the military). But when there are real clashes of rights, what we need is discussion and argumentation, not name-calling or claims that adherence to a definition of sex based on biology is designed to “erase” trans people—or rests at bottom on bigotry.
You can see where Currah is going at the outset:
On April 27, 2023, Kansas became the first state in the country to institute a statewide definition of sex. “A ‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” the law declared, “and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” Since then dozens of state legislatures have introduced similar bills; sixteen have passed. In Indiana and Nebraska governors have issued executive orders to the same end. Each of these measures effectively strips transgender people of legal recognition.
While Currah, tellingly, never gives a definition of “man” or “woman,” he seems to tacitly accepts the self-identification principle: “a woman is whoever she says she is,” regardless if that person has had no hormone therapy or surgery, and has a beard and a penis. He rejects the biologicaL sex definition on the grounds that so many seemingly intelligent people do. People like Steve Novella and Agustín Fuentes, for example, argue that gamete-based sex is associated or can be disassociated from many other traits, including chromosome type, hormonal titer, chromosome content, and morphology, so there is no one way to define biological sex. I won’t go into the arguments about how a gamete-based defintion is both nearly universal and also helps us make sense of biology; I’ve gone through that a million times. If you want a good take on sex, see Richard Dawkins’s Substack article). Here’s Currah again:
There is no single sound definition of “biological sex.” Even if you know the chromosomes of a fertilized egg, you can’t definitively determine which type of reproductive cells will develop. . . .
But that definition, too, flies in the face of current knowledge. Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia. For most people, these characteristics generally align in a single direction, male or female. But they won’t for everyone. At birth some people, often labeled intersex, don’t fall neatly into the male or female column.
Most people? The frequency of true intersex people in the population, estimated by serious people rather than ideologues, lies between about 1 in 5600 and 1 in 20,000. This means that, for all intents and purposes, sex is a true binary.
Currah’s implicit definition of “sex” based on self-identification leads him to reject all forms of discrimination involving biological sex, including the “hard case” of sports, where biology makes the crucial difference:
That coercion isn’t confined to trans people: the current wave of efforts to enshrine biological definitions of sex pressures cis people, too, to conform to a conservative vision of gender difference. A sports ban in Utah led officials to investigate the birth sex of a cis girl after parents of her competitors complained.
And while he’s again not explicit about gender medicine—at a time when “affirmative care” is being recognized as harmful and is being rolled back for young people—he seems to buy that, too, and without age limits:
A blitz of anti-trans executive orders requires that passports list birth sex, trans women in federal prisons be housed with men and denied transition-related medical care, and federal employees use bathrooms associated with their birth sex.
I am not as concerned with bathroom bills (though single-person bathrooms are one solution) as with medical care. No, allowing a 12-year old girl to have a double mastectomy, or a teenage boy to start taking estrogen or testosterone blockers, or any adolescent to take pubery blockers, do not comprise an “enlightened” form of care. What about therapy—objective therapy? What about the fact that the vast majority of gender-dysphoric adolescents not given hormones or surgery eventually resolve as gay people as opposed to trans people?
Currah’s main conclusion is that accepting a biological definition of sex, and thinking that biological sex matters, are not only bigots bent on erasing trans people, but also are doing severe damage to feminism:
By campaigning to make birth sex the sole basis for legal distinctions between men and women, advocates of a “gender critical” feminism evidently hope to cordon off trans women from the rest of womanhood without jeopardizing cisgender women’s access to the rights and freedoms that feminism won. But the logic of this position in fact aligns with—and ultimately serves—the desire to roll back feminism itself. That trans and nonbinary people have been able to move beyond their birth sex classifications is due precisely to the successes of the women’s liberation movement. And that movement’s most influential social victory, the decoupling of ideas about biology from ideas about how women ought to be, is precisely the achievement under threat today.
Currah doesn’t realize that liberals like me don’t give a damn about women’s “roles” or “how women ought to be,” but do care about the difference that biology makes when rights clash between groups. He doesn’t realize that those on the Left who emphasize biology are not “transphobes,” but accept trans people but also care about women’s rights—the rights of natal women. (Note that if you think you can be whatever sex you think you are, there is no such thing as “women’s rights”; there are just “people’s rights.” This goes along with the inability of those favoring trans rights, including the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Skrmetti case, to even define “man” and “woman”.)
In fact, what does “feminism” even mean for those who think that you’re whatever sex you think you are? Does a biological man who suddenly identify as a woman gain a new set of “rights”? If so, what are they beyond the “right” to be called whatever pronouns you want? Tarring one’s opponents as conservatives, bigots, or transphobes accomplishes nothing; in fact, it’s counterproductive. And society is beginning to realize this.
I will tar people like Currah, though, with one word: “misguided”.
Well, I can’t omit Bill Maher’s 8-minute weekly comedy monologue, especially because this week it’s about betting. I’ve always called gambling, betting enterprises, and lotteries “taxes on the stupid”, because people who spend their money that way don’t seem to know that the expectation of money is far less than they’re spending. And it’s a regressive form of taxation, as the poor spend more than the rich, both absolutely and relatively. It’s just an easy way for governments to raise money. I don’t approve of government-funded gambling at all.
In this episode, a good one, Maher recounts the history of gaming in America, and although he opposes it, he also says it’s okay because he’s a libertarian. On the other hand, he argues that gambling is un-American because it puts fate rather than initiative in control of your life. (Maher clearly is not a determinist.) You’ll appreciate the picture of a young, entrepreneurial Maher at 6:56.
Did I ever gamble. Well, when I used to be in a place that had slot machines I’d put a quarter in one and that was it (I never won). One time I really did want to make a substantial bet was when I was in Scotland some years ago, and wanted to bet that the Queen Mother would live to be at least 100. My girlfriend wouldn’t let me go into the betting parlor, and in the end I would have won: she lived to be 101. I was betting on her genes.
The guests include former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada Chrystia Freeland.
Today’s photos come from Ephraim Heller, who took photos at Yellowstone. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
I spent the last week of January in Yellowstone National Park hoping to photograph a wide variety of wildlife. It was a surprisingly unsuccessful trip. While the bison and coyotes cooperated, I never spotted any other mammals. Absent were foxes, wolves, otters, martens, ermine, bobcats, mountain lions, bighorn sheep, and mountain goats. I suspect that it was due to a combination of bad luck and the least snow in everyone’s memory, so (a) it was harder to spot wildlife in the sagebrush, and (b) animals were up in the hills rather than in the valleys and on the roads. Too bad!
The folks with whom I was traveling wanted to visit the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center, a nonprofit wildlife park located in the town of West Yellowstone. I normally don’t photograph animals in zoos. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, which is a poor metaphor because shooting fish in a barrel with a camera would be quite challenging. So the wolves (Canis lupus) and grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) in the following photos are not wild.
I also normally don’t shoot landscapes, but I liked the mood of the morning steam rising from this pool at the Mammoth Hot Springs:
It’s also Boy Scouts Day (scouting came to America on this day in 1909), National Molasses Bar Day, National Potato Lover’s Day (again they misplaced the apostrophe, implying that we’re celebrating only one person who loves potatoes), Opera Day, and Super Chicken Wing Day (thighs have more meat).
In honor of Opera Day, here’s another famous aria: “Vissi d’arte” from Puccini’s Tosca. This is a lovely rendition by Kiri Te Kanawa:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 8 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The latest hamhanded move by the Trump administration is posting a political video, set to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, showing Trump as a triumphant lion and his opponents as other animals, with the worst part being the depiction of the Obamas as apes (see below). The video was deleted after about 12 hours, and Trump won’t apologize for it.
President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, but he insisted he had nothing to apologize for even after he deleted the video following an outcry.
The clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was among a flurry of links posted by Mr. Trump late Thursday night. It was the latest in a pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive imagery and slurs about Black Americans and others.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Mr. Trump said he only saw the beginning of the video. “I just looked at the first part, it was about voter fraud in some place, Georgia,” Mr. Trump said. “I didn’t see the whole thing.”
He then tried to deflect blame, suggesting he had given the link to someone else to post. “I gave it to the people, generally they’d look at the whole thing but I guess somebody didn’t,” he told reporters.
Still, Mr. Trump offered no contrition when pressed. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.
The White House response to the video over the course of the day — from defiance to retreat to doubling down — was a remarkable glimpse into an administration trying to control the damage in the face of widespread outrage, including from the president’s own party.
The clip was in line with Mr. Trump’s history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants, and he has for years singled out the Obamas. Across Mr. Trump’s administration, racist images and slogans have become common on government websites and accounts, with the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging.
But the latest video struck a nerve that appeared to take the White House by surprise. The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, historically used by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings.
At first, the president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, brushed off criticism of the video and made no attempt to distance the president from it.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Ms. Leavitt said on Friday morning. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Finally, after outrage mounted, including among Republicans (the Senate’s only black Republican, Tim Scott, also objected), they pulled the video. But really, a rational and aware president would have apologized for this profusely. If Trump wants to maintain any credibility among his own party, he should start behaving himself. The fact that he seems not to realize the odious history of these monkey tropes is disturbing.
Here’s the full video, though I thought the Obama bit came at the end:
WATCH: The full Barack Obama “monkey video” portrays numerous elected officials, Republicans and Democrats, as Lion King-like characters, with Trump as a lion and king of the jungle.
Everyone’s an animal. Trump is the lion KING of the jungle
Dems are various animals. Obamas… pic.twitter.com/QEnEphdrHX
*After struggling for something to say about the voluminous Epstein files, Andrew Sullivan wrote a column called, “Notes on Epstein,” with the subtitle, “On an American elite that’s self-dealing, self-obsessed, and long past good and evil.” Well, that a bit hyperbolic, but Epstein did deal largely with the elite. Some quotes:
I’ve been struggling to write about the Epstein case — and the eponymous “files” — because, to be honest, I’ve been struggling to figure out what to think about them. I’m not a big conspiracy buff; my thoughts are far too complicated to say anything simple; and, well, sometimes life is too short to comb through acres of skeevy emails by many of the rich and powerful people I’ve spent the last 30 years desperately trying to avoid.
But here goes!
The following, it seems to me, is what really matters: an email from an Epstein friend in 2014 (long, long after Epstein’s conviction for sex with a minor):
Thank you for a fun night …
Your littlest girl was a little naughty.
No proof of an actual crime here but, in the broader context of what we know about Epstein, the mind reels at the way so many in our elite were able to ignore the abuse of minors happening in the wings. Money, glamor, and connections easily trumped any moral qualms. I guess if Catholic Cardinals can look the other way, so can Larry Summers and Brad Karp.
There’s something darker here too. The abuse of minors turned into a joke — long after Epstein’s first conviction:
Redacted: Where are you?
Jeffrey: Paris with Woody Allen
Redacted: For les pedophile convention?
Jeffrey: I think pedophilee is the plural
Redacted: lol
Lovely. Then there’s the quite obvious inference from the entire dump: these people really do look after themselves first, don’t they? This is elite network heaven, the trading of favors, the mutual backslapping, with private planes and desert islands as lubricant: catnip for populists. I don’t see a vast pedophile conspiracy in these files. I see a status-seeking parvenu with a sex addiction to underage and barely legal girls, collecting the rich and powerful as a kind of insurance for his compulsive vice.
. . . When historians review this, they’ll see the historical context: our post-Cold War Gilded Age. So much money held by so few. That’s what keeps these people buzzing around Epstein, one senses: proximity to the new mega-rich. You wonder if the sense of utter impunity they all express would be possible in an era other than our own.
. . . Which brings me to the courageous anti-anti-Semite, Keir Starmer. Trump will survive all this, but Keir very well may not. The reason he made Peter Mandelson ambassador to the US is precisely because “Mandy” is a slimy, amoral, networking sleaze — and Keir thought that was a good match for Trump. Too good, it turned out. I watched Prime Ministers’ Questions on Wednesday and could feel the tides turning. Keir knew Mandy had kept in touch with Epstein long after his conviction and appointed him anyway. He says now he just didn’t know the extent of the bond. That’s almost certainly not good enough.
So far, the only people who have actually suffered serious consequences from this are Ghislaine Maxwell, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (former prince), Peter Mandelson — who now may face criminal charges for leaking classified material — and Keir Starmer, who might be forced to leave office entirely. All Brits. Quite a contrast with the American elite, no? If only there was a smidgen of similar accountability here.
At least Sullivan called Starmer an “anti-anti-Semite.” In the UK, Mandelson’s missteps are reason enough for the PM to resign. Pity he is Labour, which of course has been ridden with antisemitism. It’s the British liberals who seem to dislike the Jews. And yes, nothing any Trump appointee could do would be enough to get the President to resign. That is inconceivable.
In a gleefully kitschy Opening Ceremony that featured ancient Romans, dancing espresso pots and a number by Mariah Carey, Italy threw open its arms to welcome the entire world to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.
Well, nearly the entire world.
In an unmistakable sign of Europe’s rapidly dimming view on America, the U.S. delegation entered the San Siro stadium here on Friday night to a chorus of boos and disapproving whistles from the international crowd of more than 65,000. The jeering only intensified when Vice President JD Vance appeared on the big screen during Team USA’s arrival.
The only other team to receive similar treatment was Israel.
Olympic organizers had braced for the possibility of anti-American sentiment inside the stadium. Small protests had already cropped up on the streets of Milan against the planned presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the city. Asked before the Games on how the Americans might be received, IOC president Kirsty Coventry said she hoped that the occasion would be “seen by everyone as an opportunity to be respectful.”
Even the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee recognized that its athletes might not be the most popular guests at the party—and made sure to warn them about the potentially frosty reception.
“We have done a ton of Games-readiness preparation with the athletes to ensure they feel comfortable and are not walking into an environment that is uncertain,” USOPC chief executive Sarah Hirshland said.
It’s okay for Europeans to boo Vance, as he’s part of a disastrous Administration, but it’s not fair to boo the American team. It not only violates the spirit of comity that’s supposed to pervade the Olympics, but it’s bigotry, pure and simple. At least half of Americans—and probably most of the American athletes—can’t stand Trump, and it’s mean to boo them. When I travel, I am tired of explaining, after I say I’m American, that I detest the Administration. Do Brits apologize for having a bad Prime Minister?
Europeans should lay off the U.S. athletes, who, with the exception of a faux anti-Trump urination in the snow (no, men can’t write like that with pee), haven’t made political gestures.
This is from American skier Gus Kenworthy’s Instagram page. (No, it’s impossible to write in the snow like this when urinating. Every guy has tried such writing, and we know this is bogus). Ten to one he used a squeeze bottle with yellow liquid and pretended that he peed:
Tehran stuck to its refusal to end enrichment of nuclear fuel in talks Friday between senior U.S. and Iranian officials, but both sides signaled a willingness to keep working toward a diplomatic solution that could head off an American strike.
According to Iranian state media, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told his U.S. counterparts that Tehran wouldn’t agree to end enrichment or move it offshore, rejecting a core U.S. requirement.
Araghchi, however, said it had been a good start, and he and Oman’s foreign minister said the parties aimed to meet again.
“We likewise had very good talks on Iran,” President Trump told reporters Friday. “Iran looks like it wants to make a deal very badly.”
The two sides didn’t meet face to face but instead held alternating discussions with Omani diplomats. Neither moved much from their initial position, people familiar with the discussions said.
Regional officials and many analysts had low expectations going into the talks, given Iran’s unwillingness to end nuclear enrichment and the U.S. insistence on including Iran’s ballistic missile program and support for regional militias in the negotiations.
Trump has signaled that he wants regime change in Iran, but he doesn’t seem to realize that he won’t get that through diplomacy, for Iran will never agree to give up its desire to make nuclear weapons. Trump must either decide to attack or he’ll decide to let the Iranian regime keep killing protestors. That is the choice he has.
Guinness World Records confirmed a massive reticulated python [Malayopython reticulatus] discovered in the Maros region of Indonesia is officially the longest wild snake to be formally measured.
The record-keeping organization said it reviewed evidence confirming the female snake measures 23 feet and 8 inches in length.
The snake is currently in the care of conservationist Budi Purwanto, licensed snake handler Diaz Nugraha and natural history photographer Radu Frentiu.
Nugraha and Frentiu said they went out in search of the impressively long snake after hearing of rumored sightings. They dubbed the serpent Ibu Baron, or “The Baroness.”
Reticulated pythons typically grow to an adult length ranging from 9 feet, 10 inches to 19 feet, 2 inches.
Here’s a video and that’s one gynormous snake! I’m glad they didn’t kill it, but why is it so still in the video?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is spooked, but Szaron calms her down:
Hili: Either I’m imagining things, or something’s there.
Szaron: We live in a world of illusions.
In Polish:
Hili: Albo mi się zdaje, albo coś tam jest.
Szaron: Żyjemy w świecie złudzeń.
Merilee sent a hilarious video from Carcass Acres. The woman is a hoot! (You may have to go to the original site to see it.) The animal names are great: Chicken Elizabeth Nugget and Debbi from Accounting!
From Masih, who rebukes Mehdi Hasan and Zohran Mamdani while showing the photo of an Iranian protestor who was flogged by the authorities. I can’t embed this, so click on the screenshot to see the whole tweet:
Speaking of Mamdani, here he is touting Islam (and adding “peace be upon him in Arabic after mentioning Muhamad); tweet provided by Luana:
“and I consider my own faith, islam, a religion built upon a narrative of migration” that’s a funny word for 1400 years of invasion, rape, and conquest at the gates of europe https://t.co/G9bgafotLJ
A flood of Iranian regime propaganda has hit @Wikipedia. More than 10,000 images and videos are being mass uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, the site’s media repository.
Almost every piece of content is watermarked by state outlets—including Khamenei’s official website and… https://t.co/Hg6HdHZSuD
This Dutch Jewish girl died in the gas chamber as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was five years old. Had she lived, she’d be 89 today. https://t.co/a9JnSOv3GA
Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue
