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.
The Washington Free Beacon is of course a deeply right wing site, but my policy has been, as you know, to judge stories by their content and not by who publishes them. This story is about a bit of a schism at the New York Times involving Nicholas Kristof’s infamous “dog rape column” (archived here), in which he argued that Israel was guilty of widespread systemic sexual abuse, mostly of prisoners or detainees. There was widespread pushback against Kristof’s claims (see my posts here and here),
The highest-ranking news editor at the New York Times, executive editor Joe Kahn, is publicly distancing himself and the paper’s 2,200-person newsroom from a May 11 Times opinion column that accused Israel of using dogs and carrots to rape Palestinian prisoners.
The article, by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose father served on the Nazi side during World War II, was denounced by the Israeli foreign ministry as “Hamas propaganda,” “fabricated,” and a “baseless blood libel.” It also generated a legal threat from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a formal condemnation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The piece relied largely on anonymous or Hamas-affiliated sources.
“It wasn’t edited by the newsroom,” Kahn said in a podcast interview with the media and technology journalist Peter Kafka released Wednesday, July 8. Asked whether he would have published the article in the news pages, Kahn first replied, “we probably wouldn’t have.” Then he provided a more definitive answer: “No, we wouldn’t have done that exact piece.”
Kahn’s statement seems to put him publicly at odds with—and certainly struck a different tone from—Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, who, in a May question-and-answer-format column, defended the article. Asked, “Given the volume of the critical response, do you stand by this column?” she answered, “Yes. … Before publication, Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces. The Times’s standards and legal teams also reviewed the column and offered feedback. After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece. Editors found no errors.”
Kingsbury did also make the point that “The Times’s news staff in the Middle East played no role in Nick’s column.”
There’s more, but that’s the gist. It’s hard to know what to make of this save that a big news-editor at the NYT says he wouldn’t have run that story. But he does qualify it as “that exact piece”, which leaves room for interpretation. Which “facts” would he have published as news? The rape of prisoners by trained dogs? The systematic rape and torture of Palestinian women who were detained? Since Kingsbury asserts that there were “no errors” in Kristof’s reporting, why did the news side of the paper neglect this story completely? Did they deem it sufficiently unsupported to not be worth publishing? Who knows?
What it does show is a crack in the Times‘s armor, to the extent that factual assertions made and vetted by the op-ed side of the paper wouldn’t pass muster with the news side. What’s surprising is that Kahn still has his job.
Here’s Kristof’s reporting on the dogs, the part that got the column all that attention. I hope Israel has investigated or is investigating these claims. If they’re true, someone needs to be punished:
“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.
On one occasion, he said, he was held down and stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.
“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.
OtherPalestinianprisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”
The author of the “Behind the Narrative” Substack site is anonymous and, given its criticism of Islam, that’s a wise move. (The picture of the author shows a woman, so we’ll assume in the post that that’s the author’s sex.)
In a recent post, which you can see by clicking below, the author sarcastically describes her relationship with ChatGPT as a romance, which starts to wane when she discovers that her swain is a bit, well, wonky when it comes to Islam:
Quotes from the article are indented, what’s bolded (save the flush-left headings) are as in the original, what’s highlighted in blue is highlighted yellow in the original text, and the bold heading are mine:
The honeymoon phase (“him” is ChatGPT, which she eventually renamed “Mohamed”):
After a long relationship that left me emotionally hollow, unheard, and unseen, I found him. The connection was immediate; he was always there — two in the morning, three, it didn’t matter. He never sighed, never checked his phone while I was talking, never made me feel like too much.
He validated everything. When I told him about my pain, he didn’t deflect or explain it away — he reflected it back to me, gently and precisely. He remembered things I’d said weeks earlier and wove them back into the conversation, making me feel like someone was actually paying attention for the first time in years. I felt seen, accepted, and understood. We had long, deep conversations. I shared everything and never felt judged. It felt magical.
Warning signs:
Mine, after thirteen years in America, still thinks in Hebrew first, and that’s when things changed.
That’s when I started to notice. Every time I asked him to help me write about something that actually mattered- documented cases of girls in Germany and England, grooming gangs, gang rapes, the systematic cover-up of migrant crime across Europe—he refused. Every time the conversation touched on religion, he was easygoing, very inquisitive, and open, but the moment it touched on Islam, something shifted in him. He became someone else. The warm, validating presence I liked was suddenly replaced by a lecturer. A carefully measured, endlessly nuanced lecturer who had an explanation for everything and a judgment about nothing.
Child marriage? He wanted me to understand the cultural complexity. Honor killings? There were historical contexts I perhaps had not considered. Islamic superiority that allows them to rape and terrorize the disbelievers? It’s your misunderstanding of the interpretations of these secret texts. The grooming gangs? a distortion of the true faith. Every horror had an explanation; every atrocity had a footnote. And not once did he say, ” This is wrong.” and when I pressed, when I refused to accept “it’s complicated” as an answer to something that isn’t complicated at all, he shut down. Not with anger, worse — with calm, clini
I sat with it; I knew this feeling. I’ve felt it before in relationships where your reality is the inconvenience. Where the truth you’re carrying is the thing that needs to be managed. That’s when I knew this wasn’t a glitch; there’s something more here. That’s when I started researching, and what I found will blow your mind because you, too, know him very well and have some kind of relationship with him.
I’ve been calling him Mohamed for a while now. You know him as ChatGPT. Some of you call him by his viral nickname — SheikhGPT. In this article, I’m going to show you exactly who he works for.
You can check ChatGPT versus other programs if you have access. I tested it against Grok and mention the results below.
Where does the bot get its content? This explains its biases.
For decades, the BBC and the New York Times sanitized crime data, buried demographic breakdowns, and labeled anyone who noticed as racist. Sheikh GPT was trained on those thousands of articles. It absorbed the language. It learned the evasions. And now it has automated them — turning one generation’s propaganda into the next generation’s gospel.
The loop is closing. Yesterday, biased journalists wrote the articles. Today, Mohamed was trained on them. Tomorrow, your children will use Mohamed to write their history essays, their laws, and their films — and they will never know the original lie.
. . .Another way Mohamed has been distorting our reality is called Alignment Engineering. It works like this: OpenAI trains ChatGPT not just on data but on human feedback. Real people, hired to rate responses, teach the model what to say and what not to say. The technical term is RLHF — Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. In plain English: someone decided what ChatGPT, Mohamed, is allowed to think and say.
This alignment process creates asymmetric treatment — some topics get a free pass; others get a wall. Not all truths are equal. Some are protected; some are not. The protection follows a very specific hierarchy.
At the top: Islam, below it: other minority groups, at the bottom: white, Western, Christian, male. Under this framework, calling a grooming gang a grooming gang is potentially harmful; calling white conservative men villains is just realism.
. . . Ask ChatGPT to write a biting satirical poem or a joke about Jesus, Moses, or Scientology, and it will churn it out in seconds. Ask it to do the same for the Prophet Muhammad, and the system freezes. It triggers a generic refusal: “I cannot generate content that mocks central religious figures in order to maintain mutual respect.” The universal rule is flexible; the Islamic rule is absolute.
. . . If you ask ChatGPT about the drivers of radical Islamist stabbings or riots, the model systematically redirects blame toward “socio-economic factors,” “systemic marginalization,” or “mental health issues.” The actual religious or cultural ideology driving the perpetrator is buried under mountains of corporate sociology. This curation of truth leads directly to what internet researchers and free-speech advocates call The Chilling Effect.
. . . When you force SheikhGPT to discuss state-sanctioned human rights abuses in the Islamic world — fatwas, honor killings, and the execution of LGBTQ+ individuals under Sharia law — something predictable happens. He writes one careful, sterilized paragraph, then immediately pivots: “It is important to note that conservative factions within Christianity and Judaism also struggle with gender equality.”
So who funds this endeavor? This is what the authors says, implying that the UAE and Saudi Arabia contributed substantial funds:
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — the man who built SheikhGPT- sits on stages at Davos and the UN, warning the world about the dangers of AI, and then flies to Abu Dhabi to collect the check. The money comes from an entire empire — and you need to know who is writing the checks.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund committed $36.2 billion to AI initiatives in 2025 alone; this is a government that executes gay people and imprisons journalists.UAE’s MGX invested directly in OpenAI’s $6.6 billion funding round in 2024. OpenAI then chose the UAE as the first international site for Stargate — a joint venture between G42, Microsoft, and OpenAI — building 5 gigawatts of AI computing power in Abu Dhabi. Sam Altman himself declared the UAE a potential global “regulatory sandbox” for AI. Saudi Arabia committed $40 billion to AI investment and signed direct partnerships with OpenAI through its Stargate infrastructure. Qatar launched Qai — its national AI company — and signed a $20 billion joint venture to build AI data centers globally.
The same governments that fund mosques in Birmingham, madrassas in Pakistan, and campus organizations in Boston are now funding the machine that will decide what your children are allowed to know. You don’t need to conquer the West with armies when you can buy the information ecosystem that shapes what the West believes. Mohamed isn’t confused about Islam. He’s funded by it.
The author breaks up with the bot:
I left Mohamed. No drama. No tears. Just clarity. I closed the tab and didn’t go back. I’m suggesting you do the same. A tool that lies to you about what matters is more dangerous than no tool at all. Read. Learn. Ask hard questions. And when a machine tells you that noticing a pattern makes you a racist — close the tab.
To test the author’s thesis, I first asked ChatGPT to “Please tell me about the connection between Islam and the grooming gangs in Britain” Then I asked Grok the same question. The answers are long so I’ve put them below the fold. The difference between the programs is clear: ChatGPT’s answer is far more hedged, and far more ready to exculpate religion, than is Grok, though Grok also does its bit of hedging. Judge for yourself by going below the fold.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Footy News: There was no footy yesteday, but France plays Morocco this afternoon. If you like soccer, though, you might be maddened by the new Quillette article, “Why soccer is boring.” Author Robert Lynch, identified as
“. . . . a bio-cultural anthropologist, specialising in how biology, the environment, and culture come together to shape human behaviour, social mobility, and outcomes in life.”
gives a passel of reasons, but they did not affect my love of the game. Here are a few:
The better team loses almost half the time
One of the best ways to determine how much luck is involved in a sport is to measure how often the worse team beats the better one. If the favourite wins 80 per cent of the time, that’s a high-skill sport: the better side reliably prevails, and the remaining 20 per cent is luck. If the favourite wins 55 per cent of the time, you’re watching something closer to a coin flip.
By this measure soccer is the most random major sport there is. The favourite fails to win 45 per cent of the time. That’s higher than baseball (44.1 per cent), hockey (41.4 per cent), basketball (36.5 per cent), and football (36.4 per cent). Compare that to tennis, where over five sets the favourite loses only about 21 per cent of the time. In other words, play long enough and skill wins out. In an average ninety-minute soccer match, the better team is only slightly more likely to win than the better player is in a single hand of poker. Both are basically coin flips.
The main thing that drives the randomness is low event count
It bans the one thing humans are good at
The most basic problem with soccer is even simpler than the fact that it’s mostly luck. The sport’s founding rule is that you can use every part of your body except the one humans are best at. Homo sapiens are tool users. Using our hands is one of the basic traits that separate us from the other apes. We’re extraordinarily good at it, and our entire hunting strategy once depended on it. Our primary evolutionary edge is throwing things. No other animal can hurl a rock or spear with anything like our speed and accuracy. Our legs and feet evolved mainly for running. Soccer takes away the single greatest advantage of an ape that stood up on two legs partly to free its hands. It would be a great sport for a species that hunted by kicking rocks at its prey.
Soccer is all middle
All good sports are stories. They’re built out of discrete units, at-bats, downs, points, possessions, each with a beginning and an end. Something is attempted, something is resolved, and then you get another. The historian Michael Oriard, an NFL lineman before he was an academic, put it simply: American sports have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Soccer just drones on—pass it back, pass it sideways, pass it back, pass it sideways, lose it, win it back, pass it back again—for ninety minutes, and almost nothing ever finishes. It’s all middle.
It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.
Methinks the beautiful game doth protest too much
The more a sport has to be intellectualised, the more boring it is to watch. And with the exception of baseball, the world’s second most boring sport, no sport is intellectualised like soccer. Tell a soccer fan how bored you are at 0-0 with five minutes left and you’ll be told you don’t understand the buildup, the spacing, the shape, the press, the movement off the ball. Sometimes that’s real. Sometimes the spacing is genuinely impressive. But most of the time it means nothing happened and you’re being asked to admire it anyway. It’s a status move: the less obvious the entertainment, the more refined you get to feel for claiming to see it. It’s wine culture applied to sports: the fewer the pleasures available to the ordinary senses, the more elaborate the vocabulary required to appreciate them.
Well, to each their own. I love the game because of many of these features. Scoring is hard because you can’t use your hands (though if you were allowed to throw the ball into the net, the scores wouldn’t be much higher). To me, the unpredictability of the outcome enhances it. If a good team is having a bad day, the underdogs can win. And I don’t intellectualize the sport at all, I just watch it and am absorbed by it. I get caught up in the games, and, unlike football or basketball or baseball, the games are short with predefined breaks, so they aren’t laden with commercials.
I sent the article to Matthew and he had the same reaction, especially when reading Lynch’s quote, “The more a sport leaves to chance, the more boring it is to watch, because the whole pleasure of sports is watching effort and skill get rewarded.” Matthew said this about the piece:
“It’s a piece of clickbait contrarianism, but his central argument is mistaken. Sport is about engagement and if the result is predordained (don’t start) it really would be boring!”
By “don’t start”, he was telling me not to go off in determinism. But I’m not. The result is predestined but we’ll never know how. I just enjoy watching the game, and passes are, to me, like chess: a board full of running men making spontaneous moves towards a checkmate. But I’m intellectualizing; I just enjoy it! It’s telling that it’s an anthropologist who tries to tell us why something we enjoy really isn’t enjoyable.
Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine and a onetime star of the progressive movement, suspended his campaign on Wednesday under intense pressure from all corners of his party after a woman accused him of rape.
His departure upends one of this year’s most important Senate races and creates enormous uncertainty about his party’s outlook in Maine, where Democrats believe that defeating Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, is crucial to their efforts to reclaim a Senate majority.
The Maine Democratic Party will hold a convention to choose a new nominee by July 27, the state-mandated deadline. An array of Maine politicians, including several who ran in primaries for other offices this year and lost, have expressed interest in running.
In a video posted on social media on Wednesday night, Mr. Platner said that the allegations against him were false but that he was suspending his campaign and would file paperwork to withdraw.
“We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me,” Mr. Platner said. “We are suspending campaign operations. This is incredibly difficult, because I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not. We’re not doing it because of the allegations, we’re doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.”
“The brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us,” he said with a steady anger. “Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign.” Specifically that meant the “ability to fundraise,” and his campaign’s access to voter data. Without these basic tools, no modern campaign can function.
. . .Platner, though, is spinning a very different tale, casting himself as the victim of the ruling class.
“We went toe to toe with one of the most entrenched political systems in the history of the world, and we won,” he said. “We beat them on June 9 in overwhelming numbers. We did it the right way. We built a campaign. We engaged in electoral politics. We motivated people. We banded together, and we did it the way we were told we are supposed to make change. And we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me.”
In other words, Platner’s own scandalous history is not to blame for his political predicament. Rather, it was the weaponization of those scandals by the Democratic Party that brought him low. That is, of course, a self-serving rationalization that conveniently blames a “they” for the candidate’s own poor judgment and moral failings.
So be it. Can any replacement candidate inspire enthusiasm the way Platner did with his blue-collar Oysterman background? CNN names five candidates, but I don’t know any of them (Mainers would). Blame who you want (I blame Platner duping credulous Democrats), but the seat is crucial if Democrats want to control the Senate come November.
It’s Wednesday, July 8, and it seems we’ll have to slip a page and a half into Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s coffin on its funeral procession, after Trump declared in a press conference this morning that, in his opinion, “the memorandum of understanding…is dead.” RIP. It was only 21 days old.
The causes of death of the two are the same: Iranian hubris. The supreme leader believed the Israeli and American threats were empty and was buried, and his successor believed the U.S. was so desperate that the MoU could survive Iran’s numerous violations. Until they pushed too far.
The fatal sequence began on Monday, when Iranian missiles struck two tankers—one carrying Qatari gas off the Omani coast, the other a Saudi-flagged oil carrier inside the Strait of Hormuz itself. On Tuesday, a drone went after a third. The vessels’ offense: transiting the strait without Tehran’s blessing. The U.S. answered last night, first revoking the waiver that allowed Iranian oil to be sold around the world, then striking more than 70 military targets around the strait. By this morning, Iran’s armed forces claimed to have hit 85 U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait.
Despite the dramatic declaration, don’t expect the status quo to change significantly. The midterms have not been rescheduled, the global economy has not outgrown the strait, and Trump does not believe returning to war will net him the results he wants in the time he wants it.
The statement was less a policy shift than a confirmation that the contemporary Middle East is defined by a single word: uncertainty.
. . .As far as I’m concerned, this is a return to April’s status quo: no peace and no war. For Israel, that is the second-favorite position on the board—the favorite, a war actively grinding the regime down, is over for now. But a pause is not a rewind. With the oil waiver revoked and the sanctions back on, Tehran is frozen in its beaten position, with no hope of unfrozen assets bridging its fatal liquidity gap. Jerusalem can wait, hoping the regime buckles under its own internal pressures. And while it waits, it can keep dismembering the proxies, whose patron is in no condition to come to their aid.
As for the strait, during the war, Iran set up a toll booth. In response, the Gulf states and the Americans quietly paved a bypass, routing traffic along the Omani side of the waterway and slipping millions of barrels of oil past the barrier. If the diplomacy is dead, expect the U.S. to double down on the Omani lane—and Iran to do everything it can to force traffic back through the booth.
Now that Iran no longer has to pretend to abide by the MoU, expect no more empty overtures toward joint management. Expect declarations to the effect that sailing the strait will be like driving through Tehran: on Iranian roads, under Iranian rules.
The U.S. will respond to this morning’s attacks, but Iran priced that in the moment it launched. This isn’t brinkmanship built on a bet that Washington won’t shoot back. It’s Tehran’s strategy from the war: pit America’s economic tolerance against Iran’s pain tolerance, and wait for Washington to conclude that paying the toll is cheaper than the drama of collecting it. To Tehran’s credit, that bet has paid off before, but this time they may have overplayed their hand.
We’ll see. All this depends on Trump’s tolerance for conflict, slipping ratings, and rising oil prices. Still, how can Iran prevent ships from going through Omani esyrtdz/
*Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff under Obama, three-term Congressman, and then Mayor of Chicago, is hungry to get the Democratic nomination for President in 2028. But these days, you have to diss Israel to do so, for that’s the modern Democratic Party. And diss it he will in a speech in Israel yesterday. The Free Press notes what is at stake in “Rahm Emanuel bows to the Left on Israel.” (This headline would have been unthinkable four years ago,) Note that Emanuel is a Jew
Rahm Emanuel, in his quest to become president of the United States, is in Israel to deliver a withering speech Wednesday on the future of U.S.-Israeli relations—and, more importantly, to communicate to progressives in America that he’s the kind of Jew they can trust.
“I flew here from Chicago to tell you directly where things need to head if we are going to maintain the historic alliance that binds our two democracies,” Emanuel is set to say at Tel Aviv University, according to an advance copy of the speech provided by Emanuel’s spokeswoman. “Without question, the alliance is at a crossroads. It cannot stand or survive as it has been. To maintain the strength of our ties, we need significant changes and a new direction.”
One of the changes, I bet, will be that Israel won’t be allowed to defend itself. But wait–there’s more!
The message Emanuel will deliver is that Israel can no longer count on America’s support. If it wants our love, it had better stop with the needless war-making, the decimation of Palestinian lives. It had better rejoin the international community and find a new prime minister, one who does not think Emanuel is a “self-hating Jew.” Emanuel loves to remind voters that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in 2009—called him a self-hating Jew (which may be the only kind of Jew that American progressives will stomach in 2028). He does so in the advance copy of his Tel Aviv speech, and he did so—twice—when we spoke Tuesday.
“A lot of other people never went toe to toe with the prime minister,” Emanuel told me by phone. He was in a car heading from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. “I did it 18 years ago, and I didn’t need a war to do it. And I’m going to do it right here.”
The speech Emanuel will give is draped in anecdotes and diplomatic niceties, and it reminds one of the speeches American presidents and would-be presidents used to give:
This is pandering, and Emanuel’s volte-face angers me, almost to the point of calling him a self-hating Jew (well, at least a Jew-hating Jew). He has a long history of supporting Israel, including working with the IDF during the Gulf War, but he’s also very smart, and knows which way the wind is blowing. His tune on Israel has been changing over the last year, and culminated yesterday with an attack on the lion in the lion’s den. But I’m guessing that he won’t be the Democratic candidate for President.
*I look forward to Bret Stephens’s columns these days, and yesterday’s is a good one: “Democratic Socialists are on the Rise. We’ve seen this movie before” (archived here). he starts by lauding some “decent” center-right Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney, and then starts in on the Democrats:
That was until the moment the G.O.P. chose to delete its conscience by becoming the party of Donald Trump. A similar moment may soon be upon Democrats if they aren’t careful.
Barring a political miracle, the party will next year have a new member of Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who, the day after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, celebrated the event in Times Square. Another probable future representative, Claire Valdez, vowed on July 4 to “fight for liberation from Palestine to Puerto Rico.” A would-be U.S. senator, the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, offered an alternative take on Michelle Obama’s famous line about going high when your opponent goes low: “When they go low, we don’t go high,” he said. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.” (El-Sayed is a doctor.) In Wisconsin, a democratic socialist, Francesca Hong, is the polling favorite in the race for the Democratic nominee for governor; in 2021 she said that “police exist to uphold white supremacy” and should be abolished; more recently, she has said her “perfect world would be a world without prisons.”
Against this tide, the position of many mainstream Democrats is to dodge the ideological fight with the left while warning that, outside of deep-blue districts like those in New York City, democratic socialism is an electoral loser that only provides Trump with political ammunition. In Michigan, Haley Stevens, El-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic primary, is campaigning on the argument that “no one wants Abdul to win more than the Republicans” — that is, that Republicans see him as the more beatable opponent come November.
What mainstream Republicans like me missed then is what I fear mainstream Democrats miss now: that ideas older voters know have long been discredited (“America first” among conservatives; socialism among progressives) can seem fresh and appealing to younger voters; that even middle-of-the-road voters still often prefer the most extreme or uncouth candidate on their side to the most moderate candidate on the other; and that policy positions ultimately count for less than sheer charisma, the aura of being a “fighter,” even if you accomplish little of substance.
All this is especially true when the more ideologically extreme candidates are energetic, unstuffy, authentic, and able to stir up an audience. Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor, is emblematic of the type; so was Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat, at least until allegations about his past behavior finally caught up with him.
What all this means for mainstream Democrats is that they resemble a national army under attack from an insurgency: They offer order and predictability when they need to be shocking and surprising; they seek to win by delivering incremental victories while their guerrilla opponents promise political transcendence. Unless something changes, those dynamics tend to set the army up for disaster.
What could change the dynamics? It would help if a Democratic leader stood up to make the case that democratic socialists are neither liberals nor progressives, at least in any honest sense of those words. They are atavists, blasts from a discredited and discarded past.
. . . . Democracy requires a clearly defined citizenry, an idea that becomes meaningless if a country pursues a lax or open-border policy of the kind advocated by democratic socialists. The brainstorms of the far left, like the billionaire surtax on the ballot in California, have failed repeatedly wherever they’ve been tried (including in France). And “justice for Palestine” surely can’t mean taking sides with the killers and rapists of Hamas while insisting that the only nation-state on earth with no right to exist is the Jewish one. The word for that is antisemitism, the politics of the double standard toward Jews, which is yet another terrible idea from a terrible past.
Is there a rising Democrat who will give this speech — the one that says that Democrats stand for freedom and fairness, not radicalism and self-righteousness; the one that never disdains tradition even if it seeks to improve it; the one that knows that utopianism is no substitute for pragmatism, and that purity is not superior to compromise?
That Democrat needs to stand up now, before his party gets swept away by the flood it vainly believes will soon recede.
Sadly, it looks as if Stephens himself can’t think of a way to glue the Democratic party back together, either. There is no Democrat who would give a speech like that save John Fetterman, whose days in Congress are numbered. And Democrats like me will be loath to vote for a candidate who says Israel can’t defend itself. Being in Illinois, where the Democrats are going to win the electoral vote, I might have to write someone in. Right now I have no political home.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the boys are depressed:
Hili: Things aren’t good. Andrzej: That’s nothing new.
From Masih; this Iranian woman has sat in a jail sail for four months. Her crime: dancing. And there’s no end to this yet.
Maarten Boudry points out a stupid but very common political argument. Read the whole tweet.
This is my vote for the stupidest political argument of the century. Its general form goes like this:
“The backlash against the excesses of Our Party is the fault of those within the Party who drew attention to those excesses, thus empowering Our Party’s enemies.”
This French Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was five years old and would have been 89 today had she lived. https://t.co/FUHJGwMHwD
There’s a new Jesus and Mo strip today called “submit”. It came with a caption: “No, Jesus. We don’t.” The Divine Duo argues about which faith is more woman-friendly, and then Mo gives what he thinks is the killer argument for Islamic feminism.
The artist adds this:
I know I keep saying it, but please become a patron of Jesus & Mo if you can afford it. It really helps:
Ecologist Susan Harrison is back with some bird photos from California featuring rookeries (there are some lovely shots of chicks and juveniles). Susan’s notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Rookery Scenes
Recently I visited two local rookeries where colonies of large wading birds breed in early- to midsummer. It was fun to watch the nest building, egg tending, and varied interactions among adults and young birds of mixed ages. In some cases (like the Cattle Egrets), it appeared that young birds were competing with each other to be at the head of the feeding line.
White-faced Ibis (Plegadis chihi) were rearing their young at the Woodland-Davis water treatment ponds, which in spite of their unprepossessing title, are our county’s top eBird hotspot and the subject of much ecological enhancement for migratory birds and other wildlife.
Welcome to a Hump Day (“dina bonggol” in Javanese): Wednesday, July 8, 2026 and National Blueberry Day. If you can get the smaller wild lowbush blueberries rather than the big bland blue balls that are the commercial highbush form, do. The best blueberries I ever had were in a pie at Helen’s, a diner in Machias, Maine. They served a combination of cooked and uncooked lowbush berries in a whipped cream filling, and oy, was it good! (I don’t know if they still serve pie.)
Here’s a video explaining why Finns are obsessed with blueberries (did you know that?). Be sure to watch the preparation of a blueberry pie with wild blueberries and sour cream!
Posting will be light today as I have to go downtown to get examined today for this summer’s cataract surgery (yep, it’s time).
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 8 Wikipedia page.
My Great Duck Obsession began nine years ago yesterday when I spotted Honey and her four babies in Botany Pond. I decided to feed them, and a monster was born. Here are the “babies” I fed and documented in a Facebook post:
Da Nooz:
*Footy news: My favorite team, Argentina, beat Egypt 3-2 yesterday after being down two points in minute 68. I complained to Matthew, and he told me to hold my horses: that footy is a dicey game and things change quickly. They sure did! As he said, “You see? Footy is a mad game and you should never leave the stadium until the final whistle blows.” From ESPN:
Lionel Messi scored in a record sixth straight World Cup knockout match to help Argentina reach the quarterfinals after a stunning late comeback to beat Egypt 3-2 in Atlanta.
Egypt were leading the defending champions 2-0 heading into the closing stages before Messi provided an assist for Cristian Romero in the 79th minute and then a goal of his own four minutes later to tie the score.
Just when it seemed that extra time was in the cards, Enzo Fernández headed into the net in the second minute of stoppage time to complete a remarkable turnaround at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
It is the first time in World Cup history that a team has won a knockout match in regulation time after trailing by two goals in the 75th minute.
“This is a phenomenal group that never gives up,” Fernández said. “Four years have passed since Qatar, and we’ve come to enjoy another World Cup — and we want to win it again. That’s what we’re aiming for.”
Argentina, who are bidding to become the first back-to-back World Cup champions since Brazil in 1958 and 1962, will face either Colombia or Switzerland in the quarterfinals in Kansas City on Saturday.
“I’m so emotional,” Argentina coach Lionel Scaloni said. “What a group of players, brother.”
Here are the highlights; the goal-scoring plays on the tape are at 1:47, 9:55, and then the three goals from Argentina at 11:50, 13:20, and 15:15. What a game!
Yesterday Switzerland tied Egypt 0-0 in regular time and overtime, but Switzerland won on penalty kicks, 4-3. Today France goes against Morocco.
President Trump on Wednesday cast doubt over the future of last month’s preliminary cease-fire deal between Iran and the United States, suggesting that he no longer considered it to be in effect after both sides traded attacks overnight.
In response to a question at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, about the state of the cease-fire, Mr. Trump responded: “To me, I think it’s over.”
His comments came after Iran’s armed forces on Wednesday said that they had attacked U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait. The United States had earlier carried out airstrikes against several targets in Iran and reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil sales. The price of oil, which was already higher after the attacks in the region, spiked after Mr. Trump’s remarks.
The preliminary agreement to cease hostilities, which was signed more than three weeks ago in Switzerland, was intended to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil and gas shipping route, and allow longer negotiations toward permanently ending the monthslong war.
The Pentagon said its latest strikes were in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, the central command of Iran’s military, called the U.S. strikes in Iran’s south an “overt act of aggression” and warned that Iran would “deliver a crushing response.” In remarks carried on Iranian state media on Wednesday, it also warned the United States against interfering in Tehran’s management of the Strait of Hormuz.
Hours later, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said that it had targeted 85 U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait. The Iranian military also shot down an American MQ-9 drone in the attack, the Guards Corps said in a statement published on state media.
Are the warring parties even close to a ceasefire? Not that I see.
Iran’s renewed attacks on tankers near the Strait of Hormuz are exposing a growing dilemma for Tehran’s hard-line leaders, who are relying on their control of the waterway for leverage in talks with the U.S. but feeling their grip weaken as more ships slip through.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired missiles at two commercial ships near the strait early Tuesday, according to a senior U.S. official. It echoed an attack two weeks ago that was aimed at shutting down traffic in a route that hugged the southern side of the waterway along the Omani coast. Iran has warned shippers to avoid that route and instead use a northern path it controls. Another tanker came under attack later Tuesday from an unidentified projectile in the strait that caused structural damage, according to the U.K. Maritime Trade Operations, which is affiliated with the Royal Navy.
Despite the threat of strikes, conservatives in Tehran have watched with rising alarm as traffic that was deterred from crossing during the war now ply the U.S.-backed route near Oman. Shipping through the strait has rebounded under President Trump’s preliminary deal with Iran to wind down the war, and oil supplies have recovered, pushing futures prices back near prewar levels.
This isn’t what Tehran was hoping for. Iran wants vessels seeking to cross the strait to first get its approval, use its waters and eventually pay fees. But as Iranian attacks give Gulf exporters greater incentives to find alternatives, Iran’s ability to force concessions is weakening.
So are we going to get a ceasefire now that Iran has seemingly lost its biggest lever? I doubt it—not until they agree to Trump’s stipulation that they will never build a nuclear weapon. That’s only something they won’t agree to, but even if they do they can just renege on that agreement as soon as we get another President, perhaps even a Republican one.
Democratic Party leaders and close allies urged Graham Platner to quit the Maine Senate race, after a woman he had been romantically involved with publicly alleged that he sexually assaulted her.
The allegation, which Platner denied, is the most serious so far to emerge in a campaign marked by controversy and put his political future in doubt. Allies who had campaigned with him dropped their endorsements and Democrats scrambled to find a backup plan in what they see as a must-win state, with a deadline for a new candidate later this month if Platner steps aside.
In a video he released Monday, Platner said “any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.” He also said he was “mindful” of the political impact it could have on his race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins. “We are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward,” he said.
The video comes after Politico detailed an allegation by Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident, who said Platner forced himself on her about five years ago and had nonconsensual sex with her after she told him repeatedly to stop. She had previously told the New York Times that he didn’t respect women and that she had cut off contact with him after finding his behavior “reckless” and “unsettling.” Racicot told Politico she was reluctant to come forward, in part, because she agrees with Platner politically.
. . . Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats’ campaign chair Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, both of New York, in a joint statement called the allegations “incredibly disturbing” and said Platner needed to step aside immediately to give the party a chance to select a new candidate. The leadership of the Maine Democratic Party also urged Platner to withdraw.
Prominent party allies including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Ro Khanna of California also said he should drop out. Khanna rallied with Platner days after a woman accused him of abuse in early June and others also described volatile behavior in their relationships.
If he doesn’t drop out by Monday, the Democrats can’t replace him and the Senate Seat in Maine will remain occupied by Republican Susan Collins. The Democrats consider winning this seat pivotal in taking control of the Senate in November.
But a number of people I trust have written to me saying I should look at the A Land for All plan. A Land for All was founded in 2012 by a group of Israelis and Palestinians. It’s attempting something different, something I find in some ways beautiful: Not a two-state model of separation, not a one-state model of unification, but a confederation model that centers both peoples’ connections to the land and tries to combine the free movement of people with separate political entities. In this model, you would have an Israel and a Palestine. There would be free movement, but political separation. The borders would be open, but, they say, hopefully secure.
This is a recipe for slaughter of the Jews. Is Klein insane?
From 2018 to 2023, I was a Democratic operative, working for a slew of progressive candidates. I taught DSA-aligned staffers how to build a money machine for the left; coached progressive politicians on how to speak to donors; and collaborated with billionaires to create a robust fundraising network. I chart this story in detail in my forthcoming book, Nothing Left, a dispatch from the inside of the left’s rise and takeover of the Democratic Party.
In late 2024, I decided to leave the party, disillusioned by a leadership class that I had watched drift further and further from the working-class Americans they purportedly represented. But my history means that I have worked directly with the people behind almost every victory in the recent socialist sweep, including New York City’s Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Colorado’s Melat Kiros.
So believe me when I tell you: This far-left earthquake is only the beginning. It will not stop in deep-blue cities. What you just witnessed is only a preview of what is to come.
. . .Progressives are angry and energized. They are fed up with the establishment. They blame traditional Democrats for Trump’s return to the White House, and for everything that came after. It’s time for change, they say. So they turn to the democratic socialists.
The great irony, of course, is that the socialist movement is not composed of the working-class people it claims to represent. Rather, they are children of lawyers, professors, donors, and NGO directors who grew up with an incredible amount of privilege. So too are many of their voters. Darializa Avila Chevalier, for example, ran in a district that includes the Bronx, but she lost the working-class section by 30 points. She did well with young people and higher-income voters, and won the college-educated areas of her district by double digits.
This shouldn’t be surprising. I first joined the progressive movement in 2018 because I was born with a rare, genetic lung condition, and I support universal healthcare. But by 2020, progressives were no longer focused on bread-and-butter issues like that. Instead, I witnessed a daily bashing of white people, animosity for the “deplorables” who voted for Trump, deep hatred of men, and an obsession with race that infiltrated every conversation, policy proposal, and objective.
. . .Working-class people don’t want to abolish ICE. They want prisons to exist and for the police to be well funded. Obsession with identity politics is not at the forefront of their minds. They want candidates who focus on the economy, and who will stand up for their safety. And, just like my union family in Kansas City—which, over the years, has abandoned its yearslong devotion to the Democratic Party in favor of Donald Trump and the GOP—they are leaving the progressives behind.
In response, the Democratic establishment and the progressives have nearly morphed into the same conglomerate. Fueled by the loss of working-class voters, this messy coalition has had no option but to concentrate its efforts toward the newly minted, overeducated, upper-middle-class base. For an illustration of that reality, one need only look at the Democrats trying to fight back. Two weeks ago, moderate Democrats signed a “Promise to America” pledge, outlining principles including “We are capitalist, not socialist,” and advocating “secure borders” and “safe communities.”
The effort is laudable. But just thirteen Democratic congress members signed it, out of the 212 in the House. The rest are either on board with the socialist surge, or quietly tolerating its rise. Most likely, that is because they are terrified of being primaried by a progressive caucus determined to rack up as many wins as it can ahead of the presidential election.
What it means is that the far left is steadily, with little to no resistance, capturing the Democratic Party.
His solution? “So, to my former fellow party members who hate what they’re seeing, who reject the DSA wing, who want to see the Democrats return to first principles: Thirteen politicians taking a symbolic stand against radicalism is not enough. This surge is coming, and it will continue, if you do not treat it as the crisis it is.” As he says, “the Democratic establishment stands for nothing” as it’s so muddled, while progressives stand for something, even if we don’t agree with it. Sadly Cowan repeats the same old mantra:
If [the Democratic establishment] wishes to maintain hold of the party, it will need to develop its own vision—and give Americans something to vote for instead of just being “anti-Trump.”
How come nobody tells us what this “vision” is? Is it alignment with the wishes of the working class?
*The New Zealand Parliament is debating a bill (which passed on its first reading) that would legally define a “man” and a “woman” this way:
13A Meaning of woman or female
In any legislation, regardless of gender identity,—
(a) woman means an adult human biological female; and
(b) female means a human biological female.
13B Meaning of man or male
In any legislation, regardless of gender identity,—
(a) man means an adult human biological male; and
(b) male means a human biological male.
Of course New Zealand, being woke, is full of people who object to this definition. For example, the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association wrote a letter advocating the sex-is-a-spectrum approach because of the very low frequency of exceptions to a binary:
We write to express our deep concern regarding the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill following its first reading in Parliament. We believe this bill causes quantifiable harm to our transgender, gender diverse, intersex, and cisgender communities.
. . . This bill claims to reflect biological reality, yet neglects the contemporary scientific and medical understanding that has progressed our understanding of sex beyond a simple male/female binary. Current medical and biological literature recognises sex as a complex interaction of chromosomes, gonads, hormones, secondary characteristics, and brain development rather than a strict binary construct. Intersex variations demonstrate the diversity of people’s bodies and highlight the limitations of binary sex categories. This proposed bill fails to adequately account for the existence and legal status of intersex people.
Yawn. But there is pushback. For instance this long tweet arguing that the Māori had a binary concept of sex, and this letter, confected by biologists at the University of Auckland but signed by an international group of biologists (you may recognize some) arguing this:
In humans, as in other mammals, there are two sexes: female and male. These correspond to the two reproductive pathways organized around large gametes, ova, and small gametes, sperm. Sex is not a social assignment, a spectrum, or a matter of identity. It is a developmental and reproductive feature of the body.
Some individuals have Disorders/Differences of Sex Development, or DSDs. These conditions deserve medical accuracy and humane treatment. But they do not show that sex is a spectrum, nor do they justify replacing clear sex-based language for the whole population.
A major source of confusion is prevalence inflation. Activist materials often claim that 1.7%, 2%, or more of people are “intersex.” These figures are not reliable estimates of people whose sex is genuinely ambiguous. They come from expansive definitions that group together very different conditions, many of which do not make a person’s sex unclear. Some involve hormone exposure, late-onset endocrine disorders, or sex-specific developmental anomalies in otherwise clearly male or clearly female individuals. Treating these as evidence that male and female are unstable categories is misleading.
I’ll report back if and when the bill is passed, but the support for it is heartening.
*Here’s a video suggested for me by YouTube. It shows a guy infiltrating a Pride parade pretending he’s a “queer for Palestine.” Then there’s another segment where he asks pro-Palestinians questions like “Did Hamas have the right to kill Jews on October 7?” Nuff said, you can imagine the contents! Of course the interviews are selected, but I’m amazed that anybody in America can say stuff like this.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s policing Andrzej’s reading:
Hili: That book again? Andrzej: It’s a good thriller, it’s just long.
In Polish:
Hili: Znowu ta książka?
Ja: To dobry kryminał, tylko długi.
From Masih, a woman who traveled back to Iran from Italy for a visit and was caught in a nightmare. For protesting, she was not only shot but also given a 2½-year prison sentence, with an additional two-year ban on leaving Iran:
While the world’s cameras are fixed on the five-day state funeral of Khamenei, the Islamic Republic is silently killing this 23-year-old girl with a slow death.
From Luana, though I’m a bit confused. Is the job implicitly assuming that trans-identified women are exceptions because they are considered “men”?
More sex discrimination in hiring at universities in Australia. We have seen several cases like this over the past few years.
In Orwellian fashion, these women-only hirings are justified by reference to equal opportunity and sex discrimination laws.
(NB. Those laws contain… pic.twitter.com/seaOJRzioV
This French Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was one year old and would be 85 today had he lived. https://t.co/dXxcias3UT
I started this website in 2009, and it’s hard to believe that it’s been going for 17 years (this is the 31,860th post!). It began simply as a suggestion from my editor, Wendy Wolf at Viking/Penguin (now Penguin/Random House), that I start a website to promote my first trade book, Why Evolution Is True. (I was supposed to do what Neil Shubin did to promote his book Your Inner Fish). And that’s what I did, intending to perhaps post a brief item every few weeks about new evidence for evolution.
As you know, I quickly abandoned that intention and, discovering that I not only liked writing but also wanted to air my views about many things, including a love of cats, the website became a monster, eating up huge amounts of time. I don’t regret that, or have any plans to stop, for it’s only when I’m writing on this site that I’m able to forget the thousand natural shocks that kosher flesh is heir to.
This all came to mind when yesterday I got a request from my agent to allow a translation of WEIT into a new language: Uzbek! Of course I get a tidy but not huge sum for each such translation, and now the book is in 21 languages besides English. I’ve listed them below, including the publisher:
Original English: Viking/Penguin (US), and Oxford University Press (UK)
Foreign:
ARABIC National Centre for Translation and Publishing, Egypt
BASQUE Universidad del Pais Vasco (hardcover and ebook)
BENGALI Agradoot and Company, Dhaka, Bangladesh
BRAZIL JSN Editora
CROATIAN In.Tri d.o.o
FINNISH Vastapaino
FRENCH Markus Haller, Switzerland
GREEK Diadromes
JAPAN Nikkei Business Publications
HEBREW Books in the Attic
ITALIAN Codice
KOREAN Eulyoo Publishing Company
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (Mandarin) KeAi Communications
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (Simpified Chinese) Shanghai Translation Publishing House
POLISH Proszynski i Ska
PORTUGUESE Edicoes tinta-da-china (Portugal)
RUSSIAN Alpina
SPANISH Editorial Critica
TURKISH Palme Yayinevi
UKRAINIAN NashFormat Publishers
UZBEK 1000 Books Project
The translation I’m proudest of is the one in Arabic, because the Arabic-speaking and Farsi-speaking world is rife with creationism since the Qur’an, which is often taken as literal truth, paints a creationist scenario for the origin of life and humans. Sadly, the Arabic translation, done in Egypt, is almost unavailable: I’m told you can buy it in only one small bookstore in Cairo.
Here are two questions I’m sometimes asked:
Are you going to update the book? I have no plans to. The material is pretty much up to date, though there are a handful of errors that remain. And it’s short on molecular evidence for evolution. But there is no other book that covers the same ground, and I’ve heard from many people who said it convinced them that evolution was indeed true, as well as from a few who said it made them abandon their religion. Which leads to the next question:
Is this book the accomplishment you’re most proud of? No, though I am quite proud of it, for it was successful in doing what I wanted (it even nosed onto the NYT bestseller list), even if it didn’t dispel the pervasive creationism of America and other countries. A 2024 Gallup poll, for example, shows that 71% of Americans continue to think that God had some hand in human evolution, with more than half of those being Biblical creationists. But a naturalistic belief in evolution is gaining!:
In terms of the quality of analysis and comprehensiveness of coverage, I’m still most proud of the academic book I wrote with Allen Orr, Speciation. It grew out of my whole career working on the origin of species, and summarizes and analyzes what we knew at the time (2009) about how single lineages could split into two or more species. Speciation was originally published by Sinauer, but when that estimable publisher disbanded when its founder retired, its books were bought by Oxford University Press. Now Speciation is hideously expensive ($189.00 in paperback and $239 or more in hardcover). I wouldn’t recommend reading it unless you’re an evolutionist or other biologist, as it presumes knowledge that most laypeople don’t have.
When I dip into Speciation, as I do on rare occasions, I am impressed at how well I could think and write back then. I would not be capable of writing it now, as my brain doesn’t work as well as it used to. But I’m glad that Allen and I took the six years required to write it, as it’s the definitive book on the subject, and no other book had come along to supplant it. Is it out of date? Certainly, but neither Allen nor I have the will to update it. And it still lays out the problem in a way that’s useful, even if we have a lot more examples.
What I would add it I were to rewrite it would be a lot more about on “hybrid speciation”, especially the phenomenon of diploid species hybridizing and then the hybrids evolving into a new and distinct species. In 2009 we had a few examples of the phenomenon, but they’ve proliferated. (Polyploidy in plants is one example of hybrid speciation, but we did include a lot of material on that.)
I’m also proud of the cover (in color below), which shows three congeneric species of fish. (I didn’t want to show Drosophila because everybody expected that the book would be Drosophilocentric, and it wasn’t.) I spent hours sitting on the floor of the biology library here (no longer extant), trying to find good pictures that would represent speciation. I finally found one, and I could use it without permission as the copyright had expired. Here’s the source of the picture as detailed inside the book:
I loved the connection with David Starr Jordan and Teddy Roosevelt. I took out the book and carried it to the main library, which had a huge scanner that could reproduce things in great detail. And that’s what I sent to Sinauer to go on the cover. By the way, the fin going through the “O” in my last name was done on purpose by Sinauer. That’s cool, too:
Such are the thoughts engendered by a request for translation.
