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.
My degree of anxiety about the new ducklings decreases asymptotically as they age. The first week I get nervous, for they are at their most vulnerable, but as they age over the next several weeks I relax (a bit!) and am never fully complacent until they can fly, which is about two months after they hatch. They appeared on Sunday morning, which means they hatched on Saturday, so today the four ducklings are four days old. My first task of the day is to count them.
And they’re doing well: they are plump, lively, and eating well. Their mother, aka Miss Duck, is still being the perfect mom, watching over them and warming them when they’re wet. (It’s a bit chilly today: about 68°F). Here are the quadruplets getting warmed.
Few things have shocked me more than the open acquiescence—or even outright support—of the international “humanitarian” community for Egypt’s decision to seal, and even reinforce, its heavily fortified border with Gaza throughout the war. Early on, Israel tried to negotiate with Egypt to allow Gazan civilians out of harm’s way so it could target Hamas more effectively. The international “humanitarian” community reacted with outrage to the very suggestion. Meanwhile, Egypt threatened to tear up its peace treaty with Israel and declared that it was “ready to sacrifice millions of lives so that nobody would approach a grain of sand [in Sinai].”
You expect that kind of cynicism toward “fellow Arabs” from a corrupt and authoritarian regime. But from self-proclaimed Western “humanitarians”? Apparently, they’d rather keep Gazan civilians trapped in an active war zone, where Hamas could exploit them as human shields, because evacuation would supposedly amount to “ethnic cleansing.” And all this while they were hurling the obscene “genocide” libel at Israel. Because that’s obviously how you would behave if you sincerely believed a genocide was taking place, right? Prevent people from escaping? It’s either callousness, mendacity, or both.
By way of analogy, imagine that Poland had sealed its border with Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022, telling the world: “Why should we let in Ukrainian civilians? We don’t want a bunch of Nazis in our country.” Bad enough. Now imagine the “humanitarian” community supporting that stance—insisting that Poland bore no responsibility for Russia’s aggression, and that admitting Ukrainians would amount to “ethnic cleansing” because Moscow might never allow them to return.
In this brilliant article, my good friend Shany Mor uses a series of clever thought experiments to expose the revealed preferences of the “humanitarians” in the Gaza war. The conclusions are deeply disturbing. They reveal an astonishing level of indifference—whether intentional or not—to the very people these organizations claim to care about. If they have to chose between demonizing Israel and helping Palestinians, they always chose the latter.
I will never, ever, ever donate to any of these organizations again—even though I supported many of them regularly in the past.
I’ll mention below which organizations Maarten deems not worthy of donations. But you’ll want to read Shany Mor’s piece, which I discuss below.
In reality, the accusation of genocide is as obscene as it is absurd. Netanyahu and his far-right cronies may be guilty of many things, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that Israel intends to exterminate Gazans, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to nonetheless accuse Israel of genocide is by now depressingly familiar, as is their blindness to Hamas’s cynical war tactics and the extraordinarily difficult conditions under which Israel has had to pursue its legitimate aims of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages. In my latest book, Het verraad aan de verlichting (The Betrayal of Enlightenment), I trace this reflex to a postcolonial ideology that casts the West as perpetual oppressor and anti-Western forces as inherently virtuous victims.
And a very nice essay on his substack site (originally published in Quillette) called “They don’t believe it either,” which is mostly about how those who accuse Israel of “genocide” don’t believe that accusation. An excerpt:
The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the willful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel—through inventions like “slow-motion genocide” or “incremental genocide”—even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020?
The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion.
Shany Mor is described by Tablet as “an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and a Research Fellow at the Chaikin Center for Geostrategy at the University of Haifa. He served as a Director for Foreign Policy on the Israeli National Security Council.” His Substack, “Roter Faden“, began in April, and you can subscribe to help get it off the ground. The article mentioned by Maarten is otherwise free to access, and you can read it by clicking on the screenshot below.
Mor considers the “epistemic community of nongovernmental organizations, activists, experts, scholars, and even a few formal intergovernmental bodies united by loosely overlapping commitments to global and transnational justice,:” and divides what he calls these “Humanitarians” into four groups. He then performs a thought experiment on the groups, to wit:
Take everything you know about the course of the war which began on October 7, about the capabilities and actions of the belligerent parties, about the war’s duration and casualties, and about the terms of the various ceasefires, but pretend you know nothing about the claims and calls to action of the Humanitarians. And ask yourself what you might expect them to say and do under each of the following four hypotheses about the rough overlapping consensus of their collective preferences.]
H1: Humanitarians, especially including scholars of international law regarding armed conflict, are neutral regarding the belligerent parties in the war, and the Humanitarians collectively are genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of civilians and noncombatants among both Israelis and Palestinians.
H2: Humanitarians are indifferent to the humanitarian needs of the Israelis but genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians. Operating on imperfect information in rapidly changing conditions, and limited by what is allowable in international law and what is politically or materially feasible, they seek whatever can be done to reduce or eliminate loss of life or suffering on the part of Palestinians either as a direct or indirect consequence of the war.
H3: Humanitarians are indifferent to the immediate humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians, but they fervently wish to see Israel defeated in the war Hamas started on October 7. They fervently believe that the only moral conclusion to the war is one that is a net gain for the Palestinians and a net loss for the Israelis. To this end, they endeavor to act as force multipliers both in theatre to preserve Hamas’ power and, especially, in Western states, to push for policies that limit Israel’s freedom of action, cut it off from military supplies, and apply pressure on it.
H4: Humanitarians are indifferent to the war’s strategic outcome and prefer to see more death and more suffering on the Palestinian side, not as an end in and of itself but rather as a means to confirm beliefs in Israel’s essentially demonic nature, and as a way of mobilizing hatred and social isolation of Jews in the West. In particular, there is a preference for any rhetoric or political action which removes what are believed to be the unfair social privileges which western Jews hold due to the memory of the Holocaust.
Mor then says what one would expect from each group if the characterization were true. (Of course he’s operating with the wisdom of hindsight here, but that doesn’t negate his argument.)
Did you decide which was the most accurate characterization of the worldwide “humanitarian” response to the war? In light of what Maarten said above about the border with Egypt, and the total neglect of Hamas’s stealing of humanitarian aid to Israel, as well as the distortions about the “starvation” situation in Gaza and the push to stop Israel from taking military action, I guessed correctly. Yes, it’s H3. Here’s what Mor “retrodicted” under that scenario:
H3 would see immediate demands for Israel to forgo any military offensive against Hamas at all, effectively locking in the tactical gains Hamas made on October 7, and opening the door for future October 7-style operations as a means to securing political advances for the Palestinian cause. Humanitarians would do nothing to get Palestinians out of a war zone, and they would boycott aid mechanisms that threatened Hamas’s continued rule in Gaza. They would pressure Western governments to cut off weapons supplies to the IDF and to suspend trade relations with Israel. They would mobilize international courts to try to stay Israel’s hand on the battlefield in order to limit Hamas’ defeat. And they would use their influence to push governments to hand the Palestinians tangible diplomatic achievements that could have been secured for decades with a peace agreement for free as a reward for the war launched on October 7.
That is pretty much what happened: the calls for Israel to not retaliate, or calls for a cease-fire, began even before Israel attacked and entered Gaza to retaliate. The lack of criticism of Egypt for sealing its borders was deafening to some of us, though most people—perhaps on purpose—didn’t even consider the implications of that silence. The pressure on Israel is obvious: Douglas Murray said something like, “Israel is the only country in the world that is not allowed to win a defensive war.” Many apologists said that Hamas’s attack was justified retaliation for Israel’s oppression of the territory, despite the fact that Israel booted the Jews out of Gaza in 2005 and handed it to Palestinians. They had, in effect, a state, but then elected Hamas, which ruined whatever valid governance Gaza had. (Don’t forget that the Palestinians had rejected a two-state solution half a dozen times before.)
Mor’s conclusions:
The war has provoked a lot of anguished discussion about the role of international law and global civil society, to say nothing of the role of international norms and the “rules-based order.” But the epistemic community that claims for itself the role of protector of those values is due for a serious moral reckoning too.
And once that reckoning begins, it shouldn’t limit itself just to the Humanitarians’ actions following October 7. Critics of Israel’s government often point to its role in supposedly propping up the Hamas regime in Gaza in the years before October 7, supposedly as a counterweight to the more moderate Palestinian Authority operating in the West Bank. It’s a legitimate critique, voiced domestically in Israel as well. But it’s worth remembering that Israel’s role in propping up the Hamas regime was tiny compared to that of international organizations such as UNRWA, MSF, and others who took care of crucial governance functions for the de facto Hamas statelet during its two-decade reign in the Gaza Strip, freeing it to hijack all the Strip’s resources for tunnel digging and weapons smuggling and manufacture. And these were joined by the experts and agencies who invented bespoke international norms after 2007 that meant that any Israeli action that we now know could have prevented October 7 would have been decried as a war crime.
Oh, and what were the NGOs that were in group 3? Maarten got a list from Claude that you can see here; it includes Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights. The question he posed to Claude was this:
Which international humanitarian NGOs or organizations have criticized the Israeli proposal early in the recent Gaza war to evacuate Gazan civilians to the Sinai peninsula, worrying that it might amount to ethnic cleansing, or arguing that Egypt has no responsibility to help Israel’s war efforts? Give me names and links please.
Maarten added, “Amnesty was appalling, as usual.” Amnesty International has gone the way of the ACLU and SPLC: ideologically captured by “progressives.”
As for the “g-word”, I write off those who accuse Israel of genocide as either ignorant blockheads or antisemites.
Welcome to a Hump Day (“Ghjornu di a Gobba” in Corsican): Wednesday, July 22, 2026, and National Mango Day, celebrating my favorite fruit. I have visited India quite a few times, but my biggest regret is that I’ve never gone in the summer, which is mango season (the photo below shows a small selection of the varieities available). It’s bloody hot then, and I haven’t been willing to trade off eating mangos for being broiled.
The Trump administration plans to announce Wednesday that it has reached a broad nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to the country enriching its own fuel for nuclear reactors, U.S. officials said.
The accord is intended to further bind the United States with the Saudi government as the war with Iran strains the relationship. The Trump administration, according to officials, estimates it will provide billions of dollars for the U.S. nuclear industry — starting with Westinghouse, which designs many of the reactors sold abroad.
The Trump administration plans to formally sign and announce the agreement with the Saudis on Wednesday, said two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It would announce the details to Congress soon afterward.
Although the agreement likely would have support among many Republicans, some U.S. lawmakers from both parties along with Israeli officials have expressed opposition to such a plan, fearing that the kingdom could use a civilian nuclear project to eventually develop nuclear weapons.
What’s the point? To keep Iran at bay? I don’t think so.
If the Houthis make good on their threat to blockade ships traveling to and from Saudi Arabia via the Red Sea, it would yet again upend global oil markets by compromising a crucial fallback for the Strait of Hormuz.
Since the early weeks of the war with Iran, Saudi Arabia has been relying on a pipeline that bisects the country to reroute millions of barrels of oil from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea.
Most of that oil gets to market via the Bab al-Mandab strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, off the coast of Yemen and near territory controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia. A smaller portion goes north to the Mediterranean Sea, via a pipeline that crosses Egypt or, in the case of oil-derived fuel, via the Suez Canal.
Any disruption to those alternatives would further restrict the supply of oil and fuels to a market rattled by renewed attacks on vessels in the Persian Gulf. The threats already appear to be having an impact. Two oil tankers, the Rodos and the Xin Long Yang, that were headed toward the Bab al-Mandab made U-turns on Tuesday, according to the maritime data firm Kpler.
Here’s a map from Wikipedia showing the chokepoint. The article adds, “The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is 26 kilometres (14 nautical miles) wide at its narrowest point, limiting tanker traffic to two 2-mile-wide channels for inbound and outbound shipments.”
In the earlier case of genocides that “succeeded” because of impunity at the time or the absence of subsequent accountability, the perpetrator state went on to benefit from its criminal actions. The invention and codification of the concept of genocide after World War II was meant to prevent the persistence of this dynamic of impunity and profit.
What we have seen unfold in Gaza, where Israel stands accused in the International Court of Justice of committing genocide in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, appears to portend a new future for the crime.
It is a future in which other nations or leaders may have an incentive to pursue genocidal policies knowing they will not only get away with murder but may even benefit from it. It is a future in which the countries and international organizations that had been committed to stopping and punishing genocide may give license to its recurrence.
Since the current cease-fire in Gaza went into effect on Oct. 10, and President Trump’s 20-point plan was endorsed by the Security Council on Nov. 17, more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli attacks. The military now controls nearly 70percent of the Strip. Two million Palestinians, who had previously lived in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, are now confined to a third of it, trying to survive in devastated spaces lacking the most basic humanitarian infrastructure.
. . . Israel is unlikely to face a reckoning for its actions. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and his former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as for a Hamas official, who turned out to have been killed. The United States has tried to undermine the court, and Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly visited the White House to, among other things, try to reportedly persuade Mr. Trump to launch his attack on Iran. Israel may eventually be found guilty of genocide by the International Court of Justice, where South Africa has lodged a separate case against Israel, but the implications of such a ruling are unclear as long as Israel retains U.S. support on the U.N. Security Council, which acts as the enforcement arm of the I.C.J.
. . . Some may argue that the case of Gaza is singular because Israel enjoys a unique international position thanks to its tight alliance with the United States and its reliance on the legacy of the Holocaust. Perhaps other states cannot expect to be rewarded and may even be punished for genocide. Yet what we are seeing today sets an extraordinary precedent, one that has the potential of undermining the entire premise of genocide as a crime punishable under post-World War II international law.
Two points here. Bartov mentions Hamas only twice, one in the third sentence of this extract (and in the whole article). There is no criticism of Hamas, nor any recognition that its attack on October 7 was intended to begin a real genocide. The original Hamas Charter of 1988 explicitly calls for the killing of Jews, and while the later 2017 charter has effaced the antsemitism, it’s still antizionist, calls for a Palestinian state from the “river to the sea” and does not recognize the state of Israel. It now uses the words “Zionist” and “Zionism”, but nobody’s fooled by that. Palestinian children are still taught to kill Jews and become martyrs, and the PA still has its “Martyr’s Fund” to reward Palestinians jailed for killing or attacking Jews. Does Bartov not recognize the explicit genocidal intent of Hamas?
Second, what did Bartov want Israel to do in the face of repeated terrorist attacks on Israel culimating on the October 7 massacre? Did he expect the Israeli army to go into Gaza, shoot a few bullets at Hamas without harming the populace in which they were embedded, and then withdraw? What would he have done to stop the terrorism?
t’s Tuesday, July 21, and buried at least 100 meters deep beneath a mountain near the city of Natanz lies a critical piece of Tehran’s nuclear program. But it isn’t enriched uranium that makes Pickaxe Mountain the stuff of Israeli nightmares.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Israeli intelligence has determined that Iran moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into tunnels deep within the mountain last fall, following the 12-day war in June. If accurate, this represents a significant acceleration of Iran’s path to reviving its nuclear program—one that both the U.S. and Israel believed was effectively dead and buried.
Pickaxe Mountain has been under construction since the fall of 2020. At the time, Iran claimed the underground halls would replace the destroyed above-ground centrifuge assembly facility at Natanz’s main site, which was severely damaged in an explosion widely suspected to have been an act of sabotage. Iran describes the facility publicly as a centrifuge assembly plant. Israeli intelligence, however, indicates the purpose is far more ambitious: The site is believed capable of supporting not just assembly operations but limited uranium enrichment.
Over the past 15 months, satellite imagery has documented steady activity: truck traffic, tunnel reinforcements, and expanding security perimeters. The assumption had been that U.S. overflights and the implicit threat of precision strikes would deter Iran from restarting its nuclear program—but that calculation appears to have been wrong. The facility was not targeted during last year’s Israel-Iran war, nor has it been struck during the current round of U.S.-Iran fighting, either because operators assessed that bombs would have minimal effect or because the site remained under construction. But that calculus may now be shifting.
Last week, Donald Trump broke his public silence on Pickaxe Mountain. “Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door,” Trump said.
. . . and from the WSJ’s similar report:
Known as Mount Kolang in Iran, Pickaxe has been under surveillance by the U.S. and Israel for years, and what little is known about Iran’s activities at the site suggests it would present challenges to any airstrikes. Located near one of Iran’s main nuclear installations, Pickaxe was commissioned as an underground replacement for an Iranian centrifuge-assembly facility that was badly damaged after a 2020 explosion, which might have been an act of sabotage.
Activity has continued there steadily for the past 15 months, with truck traffic, tunnel reinforcements and a security perimeter springing up, said the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank on nuclear and nonproliferation issues. There was also work around an older tunnel network that dates from 2007, which Iran has since sealed up.
“It is plausible that Iran moved centrifuges into the tunnels” in Pickaxe, said David Albright, the institute’s president.
Experts estimate that the subterranean complex reaches 300 to 450 feet deep beneath solid rock, with enough room to accommodate several nuclear-related facilities.
It still amazes me that any sentient being thinks that Iran will obey an agreement to not construct nuclear weapons. That is its overweening task, and if it agrees to abandon the drive for nukes, it is lying. And, of all people, Trump seems to believe it, too. If he was serious in saying that no agreement to end hostilities can be made without Iran promising to never make nuclear weapons, he was deluded. Besides, we’ll have a new President in 2029, and all bets are off.
I was a member of the DSA from the 2010s until 2022. During that time, I witnessed a rise in extremism, ranging from an eagerness to collaborate with Leninist groups to a growing animosity toward the U.S. and the West. My final departure was prompted by a DSA statement that attributed Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to American “imperialist expansionism.”
So what does the DSA stand for? An answer to that question arrived last week in the form of a new platform. Among the DSA’s core aims are ending the presidency and Supreme Court. Abolishing prisons. Universal free housing. The elimination of all debt. Closing all U.S. military bases overseas. Lifting all sanctions from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. And so much more.
“Workers Deserve More!”—the title of the new platform—is meant to present a friendlier face to the world and overcome the radical reputation the organization has developed in many corners of the public. That makes it even more remarkable that the document is still so radical on its face. It advocates the elimination of capitalism, not a thick layer of redistribution on top of the current economy. It prompts readers to imagine a world where the profit motive has been squelched out of existence. “You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded.” It goes on to promise open borders, the abolition of the police, “free” everything, and guaranteed jobs, all with less effort from the individual. This is the stuff of fairy tales, but instead of a fairy godmother, the reader is greeted by an agent of the secret police.
. . .Crucially, DSA’s foreign policy positions ignore America’s enemies: While DSA targets U.S. and Israeli leadership for prosecution, the platform is silent on the actual atrocities committed by the Russian, Iranian, Venezuelan, and Chinese regimes. In early 2019, when I argued that the DSA should denounce the Nicolàs Maduro regime for mass persecution, abuse, torture, and murder, a local leader told me that to advocate against the Maduro administration would be to play into U.S. war propaganda.
It is always the U.S.—so-called American imperialism—that comes in for the harshest criticism while America’s authoritarian enemies get apologia. For the DSA, the world’s most authoritarian regimes deserve political cover. DSA blamed NATO and Western “imperialist expansionism” for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. October 7, 2023, the DSA first expressed its solidarity with Palestine and then laid the blame for Hamas’s terror attacks on Israel. After the Maduro regime brutalized and murdered its opponents, DSA members were happy to visit him and celebrate his regime. Meanwhile, the West is expected to dismantle its military capabilities.
Part of the DSA program is an attack on the forces of law and order. The DSA continues to push for police and ICE abolition while simultaneously establishing what sounds like a paramilitary wing. The DSA has formed a group called the Red Rabbits to prepare for a “national uprising against federal agents and police brutality.” So it’s a paramilitary force for the DSA, but no protection for the rest of us.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and dare I say comrades?: this is what the mayor of NYC wants, along with AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Bernie Sanders (the former two card-carrying DSA Congresswomen, and Bernie a running dog. Some day, when AOC tries to realize her ambition of becoming a Senator, or even President, this will come back to haunt her. Well, it should.
*More ideological corruption in publishing: the Times of Israel reports that a U.S. publisher refused to publish a book, Cartoonists Against the Holocaust, containing 150 political cartoons published in the U.S. during the Nazi era, unless the author let the publisher add an anti-Israel statement. This is unbelievable.
A US publisher canceled a book about the Holocaust because the author refused to add text denouncing Israel to the book, the StandWithUS advocacy group said this week.
Dark Horse Comics was scheduled to publish the book, “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” by Dr. Rafael Medoff, this summer, but informed the author’s team last month that publication had been canceled.
The book uses 150 editorial cartoons that had been printed in US newspapers in the Nazi era, alongside commentary from Medoff, to show what Americans knew about the Holocaust at the time.
An editor at Dark Horse last year told Medoff that he would add a statement to the book accusing US President Donald Trump of “attempting to create concentration camp-style prisons,” among other offenses, according to correspondence shared by StandWithUs.
The proposed addition also included a paragraph condemning Israel.
Get a load of this “addition”:
“A country populated by a [sic.] ethnoreligious group who were immorally and horrifically tortured and killed in the Holocaust for their ethnicity is led by a Prime Minister that the world’s top war crimes court has issued warrants for his alleged acts of war crimes an [sic.] crimes against humanity,” the paragraph said.
In a response emailed to the editor, Medoff pushed back against “politicizing our book” and called the claims “factually inaccurate.”
The email also said that, during a phone conversation, the editor had demanded Medoff accuse Israel of genocide in the book’s introduction to prevent people from getting “mad.”
Medoff said the editor’s proposals amounted to minimizing the Nazi genocide and Holocaust inversion.
“What you are saying, in plain English, is that the Jews were victims of the Holocaust and now the Jews are committing another Holocaust,” Medoff wrote. “I understand it has become fashionable in certain circles today to accuse Israel of mass murder. But being fashionable is not the same as being right.”
More of the same—every damn day. Here the publisher wanted to establish purity by damning Israel, in a book that was about the Holocaust in WWII. Relevant? No. Shameful? Certainly.
Scottish middle-distance runner Josh Kerr became the fastest man in world history over four laps on Saturday, clocking 3:42.66 to break a world record set 27 years ago by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco.
The historic run at the London Diamond League fulfilled Kerr’s season-long Project 222 quest, so named for the number of seconds required to break 3:43.13, the standard set by El Guerrouj in 1999 at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, the site of his still-standing world record of 3:26.00 in the 1500 meters set a year prior. Prior to this race, Kerr was the sixth-fastest man in world history with a personal best of 3:45.34.
Kerr’s Brooks Beast teammate Brannon Kidder of the United States and Zan Rudolf of Slovenia paced the attempt with splits of 54.75 and 1:50.63. With a lap and a half to go, Rudolf stepped off the track and it was up to Kerr, who led American Yared Nuguse and Germany’s Robert Farken through 1200 meters in 2:46.39 with a quarter-mile split of 55.76. The final result was never in contest as the Brit powered home in a new world record. Nuguse finished a well-beaten second in 3:45.69, a season’s best.
. , ,Kerr has built a reputation as one of the most confident middle-distance runners in the world. On Saturday, he said he relied on the pacemakers to carry him through.
“The best analogy we worked with today was that my two pacemakers set the tone, the river,” Kerr said to FloTrack. “They set the stream and all I had to do sit in that water for as long as I could, follow it, and not fight it. I said I wasn’t on a chase today. I was flowing with the conditions that were set and I just needed to not slow down.”
It took year to shave off half a second from the previous record. Of course there is a physiological limit to how fast it can be run: humans cannot run a mile in ten seconds but they can in 3:43. And the time is reaching an asymptote, though we don’t know what it is. .
Here’s the record run:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is lording it over Kulka (Hili hates Kulka but Szaron doesn’t mind her):
Szaron: Kulka is right below you. Hili: Everyone ought to know their place.
In Polish:
Szaron: Pod tobą siedzi Kulka.
Hili: Każdy powinien znać swoje miejsce.
*******************
From Addicted to Ducks. And this is true, too! In French, for example, duck noises are “kwan kwan” (IPA: /kwɛ̃/), with the vowel nasal.
From the Free Press via Masih: two young Iranians just executed for sheltering protestors. The regime continues to kill left and right, but “regime change” is not on Trump’s agenda:
Two Iranian teenagers were just executed for opening their doors to fleeing protesters. They are only the latest victims of a regime that uses the world’s distractions to carry out mass killing, writes Masih Alinejad. https://t.co/2OabCNqUqL
Photo du Jour: Members of the press photograph a dead mouse caught by Larry the Downing St cat (left). By Stefan Rousseau/PA pic.twitter.com/2TrY1OFJh8
One from my feed; a lovely baby otter and its mom:
The embrace between Sea Otters and their babies is one of the most tender behaviours in the animal kingdom.
The mothers hug them against their bellies to keep them warm, groom them, and prevent the current from carrying them away.#WildlifePhotography#Otters 🦦
Two from Doc Cobb. He posted this one about a man part of whose job is to remove knobs from the Tour de France course. He’s been doing it for 15 years!
The guy who artfully removes the knobs from the Tour de France roads so TV viewers will not be shocked by infantile graffiti.
Since there’s no significant news today, allow me to bore you with my latest duck pictures, as I’m chuffed that all the babies are in their fourth day, having survived two nights without attrition. They look healthy, are eating heartily, and are lively, swimming around between bouts of napping with Miss Duck, their mom. All these photos are from this morning.
Feeding time (four—count them, four:
Their adorableness abides:
A postprandial stretch:
And an early morning nap, with Miss Duck being nearby. (I’ve already fed them twice):
And naptime turns into a huddle underneath mom. One underneath:
Two underneath (look at those fat little tummies!):
All underneath and getting warm. Miss Duck is proving to be a great mom.
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, July 21, 2026, and National Junk Food Day. Let me put in a word for occasional enjoyment of “bad for you” food. You could live a long time eating just vegetables and cheese, but is that a life? Here is some junk food: a multi-layer carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting, which I ate two years ago in a restaurant. Is this junk food? It was terrific (note the candied carrot curls festooning the plate):
It’s also National Lamington Day, celebrating an Australian cake I’ve never had. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:
A lamington is an Australian cake made from squares of butter cake or sponge cake coated in an outer layer of chocolate sauce and rolled in desiccated coconut. The thin mixture is absorbed into the outside of the sponge cake and left to set, giving the cake a distinctive texture. A common variation has a layer of cream or strawberry jam between two lamington halves.
Sounds excellent to me. Here’s a cream-filled Lamington from New Zealand; I never saw one when I was there. It looks like it needs a dollop of vanilla ice cream.
Spacekadet at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Footy news: Spain won, that’s all she wrote, and the fat lady sang. This is from the NYT Times’s morning newsletter yesterday:
15
— That’s how many margherita pizzas Spain’s World Cup team ordered for delivery in New Jersey after the game. They also got 15 plain and 10 buffalo chicken pies, a specialty of the restaurant.
The Houthis, the Iran-backed armed faction in Yemen, said they would impose a blockade on Saudi ships, threatening to open a new front in the Middle East conflict and raising the pressure on volatile global energy markets.
The announcement was made as many in the region were tensely watching to see if the rounds of bombardment between U.S. and Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf would continue to escalate. The two countries traded new attacks on Monday, with Iran targeting countries that host U.S. military bases, despite efforts by mediators to calm tensions.
The latest hostilities initially focused on the Strait of Hormuz, but they have expanded into a cycle of attacks and counterattacks that have killed at least three American service members since Friday, hit Arab states across the Persian Gulf and damaged critical infrastructure in Iran and U.S.-allied Kuwait.
Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz has reduced global fuel supplies, pushing prices upward, but Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, has been able to reroute some of its exports through the Red Sea. If the Houthis follow through on their statement that they will not allow Saudi vessels to pass through the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the southern portal to the Red Sea, it would worsen the global fuel crisis.
While U.S. and Iranian officials said that they were open to a diplomatic offramp, there was little sign on Monday of significant progress since a cease-fire agreed last month collapsed.
. . .The top U.S. and Iranian diplomats signaled separately that they remained open to negotiating even as the two sides traded strikes on Monday, more than a week into a spiraling escalation in their war.
Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said the country had “emerged as a significant interactional actor” from the war, which began in February, and had demonstrated its “resilience.” His comments sought to portray Tehran as having gained from the conflict despite the heavy loss of life and damage inflicted by months of punishing U.S. and Israeli strikes.
“The right time to negotiate is exactly when you have achieved reliable battlefield and strategic gains,” Mr. Araghchi said, according to remarks published by IRNA, the state broadcaster. He also warned against taking “risks with people’s lives and the fate of the entire country.”
Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry’s spokesman, said at a news conference that Tehran had received proposals from mediators who were “trying to prevent an escalation of tensions,” though he declined to provide details.
All the issues seem to have devolved to the Strait of Hormuz now; as I said yesterday, nukes seem to have dropped out of sight. No viable solution is in sight, but have a look at the next item:
*John Spencer is “a retired United States Army officer, researcher of urban warfare, and author. He currently serves as the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast at West Point,” and on his Substack he has a new article called “What options does the United States have in Iran? Actually, many.”
The campaign imposed enormous costs, although those costs have not yet compelled the regime to accept American terms. Iran has continued to resist demands concerning its nuclear program and freedom of navigation. Iran’s conventional means have been badly damaged. Its will has survived. That is the problem the next phase must solve.
The next phase should place the regime under simultaneous military, economic, diplomatic, informational, and psychological isolation. Compellence is cumulative. Military action, economic pressure, diplomacy, intelligence, cyber operations, information operations, and support to internal resistance should reinforce one another until the regime concludes that continued resistance threatens what it values most: its power and survival. Iranian leaders should lose the ability to communicate securely, gather safely, move military forces freely, protect the coastline, observe the strait, generate military revenue, or assume that they can outlast American attention. Every day of resistance should leave the regime weaker, more divided, and less confident about its own survival.
There is no single operation that guarantees this result. The United States could select any of the following measures, combine several of them, employ nearly all of them over time, or reject those that do not fit the political and military circumstances. Their value lies in giving the president options and forcing Iran to defend against possibilities it cannot confidently exclude.
Possible actions against the regime’s wartime leadership include:
Continue targeting senior regime and IRGC leaders. Military, intelligence, missile, naval, drone, nuclear, and command officials who direct or enable ongoing hostilities.
Strike command posts, emergency headquarters, communications centers, and protected meeting locations used to direct the war.
Force commanders to disperse, relocate constantly, restrict their communications, and abandon established headquarters.
Use cyber, intelligence, information, and covert action to make senior leaders feel exposed wherever they operate.
Publicize defections, internal disputes, corruption, failed operations, and leadership losses to deepen mistrust within the government.
Make continued participation in the war personally costly for those directing attacks against American forces, regional partners, and international shipping.
The senior political and military leadership should not enjoy sanctuary while Iranian forces attack American personnel and attempt to control the Strait of Hormuz. Those directing the war should be hunted, isolated, and prevented from exercising effective command. Their military headquarters, communications systems, protective organizations, and operational networks should remain under constant pressure.
Spencer then gives further lists of possibilities: actions that go after Iran’s communications and transportation systems, and actions that physically isolate its regime, actions against military power and infrastructure, military industry and sources of wartime revenue, economic measures, restoration of freedom of navigation, and groundforce operations (these latter ones would cause an outcry). His maritime operations include two I like:
Seize Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil export terminal, and suspend exports under regime control until Iran accepts negotiated terms.
Destroy remaining military facilities supporting regime operations on Kharg and other strategic islands.
I don’t understand why Trump hasn’t yet threatened to take Kharg Island, though that would likely take “boots on the ground.” Spencer’s conclusion:
That pressure would still serve the limited objectives established at the beginning of Operation Epic Fury. The objective would remain a negotiated change in Iranian behavior, not the conquest or permanent occupation of Iran. The United States should bring overwhelming military, economic, diplomatic, and informational power to bear in an integrated campaign that leaves the regime with a single conclusion: accepting American terms offers the only realistic path to preserving the regime and their own survival.
The campaign should continue until Iran accepts those terms. Diplomacy may record the final agreement, but compellence will create the conditions that make agreement possible. The United States still has many options left in Iran. The question is no longer whether additional instruments of American power exist. It is whether Washington is willing to employ them in sufficient combination to convince Tehran that continued resistance is more dangerous than accepting American terms.
There’s the rub, for “Washington” is synonymous with “Trump,” who of course vacillates on a daily basis. I wish Trump would employ Spencer as a military advisor, for I haven’t seen any vacillation from Spencer.
*According to It’s Noon in Israel, there was a march by Israelis into Gaza yesterday, with their aim being to promote Israelis settling in Gaza. What a dumb idea! Fortunately, they are not in the majority of Israelis. (Bolding is Amit Segal’s).
Government ministers on Sunday joined thousands of settler activists in a march through a closed military zone to the Gaza border in a show of support for Jewish settlement of the territory.
The “March of Thousands,” marking 21 years since Israel’s evacuation of the Gush Katif settlement bloc inside the Gaza Strip, drew leading figures from the religious Zionist camp—National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich among them—alongside lawmakers from Netanyahu’s Likud.
The name isn’t mere aspiration. There is a real constituency of Israelis that holds settlement as the only durable path to security, and on Sunday they came out to say so. But there is also a reason they couldn’t call it a march of millions. They remain a minority: A majority of the public, Jews and Arabs alike, opposes Jewish settlement in Gaza, even as most of the right supports it in the abstract.
The more telling detail was the turnout of government officials: 28 ministers and coalition lawmakers, by the organizers’ count. Representatives of Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit were a given—resettling Gaza is written into their platforms. But the march also drew more than 10 Likud members, in open protest against their own leader’s emphatic decision not to reestablish settlements in the Strip.
One imagines these members are hedging their bets—in case a war doesn’t cancel the primaries after all.
This is exactly the wrong thing to do if you want to stop terrorism. Yes, I agree that a two-state solution is not on right now, but settling Gaza, which Israel basically gave (as a “state”) to Palestinians in 2005, dismantling all Israeli “settlements” at that time. (I’m surprised that so few people know this). What you give to the Gazans stays in Gaza.
Based on new research by my polling firm, I believe America is better described as having eight political “tribes” — groups organized not just around demographics, party affiliation or even issue positions, but also around their postures toward institutions and societal norms.
Close to 40 percent of Americans fall into one of two groups that look like our traditional right wing and left wing. We describe them as the Loyal Left and the Loyal Right.
But most voters fall into one of the six other tribes that take some of their views from the right and some from the left.
Here are the groups (bolding is Anderson’s):
1.) Let’s start with the political left, since that’s where the action seems to be in this year’s primaries. We find that 21 percent of voters — including 42 percent of self-identified Democrats — fall into the Loyal Left, a group that is progressive on most issues and especially outraged by what its members see as widespread political corruption.
2.) Their closest cousins are what we call Electability Democrats. Making up 10 percent of voters overall (and about 19 percent of the Democratic Party), these voters are also fired up to vote in the midterms and progressive on economic matters. However, this group is slightly more ethnically diverse than the Loyal Left, which is overwhelmingly white, and also diverges sharply on several key cultural questions. Electability Democrats generally oppose the idea of defunding the police, take more conservative views on the participation of transgender individuals in competitive sports and are more middle-of-the-road on immigration issues. Asked which group I’d sort James Carville into, I’d put him here.
3.) The American Institutionalists, who represent 11 percent of all voters, are the most likely to have a high income or a graduate degree. They are whiter and older; more than half were born before 1965. They tend to get their news from broadcast TV rather than social media
4.) The Young and Disillusioned are pretty much the opposite. They are 9 percent of the electorate but an even smaller share of the Democrats’ most reliable voters because they are, as the name says, young and disillusioned. Social media is their top source of news, and politics is not a major part of their identity.
5.) On the right, first, look to a tribe we call Middle American Optimists, making up 11 percent of voters this year. They’ve little love for Democrats, and two-thirds voted for Mr. Trump in 2024. So far, they think he is doing an OK job as president, but they’re less than thrilled about the state of the economy.
6.) Critical to Mr. Trump’s reinvention of the G.O.P. has been our next group, the New Republican Populists, who are about 6 percent of the 2026 electorate. They are quite religious, live in more rural areas and oppose abortion, while rejecting much of the traditional conservative economic orthodoxy — they’re unlikely to say that you can just pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
7.) That brings us to the Moderate Right, who are 13 percent of voters and a group whose members are fairly pro-establishment in contrast with their more anti-establishment right-of-center peers. They still subscribe to a more traditional conservative view on economics and are fairly socially conservative. But perhaps by virtue of being a more female-heavy tribe, they’re also moderate on the issue of abortion and more open to the view that sexism remains a problem in society.
8.) The Loyal Right remains enthusiastic about Mr. Trump and ready to turn out for Republicans in this year’s midterms, but its size — 18 percent of the electorate — makes it insufficient, on its own, for retaining a Republican majority.
Put me in Carville’s group. Actually, I don’t see much of a difference between #2 and #3, so I’ll dub myself a 2½. I’m not quite sure what this kind of subdivision accomplishes save, as Anderson’s claim that we don’t have a two-party system but a system of two coalitions. But didn’t we already know that?
Ashley Webb, a man who identifies as a woman and is running for the United States Senate in Maine in the wake of Graham Platner’s sudden withdrawal, went viral recently for promising that he would never lie to or deceive the public. The remark struck many viewers as ironic, given that Webb made it while wearing a dress, presenting himself as a woman, and expecting voters to address him as one.
. . .Webb identifies not only as transgender but also as intersex. Earlier this month, he announced his run for the Democratic nomination in a post titled “Running Openly as Trans Intersex candidate for Senate in Maine.”
The account’s comment history contains some truly extraordinary claims.
Webb claims to ovulate. Webb also claims to experience a monthly period that began when he was 25. However, because Webb was born with “external male parts” rather than “the proper hole,” the supposed menstrual blood cannot leave through a vagina. Instead, Webb believes that a hidden female reproductive tract formed an “exit connection” with his colon, causing monthly rectal bleeding.
“When you don’t have the proper hole, it finds one of two exits,” Webb wrote. “My exit connection was made with my colon. Cause when I get this monthly pain, that is where the blood comes out of.”
Webb has not given any anatomical evidence for this claim. According to his other posts, colonoscopies have not found any such connection, while repeated CT scans have failed to reveal a uterus or ovaries.
Webb does not view these negative findings as evidence against his hypothesis that he’s actually female. Instead, Webb claims that CT scans “can’t find a uterus and ovaries when they enter your gender as male” because doctors supposedly “use a different scanning process for females.”
But that’s not how abdominal and pelvic CT imaging works. A uterus does not become invisible on a CT scan because the patient is simply listed as male.
And rectal bleeding is not a form of menstruation. Menstruation occurs when the uterine lining breaks down and blood and tissue pass from the uterus through the cervix and vagina. Ovulation occurs when an ovary releases an egg. For the blood coming out of Webb’s anus to be menstrual blood, he would need functioning ovaries, a uterus capable of cycling and shedding, and some abnormal passage connecting the reproductive tract to his colon. Those are not conclusions that can be drawn from abdominal pain and rectal bleeding.
Here’s the CT scan that Webb posted with the comments. There are no ovaries.
Such claims are, frankly, insane.
Webb also posted an image that’s supposedly one of his CT scans. He falsely claimed to be a 5’6’’, 26-year-old female. He’s 6’1’’, 40, and male. He asked other Reddit users whether his “ovaries” looked normal, and simply marked objects on the scan that he believed to be his ovaries.
He said he “just want[ed] to make sure nothing was wrong” with his ovaries, because he “want[s] to be a mom.”
Webb also makes bizarre claims about his chromosomes. In multiple posts, Webb says that a karyotype test came back XY—that of a typical male. Webb also says he was recorded male at birth. Nevertheless, Webb has written, “Pretty positive I am the XX type.”
And Webb’s claim about his chromosomes:
Regardless of whether you buy into this type of delusion, nobody should vote for Webb simply because he’s lying on many fronts.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s being arrogant:
Hili: Between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the cat is the perfect central point.
Andrzej: I doubt it.
Hili: You always have to be skeptical.
Hili: Między mikro i makrokosmosem kot jest idealnym punktem centralnym.
From Luana via Michael Shermer; you can read the Quillette article, written by the former head of Canada’s Human Rights Tribunal, here. (The fine in US dollars is a measly $530,000!)
What is the price for saying people cannot change sex?
In Canada it is $750,000.
Justification:
“Transpeople are, by definition, people ‘whose gender identity does not align with the sex assigned to them at birth.’ If a person elects not to ‘believe’ that gender identity is…
From Jeff Maurer. El-Sayed is running for the Senate from Michigan, and was endorsed by Elizabeth Warren. He’s a “progressive” Democrat, but
It’s easy to focus on how El-Sayed’s “people are sad in Dearborn today” comment is awful, but let’s focus on how it’s stupid: Assuming that Iranian-Americans were sad when the Ayatollah died is like assuming that Cuban-Americans were sad when Castro died. https://t.co/bAPy0tdv17
Well, we have another brood of four ducklings in Botany Pond, and this time I’m hopeful they’ll grow up and fledge. Yes, it’s a late brood, but in two months they’ll be ready to fly, and the weather is good in mid-September.
The story: four days ago an undergraduate alerted me to the presence of a nesting hen up against the student union building next to my own building. The hen had cleverly positioned her nest in a cranny in the building where it couldn’t be seen. A few shots.
I’ve circled the nest; you can see how hidden and inconspicuous it is. She must have been there for nearly month, unnoticed by anyone, when I came upon her, for her eggs hatched about a day after this and the incubation period is 28-29 days.
Here she is sitting on her eggs. It looks like a big pile o’ eggs, but in reality there were only five. It had been hot, and I hadn’t seen her in the pond, so not only was I unaware of her presence, but she must have gone without food or water in the blistering heat. I put a dish of cool water near her, and she didn’t seem very skittish.
She is a lovely hen; there’s something appealing about her face. As I’ve run out of duck names, I call her ‘Miss Duck”. She may be identical to Margot, as I haven’t yet checked bill photos, but I think she’s new. Also, unlike most hens, she nested on the ground rather than on a windowsill (wild mallards are ground-nesters).
Yesterday (Sunday), I looked at the pondcam and saw a blob at the south end of Botany Pond, apparently followed by several smaller blobs. I went downstairs, and, sure enough, there was a duck with four ducklings. I went immediately to the nearby nest to see if there were any orphans hanging about, but no: there were broken eggshells and one unhatched eggs, which I kept warm for a day and a half though it didn’t hatch. This was Miss Duck in the pond, and she had laid five eggs.
The nest after hatching:
The one egg I saved, which was apparently infertile (I didn’t open it). It’s really light green, the normal color of mallard eggs, but the light in the lab makes it look pale orange.
And now the happy family. The babies are adorable, and Miss Duck is much tamer than the others we’ve had. The splash of water is made by a fish, which somewhat startled Miss Duck.
I don’t know how she got to the pond; when I looked yesterday, it was about 6 a.m. Since the ducklings could not climb the stairs up through the breezeway, they must have been led around Erman, the building perpendicular to the one above, and then north again through the fence to the water. Miss Duck is smart.
Four is a small brood but she may be a young hen. Here are the babies, who, if they live, I’ll name after World Cup players. Aren’t they adorable? I think this is one of the best duckling photos I’ve ever taken:
More ducklings:
Since the dreaded Aggressive Drakes are gone, I have great hopes for this brood. The only problem is the algae: I don’t want the ducklings entangled in it and am asking Facilities to somehow remove surface algae without disturbing the ducklings.
They started eating yesterday. Miss Duck had Big Duck pellets, while the babies nibbled at Little Duck Pellets and crushed mealworms. This morning they were all still there, and were in the channel, where I fed them. Miss Duck has an endearing habit of quacking quietly when I greet her before feeding, and she’s learning my whistle.
Here they are yesterday on the rocks, sunning, drying off, and sometimes lying under mom’s belly:
I don’t think I could take another lost brood, so please cross your fingers that these little ones will grow up and fledge, and will not encounter ensnaring algae.
I have named the ducklings though I can’t distinguish them. With Matthew’s help, and because the ducklings hatched during the semifinals, I will name them
Messi (the GOAT),
Rodri (best player),
Kylian (golden boot), and
Erling (Norwegian star)
