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 president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant. He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.
Mr. Biden has been an admirable president. Under his leadership, the nation has prospered and begun to address a range of long-term challenges, and the wounds ripped open by Mr. Trump have begun to heal. But the greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.
As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.
If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick. That is how much of a danger Mr. Trump poses. But given that very danger, the stakes for the country and the uneven abilities of Mr. Biden, the United States needs a stronger opponent to the presumptive Republican nominee. To make a call for a new Democratic nominee this late in a campaign is a decision not taken lightly, but it reflects the scale and seriousness of Mr. Trump’s challenge to the values and institutions of this country and the inadequacy of Mr. Biden to confront him.
. . . Mr. Biden answered an urgent question on Thursday night. It was not the answer that he and his supporters were hoping for. But if the risk of a second Trump term is as great as he says it is — and we agree with him that the danger is enormous — then his dedication to this country leaves him and his party only one choice.
The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.
It is the best chance to protect the soul of the nation — the cause that drew Mr. Biden to run for the presidency in 2019 — from the malign warping of Mr. Trump. And it is the best service that Mr. Biden can provide to a country that he has nobly served for so long.
Will he withdraw? As Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have said when he heard that Walter Cronkite declared that the Vienam war was likely to end in a stalemate, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” What about if you lose the New York Times?
The Oklahoma State Department of Education is mandating public school teachers use the Bible in classrooms, effective immediately.
Public school superintendents were sent a memo on Thursday announcing the new rule.
“The Bible is an indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” said State Superintendent Ryan Walters. “Without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation which is why Oklahoma educational standards provide for its instruction. This is not merely an educational directive but a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country.”
The memo directs schools to “incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support into the curriculum.” The superintendent said the directive is in alignment with curriculum rules approved in May 2019 and all districts must comply.
The new policy takes effect right away and “adherence to this mandate is compulsory,” the memo states.
According to the Oklahoma Attorney General Oklahoma, law already allowed Bibles in the classroom and enabled teachers to use them in instruction.
Critics were already calling the move unconstitutional following Walters’ announcement Thursday.
“Public schools are not Sunday schools. Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters has repeatedly made clear that he is incapable of distinguishing the difference and is unfit for office. His latest scheme – to mandate use of the Bible in Oklahoma public schools’ curriculum – is a transparent, unconstitutional effort to indoctrinate and religiously coerce public school students,” said Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
This would appear on its face to be a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, but note how they try to circumvent that by arguing that the Bible is important in American history and education. Sorry, but if you want to do that, wait until graduate school when you can have a course on the Bible as History and Literature. There’s no doubt that this is just a sneaky way to insinuate religion (and Christianity; or are they teaching only the Old Testament?) into public schools. I believe the FFRF will sue the Dept. of Education.
*As always, I’ll steal three items from the estimable Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press. This week’s in honor of Thursday’s debacle, is called “TGIF: The President has a cold.”
→ Jamaal accidentally ran for the wrong district: I feel terrible for Jamaal Bowman, the Squad member who just lost his race after accidentally running in the wrong district. To rally voters, he went to the South Bronx. He said things like: “We’re gonna show fucking AIPAC the power of the motherfucking South Bronx.” And: “We’re gonna show them who the fuck we are.” He said really mean things about folks to the north of the Bronx and their weird religious practices.
“In New York City we all live together. Westchester is segregated. There’s certain places where the Jews live and concentrate. Scarsdale, parts of White Plains, parts of New Rochelle, Riverdale. I’m sure they made a decision to do that for their own reasons,” he said. “We’ve been separated and segregated and miseducated for so long. We need to live together, play together, go to school together, learn together, work together.”
His district, however, includes Westchester. It also does not include the South Bronx! No one told Jamaal Bowman, and I honestly think that’s really mean.
And it was mean that the Jews didn’t vote for Jamaal Bowman, who celebrated the Hamas attacks and denied that any Israeli women were raped. And it’s mean that AIPAC helped boost his opponent. But Bowman had already been down by 17 points before AIPAC even got involved. Anyway, here’s how The New York Times initially described his loss:
Yes, he was doing great but for the Jews! It’s all that money. It’s exactly how they described abortion rights groups who spent ten times the amount of money on the most recent midterms. Pro-life groups fell, “overtaken by flood of pro-choice money,” I’m sure. Right? Right? That was ten times the amount! Weird, I can’t find a single NYT headline about thatnumber.
→ Oh, California: After a sweep of a Los Angeles homeless tent encampment, local businesses and residents put big planters on the sidewalk, hopeful that this might disrupt the tent city. But you cannot have random planters! Sidewalks are for fentanyl dens and taking naps naked. The city immediately removed the planters. Los Angeles cops respond faster to a new flower box than they do to a murder. You can park your car next to a group that includes a sex-trafficked teenager and enough fentanyl to kill an elephant, and oh, the police will come: to give you a ticket for parking too long in a loading zone.
As for California’s budget: it’s so hard to balance those old things. Even though our markets are hitting record highs and things seem good or should be, California has declared “a budget emergency.” The reasons given for the “emergency” are that the stock market went up but also down. And that there were a lot of winter storms. So the state is drawing down the reserves by $12 billion over the next two years.
→ The Taliban makes a good point about women, UN says: When Afghanistan’s representatives at the United Nations asked that no Afghan women be allowed in the conversation to discuss Afghanistan, the United Nations said of course, good sirs. Furious American feminists held rallies to—oh, oh, never mind, American feminists are totally and completely silent and maybe sort of into it. Taliban are so indigenous, so very anti-Zionist, they understand the power of layering loose fabrics. It’s so hot right now. Almost as hot as the Houthis. Women under Taliban rule need to just sit tight for one or two or three generations to pass, and then maybe worrying about your freedom will be cool again. Or maybe never! Either way, please don’t come into the room when men are in there!
*Here are, as of 7 a.m. today, the results from yesterday’s poll about who won the Presidential debate. The readers apparently agree with the NYT, CNN, and almost everyone else:
And from Bari Weiss at the Free Press, in an article called “They Knew“:
Rarely are so many lies dispelled in a single moment. Rarely are so many people exposed as liars and sycophants. Last night’s debate was a watershed on both counts.
The debate was not just a catastrophe for President Biden. And boy—oy—was it ever.
But it was more than that. It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.
Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president were accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “fake news,” and, most recently, “cheap fakes.”
Cast your mind back to February, when Robert Hur, the Special Counsel appointed by the Department of Justice to look into Biden’s handling of classified documents, came out with his report that included details about Biden’s health, which explained why he would not prosecute the president.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Can anyone doubt that characterization after watching Biden’s debate performance?
Yet Eric Holder told us that Hur’s remarks were “gratuitous.” The former attorney general tweeted: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.” Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser, said Hur’s report was a “partisan hit job.” Vice President Kamala Harris argued: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous.” The report does not “live in reality,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, stressing that the president was “sharp” and “on top of things.”
Shall I go on? Okay.
She goes on, but the point is made. Here’s a screenshot of yesterday’s NYT editorial headlines. Five of the seven columns—every column about the debate—urge Biden to drop out of the race. But who will replace him? Surely not Kamala Harris. I vote for Gretchen Whitmer now. (I’ve rethought my support for Mayor Pete.)
This is not a hard column to write. In fact, I wrote it twice already! But last night’s debate performance by Joe Biden is the end of his campaign. It’s over. Done. No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years. No sane person can vote for him.
And watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife.
The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?
And if they have not told him the truth on this, what else are they afraid to tell him?
The mainstream media also bears responsibility for once again being an arm of the DNC establishment, running countless stories about Biden’s acuity and sharpness from inside sources, while attacking the few journalists who actually dared write the most obvious truth about this election: Biden has deteriorated rapidly in the last four years, he is unrecognizable from the man who ran in 2020, and we’ll be lucky if he is able to function as president for the next six months, let alone four years.
. . .But there is a huge, gleaming, hopeful silver lining, as I’ve noted many times before. For the first time this year, we have a chance of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office with a new nominee from a younger generation. No, I don’t know who — except it obviously cannot be Kamala Harris, who would lose by an even bigger margin than the ambling cadaver. But that is what politics is for! There is time for a campaign before a convention that could now be must-see television. A future campaign already has a simple message that vibes with the moment and instantly puts Trump on defense: it’s time for the next generation to lead. We are choosing between the past (Trump) and the future, between the old and the young, between the insane versus the coherent.
All it takes is a credible Democrat of stature to say they are running against Biden. Then all the bets are off. He or she need not criticize Biden, and, in fact, should lionize his service. But they can say they’re running because beating Trump is the first and most important objective, and, at this point, it is obvious that Biden simply cannot beat Trump.
Does anyone have that courage? The person who shows it will instantly become the front-runner. Go for it.
Indeed, but then what will happen. Will there be two more debates? I agree about Harris not being suitable, but it’s really uncharitable for Sullivan to call Biden, a fellow human, “the ambling cadaver.” That’s bloody rude.
The debacle [of the debate] put a spotlight on a handful of Democrats who were once seen as 2028 presidential hopefuls, but are now being whispered about as potential contenders to replace Biden. They include Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden would need to step aside from the race in order for Democrats to replace him, given that he controls most of the party’s delegates headed into their August convention.
Whitmer, in a Friday statement, praised Biden: “Joe Biden is running to serve the American people. Donald Trump is running to serve Donald Trump.”
After the debate, Newsom was asked repeatedly whether he would consider replacing Biden on the ticket. He said that he didn’t believe the party should change nominees. “Our nominee is Joe Biden, I’m looking forward to voting for him in November,” he said, trailed by reporters as he walked through the debate spin room.
Harris gave interviews on cable news defending Biden after the debate. She will continue to back the president, keep up her travel schedule and be careful not to show in any way that she isn’t being loyal to Biden, according to people close to her.
Top White House and Biden campaign officials were holding one-on-one calls Friday with key Democratic elected officials, donors and supporters to describe what they argued was a gap between what pundits were saying about the debate and what voters took away from it.
“We think there’s going to be a lot of twists and turns here,” the senior Biden adviser said. The official said the campaign’s data showed that persuadable voters supported Biden’s agenda and remained concerned by Trump’s continued denial of the 2020 election results, his backing of the repeal of Roe v. Wade and his defense of Jan. 6, 2021, rioters at the Capitol.
Democratic donors and strategists said they were shocked by Biden’s showing. They acknowledged, however, that the chances of the president withdrawing remained slim.
Why didn’t I think of Whitmer? I prefer her to Newsom, but both would be acceptable replacements for Trump.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is posing prettily:
Hili: This is the right background for a cat who wants to look good.
A: That’s narcissism.
Hili: Really? I didn’t know.
In Polish:
Hili: To jest właściwe tło dla kota, który chce dobrze wyglądać.
Ja: To jest narcyzm.
Hili: Naprawdę? Nie wiedziałam.
And a picture of baby Kulka, sharing Malgorzata’s snack of yogurt:
*******************
From reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe, “The psychic hot line”
From Masih; more Iranian women remove their hijabs (check below for some English subtitles):
My heroes are Iranian women who refuse to vote for slavery, unlike those you see in the videos voting for their oppressors from West.
If your government denies you basic freedoms as a woman but lets you vote for those who oppress you, what will you do?pic.twitter.com/EOA3TuwQBW
From my feed. A really nice palace guard lets a blind girl feel his horse. Normally they’d be very strict, yell at the person, and even try to hit them with the horse’s head. But he moves the horse closer to the girl:
Here, just posted, is a speech Biden gave today, after last night’s debate debacle. It’s terrific, passionate, and not doddering at all. Are there two Joe Bidens? Does he have a Doppelgänger?
Here’s an 11-minute video of CNN commentators (and a few guests), most of whom are certainly Democrats, discussing the debate and agreeing that Biden’s performance was dismal—that Biden appeared disengaged and incompetent. As David Axelrod notes, Biden did make some good points, but his performance, particularly near the beginning, made Democrats panic.
Yes, of course Trump blustered and lied, but his supporters are used to that, and probably ignore the lies. Debates are about appearances, not substance, and appearances were critically important in this debate when so many Americans, like me, are worried about Biden’s ability to run the country. Biden flunked. And remember too, he has coattails. If Biden’s defeated, it will affect other Democrats across the country. We’re faced with the prospect of a Republic President, a Congress with two Republican houses, and a conservative, pro-Republican Supreme Court.
My view is the same as that of most of the commentators, and I especially agree with Van Jones. “it was painful.” But I also liked his quip: it was “an old man versus a con man.” Jones added this:
“I just want to speak from my heart. I love that guy. That’s a good man. He loves his country; he’s doing the best that he can. But he had a test to meet tonight—to restore confidence of the country in a debate, and he failed to do that. And I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now. We’re still far from our convention, and it’s time for this party to figure out a different way forward if he will allow us to do that. But that was not what we needed from Joe Biden, and it’s personally painful for a lot of people: it’s just panic—it’s pain.”
Most of us Democrats harbor similar affection for Biden, but that doesn’t mean he should now run the country.
A different way forward? Who could the Democrats nominate now? The money has come in, the posters and buttons are printed, and the Democratic Convention is ready to roll. Will Biden step aside now? I wouldn’t bet on it. He and his wife appear convinced that he did okay. And who could take on the painful job of saying, “Joe, it’s time to step aside”?
Here’s your chance to weigh in on the debate in the comments.
I’m watching the debate now, and have gone through an hour. It’s pretty bad: Biden wobbles and Trump lies. So far Biden isn’t totally out of it and has made some good points. But he does look as if age has taken its toll. He’s a good man—far better than Trump—but Trump is winning. Half an hour to go. Here are some “must watch” moments from the debate selected by CNN; the video 35 minutes long:
All I can say is this: I TOLD YOU SO! Every time I worried and kvetched on this site about Biden’s scary shows of incompetence and inscentience, some readers took me to task, even asserting that I was trying to promote Trump. To those folks: do you still think Biden is a good choice for President? You may say he’s better than Trump—and I will never vote for Trump—but how competent will he be in a couple of years? Seriously!
Well, last night’s debate vindicated me, but also terrified me, because Biden’s performance was apparently so appalling that Democrats throughout America are calling for someone to replace him as a candidate—at this last minute! Trump, meanwhile, blustered and lied a lot, but clearly came off looking better. We Democrats had better regroup! Ceiling Cat help us all!
Here’s this morning’s NYT headlines. You can read the stories behind the headlines on the top and left here, and here, respectively:
→ The debate happened: I don’t know where to begin. In my home we’ve been screaming at the TV for two hours as I write this. Biden walked on stiff, uncomfortable, strange. He held a bewildered expression throughout the night, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide, staring off into the distance, rarely smiling. I won’t say Trump looked young (he isn’t), but he is less stiff and his eyes blinked normally, jaw firmly in control of mouth. And then they started talking. The extent of Biden’s cognitive decline is undeniable and, speaking as a citizen who wishes my president the best, devastating. For a strange moment as the debate went on, the entire media commentariat was in agreement: this is a disaster for Joe Biden, and the Democrats need to replace him.
Here’s Nicholas Kristof, éminence grise of progressive political commentators: “I wish Biden would reflect on this debate performance and then announce his decision to withdraw from the race, throwing the choice of Democratic nominee to the convention.” Here’s Kasie Hunt, CNN anchor: “The voice, open-mouthed look, and visual contrast between President Biden and former President Trump all have Democrats I’m talking to nearly beside themselves watching this debate.” Here’s top pollster Dave Wasserman: “This debate making abundantly clear that Biden’s insistence on running for another term. . . has gravely jeopardized Dems’ prospects to defeat Trump.”
The low moment for Trump was probably when Biden said Trumpo had “the morals of an alley cat” (great line). And Trump found himself saying: “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.” Which is just. I mean. With all due respect. . .
Low moment for Biden, other than overall presentation, was when his words became a nonsensical garble and then the camera panned to an alarmed-looking Trump for his response. “I really don’t know what he said,” Trump says. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.” Or maybe it was when Biden said, perplexingly: “We finally beat Medicare.”
High moment for both was the two of them fighting about their golf skills. Biden goes: “I got my handicap when I was vice president down to a 6.” Trump hits back: “That’s the biggest lie—that he’s a 6 handicap—of all.” Biden: “I was an 8 handicap and—and—” Trump: “I’ve seen your swing. I know your swing.”
And kudos to CNN’s moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bush, praised by the left and right for being fair. Turning off the mics after each candidate hit their time limit was really smart, as was having no studio audience. It made for a calmer, more focused debate, and it made it harder for Trump to be a bully. But it still didn’t save Joe.
On CNN, Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s former communications director, said: “It was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden. I don’t think there’s any other way to slice it.” Van Jones, close to tears, suggested Biden should drop out. CNN correspondent John King said senior Democrats are considering going to the White House to urge Biden to drop out. The most positive thing former Obama campaign chief David Axelrod could muster was to warn Republicans that if Biden did drop out, Trump might be in trouble.
I won’t fact-check here, but they both told huge and strange lies (Trump said Democrats allow killing children after they’ve been born full-term; Biden said the Border Patrol guys endorsed him). Maybe I’m slap-happy, but this random left-wing Twitter account made me laugh a lot.
In a last-minute scramble, Biden’s team leaked to friendly media: The President has a cold. The Biden after-party featured an extraordinarily animated Jill Biden saying to her husband: “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question! You knew all the facts. And let me ask the crowd, what did Trump do? He lieeeed!”
I think the question we all have to ask after tonight is simple: If this is Biden, who’s been running our country? Like, practically, who’s been doing the job job of it? Jill Biden? The White House handyman? The interns? Karl Rove? A random Houthi? I’m not mad, I just want to know. Because the people who have been pushing to keep him in office certainly know he’s this bad, and they must like it that way. Weak and confused, he can be used, kept as a pet moderate. Interns, release the old man, just tell us your demands, and we can figure something out.
All right, it’s the turn of readers to weigh in. What do you think? Did Biden really do that badly (I’m watching the debate as I write)? Should he be replace? (And isn’t it too late?). If you’re a Democrat, as most of us are, do you still plan to vote for Biden, or will you not vote at all for President (something I contemplate on and off in a state where Biden’s victory is assured)? And if you chewed me out for saying in earlier posts that Biden looked bad, you’re welcome to apologize! 🙂
Your opinion below, please, while I finish watching this debacle. And I’m adding a poll, so please vote, too
Reader Lou Jost, who works as a naturalist in Ecuador, was making one of his occasional visits to his home country, the U.S., and came upon a duck rescue in Wisconsin. He sent a video and some photos, which I’m posting here. First, Lou’s notes:
I in visiting the US now, and as I was hiking in a local Milwaukee park (Wehr Nature Center/ Whitnall Park), I noticed a gathering of people on a pier on the edge of the aptly-named Mallard Lake. There were also large boxes being unloaded from a park vehicle. I had stumbled upon a duck rescue in progress! This was the “tail end” of the process, in which thirty adolescent mallards would be released after growing up in a Wisconsin Humane Society shelter. Of course I thought of PCC(E) but I didn’t have a camera with me. A woman, who turned out to be Carly Hintz, the Director of the Wehr Nature Center, was taking pictures and she kindly offered to send them to me for you.
The ducks were at first very reluctant to make the jump from the pier into the water below, but after the first few dared to do it and began swimming and splashing and exploring the duckweed with obvious energy, most of the others followed at once. A few stragglers needed more persuasion. They all then formed a dense mallard flotilla and went off to do duck things. I think they will be very happy here.
The rescue was on June 20, and here’s a video, with credits to Carly Hintz (the director of Wehr) and to the Wehr Nature Center:
‘
Carly’s photos of the release:
The mallards, unused to freedom, grouped together at first. As Carly said (she knows about my duck tending):
It was remarkable to see the “teenagers” rally together and take the leap into Mallard Lake (aptly named). Perhaps it’s a four star hotel to them much like your Botany Pond.
I’m increasingly impressed by the Wisconsin Humane Society and all wildlife rehabers out there doing their best to care for injured and orphaned wildlife. It’s a good thing to care for the earth as in return it will care for us.
Now I know what happens to my rescue ducklings, though they’re tended at Willowbrook Wildlife Center in the Chicago suburbs.
What wonderful people to take such good care of these orphans! Clearly, they didn’t agree with a member of the Chicago Facilities team at Botany Pond, who dismissed any accidents that befall ducklings with “Well, they’re only ducks.” I responded with the Jewish proverb, “If you save one life, you save the world entire.” (I would also have asked this person if they had pets or children and would apply the same “let-natural-selection-sort-it-out philosphy with them; but I bit my tongue.)
Welcome to, June 28, 2024, and National Tapioca Day. I liked the pudding with its “fish eyes”, and now tapioca pearls, made from starch extracted from the cassava plant, have been used to make the wildly popular bubble tea, which I also love. At least have some bubble tea today: it’s everywhere now:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 28 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*I haven’t watched the debate yet, as I went to bed early with a terrible stomach ache (I think I ate something bad). But I’ll watch it this monrong. I’m better now, but the NYT suggests the debate was a total debacle, with Trump blustering and Biden, sadly, losing it. It’s SO bad that Democrats (including the mushbrain Nick Kristof) is calling for Biden to be replaced as a candate. Here are all 12 NYT op-ed columnists weighing in, and all think that Trump won or, for two of the clueless, that it was a draw (click to read):
SAVE YOUR COMMENTS FOR THE UPCOMING POST (AFTER READERS’ WILDLIFE).
I’ll watch it this morning, but we’ll have a reactions post for readers this morning. Posting may also be light today, as we have a department party at noon to celebrate the departure of our beloved departmental administrator, who’s been here for several decades.
Here’s the whole debate:
and MSNBC’s 3-minute summary:
*Over at his Substack Site The Silver Bulletin, statistician Nate Silver, founder of the site FiveThirtyEight, announces, to my dismay, that “The Presidential election isn’t a toss-up.” (h/t Rosemary) Oy vey, because he’s putting the odds in Trump’s favor. He’s just published a new model for predicting outcomes. It’s a long post, but here’s the upshot:
It’s not my job to tell you how to vote, and I hope that we have some Trump (and RFK Jr., etc.) voters among the Silver Bulletin readership. Republicans buy sneakers — and sign up for Substack newsletters. But I think it’s important to be up front, because I’ve been rather lucky in one sense in my election forecasting career. I began making election forecasts in 2008, and in literally every presidential year since then, I haven’t really had to deal with a conflict between what I personally wanted to see happen and what my forecast said. This year, I do have that conflict. The candidate who I honest-to-God think has a better chance (Trump) isn’t the candidate I’d rather have win (Biden).
. . .And what I’d noticed over time is that the reasons that Trump would win have gradually become somewhat more compelling than the reasons for Biden. Emphasis on gradually and somewhat. Biden clearly could win in November. He won the same matchup four years ago. Not only would he be within a normal-sized polling error of Trump if the election were held today, but there are still four-and-a-half-months to go.
Still, the items on the “reasons to think Trump might win” checklist have proven to be more robust. There’s Biden’s age, which voters have extremely persistent concerns about. There’s the very high inflation of mid-2021 through mid-2023 — which has considerably abated, but still is reflected in much higher prices than when Biden took office. There’s the fact that the global mood is pessimistic and that incumbents have been getting crushed everywhere around the world. Plus, some of the factors I thought would be an advantage for Biden haven’t proven to be. There’s less of a fundraising gap than I expected, for instance, and I’m not sure that Biden has run the smarter tactical campaign.
. . . . When the model was finally done on Sunday night, it turned out that Trump was favored by a slightly larger degree than I’d anticipated at Manifest — although Biden retains highly viable paths to victory.
, , , It would be easy to overstate the case, however. Trump does still lead in our national average — however narrowly. But the bigger problem for Biden though is that elections in the United States aren’t determined by the popular vote. His current popular-vote disadvantage is modest — modest enough that a couple more polls like the recent Fox News national poll could be enough to put him ahead. And the fundamentals part of our model — which in the case of the Silver Bulletin, just means the economy and incumbency — slightly helps Biden, as I’ll cover in the next section.
. . . . Of course, you could also argue for subjective adjustments that go the other way, like for Trump’s criminal convictions. I just don’t think it’s so obvious that there are strong gravitational forces pulling in Biden’s direction. In a time of extremely high polarization, elections tend toward being 50/50 affairs, and it’s a challenge to win the 50/50 races when you’re at a disadvantage in the Electoral College.
It’s a long article but a good one, and we Democrats are right to worry A LOT about Biden’s chances in this election.
*NYT columnist Pamela Paul, in her latest piece called “Who you calling conservative?“, has the same beef I do: not agreeing 100% with “progressive Leftists” automatically turns you into a right-winger, or even a “fascist.”
You know you’ve touched a nerve with progressive activists when they tell you not just that you’re wrong but that you’re on the other side.
Such is the fate of any old-school liberal or mainstream Democrat who deviates from progressive dogma. Having personally been slapped with every label from “conservative” to “Republican” and even, in one loopy rant, “fascist,” I can attest to how disorienting it is given my actual politics, which are pure blue American only when they aren’t center French.
But it’s not just me. New York magazine’s liberal political columnist Jonathan Chait was accused of lending “legitimacy to a reactionary moral panic” for critiquing political correctness. When Nellie Bowles described the excesses of social justice movements in her book “Morning After the Revolution,” a reviewer labeled it a “conservative memoir.” Meghan Daum, a lifelong Democrat, was accused of having fallen into a “right-wing trap” for questioning the progressive doctrine of intersectional oppression.
If this was just about our feelings, these denunciations could be easily brushed aside. But the goal and the effect is to narrow the focus of acceptable discourse by Democrats and their allies. If liberals are denounced for “punching left” when they express a reasonable difference of opinion, potentially winning ideas are banished.
. . .In the run-up to a tight election with a weak Democratic candidate and a terrifying Republican opponent, pushing liberals and centrists out of the conversation not only exacerbates polarization, it’s also spectacularly counterproductive.
Meanwhile, according to a recent Axios poll, even 42 percent of Democrats support mass deportations of illegal immigrants. It’s no secret this election will be fought in the swing states and won in the middle, which makes another poll’s finding that 46 percent of independents in support even more concerning for the party’s electoral prospects.
Consider other liberal political positions that have been denounced by the progressive left: Criminal offenders — even those not named Donald Trump — should go to prison and a well-trained and respected police force provides community safety.
The goal of progressives may be solidarity, but their means of achieving it are by shutting alternative ideas down rather than modeling tolerance. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a co-author of a recent book called “Solidarity,” said those liberals who critique illiberalism on the left are “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”
But liberal people can disagree without being called traitors. Liberals can even agree with conservatives on certain issues because those positions aren’t inherently conservative. Shouldn’t the goal be to decrease polarization rather than egg it on? Shouldn’t Democrats aim for a big tent, especially at a time when registered party members are declining and the number of independents is on the rise?’
It may sound a bit defensive (and I probably do at time, too), but the more progressive Democrats, who are increasingly insinuating their policies into Biden’s agenda, may help cost Biden the election in November. It certainly cost Jamaal Bowman the election this week.
*The Sackler family, infamous for making and sneakily pushing opioids on the American public (read the fantastic book about them, Empire of Pain), have lost one in the Supreme Court. The judges ruled that the family could not be exempt from civil lawsuits, which could bankrupt the gazillionaire family easily, under the bankruptcy plan they confected.
The Supreme Court rejected a bankruptcy plan for OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma that would have allocated billions of dollars from members of the wealthy Sackler family to combat opioid addiction in exchange for shielding them from civil lawsuits over their alleged role in fueling the drug epidemic.
The 5-4 decision marks a victory for the minority of opioid victims who voted to reject the settlement plan because they want to continue pressing lawsuits against the Sackler family members who own Purdue, and a loss for the majority of opioid victims and state and local governments who voted to accept it.
The high court said U.S. bankruptcy law doesn’t allow for a release of the Sacklers’ legal liabilities stemming from their ownership of Purdue when not all opioid-related plaintiffs have accepted the terms offered by the company’s family owners, whose wealth has been estimated at $11 billion.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a dissent, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Notice the split in the liberal Justices here, with Jackson joining the conservatives and Roberts joining the liberals (Roberts is becoming saner every year), though it’s above my pay grade to weigh in on this particular decision.
Thursday’s ruling—among the highest-profile bankruptcy decisions ever from the high court—weakens the ability of corporations and their insiders to use bankruptcy to resolve mass litigation alleging they harmed consumers.
The Sacklers didn’t file for bankruptcy themselves and didn’t agree to place “anything approaching their full assets on the table” for distribution to opioid victims, Gorsuch wrote. “Yet they seek a judicial order that would extinguish virtually all claims against them for fraud, willful injury, and even wrongful death, all without the consent of those who have brought and seek to bring such claims,” he wrote.
Nothing in U.S. bankruptcy law authorizes that outcome, Gorsuch said.
Now the Sacklers will have to reorganize some kind of bankruptcy plan that leaves them open to civil cases.
*Doctors Without Borders (“MSF”) has been beefing because one of their staff in Gaza City was killed in an IDF strike. At any rate, the staffer proved to be a terrorist who made rockets for Islamic Jihad. turning rockets into precision-guided rockets, and thus he was an enemy combatant whose death likely saved the lives of many Israelis. I am not sure whether MSF knew of this terrorist connection. Although I dislike the organization, I wouldn’t accuse them of knowingly hiring terrorists.
(The organization has long denigrated Israel, and it kills me that I gave them over ten thousand bucks as the proceeds from a multiply-illustrated and Kelly-Houle illuminated copy of Why Evolution Is True that I auctioned off on eBay. Had I known the extent of their Jew-denigration then, I would have found some other charity.)
A Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket expert, named by Doctors Without Borders as a staffer, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in Gaza City on Tuesday, the military said.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, reported on Tuesday morning that Fadi al-Wadiya was one of its staffers.
The organization said in a post on X that al-Wadiya was killed along with five other people, among them three children, while riding his bicycle to the MSF clinic where he worked.
A Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket expert, named by Doctors Without Borders as a staffer, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in Gaza City on Tuesday, the military said.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, reported on Tuesday morning that Fadi al-Wadiya was one of its staffers.
“Killing a healthcare worker while on his way to provide vital medical care to wounded victims of the endless massacres across Gaza is beyond shocking; it’s cynical and abhorrent,” Caroline Seguin, the organization’s local operations manager, was quoted saying in a statement.
The Israel Defense Forces later in the day confirmed that it had killed al-Wadiya, saying that he was an Islamic Jihad operative involved in developing the terror group’s missiles.
. . . Al-Wadiya was involved in “the development and advancement of the organization’s missile array,” the military said in a statement.
The IDF said he was also a “source of knowledge” within the Islamic Jihad, in the fields of electronics and chemistry.
According to ther IDF, Hamas fired at an aid convoy:
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Hamas launched mortar shells at Israeli troops escorting a United Nations humanitarian aid convoy in the central Gaza Strip, the military said, publishing footage of the incident.
The IDF and COGAT had been coordinating a UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) convoy, part of a mission to reunite children from northern Gaza with their families in the south, according to the military.
Here’s the IDF’s picture of al-Wadiya in his two roles, MSF on the left and wearing a Palestinian Islamic Jihad uniform on the right:
It’s sad if any civilians were killed, but if you look at the video (below), you don’t see anybody around al-Wadiya, so I would take that claim with a grain of salt.
Here’s the outrage from MSF:
We are outraged and strongly condemn the killing of our colleague, Fadi Al-Wadiya, in an attack this morning in Gaza City.
The attack killed Fadi, along with 5 other people including 3 children, while he was cycling to work, near the MSF clinic where he was providing care. pic.twitter.com/Lmd8E5AkC1
Medicins San Frontier may have engaged in material support of terrorism under federal and state law depending on what they knew about their Islamic Jihad employee. Their full defense of him even after evidence of his Islamic Jihad role come out will make it hard to argue this was… https://t.co/ulFsoIMNPm
The IDF’s video of the drone strike in Gaza City. Google translation:
An Air Force aircraft, under the direction of the Southern Command and AMN, attacked earlier today in the Gaza City area and killed the terrorist Fadi Jihad Muhammad Alwadia, who served as an operative in the GAP terrorist organization and was involved in the development and promotion of the organization’s missile system. Also, the terrorist was a unique center of knowledge in the organization in the fields of electronics and chemistry.
And yes, there could have been bystanders; it’s hard to tell.
כלי-טיס של חיל-האוויר, בהכוונת פיקוד הדרום ואמ”ן, תקף מוקדם יותר היום במרחב העיר עזה וחיסל את המחבל פאדי ג׳האד מחמד אלואדיה, אשר שימש כפעיל בארגון הטרור גא״פ ועסק בפיתוח וקידום מערך הטילים של הארגון.
כמו כן, המחבל היווה מוקד ידע ייחודי בארגון בתחומי האלקטרוניקה והכימיה. pic.twitter.com/kidkxFRNVQ
From Luana, The Biden Administration is not doing a good job with this stuff! See the NYT article here.
I’ve been reporting on the political corruption of advocates for transitioning minors, absence of robust scientific evidence, for over 2 years now! Now @nytimes readers are finally learning that pediatric sex-trait modification has always been guided by activism, not science. pic.twitter.com/Qz3SE8T6rD
It’s currently breeding season at the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center and BFFs are pairing up. The science being done at the center to help preserve the black-footed ferret species, is incredible. pic.twitter.com/T0JAYXJlC8
— U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (@USFWS) June 25, 2024
If you’ve studied Freud, or read the New York Review of Books, then you’ll surely have heard of Fred Crews. Although I met him only once (see below), we exchanged tons of emails over the years and, after reading his works, became a big fan and admirer. Sadly, according to the NYT, Fred died six days ago at his home in Oakland. He was 91. The NYT gives a fair accounting of his accomplishments; click on the link below or see the archived obituary here. Indented quotes in this piece, save for the last one, come from this NYT piece:
Fred was a literary critic—and later a Freud critic—and taught English at UC Berkeley for 36 years, eventually becoming Chair before retiring. He told me he left because he couldn’t stand the way literary criticism was going, becoming too tendentious and ridden with various “theories”, effacing the value of a work of literature itself. He made fun of these schools of criticism in two of his books (The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh) in which the Winnie the Pooh stories were analyzed through the lenses of various literary schools. The books are hilarious, and the NYT says this about them:
As a young professor at Berkeley, Mr. Crews made a splash in 1963 with “The Pooh Perplex,” a best-selling collection of satirical essays lampooning popular schools of literary criticism of the time; they carried titles like “A Bourgeois Writer’s Proletarian Fables” and “A.A. Milne’s Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex.”
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Gardner called it a “virtuoso performance” and “a withering attack on the pretensions and excesses of academic criticism.” (In 2001, Professor Crews published “Postmodern Pooh,” a fresh takedown of lit-crit theories.)
The Pooh Perplex should be read by all English majors, or anyone who likes literature. It’s a hoot! Click below to see the Amazon site:
Fred was perhaps the most scientific literary critic I know of. This was seen both in his willingness to change his mind (he began as a Freudian critic but later repudiated Freud), and in one of the big projects of his life, debunking Freud, which he did elegantly, trenchantly, and in a thorough way that nobody has rebutted (the critics didn’t like his analyses mostly because they were imbued with love of Freud).
And having read a lot of Freud myself and being appalled as a scientist by its empirical vacuity, I agreed with Fred: Freud was simply a charlatan, fabricating theories that were never tested, pretending he had hit on the truth, and stealing ideas from others. As you know, Freud did, and still does, dominate the mindset of Western intellectuals. But Freud was also tendentious, an intellectual thief, and a miscreant in his own life, as well as a cocaine addict whose addiction influenced his work. If you want to read one book to show what a fraud the man was, go through Fred’s book Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017), which is at once a biography and a demolition of Freudianism as a whole. You can get the book on Amazon by clicking on the title below. Anybody who has the pretense of being an intellectual in our culture simply has to read this book; and it’s best read after you’ve read some Freud, so you can see the effectiveness of Crews’s demolition.
The NYT says this about the book:
“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”
But Freud didn’t develop: his ambition was overweening from the start, as was his tendency to fabricate stuff and steal ideas from others.
I read many reviews of that book, and virtually all were negative, for they were written by acolytes of Freud, many of whom, lacking a scientific mindset, had no idea that his theories were fabricated, false, or untestable. Even now Freud has a strong grip on the therapy culture, and you can still find expensive analysts who will make you see them several times a week at unbelievable prices. They may mutter a few tepid disavowals of Freud, but their technique is based on Freud’s model.
Fred was a great guy, and in the face of this criticism, he simply moved on, unleashing other attacks on Freud, and on other unpopular views. More from the NYT:
Professor Crews started writing for The New York Review of Books in 1964, beginning with a review of three works of fiction, including a story collection by John Cheever. His essays over the decades covered a lot of territory, literary and otherwise, and while his writing was invariably erudite and carefully argued, it was often mercurial, by turns sarcastic, penetrating, acerbic and witty.
What’s wrong with mercurial? Here the NYT is trying to sneak in some criticism, but I urge you to read some of his essays yourself (you can find many of the NYRB essays here, and some are free). The writing is wonderful and stylish. I don’t get why “mercurial”, turning at times to humor, sarcasm, and penetrating analysis, is pejorative.
Another unpopular cause that Fred took up after retirement was the reexamination of the case of Jerry Sandusky, which I posted about (and about Fred’s commentary) in 2018.
One unlikely cause that he devoted himself to in recent years was to assert the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys and is now in prison.
“I joined the small group of skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort,” Professor Crews wrote in one article in 2021, adding, “believe it or not, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone.”
He also went after “recovered memory therapy” in league with his friend Elizabeth Loftus (see my post here, which contains a comment by Fred). That, too, rests on no empirical evidence, but simply on the wish-thinking assertions of therapists and prosecutors.
Professor Crews linked the charges against Mr. Sandusky to another of his notable targets, the recovered memory movement, which took hold in the 1990s and which he saw as stemming from the excesses of psychoanalytic theory. His two-part essay, “The Revenge of the Repressed,” which appeared in 1994, was included in his collection “Follies of the Wise,” a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award.
“Thanks to the ministrations of therapists who believe that a whole range of adult symptoms can probably be best explained by the repression of childhood sexual abuse,” he wrote in The Times in 1997, “these people emerge from therapy drastically alienated not only from their families but also from their own selves. In all but the tiniest minority of cases, these accusations are false.”
Professor Crews’s work “was and remains an invaluable weapon, wielded on behalf of sanity and science, against the forces of ignorance, self-interest and moral panic,” Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and another longtime critic of recovered memory therapy, said in an email.
His recovered memory essay prompted a series of no-holds-barred exchanges with readers that spilled over into multiple issues of the magazine. Professor Crews was oftenathismostfull-throated in The Review’s letters to the editor column, where intellectual debates can border on trench warfare.
He proved to be a merciless adversary over the decades, especially for Freud supporters, and in the process helped elevate the letters column into something of an art form.
“Mercurial” my tuches!
And some on his other efforts (he was a busy man):
Frederick attended Yale University and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1958 with a dissertation on E.M. Forster. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1958 and taught there until his retirement in 1994. In the mid-1960s, he became involved in the antiwar movement, serving as a co-chairman of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee, “but when even moderate Republicans joined the antiwar cause around 1970, I felt that my activism wasn’t needed anymore,” he told an interviewer in 2006.
In addition to his essays and critical works, Professor Crews wrote “The Random House Handbook,” a popular composition and style manual first published in 1974, and edited several anthologies and style guides. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Fred helped me once or twice by suggesting edits on my own popular writing, and in gratitude I purchased, at long distance, a good bottle of Italian red wine at a store in Berkeley, and then told Fred to go pick it up.
As I said, Fred was a great guy, and despite the academic squabbles in which he participated (which show both his heterodoxy and his courage), he was a man of sanguinity and of even keel.
His emails were works of art themselves, and during one of our exchanges I asked him what, given his numerous achievements (and battles), he thought was his most memorable accomplishment. I still have his response, and here it is (I’ve given a link to what he cites):
My most memorable feat, though it originated simply from a book review assignment, was the exposé “The Unknown Freud,” in NYRB, issue of 11/18/93. It caused the biggest hubbub in the magazine’s history. When there was a similar stir, a year later, regarding my piece on recovered memory, NYRB decided to turn the two controversies into a book (The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute). Because I’ve always been a debater, the sparring with shrinks was a special pleasure.
Indeed!
After many years of e-communication, I finally met Fred and his wife Betty for lunch in Chicago in 2009. That was a great pleasure, and here’s a photo of Fred and Betty that I took in the restaurant. He doesn’t look like a man who would battle with shrinks and academics, does he?
No prayers need be offered, for Fred was a diehard atheist, but I’ve given a few thoughts in this short memoriam. The world in general, and especially the literary world, is poorer for his absence.
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