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.
Welcome to Monday, July 28, 2025, as we inch ever closer to the dreaded month of August. It’s National Milk Chocolate Day, and though as I get older I prefer the darker chocolate (all the way to 90% or higher), I still like this brand of milk chocolate:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 28 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Obituaries first: Tom Lehrer died. At least he had a good long life:
Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.
Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.
But his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.
He stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.
As popular as his songs were, Mr. Lehrer never felt entirely comfortable performing them. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”
Mr. Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”
Here’s my favorite Tom Lehrer song (I had no idea he was an academic mathematician!), And see one comment below from a reader tangentially involved with him.
The Democratic Party’s image has eroded to its lowest point in more than three decades, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll, with voters seeing Republicans as better at handling most issues that decide elections.
The new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.
That is a far weaker assessment than voters give to either President Trump or the Republican Party, who are viewed more unfavorably than favorably by 7 points and 11 points, respectively. A mere 8% of voters view the Democrats “very favorably,” compared with 19% who show that level of enthusiasm for the GOP.
Here’s a time chart of the parties’ popularity over the last 35 years. Both have gond down, but the Democrats more so:
Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term. But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party.
On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress.
In some cases, the disparities are striking. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation outweighs approval by 11 points, and yet the GOP is trusted more than Democrats to handle inflation by 10 points. By 17 points, voters disapprove rather than approve of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and yet Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on the issue by 7 points.
The only issues on which voters prefer congressional Democrats to Republicans, among the 10 tested in the Journal survey, are healthcare and vaccine policy.
What do we need? LEADERSHIP! When do we need it? NOW! The article suggests that the Democrats may take the House back in the midterms, but not nearly by as much as they did in Trump’s previous midterms. (And remember, Trump can veto anything coming out of Congress.) If we Democrats have policies to articulate (and if we don’t we shouldn’t be Democrats), then we need a credible spokesperson, and then for the Democrats to get behind him or her. Neither of these seems very plausible at this moment.
Earlier this evening, Columbia University announced an agreement with the Trump administration in which Columbia makes a host of concessions in order to restore its eligibility for federal funding. The agreement is already being described as “unprecedented,” “the first of its kind.” These descriptions are true but ambiguous, because the agreement breaks new ground on any number of levels.
For instance, the agreement marks the first time that antisemitism and DEI have been invoked as the basis for a government-enforced restructuring of a private university. The agreement was engineered by a novel collaboration among the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration, and the White House, which pooled their resources to ratchet up the pressure on Columbia (with some help on the side from the Department of Justice). The agreement is also the first to require a university to fork over money to the government as a condition of receiving money from the government, bringing a new brand of pay-to-play into the world of scientific and medical research.
And let’s not forget that the agreement grows out of the executive branch’s first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, withoutanypretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures. Lawyers have been debating the exact circumstances under which the executive branch may freeze particular grants and contracts to particular schools. Yet as far as I’m aware, no lawyer outside the government has even attempted to defend the legality of the initial cutoff that brought Columbia to its knees and, thereafter, to the “negotiating” table.
In short, the agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme—the first of its kind!—that defies the relevant statutes as well as the constitutional separation of powers and the First Amendment.
. . .This emerging model raises profound concerns not just for universities’ budgets and independence but also for the rule of law. By relying on “particular transactions to effectuate government policy,” scholars have observed in other contexts, regulation by deal bypasses all of the “notice, comments, [and] due process standards that we ordinarily expect from public administration.” While guidance documents may share some of these deficits, they are not actually binding on regulated parties and at least aspire to uphold bedrock legal principles of “generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity.” The style of regulation reflected in the Columbia deal is at once far more coercive and far more arbitrary—opaque in development, unpredictable in application, deeply susceptible to personalism and corruption, and only contingently connected to the laws Congress has written. As compared to the familiar fare of public administration, “one-off dealmaking is more about back-door terms, forceful results, and unequal application of standards, to the extent standards exist at all.”
. . . The spread of regulation by deal would be worrisome in any period, but it is especially worrisome at this time and in this domain. Authoritarianism feeds on manufactured emergencies and hardball tactics that give the executive leverage to attack political opponents and compel obedience. Basic research, on the other hand, thrives under stable institutional frameworks, reliable funding commitments, and a climate of free inquiry. Deals like Columbia’s enhance the power of presidents and their allies within targeted universities; sideline Congress, the courts, and most faculty; and sow fear and uncertainty throughout civil so
What worries me about this is that although Harvard has taken the government to court over this dealmaking, the courts seem rather unpredictable in their rulings these days, and what if Harvard loses—especially in the Supreme Court. If that were the case, we can kiss colleges and universities as we know them goodbye, for the government (at least ones like Trump’s) can make them do anything it wants simply by threatening to freeze federal grant money. Oy, what a world, what a world!
Missionary groups are using audio devices in protected territories of the rainforest to attract and evangelise isolated or recently contacted Indigenous people in the Amazon. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Brazilian newspaper O Globo reveals that solar-powered devices reciting biblical messages in Portuguese and Spanish have appeared among members of the Korubo people in the Javari valley, near the Brazil–Peru border.
Drones have also been spotted by Brazilian state agents in charge of protecting the areas. The gadgets have raised concerns about illegal missionary activities, despite strict government measures designed to safeguard isolated Indigenous groups
This is not thought to be the first recent attempt by missionary groups to reach isolated and uncontacted communities in the Javari valley. Shortly before the pandemic, a group of US and Brazilian citizens affiliated to evangelical churches were allegedly reported to be planning to contact the Korubo people. It was claimed they had used seaplanes to map trails and locate longhouses.
Three missionaries were identified as planning these alleged contact efforts: Thomas Andrew Tonkin, Josiah McIntyre and Wilson de Benjamin Kannenberg, linked to the Missão Novas Tribos do Brasil (New Tribes Mission of Brazil – MNTB) and a humanitarian group known as Asas de Socorro – or Wings of Relief. They were prohibited from entering Indigenous territory by court order during the Covid crisis.
Now it has emerged that missionaries have returned to the Javari valley and surrounding towns, such as Atalaia do Norte, with a new tool.
The first device uncovered, a yellow and grey mobile phone-sized unit, mysteriously appeared in a Korubo village in the Javari valley recently. The gadget, which recites the Bible and inspirational talks by an American Baptist, can do so indefinitely, even off-grid, thanks to a solar panel. Up to seven of the units were reported by local people, but photo and video evidence were obtained for just one.
A message on the device located by the Guardian states: “Let’s see what Paul says as he considers his own life in Philippians chapter 3, verse 4: ‘If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more’.”
The state also strictly controls access, to protect the Korubo and other uncontacted peoples in the region from common diseases to which they have little or no immunity.
I have just four words for these misguided and criminal Jesus-lovers: LEAVE THOSE PEOPLE ALONE!
*In an article in the that tries to understand why minority voters largely deserted the Democrats in the last election, a NYT analysis seems to avoid blaming the Democrats.
In many ways, the story of Milwaukee’s disillusioned Black voters encapsulates the tectonic shifts in American society that voters of color have faced in recent years. Like many other distressed cities, Milwaukee continues to reel from the foreclosure crisis, the opioid epidemic and chronic funding shortfalls. Together, these problems have created cracks in the bedrock of Democratic support in these communities.
That bedrock was formed over the last 70 years. In the 1960s, as the civil rights movement pressed for governmental action to address longstanding patterns of discrimination and inequality, the national Democratic Party slowly aligned itself with this vision. Landmark legislation on issues like segregation and equal opportunity employment established Democrats as the party that could deliver for nonwhite voters. The party formed alliances with the places and institutions that were pillars of these communities: churches and places of worship, community newspapers, labor unions and other civic organizations where voters of color congregated.
But the America that this version of the Democratic Party emerged from has changed drastically. The restructuring of the U.S. economy over the last 40 years, along with the yawning inequality it has spurred, has disproportionately hurt communities of color. The Democratic-championed civil rights protections and social welfare programs that have defined the party’s appeal to nonwhite voters have proved inadequate in the face of the interconnected crises that define America now. Policies to address residential segregation some 70 years ago can do little to ease the housing shortages plaguing many communities today. The 1965 Immigration Act was not designed to manage the migration driven by economic downturns, military strife and climate catastrophes unfolding around the globe.
And yet, Democrats have largely doubled down on promising relatively modest policy reforms meant to speak to the interests of voters of color. Shana Gray, a cafe owner in Milwaukee, told me how frustrated she had become with Democrats in her community. “‘Oh, just give us your vote.’ That’s all we heard,” she told me. “There was no action behind that. Maybe they were speaking the language of reform for themselves, but the people who had mattered were not feeling that.”
Disappointed in the party that they saw as presiding over these profound economic shifts, nonwhite voters found that the institutions where many of them found their political identities — churches, unions, clubs — have been in decline.
Unmoored from these places and groups, voters of color today are shaped by many new forces, including right-wing podcasts, influencers and social media — some of it specific to individual ethnic and linguistic groups — that have atomized people even within their own community.
. . . . Democrats and progressive advocacy groups remain mired in a debate about whether they need to tack right to stem the hemorrhaging of voters of color to the G.O.P., or double down on the agenda of racial and economic liberalism that originally built the party’s base among minorities. What I’ve found in my conversations is that the forces moving multiracial voters rightward are more often rooted in economic vulnerabilities.
Well, Carville said that years ago: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Yes, the article does say that the Democrats didn’t do enough, but doesn’t say what more they could have done. And it doesn’t blame the Democrats for pushing policies on immigration, women’s rights, and use of language, that were performative but without effect.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, things get more and more mysterious. I’m not even sure that Hili is doing the talking here, though there is a photo of her.
There’s no new material today. I don’t know if there will be tomorrow. Sunday revolved around Saturday, Monday stretches out its arms to Tuesday. Dobrzyń is whispering about a reward, or “people are talking.” The editorial team is preparing for a month-long break. Work on the book needs to be accelerated. It’s not yet known whether this will be a full break, or whether dialogue will appear every day as usual. We don’t know anything yet.
Oy!
In Polish:
Nie ma dziś nowych materiałów. Nie wiem, czy będą jutro. Niedziela kręciła się wokół soboty, poniedziałek wyciąga ręce do wtorku. Dobrzyń szepcze o nagrodzie, czyli „ludzie mówią”. Redakcja przygotowuje się do miesięcznej przerwy. Trzeba przyspieszyć prace nad książką. Jeszcze nie wiadomo, czy to będzie pełna przerwa, czy jednak dialogi będą pojawiać się każdego dnia jak zawsze. Jeszcze nic nie wiemy.
From Masih: a woman finds out that her father was executed
heartbreaking! Imagine this: You wake up before sunrise to the sound of the morning prayer call… and learn the Islamic Republic just executed your father.
This is happening every morning in Iran and today happened to this woman, daughter of Mehdi Hassani, a political prisoner… pic.twitter.com/oOt6YyRmlV
From Dr. Cobb. Jeremy Berg, once editor of Science, pondered what to do with the arsenic-life paper, considering whether to retract it (it’s been retracted by Holden Thorp the current editor). But after consideration Berg decided (and I agree) that the paper should NOT have been retracted.
Why I didn't retract this paper when I was Editor-in-Chief at Science (THREAD 🧵)
I failed completely in arguing with the guy (?) who thinks it’s fair for men to compete in women’s sports. I pointed out that biological males are on average taller than women (and they’re always stronger, assuming good health). Long rambling answering including:
When you use words like “average” and “biological,” these are merely totems or fetish objects. It’s important for you to put lipstick on the pig, so to speak, because you feel a bit of a need to dress up what’s really going on.
So “average” — a well defined mathematical concept—is a totem or fetish?
I blocked the person.
You have to remember that the normal distribution is racist.
I’d forgotten about that. Thanks for the reminder.
🎯
I don’t foray into the nutty thickets like you do, but good on you for trying!
I think the trans activists are losing that one to common sense (except in Canada, of course.)
There is a weakness in the argument, though, which the TRAs exploit. When they call a transwoman a kind of woman, and refer to “her” as “she”, and we not only let them but punish “misgendering” instead of correcting them (politely), we’re then drawn into distracting arguments about average performance of transwomen and cis-women. Rather, the argument should be, “There is no such thing as a transwoman. A man who thinks or says he is a woman is simply wrong. He is still a man and he has no business playing women’s sports or doing anything else that is restricted to women.” If the TRA protests that this is “erasing” trans people, yes it is. Tough. Women should be able to have their own leagues that exclude men even if there is no performance difference, just because they want a women’s space. It’s no one else’s business if women’s horse events “should” include men, or should include men who say they’re women. They don’t want to. If the government doesn’t want to give money to “non-inclusive” leagues, well, to choose is to make choices among consequences.
This position will get you banned from many social gossip sites but who cares about them? You’re not trying to change their minds. You’re trying to convince persuadable decision-makers like legislatures and the U.S. Supreme Court. (This is part of the fight to protect people from harmful medical treatment.)
Lots of young women are far faster on a bicycle than I am now. But this obvious truth, that all men aren’t necessarily faster than all women, isn’t an argument that a much younger man, who could beat them all easily, should be able to compete against them. Rather, you exclude all men from women’s events just because they’re men. Full stop. No VO2-max or grip-strength testing or oppressive (because hard for activists to understand) statistics necessary. If he’s got an SRY gene, he’s out. (CAIS etc. excepted.)
Agree. The trans craze has led to so much nuttiness. No sign of change in Canada, either. If anything the progs are even more determined since Trump ruled against it so it MUST be wrong.
That is an interesting nyt analysis of the minority movement away from the mid-fifties/sixties cis Democratic Party.
??Can someone please provide its source (which seems to be missing from the above write-up) – preferably a freely available internet archived source??
On the subject of Democrats and their missteps, the station we all seem to hate these days (npr) had an interview with Pete Buttegeig this morning (conducted by Steve Inskeep) in which the former admitted that the Democrats hyper focus on identity has hurt them. I remember you used to like him as a possible candidate in 2028. Sorry no link. It’s easy enough to find if you decide to give it a listen.
Yeah, I used to think he was a viable candidate, but he’s keeping a very low profile these days.
Thanks!
I wonder whether Tom Lehrer ever met Weird Al–that could have been an epic collaboration!
THAT would have been fantastic.
Sadly, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk is a shadow of its former self after Mondelez bought the company. American chocolate has always tasted different to British because of the cocoa beans used (south American versus African) and they have chosen the cheapest they can get. But there is still a difference between UK-made and north American-made CDM, the former has to have ≥20% cocoa solids, whereas the latter tends to have 10%, so a CDM bar bought at a British import shop will still be an improvement over locally made. Take that to it’s extreme and you begin to see why our host quite rightly likes his 90% chocolate!
And they have now cancelled Jersey Milk 🙁
The Ozzy cat video is hilarious!
So David Pozen’s hair is on fire because, among other things, a university had to agree to stop racial discrimination and hatred of Jews. Oh the horror!
It’s hysterically hypocritical that academics bemoan requirements for funding, yet plastered DEI obligations for hiring and promotions as well funding for “scientific” studies.
When academics scream for institutional independence, they really want is unaccountably. What a bunch of babies.
Unless you’re a university researcher you can’t imagine how bad it is.
I’m writing a grant proposal right now in which I must “increase the inclusion and advancement of underrepresented groups in the natural sciences” by “address[ing] systemic barriers that limit the full participation of all talented individuals.”
It’s assumed that this inclusion and advancement are good, and that there are systemic barriers to doing so.
However, one must not describe past success in overcoming systemic barriers or recruiting diverse trainees, because membership in “underrepresented groups” is not an objective or observable trait. Instead membership is a subjective identity knowable only to the individual, and is considered confidential and not to be disclosed.
“Important: Trainee demographic data should not be submitted. It is not requested or required to assess impacts resulting from consideration of equity, diversity and inclusion in the research and training environment. How an individual self-identifies is considered personal and confidential information.”
In all other parts of the proposal it’s crucially important to show how my past research has successfully contributed to knowledge. But in this one part of the proposal it’s important to not say how past efforts to achieve inclusion and equity have successfully contributed to diversity.
And this morning I got email reminders from my university about funding opportunities that include the Robbins-Ollivier Award for Excellence in Equity; the National Anti-Racism Fund’s Projects Grants (supported by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation); and something called the Catalyst Grants from the Women’s Health Research Institute, which the announcement emphasizes are “cis and trans inclusive”.
And sorry for overcommenting.
Wow! You’re right, it’s worse than I thought and I was a university trustee. One more thing, DEI is just a fancy way of lowering standards. As a minority, that hurts us rather than lifts us up. There were times in my career when I had to be better than my non-minority colleagues doing the same job. That double (and higher) standard led to success that I (and my dis-believing family) never dreamed of.
Yeah imagine if Columbia had a bunch of white supremacist KKK members on its academic staff promoting racist hatred of blacks, and hordes of students holding white supremacist rallies and preventing black students from attending classes. In that hypothetical case, Trump would be hailed as a civil rights hero for what he has done to punish Columbia. Although I do agree with Dr. Coyne that the approach should have been more targeted – eliminating Islamic and Middle East “Studies” units for example to the extent that they have been sources of virulent antisemitism.
Thanks for featuring “National Brotherhood Week” in your tribute to Tom Lehrer.
I grew up with his An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer record, and at any moment I can still sing “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” straight thru, and have a good go at most any other song on the album.
And his amazing “Elements” song:
Is it possible to parody a parody, so to speak? I have here a modest example, that of putting the names of famous chessplayers to Lehrer’s “Elements” music (which of course is taken from Gilbert and Sullivan):
It turns out that YouTube’s computer-generated Closed Captions for Elements (enabled by the “CC” button) are sometimes interestingly wrong, e.g. “golden californium”. Have a look. AI™ is not (yet) ready to take over the world.
My favourite has always been Be Prepared. I still have an LP of Lehrer’s, but I no longer have a record deck. Many years ago my late wife and I played it for an accountant friend, whose reaction was that he was a good pianist???
National Brotherwood Week. “And everyone hates the Jews.” Still relevant after all these years.
And Lehrer reportedly stopped performing when Henry Kissenger got the Nobel Peace Prize, saying satire is dead.
The most substantial political divide in America is between college-educated women and working-class men. And while white working-class women are not as Trumpy as the men, these women stand more in “solidarity” with their male partners, relatives, and coworkers than they do with their educated “sisters” across the aisle. Similarly, while college-educated white men lean toward the policy preferences of their female partners and colleagues, they tend to be more moderate, slightly favored Trump in 2024, and are less stridently social justicey.
I suspect our political divide is increasingly about disposition rather than about policy. Perhaps it always has been. James Carville might have been offensive but he was not entirely wrong when he said the Democrats suffer from having too many “preachy females” in the party. (They also have too many preachy men.) Young men, in particular, do not like the hectoring, sermonizing, infantilizing, and moralizing, let alone the incessant language policing. It is not an accident that those under 50 shifted strongly toward Trump in 2024. Nor are they reacting against strong women. A Georgia Meloni of either party could earn their support.
Leadership matters more than policy, just as tribalism tends to be stronger than thinking. Both parties have opted primarily for the tribal, but it is the Republicans right now who are more open to inviting those with whom they might disagree. Scoff? Where are Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy right now? Which party prides itself more on “unity”? And while Trump has glaring leadership deficiencies, he is not devoid of talent in that arena. Ironically, his heir apparent in JD Vance has the same flaw as many Democrats: he can be offensive in an intellectualizing and condescending way. The Democrats need more Bill and less Hillary. They need the uplifting and challenging “What can you do for your country?” rather than the condescending and dismissive elitism of “they cling to their guns and religion.”
“Unity” has a dark side which tribalism tends to bring out, e.g. Gleichschaltung.
Gerald Nachman’s book “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s” includes an interview with Tom Lehrer. He said that mathematics was always his first love and that students would sign up for his courses in droves, then drop out when they realized he wasn’t going to be doing “funny math.”
A few years ago I wrote an short comic about feeding pigeons in the park, with a nod and some lines towards Tom Lehrer.
(including a pic of my dog “Aussie” and me. He didn’t care about our daily covid mission of feeding the birds, but he loved going out with his Dad!)
D.A.
NYC
I wonder if missionaries have landed drones on that island in the Andaman Sea yet – the one that’s off-limits where they killed an idiot not all that long ago who landed there, determined to bring them Good News. If they haven’t, they’re surely thinking about it.
There is a good surf break off one of those islands. I read a story about how a boatload of surfers went there to surf the break, accessing it from their boat (they did not land on the island). At one point a group of islanders in a war canoe started paddling toward the boat, only to retreat once they were within earshot of the rock music being played loudly on the boat. I wonder what they thought of that.
Tom Lehrer donated thousands to the abortion clinic at which I used to work. Whenever the admin received his donation, they always told us. Some of the younger staff didn’t know who Lehrer was, so of course we older staff educated them. The ED said she always sent him a long personalized thank-you letter. We truly appreciated his generosity and support of women’s rights.
He did a lot of good in the world besides his music. (I don’t know anything about his academic career.)
Democrats are getting the lowest rating from voters in 35 years… What is going on? <<
Perhaps Americans are seeing (thanks to the breaking of the stranglehold on information of the mainstream media) the results, in so many places, of Democrat policies and governance.
The Macrons are suing Candace Owens (conspiracy theorist of the first rank).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/26/emmanuel-brigitte-macron-candace-owens-conspiracy-theory-jean-michel-trogneux
I failed completely in arguing with the guy (?) who thinks it’s fair for men to compete in women’s sports. I pointed out that biological males are on average taller than women (and they’re always stronger, assuming good health). Long rambling answering including:
When you use words like “average” and “biological,” these are merely totems or fetish objects. It’s important for you to put lipstick on the pig, so to speak, because you feel a bit of a need to dress up what’s really going on.
So “average” — a well defined mathematical concept—is a totem or fetish?
I blocked the person.
You have to remember that the normal distribution is racist.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/01/19/our-attempt-to-correct-the-record-about-e-o-wilson-a-joint-letter-to-scientific-american-which-of-course-they-rejected/
I’d forgotten about that. Thanks for the reminder.
🎯
I don’t foray into the nutty thickets like you do, but good on you for trying!
I think the trans activists are losing that one to common sense (except in Canada, of course.)
There is a weakness in the argument, though, which the TRAs exploit. When they call a transwoman a kind of woman, and refer to “her” as “she”, and we not only let them but punish “misgendering” instead of correcting them (politely), we’re then drawn into distracting arguments about average performance of transwomen and cis-women. Rather, the argument should be, “There is no such thing as a transwoman. A man who thinks or says he is a woman is simply wrong. He is still a man and he has no business playing women’s sports or doing anything else that is restricted to women.” If the TRA protests that this is “erasing” trans people, yes it is. Tough. Women should be able to have their own leagues that exclude men even if there is no performance difference, just because they want a women’s space. It’s no one else’s business if women’s horse events “should” include men, or should include men who say they’re women. They don’t want to. If the government doesn’t want to give money to “non-inclusive” leagues, well, to choose is to make choices among consequences.
This position will get you banned from many social gossip sites but who cares about them? You’re not trying to change their minds. You’re trying to convince persuadable decision-makers like legislatures and the U.S. Supreme Court. (This is part of the fight to protect people from harmful medical treatment.)
Lots of young women are far faster on a bicycle than I am now. But this obvious truth, that all men aren’t necessarily faster than all women, isn’t an argument that a much younger man, who could beat them all easily, should be able to compete against them. Rather, you exclude all men from women’s events just because they’re men. Full stop. No VO2-max or grip-strength testing or oppressive (because hard for activists to understand) statistics necessary. If he’s got an SRY gene, he’s out. (CAIS etc. excepted.)
Agree. The trans craze has led to so much nuttiness. No sign of change in Canada, either. If anything the progs are even more determined since Trump ruled against it so it MUST be wrong.
That is an interesting nyt analysis of the minority movement away from the mid-fifties/sixties cis Democratic Party.
??Can someone please provide its source (which seems to be missing from the above write-up) – preferably a freely available internet archived source??
Sorry, omitted the link, which is here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/24/opinion/minority-voters-trump-right.html
On the subject of Democrats and their missteps, the station we all seem to hate these days (npr) had an interview with Pete Buttegeig this morning (conducted by Steve Inskeep) in which the former admitted that the Democrats hyper focus on identity has hurt them. I remember you used to like him as a possible candidate in 2028. Sorry no link. It’s easy enough to find if you decide to give it a listen.
Yeah, I used to think he was a viable candidate, but he’s keeping a very low profile these days.
Thanks!
I wonder whether Tom Lehrer ever met Weird Al–that could have been an epic collaboration!
THAT would have been fantastic.
Sadly, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk is a shadow of its former self after Mondelez bought the company. American chocolate has always tasted different to British because of the cocoa beans used (south American versus African) and they have chosen the cheapest they can get. But there is still a difference between UK-made and north American-made CDM, the former has to have ≥20% cocoa solids, whereas the latter tends to have 10%, so a CDM bar bought at a British import shop will still be an improvement over locally made. Take that to it’s extreme and you begin to see why our host quite rightly likes his 90% chocolate!
And they have now cancelled Jersey Milk 🙁
The Ozzy cat video is hilarious!
So David Pozen’s hair is on fire because, among other things, a university had to agree to stop racial discrimination and hatred of Jews. Oh the horror!
It’s hysterically hypocritical that academics bemoan requirements for funding, yet plastered DEI obligations for hiring and promotions as well funding for “scientific” studies.
When academics scream for institutional independence, they really want is unaccountably. What a bunch of babies.
Unless you’re a university researcher you can’t imagine how bad it is.
I’m writing a grant proposal right now in which I must “increase the inclusion and advancement of underrepresented groups in the natural sciences” by “address[ing] systemic barriers that limit the full participation of all talented individuals.”
nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ResearchPortal-PortailDeRecherche/Instructions-Instructions/DG-SD_eng.asp#a3
It’s assumed that this inclusion and advancement are good, and that there are systemic barriers to doing so.
However, one must not describe past success in overcoming systemic barriers or recruiting diverse trainees, because membership in “underrepresented groups” is not an objective or observable trait. Instead membership is a subjective identity knowable only to the individual, and is considered confidential and not to be disclosed.
“Important: Trainee demographic data should not be submitted. It is not requested or required to assess impacts resulting from consideration of equity, diversity and inclusion in the research and training environment. How an individual self-identifies is considered personal and confidential information.”
In all other parts of the proposal it’s crucially important to show how my past research has successfully contributed to knowledge. But in this one part of the proposal it’s important to not say how past efforts to achieve inclusion and equity have successfully contributed to diversity.
And this morning I got email reminders from my university about funding opportunities that include the Robbins-Ollivier Award for Excellence in Equity; the National Anti-Racism Fund’s Projects Grants (supported by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation); and something called the Catalyst Grants from the Women’s Health Research Institute, which the announcement emphasizes are “cis and trans inclusive”.
And sorry for overcommenting.
Wow! You’re right, it’s worse than I thought and I was a university trustee. One more thing, DEI is just a fancy way of lowering standards. As a minority, that hurts us rather than lifts us up. There were times in my career when I had to be better than my non-minority colleagues doing the same job. That double (and higher) standard led to success that I (and my dis-believing family) never dreamed of.
Yeah imagine if Columbia had a bunch of white supremacist KKK members on its academic staff promoting racist hatred of blacks, and hordes of students holding white supremacist rallies and preventing black students from attending classes. In that hypothetical case, Trump would be hailed as a civil rights hero for what he has done to punish Columbia. Although I do agree with Dr. Coyne that the approach should have been more targeted – eliminating Islamic and Middle East “Studies” units for example to the extent that they have been sources of virulent antisemitism.
Thanks for featuring “National Brotherhood Week” in your tribute to Tom Lehrer.
I grew up with his An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer record, and at any moment I can still sing “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” straight thru, and have a good go at most any other song on the album.
And his amazing “Elements” song:
Is it possible to parody a parody, so to speak? I have here a modest example, that of putting the names of famous chessplayers to Lehrer’s “Elements” music (which of course is taken from Gilbert and Sullivan):
It turns out that YouTube’s computer-generated Closed Captions for Elements (enabled by the “CC” button) are sometimes interestingly wrong, e.g. “golden californium”. Have a look. AI™ is not (yet) ready to take over the world.
My favourite has always been Be Prepared. I still have an LP of Lehrer’s, but I no longer have a record deck. Many years ago my late wife and I played it for an accountant friend, whose reaction was that he was a good pianist???
National Brotherwood Week. “And everyone hates the Jews.” Still relevant after all these years.
And Lehrer reportedly stopped performing when Henry Kissenger got the Nobel Peace Prize, saying satire is dead.
The most substantial political divide in America is between college-educated women and working-class men. And while white working-class women are not as Trumpy as the men, these women stand more in “solidarity” with their male partners, relatives, and coworkers than they do with their educated “sisters” across the aisle. Similarly, while college-educated white men lean toward the policy preferences of their female partners and colleagues, they tend to be more moderate, slightly favored Trump in 2024, and are less stridently social justicey.
I suspect our political divide is increasingly about disposition rather than about policy. Perhaps it always has been. James Carville might have been offensive but he was not entirely wrong when he said the Democrats suffer from having too many “preachy females” in the party. (They also have too many preachy men.) Young men, in particular, do not like the hectoring, sermonizing, infantilizing, and moralizing, let alone the incessant language policing. It is not an accident that those under 50 shifted strongly toward Trump in 2024. Nor are they reacting against strong women. A Georgia Meloni of either party could earn their support.
Leadership matters more than policy, just as tribalism tends to be stronger than thinking. Both parties have opted primarily for the tribal, but it is the Republicans right now who are more open to inviting those with whom they might disagree. Scoff? Where are Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy right now? Which party prides itself more on “unity”? And while Trump has glaring leadership deficiencies, he is not devoid of talent in that arena. Ironically, his heir apparent in JD Vance has the same flaw as many Democrats: he can be offensive in an intellectualizing and condescending way. The Democrats need more Bill and less Hillary. They need the uplifting and challenging “What can you do for your country?” rather than the condescending and dismissive elitism of “they cling to their guns and religion.”
“Unity” has a dark side which tribalism tends to bring out, e.g. Gleichschaltung.
Gerald Nachman’s book “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s” includes an interview with Tom Lehrer. He said that mathematics was always his first love and that students would sign up for his courses in droves, then drop out when they realized he wasn’t going to be doing “funny math.”
A few years ago I wrote an short comic about feeding pigeons in the park, with a nod and some lines towards Tom Lehrer.
To wit:
https://themoderatevoice.com/not-poisoning-pigeons-in-the-park/
(including a pic of my dog “Aussie” and me. He didn’t care about our daily covid mission of feeding the birds, but he loved going out with his Dad!)
D.A.
NYC
I wonder if missionaries have landed drones on that island in the Andaman Sea yet – the one that’s off-limits where they killed an idiot not all that long ago who landed there, determined to bring them Good News. If they haven’t, they’re surely thinking about it.
There is a good surf break off one of those islands. I read a story about how a boatload of surfers went there to surf the break, accessing it from their boat (they did not land on the island). At one point a group of islanders in a war canoe started paddling toward the boat, only to retreat once they were within earshot of the rock music being played loudly on the boat. I wonder what they thought of that.
Tom Lehrer donated thousands to the abortion clinic at which I used to work. Whenever the admin received his donation, they always told us. Some of the younger staff didn’t know who Lehrer was, so of course we older staff educated them. The ED said she always sent him a long personalized thank-you letter. We truly appreciated his generosity and support of women’s rights.
He did a lot of good in the world besides his music. (I don’t know anything about his academic career.)
The Free Press has this article about Lehrer: https://www.thefp.com/p/what-tom-lehrer-left-us?utm_campaign=email-post&r=c7qbe&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Perhaps Americans are seeing (thanks to the breaking of the stranglehold on information of the mainstream media) the results, in so many places, of Democrat policies and governance.