Welcome to Thursday, August 28, 2025, and National Red Wine Day. If I had my choice, I’d take a bottle of this (from 1999).
It’s also National Bow Tie Day, National Cherry Turnovers Day (why the plural?), and International Cabernet Sauvignon Day. Except for the bow tie bit, it’s a good day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 28 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Ripped from the headlines: The shooter in Minneapolis who fired at a church, killing two children and injuring 17, turns out to have been a nutcase with a lot of grievances, many against Jews (he wrote antisemitic messages on his guns). The NYT reports it as if the shooter was a woman, but he was actually a trans-identified man (they allude to this farther down in the report). From the NYT, which uses the acceptable pronoun:
Robin W. Westman, who officials said strafed the church through the stained glass windows, killing two children, was believed to have once attended the school at Annunciation Catholic Church, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation.
. . . . And Ms. Westman, armed with three weapons, seemed to choose the time carefully. She barricaded the doors during the first all-school Mass of the academic year, the police said.
But it is hard to fathom what drove Ms. Westman to attack before killing herself, despite the dark and violent writings and videos she left behind.
. . .On social media, some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. The police did not provide any motive for the attack, but Ms. Westman’s extensive social media history was a contradictory catalog of anger and grievance.
In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she posted, she fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices, scrawled with antisemitic and racist language and threats against President Donald Trump.
The videos also show pages from a diary, with long entries describing self hatred, violence against children, and a desire to inflict harm on herself. The diary entries are almost entirely written in English, but using Cyrillic letters. A sticker in the diary displays L.G.B.T.Q. and transgender flags with a gun and the slogan “Defend Equality.”
In other words, Westman appears to be a mentally ill trans-identified man with diffuse anger issues (the guns were obtained legally). Here’s a tweet from Luana:
Trans Minneapolis shooter Robin Westman mused about slaughtering ‘filthy Zionist Jews’ in sick journal before deadly Catholic school massacre https://t.co/BFcNusyuOd pic.twitter.com/WspaLRlLlo
— New York Post (@nypost) August 27, 2025
*The NYT editorial board has published a response to Trump’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook, one of the Federal Reserve Board’s governors. He doesn’t appear to have the right to do that, but he’s accusing her of having listed two homes as her primary residence, and that is a “just cause” reason he could use to remove her. But the NYT is calling for evidence in its op-ed, “Where’s your evidence, Mr. President?”
Mr. Trump does not appear to regard that law as a binding constraint. He has made clear that he wants to replace the Fed’s leaders because they have resisted his demands to lower interest rates. In pursuit of this goal, he now says he is firing Ms. Cook because of “potentially criminal” behavior.
The law does allow the president to remove Fed governors “for cause,” and Mr. Trump has not presented any evidence of wrongdoing by Ms. Cook, an economist whom President Joe Biden appointed to the job three years ago. Mr. Trump has asserted that she “may have made false statements on one or more mortgage agreements.” We have two words for the president: Prove it.
In the absence of any finding of wrongdoing by a judge — or even presenting evidence to one — Mr. Trump is effectively asserting that the president gets to decide what counts as cause, which would render the standard meaningless. If the courts allow him to get away with it, the Fed will be stripped of its insulation from political pressure. Mr. Trump will be able to bully the central bank into delivering the economic sugar highs he craves, and we will all suffer the eventual consequences.
Those governors make mistakes. They have sometimes kept interest rates too high. They have sometimes kept rates too low. The president, along with every other American, is welcome to express his views on the current level of the Fed’s benchmark rate.
But Ms. Cook and her colleagues are the lawfully appointed representatives of the American people, experts performing the people’s business to the best of their ability. As we wrote last month, if Mr. Trump has an idea for a better system, he should speak it. But he must not be allowed to destroy the current system.
The Supreme Court deserves significant blame for this situation. In May the court issued a decision expanding the president’s authority to remove officials at independent agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board, while carving out an exception for the Fed. Its independence, the justices said, remained intact. Yet the ruling was part of the court’s emergency docket, and the justices included scant justification for the exception.
Mr. Trump, as is his habit, has tried to take advantage of the court’s lack of a clear, definitive standard. By attempting to fire Ms. Cook, he has set up a direct clash with the conservative court majority he helped create. The justices didn’t want this fight, but now the courts have to stand up for the ruling the Supreme Court just made — and for the rule of law.
But what will happen if Cook did what she’s accused of? If so, that’s probably duplicity rather than just a mistake. But, as the editorial asks, “Where’s the evidence?” It should be easy enough to find.
*In Trump’s drive to be Dicatator of Washington, D. C., he’s called for the death penalty to be imposed on everyone convicted of murder in the Capital.
The president also said he plans to extend federal control over D.C. with help from Congress. Under the law, his authority to commandeer the city’s police department expires after 30 days unless Congress votes to extend it.
Trump said he had discussed plans for an extension with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and plans to talk about it soon with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota).
His call for expanded use of the death penalty, however, could require legislative changes and likely will face significant legal and political hurdles.
In D.C., most homicides in D.C. are prosecuted under local law, but U.S. attorneys can seek the death penalty for certain crimes under federal statutes. Those laws cover some, but not all, homicides. Under current practice, all decisions to seek the death penalty must be approved by the attorney general.
A death sentence can only be imposed if a jury agrees, a significant challenge for prosecutors in a city where opposition to capital punishment is widespread.
The D.C. Council abolished capital punishment in 1981. In 1992, Congress placed a referendum on the D.C. ballot asking if capital punishment should be restored — the city’s voters said no by a large margin.
The last time prosecutors sought the death penalty under federal law in D.C. appears to have been in 2003, in the case of two of the most violent convicted killers in the city’s history. One of them was found guilty of ordering or carrying out 19 murders. But the jury deadlocked, and the eight-month trial ended with life sentences.
In fact the death penalty is not a “preventative” (“deterrent” is the correct word); it has no effect on reducing murder rates. And even the most rabid advocated of the death penalty does not think it should be applied to everyone convicted of murder. And how is Trump going to convince every jury who convicts to impose the ultimate sentence? Threaten the jurors?
*Among all this mishigass, Trump has also decided to take over the historical rail terminus in Washington, Union Station, a place from which I left and returned many times.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced on Wednesday that his department would take control of Washington’s central train and bus hub, Union Station, as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on the nation’s capital.
“We think that we can manage the property better, bring in more tenants, bring more revenue,” Mr. Duffy said, framing the move as part of President Trump’s efforts to tackle crime, remove homeless encampments and invest in beautification projects across the city.
“We think we can make this the premiere train station not just in America but the premiere train station in the world,” he added.
It was not immediately clear how and when Mr. Duffy would roll out his planned revitalization project, or whether it would use some of the contentious tactics the Trump administration has employed — such as rounding up homeless people — on federally owned land in other parts of the city.
The Transportation Department has owned Union Station since the early 1980s, but had yielded daily operations as well as oversight for its planned upgrades to the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, a local nonprofit. In a statement, the department said that it would renegotiate a cooperative agreement with the nonprofit and Amtrak, the national passenger rail service, that would better enable them to generate the money needed to make improvements to the station. Last year, Amtrak took over management and operations of the station under a sublease from the nonprofit. The U.S. government is Amtrak’s controlling shareholder, and the president appoints its board of directors.
The department’s statement indicated that the commercial aspects of Union Station would remain under the direct management of the nonprofit.
I have to admit that the station has become decrepit over time, and maybe this is a good move. But I’d be happier if Trump fixed Amtrak, which is getting extremely expensive, not to mention that many of the trains are way late. Here’s a photo on Wikipedia of Union Station, a lovely building just a few minutes’ walk from the Capitol:
*This was highlighted in Substack notes by Andrew Sullivan. On David Josef Volodzko‘s own substack, there is a report that the New Yorker that comes from Jacob Savage, to wit:
I read a shocking statistic today. In an essay for Compact Magazine, “The Vanishing White Male Writer,” Jacob Savage writes:
Not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.
Not a single one.
You can read Volodzko’s report here. A few excerpts:
In 2021, longtime archives editor Erin Overbey audited the ranks of the magazine’s editors and writers, uncovering stark racial disparities. Reviewing over 40,000 features and reviews, she found that “almost none” were edited by a black person, and only a sliver were written by black, Latino, or Asian American women. For a magazine rooted in New York, the city of the Harlem Renaissance, that record was indefensible. Aside from a single Langston Hughes poem in the 1940s, the magazine had largely ignored that cultural flowering. Overbey was blunt. She said the masthead resembled “member registries at Southern country clubs circa 1950,” and tweeted that in its 96 years, The New Yorker had run only four book reviews by African American women, or less than 0.01%. She even took a swipe at Remnick, writing:
In seeking to address its racial disparities, The New Yorker has lurched the other way, grossly overcorrecting and “fixing” the lack of nonwhite writers by unofficially banning white male ones and publishing black racists instead. But is this simply a case of one or two controversial figures, or of a broader editorial pattern? Is Doreen St. Felix the problem, or merely the product of The New Yorker’s own brand of systemic racism? Are there more fashionably racist black writers on staff? The magazine currently has, by my count, 13 black staff writers. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to use the same standards of racism commonly invoked in leftist discourse. That means impact over intent, linguistic taint, and the “community standard” principle, which says that if a racial group deems a term offensive, that testimony is authoritative. This is rooted in standpoint theory and the recognition that marginalized groups are best positioned to define what harms them. Another test is the “reverse rule,” or the idea that if one racial group can be described in a particular way, would the same language be considered racist in reverse? Many progressives reject this “symmetry test,” arguing in Marxist terms that racism is about power dynamics, and that whiteness operates as a dominant racial formation, or a “strategic rhetoric,” with structural advantages. I’m more interested in thinking about ways in which we all would like, or not like, to be treated. So, without further ado, here are the 13 names from the Contributors page:
Volodzko attempts to convict each writer of racism using their own words in short excerpts:
- Hilton Als
- Hanif Abdurraqib
- Jericho Brown
- Jelani Cobb
- Vinson Cunningham
- Rita Dove
- Doreen St. Felix
- Lauren Jackson
- Kelefa Sanneh
- Zadie Smith
- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
- Bryan Washington
- Alexis Okeowo
You can read the judgement on each one, which, in the end, has them all save two branded “racist” (there is one “racist-ish” and another “untouchable sage”. I don’t read the New Yorker and aren’t familiar with any of these names. Read for yourself and decide how strong a point Volodzko has, and whether, indeed, a black person can be a “racist” (I think they can, but can neither agree nor disagree with all the assessments. There’s no doubt that the New Yorker is uber-woke, and if that’s the case, then they need to be putting their money where their mouths are.
*Carl Zimmer’s story in the NYT reveals some of the developmental and genetic steps that turned us into full bipeds from knuckle-walking ancestors. Click to read (article is archived here):
From Zimmer:
Scientists have now discovered some of the crucial molecular steps that led to that conspicuous character millions of years ago. A study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday suggests that our early ancestors became bipeds, as old genes started doing new things. Some genes became active in novel places in the human embryo, while others turned on and off at different times.
Scientists have long recognized that a key feature for walking upright is a bone called the ilium. It’s the biggest bone in the pelvis; when you put your hand on your hip, that’s the ilium you feel.
The left and right ilium are both fused to the base of the spine. Each ilium sweeps around the waist to the front of the belly, creating a bowllike shape. Many of the leg muscles we use in walking are anchored to the ilium. The bone also supports the pelvic floor, a network of muscles that acts like a basket for our inner organs when we stand up.
As vital as the ilium is to everyday life, the bone can also be a source of suffering. The ilium can flare up with arthritis, grow brittle in old age, especially in women, and fracture from a fall. Genetic disorders can deform it, making walking difficult. The ilium also forms much of the birth canal — where babies can sometimes get stuck, endangering the mother’s life.
Here’s a picture of the human ilium from Wikipedia. There are more drawings of our pelvic bones and those of our relatives and possible ancestors in the NYT article.
And yet, as important as the ilium is to us, its development has long been a mystery. “It’s remarkable to me,” said Terence Capellini, a developmental geneticist at Harvard. “The ilium is essential to how we walk and how we give birth, and yet very little is known about it.”
. . .Dr. Senevirathne and her colleagues found that primates develop the ilium in much the same way mice do. Two tiny rods of cartilage take shape on either side of the spine and parallel to it. The rods grow and fuse to the spine, and bone cells replace the cartilage.
Dr. Senevirathne and her colleagues figured that the human ilium had evolved from this ancient blueprint. They expected that in a human embryo each ilium would start as a rod of cartilage parallel to the spine; eventually it would stop growing in that direction and expand forward.
“Lo and behold, that’s not the case,” Dr. Capellini said. “It’s not a stepwise process. It’s actually a complete flip.”\
The human ilium, the scientists were surprised to discover, starts as a rod perpendicular to the spine; one end points forward toward the belly, and the other points toward the back. The cartilage rod retains this orientation as it grows into the final shape of the ilium.
“That was really striking to us,” Dr. Capellini said. “Nowhere in the human body do you find a place where humans have just changed the way we grow altogether.”
Just as strikingly, Dr. Capellini and his colleagues found, our ilium employs the same network of genes that are active in ilium cells in mice; they just work differently.
In human embryos, ilium cells turn the genes on and off in a new pattern in response to molecules released by neighboring cells. The result is a rod of cartilage forming in a new direction.
. . .Dr. Capellini and his colleagues argue that this flip was crucial to the evolution of bipedalism. It allowed early human ancestors to grow a new kind of pelvis that supported muscles strong enough for walking upright.
But the new study also suggests that the ilium underwent a second major change millions of years later, when humans evolved big brains. The scientists discovered that the ilium is slow to switch from cartilage to bone, lagging about 15 weeks behind the rest of the skeleton. “It’s a unique, radical shift,” Dr. Capellini said.
The sad part is that Capellini, at Harvard, was one of the scientists who lost their funding when Trump froze federal grants to the school as a form of blackmail. Capellini was only two years into a five-year grant. Click below to read the Nature article. Of course there’s more to bipedalism than changes in the ilium (prioprioception, restructuring of the torso, etc.); what Zimmer is homing in on are the key steps:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dysthymic, using a metaphor:
Hili: I’m slowly losing faith.
Andrzej: In what?
Hili: In the effectiveness of peace negotiations between cats and mice.
In Polish:
Hili: Powoli tracę wiarę.
Ja: W co?
Hili: W skuteczność negocjacji w kwestii pokoju między kotami i myszami.
*******************
Reader Kathy sends us a “thing with faces,” and explains it:
We walk our pups past this rotted stump several times daily, but today I noticed the face. The stump was probably incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens), with a small Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana) to the right and a Ponderosa pine(Pinus ponderosa) to the left. The face is quite animated with some type of hymenoptera, probably a yellow jacket (Vespa), but I chose not to spend lots of time hanging out there to do a proper identification. The face was more clear in the evening, but the wasps were more photogenic earlier.
From Jesus of the Day:
From Now That’s Wild:
This may be a repost from Masih, but it shows us that in Iran, the problem of the theocratic oppression of women persists in virulent form. But women are no longer afraid of the black-garbed “morality police”:
See how teenage girls fought back against a hijab enforcer who attacked them and called them “whores,” for showing their hair in Iran.
As you hear, the video men supported these girls but source told me that they were arrested the day after when this video went viral on local… pic.twitter.com/9RUk9iSFmB— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) August 27, 2025
Ignorant ideologues like New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones don’t seem to pay attention to the politicization of science. I’m reading the book below right now:
You might be tempted to defend academia by saying Fuentes is a joke, not a real biologist.
But he is a full professor at Princeton, a member of the AAAS, and Princeton just published his book in its biology catalog, so I’m not sure academia really beats the allegations here. https://t.co/VKJHNLqvrZ pic.twitter.com/pQn1jr9BPB
— Brandon Warmke (@BrandonWarmke) August 26, 2025
From Barry: “America is a Christian Nation. . . there is only one true god, and that is the God of Israel.” This is a Republican candidate for Congress from Texas, burning the Quran: The video has been made private or something, but you can see the video by clicking on the screenshot:
From Bryan. Others who have tried this say it doesn’t work!
New wasp removal hack just dropped pic.twitter.com/Se3PhuGPSt
— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) August 25, 2025
From Malcolm, who says he’s not sure he would do this:
This is crazy pic.twitter.com/xE9fQrHJ1U
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) August 9, 2025
One that I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
A four-year old Yugoslavian Jewish boy was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. Had he lived, he'd be 86 today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-28T10:54:05.733Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb, now back from hols. Look at all the lovely buns you can make from one slice!
Creating a variety of shapes using steamed buns: #AGoodPlaceSource: http://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatis…
— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) 2025-08-25T22:55:24.298Z
Is there anything to be done about this use of AI? Matthew posts himself:
My god this is awful. Any time Altman opens his mouth every journalist should ignore his prattle and read out these quotes. Shut it down.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-08-26T20:59:17.214Z
I started a paper bag wasp eviction the other day. Not working… if it actually would work. It might need to be fixed, or closer… it’s intriguing, but perhaps folklore.
We’ll see – eventually it’ll be winter. 😁
Temu sells paper wasp nests online. They are quite cheap and may be better than a random bag. Unless wasps like Starbucks of course.
I’ve always liked having wasp nests on the porch. They are such beautiful creatures and, like me, hurt no one if not attacked.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (28 Aug 1749-1832)
One’s under parts, the other under labor
Ars longa, vita brevis
Today’s NPR “Morning Edition” assiduously employs “they”/”them” when referencing the Minneapolis shooter.
Like news outlets did with the other transgender shooter in Nashville. Lest we dare think there is any connection between being transgender and mentally ill.
Which use pretty much guarantees that we will.
They should’ve used “she”. Such transphobes!
I haven’t seen the evidence on Cook, unlike Schiff, where it seems pretty conclusive. As the Secretary of the Treasury pointed out, though, she hasn’t denied the charge. The real problem, as I understand it, is that if she is later found guilty, any of the Fed’s decisions in which Cook participated after she was charged would be considered invalid.
I disagree. The “real problem” is firing someone without providing evidence and without due process. The “real problem” here is the act of a child/man who wants to be a dictator.
Being an engineer myself by vocation, I am not sure about these things, but it seems to me, looking in from the outside, that Fuentes, as an anthropologist is not a biologist but, rather, biologist-adjacent…more of a social scientist.
Biological anthropology is biology-adjacent. Cultural anthropology is humanities-adjacent and massively woke.
The fact that so many school shooters are transgender cannot by itself be used as evidence that there is an association between mental illness – particularly of the anti-social kind – and gender dysphoria. Rather, the association may be between mental illness and unhappiness.
Almost all severely mentally ill people are also severely unhappy and are constantly searching for a way to relieve their unhappiness as a result. And, as we all know by now, if you are an unhappy youth today, you will be repeatedly exposed to the message, on social media, that the cause of your dysphoria could be unrecognized gender dysphoria – and if you transitioned, your unhappiness with your life would go away!
My point is that it’s likely most of these shooters were not in any way actually transgender. Rather, they were extremely unhappy with their lives due to their mental illness, and, thanks to social media, they transitioned as a form of (attempted) self-treatment for their unhappiness.
If the Columbine killers had been alive today, they’d probably have stormed their high school wearing dresses.
I doubt trans is causative of violence in any way HOWEVER… it has in the past few years become a “symptom pool” for a lot of behaviors and pathologies which aggregate into the bizarre presentation we see as “trans” now.
Lots of comorbidities.
D.A.
NYC
I doubt that anyone is actually transgender. (I do accept there are real mental illnesses characterized by delusions. But there is no one whose brain is actually being controlled by microchips implanted with mRNA vaccines.). If the shooter had been a self-identified witch, we wouldn’t have concluded that witches are dangerous, no. But we might have concluded that people who think they are witches may well be. We might be sensible to call for a ban on casting spells and forming covens just the same, to prevent their self-reinforcing exponential agglomeration. Even if banning the selling of brooms was over-reach.
I don’t see why no one is really transgender. The model I have is that there are those who really are (and they prove it with a life-long commitment), and those who are confused about being a cross-dresser or about being gay.
How would you define “really transgender”?
It is a bit of a semantic question to ask if anyone is actually “transgender”. If we define transgender as “a mismatch between a gendered essence and the sex of the body” then no, transgender doesn’t exist. In fact, it is absurd to think of that as a medical diagnosis. It is a metaphysical assertion that has no scientific meaning.
But if we define transgender to mean a deep-rooted distress about the sex of one’s body, that exists. And there is no reason to think it is more common than it was decades ago. The vast majority of “trans kids” these days don’t have deep gender disphoria. They are unhappy messed up kids, typically depressed, autistic, and etc. who grab onto transness as a way to self-diagnose their misery. They learn that from teachers, their peers on social media, and the broader culture. Then they go to the gender clinic and get enthusiastically affirmed in that theory about the source of their unhappiness and encouraged to take drugs and hormones and to start thinking about surgeries.
I tend more to Leslie’s interpretation – that it isn’t a thing, it is certainly not a biological thing.
So called Gender Dysphoria had a rate of 1 in 50K children, higher than apotemnophilia (wanting to dismember/amputate oneself) but not by a lot.
So it is vanishingly rare. (From memory it works on the same brain section).
In the past decade it has become a much larger monster, encompassing all types of pathologies, worries, high neurosis, fear of homosexuality by gay teens, not liking one’s body and now… a dreadful at times violent political ideation.
Definitions are difficult.
A study in the Netherlands 20ish years ago supposedly diagnosed a “trans brain” and that study has been entirely, utterly debunked.
The hormones in the equation – and the surgeries which if you do any digging are an utter disaster… is as misguided and evil as lobotomy, DES and thalidomide, Satanic Panic and Multiple ID disorder combined.
Surgeries are pretty rare but hormones are NOT.
People like Funentez and Fausto Sterling muddy the waters and are vile dishonest people.
D.A.
NYC
I would be cautious about saying that so many school shooters are trans. There are various reasons why correlations like that can seem magnified when they really are not, one being when there is a lot of news about it if and when it happens. Anyway, a quick check for the # of school shootings for 2025 alone (in the US, I assume) produces different results depending on definitions of that event. So it could be about 90, up to 145 depending on definitions. And it’s only summer. I got this from Google AI, so there is that, but surely it can’t be far wrong given this country.
How many people claim trans identity? That too calls for some hedging. Wikipedia says it is less than 1% worldwide, but I would allow it could be a higher given prohibitions for being open about that. So let’s say 1-2%
Anyway, what is suggested here, with no correlation whatsoever about shootings and trans people is that there easily could be 2-3 school shootings per year involving someone who claims to be trans. But that will get a lot of news attention so it can seem magnified.
How many of those 90-145 school shooters were women? (Presumably the low number includes only interlopers from outside, excludes student gang shootings.). Half a dozen, tops, I bet. And how many of them are trans-identified, taking testosterone? Maybe male levels of testosterone are just bad for the female brain. (They’re not always the best for ours, either.) And some women, the more disturbed ones, take extra-high doses to produce “gender euphoria”, as well as other drugs promising plain old euphoria.
I have never heard of a trans-identified man shooting up a school or church. The fake ones are the ones women worry about, with good reason, being hormonally and anatomically intact liars acting in bad faith, but the “real ones” — homosexual men who think suppressing testosterone and looking a little like women will somehow make them happier — don’t seem to do much violence of any kind. So trans-identified men probably drop out of the school-shooting statistics altogether, enriching the mix for trans-identified women. If 2% of school shooters are trans, apparently by coincidence, that could be consistent with the claim that all the women shooters are trans. But if the biological sex is suppressed for “equity” or “privacy” reasons, we’ll never know. Even if trans-IDed women aren’t doing a lot of damage in aggregate to students and congregants, trans ideology could be doing a lot of damage to a few women. The implication that even one in 50 school shootings is iatrogenic, because women don’t do this absent medical prescribing, should raise concerns in the medical profession. The concern about violence by people taking SSRIs comes from the same place—surprisingly little evidence of benefit, nor for the claim that serotonin or any other “brain chemical imbalance” has any role in depression in the first place.
The question about whether anyone is really transgender is more than just pedantic bigotry. Not what I took to be your accusation, Mark, but one does hear it, often expressed as the discussion-shutting, “Haters gonna hate.” If being transgender is a real medical condition, then doctors are ethically obligated to provide the afflicted with the best treatment available, without a thought to what this means for society, such as more school shootings maybe. (“‘That’s not my department’, says Werner von Braun!” — TL.). But if “treating” trans is about autonomous embodiment goals, not medicine, then the state can tell doctors to stop doing it, because the externalities are too costly (or because minors are made to suffer from therapeutic enthusiasm.). Analogously, is there such a thing as being born with a life-long brain-chemistry need for opiates, so that some of us have an “opiate deficiency disorder” that needs chronic “replacement” therapy to prevent severe psychological distress? (This is a genuine, serious question that plagues development of guidelines for and against long-term prescribing. Why else do we have several types of opiate receptors, not just in our brains but in our lungs and guts as well? Why else do women have androgen receptors?)
My mistake. I got this totally wrong. The shooter in this case is a trans-identified man. I read the story about “her” and missed Jerry’s clarification. My humble apologies.
“The fact that so many school shooters are transgender….”
Is that a fact? What does “so many” even mean? I get your points following that statement (and agree with them!) but that one I’m not so sure of….
I have seen one report that the shooter’s mother worked for the school.
It came in after press time last night that CDC Chief Dr. Demetre Daskalakis resigned over Junior Kennedy and the relentless effort to push science to the sidelines.
Also, Ukraine took out a literal boatload of Shahed drones that had just docked on the Caspian Sea in Russia from Iran, and then took out multiple sites of munitions and explosives manufacture in Russia. Presumably that was the reason for the Russian attack on Kyiv that I woke up to.
The inside medicine substack has copies of some of the resignation letters at
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-read-three-top-cdc
Re: the Minneapolis shooter.
Again, we have to question whether certain so-called (former) skeptics, humanists and atheists such as PZ Myers, Hemant Mehta and the American Humanist Association, are responsible for the murderer’s actions, because of their extremist rhetoric… /s
PS PZ is a big fan of of that Fuentes book.
Oh what a rollcall of horror. PZ is the vilest thing alive.
Fuentez is no threat – just a clown on a long con profitable grift.
Fools all.
D.A.
NYC
Predictably, PZ has an article up, and he and the commentators are saying its all about “gun culture” and nothing to do with anything else. Sharp contrast to when those eejits blamed Christchurch on humanists and skeptics saying mean things about a fascist ideology.
BTW, I will also point out that PZ and his horde were celebrating gun culture a few months ago, when they cheered on and defended some guy shooting a drugs company boss on a street.
According to the NY Post, the shooter Robin Westman was regretting having transitioned.
https://x.com/nypost/status/1961036172957749747
Woooooh, Kathy, that is one scary thing with face! Guard your doggies!
Whoa. Don’t let that face fool you into thinking it’s friendly. It’s not. Those are yellow jackets! They rather sting you than look at you.
Coincidence Department. The BBC is receiving letters that object to referring to the “Samurai killer” (Joanna Rowland-Stuart, originally named Andrew Rowland-Stuart) as a woman. Rowland-Stuart is a trans-identifying male. There being two trans-identifying male killers in the news at the same time is certainly an odd coincidence. Referring to trans-identifying male people in the language we use to refer to women is a courtesy it is reasonable to extend to them in many contexts, but the people who complained to the BBC about referring to the “Samurai killer” as “she” were making a reasonable complaint.
Big news in abiogenic origins! Here’s the WaPo summary, with embedded link to the Nature paper. Relatively simple thiols are apparently easily involved in activating amino acids for protein synthesis, forming thiolester intermediates. This has been a major stumbling block. I’ll post the direct Nature link as a comment, for those without a WaPo subscription, and since WordPress can’t handle two embedded links in one comment.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09388-y
The core summary sentence, to help dial in on what this is all about:
Here we demonstrate that (biological) aminoacyl-thiols chemoselectively aminoacylate RNA at neutral pH in water.
This is exciting. Thanks for posting it. Do you think this work might lead to a Nobel, the way the discovery of ribozyme activity in rRNA did, solving another stumbling block in the way of abiogenesis?
What I’m not clear on is what the authors mean by “chemoselective” aminoacylation. I see that they demonstrate that aminoacylation of tRNA using thio-esters as intermediates is promoted selectively over other non-productive reactions, so fair enough, applause. But I don’t think they have demonstrated that the correct amino acid can be covalently bound (pre-enzymatically) to the tRNA with the correct anti-codon. (As I understand it, it is not even entirely clear how amino-acyl tRNAse enzymes accomplish this trick, albeit with errors that must be mostly corrected.) I’m not accusingly them of making this claim. I only want to be sure I understand that they have “just” demonstrated that generic aminoacylation of tRNA with the provided amino acid — alanine in most experiments — can be productively accomplished with high output and little nonsense side-reaction while not requiring protein enzymes as catalysts. This is still a very big deal.
I think your summary has it. Before there can be sequence specificity of a string of codons pairing vs. anticodons on tRNAs, there had to be a way of getting amino acids attached to RNA, and nobody had found a way of activating the carboxyl in such a way that it could bond with a ribose hydroxyl. It doesn’t happen by itself – there had to be an intermediate. Many had been tried but they either didn’t form in good yield or they required unrealistic (vs. those supposed in the prebiotic world) conditions.
I what will happen if you have a random mix of these prebiotically charged amino acids is that the chain will be able to grow in either direction, but I haven’t gotten to the end of the Nature paper yet (since grass needs mowed etc), but it may be that once a dipeptidyl-RNA is formed at random (suppose you have Alanyl-RNA and Glycyl-RNA, you could either get AG-RNA or GA-RNA, but if the amino group of the next aminoacyl-RNA (say, a Serine) is considerably more reactive than the dipeptidyl one, then reacting with GA-RNA would get you GAS, (as would happen with ribosomal/mRNA-directed protein synthesis) but if they’re equally reactive you’d get a mix of GAS and SGA, so there would be further pressure to get things to progress by having something to set things going in one direction. I assume the paper will at least point that out.
For a great summary of the state of understanding of things in this area, highly recommend Is Earth Exceptional (Livio & Szostak, 2024). The first part is biochemist Jack Szostak’s, the second half astrophysicist Livio’s. I got bogged down in Livio’s since I’m a biochemist, and haven’t gotten to the end to see if they have a joint chapter.
This work takes things to the next level!
And no idea about a Nobel. It might be seen as breakthrough or it might be seen as incremental. Szostak already has a Nobel, but not for his abiogenic work. (BTW, he is also head of the Center on Origins of Life at U Chicago. How close this is to the duck pond is unclear.)
It is so kind of whatever Fates might be to allow every evil and every tragedy to confirm the core ideas that those same Fates randomly installed within me.
He hated Jews but shot up a Catholic School/Church – I haven’t seen anything about this.
He hated both jews and catholics. He was clearly seriously disturbed. I can’t believe that the USA supports the right of the mentally ill to own lethal weapons.
I commented with this link earlier, showing the police calling him a man and some of his videos, but I can’t see it.
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/gendered-offendersdead-names-double
Thanks joolz
If ChatGPT enabled a suicide, what other craziness can it enable?
Did anyone ever imagine that the Machines could take over by literally talking us to death? (It does sound like a SciFi plot device.)
And FWIW, in ¶59 the ‘bot enthusiastically supporting the plan including “a girlfriend discovering his body” is a particular horror. It’s the living who suffer from a loved-one’s suicide. Utter social irresponsibility. 💢💢
I am very pleased that Open AI is being sued over this. And IMO jail time would also be salutary.
I have read recently that the Fench wine industry is under threat. With the downturn in wine consumption, competition causing a glut “many” are selling off vineyards to wealthy celebrities and the like… especially in the Bordeaux region. Interesting and kinda sad really.
Quick google link but this not where I read the story, I can’t find it, in the UK at the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/14/french-vineyards-bordeaux-payout-pour-wine-down-drain-trade-sales.
Chinese investers who bought up biggly are now selling off.
Ms Gomez was rather brave in her choice of pages to burn. By contrast those who burn mere flags are wimps.