It’s Friday already! Yes, Friday, August 29, 2025, and National Chop Suey Day, celebrating a dish that’s not even served in China, and not very good. My mom used to serve it to us when I was a kid, sprinkled with those dry noodles that came in a can (as did the chop suey itself). Yes, it’s edible if you’re hungry, but not flavorful. It has CELERY! Here’s a picture from Wikipedia. You can tell how bland it is merely by looking:
It’s also International Day Against Nuclear Testing, Lemon Juice Day, and National Swiss Winegrowers Day (I don’t think I’ve ever tasted Swiss wine).
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 29 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*After only a short tenure as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Susan Monarez has been fired (she started not long ago).
“When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda,” the lawyers, Mark S. Zaid and Abbe Lowell, wrote in a statement. “For that reason, she has been targeted.”
Soon after their statement, the White House formally fired Monarez.
Wednesday’s shake-ups — which include the resignation of the agency’s chief medical officer, the director of its infectious-disease center and other key officials — add to the tumult at the nation’s premier public health agency. Kennedy and his allies have long criticized the CDC as too deferential to the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine makers. As the nation’s top health official, Kennedy has upended vaccine policies, including on Wednesday narrowing approval of coronavirus vaccines to high-risk groups, and he has taken steps that medical experts worry are undermining the nation’s public health response.
Monarez, who was confirmed in late July, was pressed for days by Kennedy, administration lawyers and other officials over whether she would support rescinding certain approvals for coronavirus vaccines, according to two people with knowledge of those conversations. Kennedy, who has a long history of anti-vaccine advocacy, and other officials questioned Monarez on Monday on whether she was aligned with the administration’s efforts to change vaccine policy, the people said.
She was clearly fired for not truckling to RFK Jr. and his dumb policies on deep-sixing development of mRNA vaccines. This reminds me of the Saturday Night Massacre when Nixon fired one Attorney General after another who wouldn’t do his bidding. But I expect Trump and RFK Jr. will find some factotum to do their bidding—and we’ll all be the worse for it.
*Well, Nellie is not doing this week’s news/snark column at the Free Press again, but we’re promised she’ll return. Today’s version, called “TGIF: All American“, is by the noticeably less funny Will Rahn. Only Nellie can do this column! (I wrote The Free Press to beef). But I’ll steal three items anyway.
→ Back to the horse race: How bad are things with the Democrats right now? Well, if you go with the headlines this week, you might think the Colorado Rockies (38 wins, 96 losses) will win a World Series before the Democrats capture the White House again.
Here’s The New York Times on how population shifts from blue states like California and New York to red states like Texas and Florida will diminish the party’s chances of winning Congress and the presidency after the 2030 census. Here’s a CNN data wonk explaining how “the Dem brand has about the same appeal with the American voter right now as the Cracker Barrel rebrand does with the American consumer: Bad, Bad, Bad.”
There’s more. Here’s one of the Democrats’ most respected pollsters bemoaning how his party’s candidates are getting awful advice at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting: “This is why our party continues to be so fucked.” And here’s an Axios story about how the DNC, which is struggling to raise money, is still paying off Kamala Harris’s substantial campaign debt.
How many times does the above need to be said before Democrats start finding a leader? Speaking of Democrats:
→ Fat guys: You know what’s funny, in a quintessentially American way? Two fat guys arguing about who’s fatter. And we got that this week when Trump, America’s foremost right-wing comedian, took aim at Illinois’s portly Democratic governor, JB Pritzker.
Trump was speaking about his (legally dubious) plan to send the National Guard to Chicago. He says it’s necessary to deal with the Windy City’s crime problem, and speaking from the Oval Office, he complained that Illinois lawmakers don’t want the troops there. “I hate to barge in on a city and then be treated horribly by corrupt politicians and bad politicians, like a guy like Pritzker,” Trump said. “He ought to spend more time in the gym, actually.”
While Trump’s stamina and ability to fat-shame across the aisle is remarkable, he is, of course, overweight, and it’s hard to imagine him hitting the gym. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen him lift any object at all. According to his doctor, Trump is six-foot-three and 224 pounds. Perfectly weighted. All man, except for the large percentage of him that is Diet Coke. But after Biden, I think it’s fair to be suspicious of such official findings. I wouldn’t be shocked if he’s 20 or so pounds heavier than he claims. His onetime campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has described Trump’s typical order at McDonald’s, and it’s nothing less than obscene: two Big Macs, two Filets-O-Fish, and a chocolate milkshake to wash it all down. That’s the order of a 19-year-old Dartmouth rower.
Pritzker, of course, was asked about Trump’s jab, and he handled it as deftly as he would an unruly sandwich. “From my perspective, it takes one to know one on the weight question,” he said Monday. “And the president, of course, himself is not in good shape.” He added that Trump “is still living in the fifth grade” and “what he’s saying is actually commentary on himself.” These men are 15 minutes from yo mama jokes.
I do worry about Pritzker’s avoirdupois, as he may be a Democratic candidate for President, and I don’t want him blowing an artery before then or after he’s elected.
→ Reichflix: Marc Maron, the comedian best known for the popular podcast WTF, went on Pod Save America recently to complain about Netflix’s relationship with Dave Chappelle. Here’s Maron:
“Fascism is good for business. Like, Netflix will just co-opt anybody that can tick that algorithm. I used to do a joke about it, that Netflix can become ‘Reich-flix’ very quickly. And I think the pivotal moment was when they had pushback from the trans community about Chappelle, they realized after several days that that community was not going to affect their bottom line at all, and they cut ’em loose. That is how fascism works in business.” Marc, buddy, I think fascism in business is a little darker than deciding not to cave to a coterie of woke coders who don’t like a joke.
At first glance, this just appears to be a comedian complaining about a more popular comedian. This is also how it looks at a second glance. Even at the height of wokeness, Dave Chappelle proved immune to cancellation because he can sell out giant venues. And if you can sell out a giant venue, it’s very hard to get canceled. Similarly, Shane Gillis went from Saturday Night Live reject—he was hired and then immediately fired after some guy found a clip of him doing a mock Chinese accent—to sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden.
But that’s not fascism. That’s the reality of the market. Whatever you think of his trans jokes, Chappelle is undoubtedly one of the great comedians of all time, so of course he has a vast and loyal fan base. (Gillis isn’t quite there yet, but one could imagine him eventually joining the pantheon, and in the meantime, Tires is a very funny show.)
I’m not at all convinced that Chapelled is anti-trans, but the bit about fascism is certainly over the top. “Reich-flix”??? That is hysterical wokeness.
*I’m reading the newish book Sex is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary by anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, a man who’s dedicated his career to distorting biology so it conforms to his progressive ideology. Fuentes takes the “sex is complicated” route favored by binary debunkers, pointing out the diversity of sex determination, sexual behavior, and even of “lived experience”, all of which he thinks efface the binary. (There should be a name for this kind of fallacy.) There aren’t many reviews of the book, but I found one on Ed Hagen’s Grasshoppermouse website (Hagen is a biological anthropologist at Washington State University). It’s a kind review, which praises the book for its good bits, but in general, and in its main thesis, Hagen is critical. (There are also ample references and footnotes.)
Excerpts:
Agustín Fuentes, an anthropologist at Princeton, whose previous book was Race, monogamy, and other lies they told you: Busting myths about human nature, opens his new book, Sex is a Spectrum (hereafter, SIAS), with a description of the strange physiology of the bluehead wrasse, a sequential hermaphrodite:
Imagine you are a fish called the bluehead wrasse, living off the coast of Florida. As you grow up, you, just like all to the other bluehead wrasse your age and size, develop one set of reproductive organs. You are what we’d call female, so you produce eggs. There is only one very large member of your group, and they are the group male, so produce sperm. But over the next few weeks you grow really fast, becoming the second-largest fish on your reef. Then the male gets eaten. Almost immediately your body starts to change, your reproductive organs mold, shift, and alter their form. You become the group’s sperm producer. As a bluehead wrasse, you can have one body and one set of DNA, but multiple forms of reproductive biology across your lifetime.
What Fuentes fails to provide is any explanation, other than a vaguely group-functional need to “become the group’s sperm producer,” for why many wrasse and other teleost fish species are sequential or simultaneous hermaphrodites. He could have looked up the literature on this as easily as I did (e.g., Avise and Mank 2009), and maybe he did, but if he did, he chose not to tell his readers.
And that’s the pattern Fuentes follows in SIAS, which is long on descriptions of biological variation but very short on explanations, either those put forward in the scientific literature, or his own. Yet his Introduction promises, at least for humans, to deliver a “new narrative” about the biology of sex. . .
, . . A general pattern (albeit one with several exceptions) is that single-celled eukaryotes are isogamous with two mating types, whereas multicellular eukaryotes are anisogamous, producing either small gametes that only fuse with large ones, or large ones that only fuse with small ones. The latter is the biological definition of the sexes: small gametes are by definition male, and large ones female.
I want to draw out an implication that I think is not as widely recognized as it should be: in its most general form, which is meant to apply to the evolution of millions of multicellular species over deep time, the sex “binary” is not a scheme to classify the potential parents (the “players”). Instead, it refers to the number of options for each potential parent in their gamete production game.
. . .It’s not that Fuentes gets anything horribly wrong in his chapters on humans, past and present, it’s that he fails to provide any, and I mean any, alternative to the standard view that binary sex is but one contributor to variation in phenotypes.
To give an example, here is Fuentes discussing the sex difference in human height:
Height in humans is not a sex binary and not a true dimorphism. Height is one morph (a measurable shape) with a range of variation that can be divided into overlapping clusters composed of 3G males and 3G females. But it does not automatically have to be divided that way. Height distribution can also be sorted by age, by people from different latitudes and dietary practices, by athletes versus non-athletes, and by a range of other variables depending on what questions you are asking. There are not two forms of human, a tall and a short version; rather, there is a range of variation with some patterns in that variation. (p. 74).
The fact that binary sex only explains some of the variation in height and other traits in humans and other species, but not all, is entirely expected. This no reason to abandon the binary sex concept – recall from my preface that species have been playing many “games” over the course of their evolution, all of which have had an impact on their phenotypes. Accounting for the impact of multiple factors on some trait, including factors like nutrition that operate during development, is bog-standard life science.
Apparently unlike Fuentes, Hagen has actually read the references that Fuentes cites, and often finds that they don’t say what Fuentes claims they do. The problem is summed up in the last paragraph above: Fuentes looks for anything that the layperson might misunderstand as eroding the sex binary, including overlap in phenotypic traits. It’s almost as if Fuentes doesn’t understand what the sex binary means, although I refuse to believe that he doesn’t. He just doesn’t like it because he thinks that it somehow hurts people who are transsexual or nonbinary. It shouldn’t, and the debunking of the gametic binary as the concept for biological sex is an enormous waste of time and effort.
*Over at The Knight Report, Stephen Knight (aka the “Godless Spellchecker”) goes after the Unfriendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, who’s been defending the indefensible for a while, as well as dumping on nearly every “new atheist” he can. Knight’s article is called “Hemant Mehta is lying about Richard Dawkins and trans ideology again“, with the subtitle “Hemant Mehta is out of his depth on trans ideology”. Knight has a big beef about the way Mehta distorts this clip he posted with part of a discussion between Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss:
Nothing to see here. Just atheists Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins comparing the acceptance of transgender people to telling anorexic and obese people they’re healthy. pic.twitter.com/nOQVvPj0yn
— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) July 24, 2025
The Beef:
Dawkins recently sat down to have an hour long discussion on Lawrence Krauss’s ‘The Origins Podcast’. The topic for discussion was ‘The War on Science’, so inevitably the issue of trans ideology came up.
Hemant took to his ‘X’ account to share a 60 second clip from the conversation in which he claims shows “…atheists Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins [are] comparing the acceptance of transgender people to telling anorexic and obese people they’re healthy”. He sarcastically prefaces this claim with the words “nothing to see here” as though he’s caught them in some noteworthy failure of decency.
However, if you watched the moments preceding this clip (from the 44:00 mark), you will observe that they are doing no such thing. The topic at hand here, rather than being merely ‘transgender people’ is the best way to approach those with ‘gender dysphoria’.
Gender dysphoria is a medical condition of course that results in deep discomfort and anxiety over a perceived mismatch in someone’s body and sex. It largely affects minors—and is not even a condition that all trans people experience.
However, Krauss actually begins the switch to this topic by saying “one can understand and sympathise with their gender dysphoria and one shouldn’t discriminate against them”. Sounds rather like ‘acceptance’ to me.
Krauss then goes on to outline his actual concern, when he says “but then that’s taken to the extreme and an unscientific version to say that they are not having gender dysphoria, [but] they literally are another sex”.
It’s just after this point that Hemant’s suspiciously cropped clip begins where Dawkins goes on to compare affirming someone’s gender dysphoria with “saying to an anorexic person who is skeletally thin, it’s ok, you’re not thin”. Krauss follows up to add a comparison of his own such as pretending that obese people are actually healthy.
Mehta frames this as Dawkins and Krauss attacking transgender people in general, rather than making a very specific point about affirming harmful beliefs in healthcare.
. . .I feel like the USA has some serious catching-up to do on this issue. Mehta seems completely unwilling or unable to grasp the fact that this ‘gender affirming’ approach where kids are encouraged to believe they are “trapped in the wrong body” isn’t being imagined by Dawkins and Krauss. It was the standard model at the highest level. Furthermore, in the UK it has subsequently been found to a woefully unevidenced approach at best and a catastrophically harmful one at worst.
This isn’t simply the position or findings of religious reactionaries or ‘far-right transphobes’. It is the outcome of independent reviews and evidence-based scrutiny resulting in reform within The National Health Service. It is the reason the NHS no longer prescribes puberty-blockers to gender confused kids. It is the reason the largest gender affirming clinic in the UK was closed due to huge failures of safeguarding. It is the reason the Supreme Court recently clarified that the word ‘woman’ in the Equality Act is defined by biology. It is why sporting bodies are now roll.
And Knight gets this spot on:
When Mehta leaves the safe territory of mocking American creationist cranks, he quickly shows how far out of his depth he really is. It’ll be interesting to see what excuses he can find to justify his support of such a harmful faith-based worldview when future generations ask how adults could have been so wicked to go along with any part of it.
Metha has one talent: attacking creationists and religious nutcases. But that involves bashing low-hanging fruit. When it comes to more complex issues, he’s clueless, except to invoke a lesser talent: hating New Atheists.
*Speaking of sex and gender, philosopher Alex Byrne at MIT “confesses” in the WaPo that “I co-wrote the anonymous HHS report on sex and gender” (article archived here). No need for confession, though, as the definition of sex is spot on. (He wrote the recent book Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions.) His op-ed was written at the end of June, but I missed it (h/t Bryan). An excerpt:
The hostile response to the review by medical groups and practitioners underscores why it was necessary. Medicalized treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria needs to be dispassionately scrutinized like any other area of medicine, no matter which side of the aisle is cheering it on. But in the United States, it has not been.
I was familiar with the other authors — there are nine of us in all — and I was confident that we could produce a rigorous, well-argued document that could do some good. Collectively, we had all the bases covered, with experts in endocrinology, the methodology of evidence-based medicine, medical ethics, psychiatry, health policy and social science, and general medicine. I am a philosopher, not a physician. Philosophy overlaps with medical ethics and, when properly applied, increases understanding across the board. Philosophers prize clear language and love unravelling muddled arguments, and the writings of pediatric gender specialists serve up plenty of obscurity and confusion.
The review was prompted by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump at the end of January, which set for us a May 1 deadline. The order’s inflammatory and tendentious language understandably roused suspicions among liberals. But the review wasn’t written by zealots busily grinding axes. In fact, liberals were in the majority. Some of us were paranoid that the White House would try to control the content of the review or even alter it pre-publication; that worry proved unfounded.
. . . After surveying all the evidence, and applying widely accepted principles of medical ethics, we found that medical transition for minors is not empirically or ethically justified.
. . .Mere hours after publication, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Susan Kressly, claimed that the review was undermined by reliance on “a narrow set of data.” A glance at the evidence synthesis (or even just the separate appendix) by anyone familiar with evidence-based medicine would show that this complaint is preposterous. The hypocrisy is blatant: the AAP’s policy statement for the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth is unsupported by its own citations.
Equally baseless was the statement issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health the day after the review’s publication, saying it “misrepresents existing research.” If it does, why not clinch the case with some examples? Yet none were provided.
Critics have mostly settled on the allegation that the review’s endorsement of psychotherapeutic approaches — in line with best practice in the U.K, Finland, and Sweden — amounts to “conversion therapy” for gender identity. Once this activist phrasing is granted, the negative association with long-discredited gay conversion therapy does the rest. Never mind that we replied in advance: The chapter on psychotherapy has a section titled “The charge of ‘conversion therapy’.”
America is full of loons marinated in progressive ideology, to the extent that if something comes from the Trump administration, even if it was written by liberals (Byrne is a liberal Democrat), it must be rejected. As Byrne concludes;
Such a culture is animated by the scientific spirit — a willingness to question assumptions, to seek new evidence, and to resist pressure to conform from our in-group. That is exactly what has been missing from the debate over youth gender medicine, and we liberals must take some blame. The more liberals who can rise above tribal loyalties and publicly dissent, the better.
Amen, brothers and sisters.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej inadvertently makes a rhyme, but is also sad:
Hili: Summer’s gone, autumn is here.
Andrzej: I once liked this time of year.
In Polish:
Hili: Lato się skończyło, to już jest jesień.
Ja: Kiedyś lubiłem tę porę roku.
*******************
From Texts from Last Night:
From Animal Antics:
From Meow:
Masih tweeted; the Grok translation of the Farsi is this: “Ghazaleh screamed: Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, we are all together… Today, her birthday cake had a candle… if the Islamic Republic had not killed her with a bullet. Ghazaleh, my homeland, happy birthday… these streets will once again shout your cry: Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, we are all together…:
غزاله فریاد زد : نترسید نترسید ما همه با هم هستیم….
امروز کیک تولدش را شمعی بود….گر جمهوری اسلامی او را با گلوله نکشته بود.
غزاله وطنم، تولدت مبارک….دوباره این خیابان ها بانگ تو را فریاد خواهند زد :
نترسید نترسید ما همه با هم هستیم…🖤#غزاله_چلابی #مرگ_بر_جمهوری_اسلامی pic.twitter.com/MaXecS5hms— Kosar Eftekhari (@kosareftekharii) August 4, 2025
From Luana; in most colleges and universities, grades don’t mean much anymore:
“They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.”
Harvard faculty recognize that grade inflation has become absurd: pic.twitter.com/ZHywJQN3io
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) August 28, 2025
From Micahel, who says “The results are not even close” (arrow and circle are mine). I AM RIGHT!
From Malcolm; a kitten not ready for prime time (there’s cutesy music):
Little hunter pic.twitter.com/jkG4MJ3w1O
— cats with powerful aura (@PowerfulAuraX) August 9, 2025
One from my feed; Science Girl always has good posts:
Wait for it
pic.twitter.com/OqsHgyXmgv— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) August 27, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Belgian Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was six. Had she lived, she would have turned 88 today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-29T10:42:45.377Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a snuffling aardvark:
Tilli the aardvark reporting for duty: professional digger, dirt enthusiast, and all-around tunnel queen. 👑 Tilli digs because she loves it. Go digging with our adorable 20-year-old aardvark. It's two minutes of pure aardvark joy. 💕📹: Assistant curator Maureen
— Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium (@ptdefiancezoo.bsky.social) 2025-08-28T03:59:54.042Z
And a lovely squid in the deep sea:
Also found this squid from the @schmidtocean.bsky.social archives. Gonatus? What a cool 👁. Dive 337 #ningaloocanyons #MarineLife
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all. -Maurice Maeterlinck, poet, dramatist, and Nobel laureate (29 Aug 1862-1949)
Regarding CDC firings and resignations: I am most concerned about the HHS mishigas because it is not just simple crazy verbal posturing but a concerted series of real actions that will directly result (and has already resulted in) increased childhood mortality. Pediatrician Paul Offit has covered this rolling junior Kennedy-centric disaster in his substack “Beyond the Noise” which is available online for free. Vince Racaneillo from Microbe tv TWiV has also teamed with Paul to bring a 20-minute video discussion of each Beyond the Noise one-pager also for free. I subscribe to the texts (they appear in my email inbox when published) and also watch the video because the discussion between Vince and Paul usually brings up a bit of extra nuance…as conversations often do. The most recent Beyond the Noise video should be at url
TWiV and Beyond the Noise have been noted both in my WEIT reader comments and I believe also Hempenstein’s and others in the past.
Yes! #’s 77, 78 & 79 are all excellent & recommended. Currently working on a letter to John Fetterman urging him to lead the charge against Junior, because of Pennsylvania’s historical connection to vaccines.
What the Dems need to do is go back to the grassroots. At the district level they should begin holding meetings and electing delegates for a national convention to determine what it is they actually want to happen. It has appeared for some time (certainly since Bernie was railroaded in 2016, but likely before) that the party is under the control of the professionals. They may be the ones who are making the Dems take the wrong side of every 80/20 issue. So get everyone together who doesn’t think they’d ever want to be in the GOP and find out what they want. Once they have done that it should be easier to find a leader.
I still don’t understand this incessant attack on progressive politics (“loons marinated in progressive ideology”) when I strongly suspect that readers of this site hold progressive views in at least four regards: 1) the need for higher taxes, 2) the need to stop burning fossil fuels and to ramp up the use of solar and wind power, 3) the need to restore bodily autonomy for women (restore Roe v Wade), and 4) the need to institute some kind of universal, single-payer health insurance.
“Loons marinated in progressive ideology” comes off as a broad brush that’s uncalled for in light of a delineation that is needed: a way to separate the wheat (the four items above) from the chaff (going after Fuentes and his ilk).
I prefer to use progressive vs. conservative to describe ideology mostly because these two words juxtapose forward looking and backward looking views of the world. Liberal doesn’t seem right to me as a term to oppose conservative.
However, the word ‘progressive’ is now often used as a stand-in for the extreme or irrational left. As much as it’s my preferred word to describe my own ideology, in contemporary discourse (especially in the USA), I’ve learned to avoid it.
What you’re reading is not an “incessant attack on progressive politics,” it’s invective against those on the left who are so open minded that their brains have fallen out.
+1
It’s the marination that’s the problem. A light seasoning is better because you can change it a bit if you think it needs, say, a bit more tarragon. If you soak in progressive ideology, you’ll be stuck with a flavor, a point of view, that cannot be altered.
Thanks for the insult. I use “progressive” as a perjorative, as everyone knows, and that means woke Democrats who don’t accomplish anything.
If you don’t like the incessant attack on a group of Democrats who I don’t like, and who are dragging down the Democratic party, then I suggest you read another site, and you know which one I mean.
Ok, I’m going to weigh in on the most important part of the Hili Dialogue–the Pie Survey.
Nobody should be surprised by the rhubarb pie position. It’s just not pie.
Pecan Pie? Nope–always has the consistency of concrete. Double nope.
Key Lime Pie? At my little store in Key West, for a time I sold slices made by Kermit, the undisputed master KL Pie chef. And the first slice is good! The second slice? Nah. Boring. Like Lemon Meringue without the whipped cream.
What should be the true winner? What else could it be? Apple, America’s Sweettart!
Yes, apple pie is a glaring omission.
But I’m sorry to inform you that you are wrong about pecan pie. It’s the best pie. Also, what business does cheesecake have for even being on the list? It has the word cake right in the name, for heaven’s sake.
As for strawberry rhubarb pie, 16% is a LOT. What I’d like to know is, when the hell did it become so popular? (with the glaring exception of a certain someone).
Pizza pie best pie.
Apple must be in the list, and should probably win in the popular vote.
But my hand will hover uncertainly over cheesecake.
JD- If you had had the Pecan Pie that Minnie Jackson (wife of the grand old man of the English Dept @ WM&Mary back in the ’40s/50s) was still making into the ’70s, you wouldn’t say that. They were from Alabama, where they know a thing about pecans. Her filling was yellow translucent and gelatinous. The secret was using both light and dark Karo syrup, and egg yolks only – six to a pie IIRC.
I vote apple, too!
Cherry pie. My favorite. Just throwing that in there.
Darn. You had me with you as you winnowed out the usurpers and pretenders right up until you announced the winner. It has to be blueberry.
But only if it is made with fresh or frozen blueberries. The canned pie filling is just blec-c-ch, or however MAD Magazine used to spell it. The saving grace for apple is that the canned apple filling is actually pretty good in a pinch.
Fuentes: “As a bluehead wrasse, you can have one body and one set of DNA, but multiple forms of reproductive biology across your lifetime.”
Yes! Exactly two reproductive forms.
Fuentes’ conceit that TWO = multiple reminds me of an old joke about Hungarian noblemen, competing to see who can name the highest number. One says: TWO!. The other thinks for a long time, and then says: You win, I give up.
Margaret Atwood has this joke in her novel The Robber Bride: “How does a Newfoundlander count fish? One fish, another fish, another fish…”
Are there firm nation-wide data on university grade-flation? Is it all majors? Is there a difference between humanities or studies and the sciences? My single data point was in the Covid-induced Zoomcast of my grandson’s Virginia Tech graduation in 2020. Going through the list of seniors with asterisks, daggers, etc for various honors, I counted 25% summa, magna, and cum laude altogether with cum laude starting at 3.4 if I recall correctly. I do not find this to be terribly off-putting. I know that at least his cohort in the sciences had to work hard for their grades. I wonder if this is the norm or Harvard or???.
With respect to “The hostile response to the [Alex Byrne] review by medical groups and practitioners”, folks might be interested in this two-parter by Jesse Singal on the fate of five systematic reviews of youth gender medicine (social transition, puberty blockers, tucking & binding, cross-sex hormones, bilateral mastectomy) and the fates of the people who carried out the SRs.
tl;dr Part 1 describes harassment by TRAs and the Southern Poverty Law Center that “traumatized” the junior authors of the SRs. SPLC accuses them of transphobia because their work was funded by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Three SRs got published, two are in limbo. Part 2 is an interview with the father of evidence-based medicine, Gordon Guyatt, who capitulates to the harassment and to the claim by SPLC that SEGM is a hate group.
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-disaster-at-mcmaster-part-1
Also as evidence against interest, I sent Jerry the pie poll and I voted for strawberry rhubarb. [shrug]
I didn’t know SEGM is a hate group! I give money to them.
Worse… I write for Jihadwatch.org – or rather they republish me and I’m friends with Robert Spencer over there and they ARE allegedly a “hate group” or waaacist or Iswamafobe or something equally stupid.
Guess I’m a just a hater! Oh well. You wouldn’t know it to meet me – I’m pretty fun but I do like my facts true.
D.A.
NYC
“Fuentes takes the “sex is complicated” route favored by binary debunkers, pointing out the diversity of sex determination, sexual behavior, and even of “lived experience”, all of which he thinks efface the binary. (There should be a name for this kind of fallacy.)”
Let me humbly suggest that this be the type specimen of the “Smokescreen Fallacy”—otherwise known as “baffle them with bullsh*t.” None of the distribution overlaps or wrasse conversions convince me that there is a sex (in complex multicellular organisms) other then make or female.
I like it a lot. Even though what Fuentes is guilty of is strawmanning and category errors, the “Smokescreen Fallacy” is a more descriptive.
“Smokescreen” is good, though I’ve always considered Fuentes’ argument a form of the Red Herring Fallacy, coupled with a Motte and Bailey.
The significant thing here is that most of his “evidence” is already recognized and granted. Some animals are sequential hermaphrodites, sure. But by pointing over and over at irrelevant and superficial examples of sexual diversity he and others who use this tactic are implying that they’re central to the issue and under dispute.
The more Red Herrings (“are some males nurturing?”) they can throw out, the more the debate subtly shifts to looking like they’re defending a winning side.
Handwave, present “therefore, sex is not binary” Bailey, and the smokescreen and mirrors make the claim appear plausible.
Totally, Norman. “Flood the zone with s**t” – lefty version of Steven Bannon’s strategy.
HA! Like RFK’s recent “mitochondria challenged” kids at airports.
So many morons.
D.A.
NYC
“Deported to Auschwitz in July, 1944…” Had von Stauffenberg succeeded, she might have survived.
Otherwise, there have been reports that ICE arrested two who were fighting forest fires in Oregon, and that the US has been running covert operations in Greenland. Stay tuned…
I always found the CDC recommendation to give COVID vaccinations to all people over the age of six months to be quite dubious. There was no consideration of individual risk from COVID, no consideration of the stark age-gradient we see for complications and death, no consideration of individual risk from the vaccine. (If you’ve known a young man with vaccine-induced myocarditis, you might know that it can be far from a mild condition.) Moreover, my understanding is that the CDC recommendation became increasingly out of line with recommendations in our peer countries.
I have asked Grok what those policies are, but as I have seen the beast hallucinate before, and as I am about to hit the road for a trip and can’t verify this myself, caveats apply. Grok informs me that most major European countries shifted by 2023 to recommending COVID vaccinations only for high-risk groups, generally defined as anyone aged 60-65 years and older, the immunocompromised, those with certain health conditions, and health care workers. That does line up with some individual country recommendations that I have seen in the past. I would welcome insight from anyone with direct knowledge from Europe or the UK.
If it turns out to be correct that most of our peers long ago shifted to vaccination primarily for high-risk individuals, then my primary question to US readers would be this: what is your opposition to the CDC shift to high-risk individuals other than that Bobby Kennedy recommended it? I am also curious whether you believe Kennedy should have left in place the “Emergency Use Authorization” that he recently rescinded. If so, for how much longer?
With myocarditis, two things.
The first is that it was seen only in young men on first or second vaccination, and was transient, lasting no more than a day, but it has apparently nearly vanished as a potential complication, presumably because everyone has either been vaccinated or exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
The second is that myocarditis is more frequent and more severe in patients with COVID. (Both per either Paul Offit or Daniel Griffin in a recent podcast – I can’t remember which).
The claim you report about myocarditis being more severe with COVID is beside the point in that vaccination does not prohibit infection, as the ample demonstration of so-called “breakthrough” infections shows. A young man is thus exposed to the cumulative risk of myocarditis from both vaccination and infection.
What I said about myocarditis is that “you might know that it can be far from a mild condition.” Your statement that suggests it is always and everywhere a “transient” condition “lasting no more than a day” is grossly inaccurate. Most are transient; others can find themselves in the hospital or even the ICU for days. According to the CDC, “Surveys of patients diagnosed with myocarditis who developed symptoms at least three months prior to answering the survey showed most patients (80%) were considered by their cardiologist or other healthcare provider to have either fully or probably fully recovered.” It’s that “probably” and the remaining 20% of patients who had not recovered by three months that have the CDC now conducting studies of patients who were diagnosed with myocarditis a year or more ago. I personally know of one of those young men, so I didn’t pull this out of my backside. It is of no consolation to him to say that “well, it is mild in most people.” Quite predictably, it was the failure to acknowledge these cases initially and to later wave them away as “transient” that helped generate distrust both in vaccines and the broader public health establishment. The trust will not be restored until our expert class swallows its pride and acknowledges publicly its many errors alongside its successes.
I both appreciate and find informative the scientific perspectives you share on this site. But ask yourself whether it is a scientific attitude to either deny or look away from the fact of these hard cases simply because they can be used by the loons and anti-vaxxers out there to generate distrust and encourage vaccine hesitancy. The advocacy approach that neglects disconfirming or complicating data is the model used by deniers of the sex binary and supporters of “gender-affirming” care. It is, unfortunately, also the model adopted by too many vaccine advocates within public health. You will, not coincidentally, find significant overlap between these two populations of advocates who think they need to curate, spin, or otherwise control what information people can access in order to force them into a desired decision. It is the game plan of those who favor the abstract group over the concrete individual.
I understand that the above risks can be considered rare. I, however, believe that informed consent and bodily autonomy for competent adults should apply to all medical procedures and not just to abortion. It is each person who should consider whether the risk/benefit calculus is acceptable. It is not for you, me, the CDC, or a university administrator to determine for them.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/vaccines/covid-19.html
Decades ago I occasionally had sapasui, Samoan chop suey, cooked by immigrant families. It was always dark and delicious, being tender and full of flavour, without vegetables as I recall, unless you count onion and garlic as vegetables.
Even more decades ago, mum’s rhubarb pie was a
dessert to look forward to. Also great when eaten cold as a leftover. Oh well, different people, different tastes.