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 CaturSaturday, December 13, 2025, shabbos for Jewish cats, and National Day of the Horse. And here, according to the Guinness book of world records, is the world’s shortest horse. He’s adorable and his job is to be a therapy horse.
Three weeks ago, President Trump sent shock waves across Europe with a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine that strongly echoed Russian talking points.
Now, Ukraine’s leaders have responded with a counterproposal that demands legal guarantees of protection against future Russian aggression, according to descriptions of the plan by European leaders and diplomats.
The 20-point Ukrainian plan for ending nearly four years of fighting is part of a broader response to Mr. Trump’s demand, made in his proposal last month, that Ukraine secure peace by relinquishing more land than Russia currently occupies. Ukrainian and European leaders say that would humiliate Kyiv while rewarding Russia for its aggression.
In press briefings this week, Mr. Zelensky has said the Ukrainian proposal now under discussion consists of three documents, including one that would lay out plans for rebuilding parts of the country that have been reduced to rubble and another that would compel the United States and European nations to come to Ukraine’s aid if it were attacked again.
The proposals, sent to Washington for review on Wednesday night, were the product of a flurry of intense diplomacy by Mr. Zelensky in recent days, including meetings in London, Brussels and Rome, and at least one conversation between European leaders and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Zelensky said on Thursday that he had told American negotiators that the security guarantees in the proposal should be submitted to the United States Congress in a bid to make them legally binding. He told reporters that “the security guarantees document we’re working on will ultimately go to Congress, and it will require congressional support. We need effective security guarantees.”
In a separate social media post on Thursday, Mr. Zelensky added that it would be critical to ensure that the guarantees are rigorous enough to prevent a future Russian invasion. He said it needed to be more robust than a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, which Russia violated when it seized Crimea in 2014 without incurring military opposition from the United States and other countries.
“That is why it is essential that this document on security guarantees provides concrete answers to what concerns Ukrainians the most,” Mr. Zelensky wrote. “What actions partners will take if Russia decides to launch its aggression again.”
And what about the crucial issue of Ukraine giving up land?
Mr. Zelensky has said that any concession of territory should be put to voters in Ukraine. Recent surveys have found that most people in the war-torn country do not support the idea of giving up territory to get peace.
Well, if Ukraine won’t give up any land in a cease-fire deal, there will be no cease-fire, and Ukraine will be taken over. That would be their decision, but a Russian Ukraine is an offense to the West–and to democracy. On the other hand, I don’t understand why the U.S. won’t offer security guarantees to Ukraine (probably because Trump is afraid of what Putin would do). It will be interesting to see how Congress would vote on such guarantees, as Trump can’t prevent such a vote. He can, however, veto it if he doesn’t like the results.
Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, one of the country’s most prominent human-rights advocates, was arrested at a public event on Friday, according to her foundation.
Mohammadi, 53, was awarded the prize in 2023 for her three decades of fighting for democracy in the Islamic Republic. She has spent years behind bars, and gained global attention for speaking out against the oppression of women and torture of dissidents under Iran’s theocratic regime.
Her Paris-based Narges Foundation said she was violently detained in the northeast Iranian city of Mashhad while attending a memorial service for Khosrow Alikordi, a lawyer who was recently discovered dead in his office in circumstances his supporters called suspicious. The foundation said Mohammadi’s brother, Mehdi Mohammadi, was at the event and confirmed her arrest.
The foundation said several other high-profile human-rights activists were also detained at the event. The foundation didn’t state a reason for the detentions.
At the time of her arrest, Mohammadi was out of prison on a temporary medical reprieve granted late last year, following an invasive surgery. She had been serving multiple sentences for alleged propaganda activities, totaling more than 10 years’ imprisonment in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.
Mohammadi is one of those brave dissidents who, like Venezuela’s María Corina Machado (also a Nobel Peace Prize winner), intends to continue protesting in their home country when they could leave. Machado intends to return to Venezuela, but it will be hard to get bac, and of course Mohammadi is already in Iran, now locked up. She has been in Iranian prisons for about seven years.
Here’s Masih’s tweet on the incident. noting that the protest was peaceful.
During the memorial for lawyer Khosrow Alikordi in Iran security forces arrested Narges Mohammadi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, along with Ali Adinehzadeh, father of a slain protester, Sepideh Gholian, Alieh Motalebzadeh, Pouran Nazemi, and Hasti Amiri.
This is how the Islamic… pic.twitter.com/PVklCi8Cwq
When students in Catherine Hartmann’s honors seminar at the University of Wyoming took their final exams this month, they encountered a testing method as old as the ancient philosophers whose ideas they were studying.
For 30 minutes, each student sat opposite Hartmann in her office. Hartmann asked probing questions. The student answered.
Hartmann, a religious studies professor who started using oral examinations last year, is not alone in turning to a decidedly old-fashioned way to grade student performance.
Across the country, a small but growing number of educators are experimenting with oral exams to circumvent the temptations presented by powerful artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT.
Such tools can be used to cheat on take-home exams or essays and to complete all manner of assignments, part of a broader phenomenon known as “cognitive off-loading.”
Hartmann tells her students that using AI is like bringing a forklift to the gym when your goal is to build muscle. “The classroom is a gymnasium, and I am your personal trainer,” she explains. “I want you to lift the weights.”
So far, her students have embraced the training regimen. Lily Leman, 20, a double major in Spanish and history, took her final exam last week. Leman admits to being “pretty freaked out” at first by the idea of an oral exam. Now she wishes she had more of them. “With this exam, I don’t know how you would use AI, frankly,” Leman said.
Ever since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, educators have been grappling with the challenge AI represents for existing methods of learning. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.)
In a recent survey of college students by Inside Higher Ed, 85 percent said they had used AI in their courses, including to brainstorm ideas and prepare for quizzes. A quarter admitted they had used it to complete assignments. And about 30 percent said colleges should design more AI-proof methods of assessment, including oral exams.
Oral exams are an even older tool, documented in ancient institutions of learning in Rome, Greece, India and beyond. Until the 18th century, they remained the default mode of assessment at Oxford and Cambridge universities, according to Stephen Dobson, a professor and university administrator in Norway who wrote a book about oral exams.
I used to give oral exams to students in my big Evolution class when they had reasons to take exams either before or after the scheduled time. Back then there was no AI, but I did it so that I didn’t have to make up separate written exams for each student (I did give them two population-genetic problems to solve in my anteoffice, which has a desk). I found, to my pleasure, that you can assess a student’s knowledge a lot better by talking to them than via written answers, as you can go off on tangents, ask them to clarify what they said, and so on. (I took notes on the students’ answers as they spoke.) Grading is somewhat more subjective than it is in a written exam (I wrote the keys for those), but you can really explore the breadth and depth of each student’s knowledge. Sadly, this will not work for courses having a lot of students.
*As always, I’m stealing a couple of items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column at the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: FIFA peace prize.”
→ Anyone who calls me fat goes to jail: There’s been reporting of late that Trump, 79, is a little slower than when he was first elected at age 70. First of all, as a human who has met 70 and then 79-year-olds, my answer to them is always the same: You look great. I said you look great. Great. G r e a t. As is Trump’s wont, he began calling for those reporters to go to jail. So here’s Trump this week:
After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean “THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it.
It’s treasonous to suggest an almost-octogenarian is, in fact, old? We should do something about this immediately, the president says, asking the sun god for endless life. Boomers will Boom till they Boom Boom Pow, and when confronted with mortality, they will call for all young people to be jailed. The NYT reporters who wrote the story about Trump’s aging even have young people names: Katie and Dylan. The indignities of a Dylan documenting your decline. It would drive me crazy too. Is it a girl Dylan? God, I bet it is. One day there’ll be one of Elon’s offspring, X7!NP, writing about my bad hips and how it’s time for me to pack the column in, and I’ll be forced to hurl myself out the car window.
→ Seattle, wear a burqa just for one single day: Seattle is hosting a World Cup match between Egypt and Iran. Cool, right? Iran in Seattle! What could be more fun? Well. It also happens to be during Seattle Pride Weekend. Seattle had long-planned Pride Match; it’s just who could have guessed that Iran and Egypt would be the two countries that ended up in it? G-d has a sense of humor. You see, Seattle goes hard for Pride. Every resident in Seattle wears rainbow face paint for the entire month, and every dog is dyed rainbow colors. Even the straights do some leather play, in solidarity. But the Egyptians and Iranians have asked if Seattle could pretend to not be so gay for like, 36 hours. On the one hand, good progressives in Seattle believe that no culture is better than another, so Iran has a good point when they scream DEATH TO GAYS. On the other hand, Pride Month, the greatest 30 days of the year, cannot be neglected. So what will Seattle do? All I can say is I was supposed to be the Pride float grand marshal, and now they tell me I have to be pushed off a Pride roof. I’ll still do it because I’m in too deep to turn back now, but it’s not what I signed up for, Seattle.
→ Antisemitism level 95: Russell Brand, a sleazy sex demon in beads and drapey pants, had on his podcast Candace Owens, and it was a fast-talking DMT hallucination. Two hugely popular podcasters. And this is a portion of the conversation that Russell’s team is using to publicize the sitdown. Like, they’re proud of this rant. YES!A perfect clip. I hate to say it, but I have to print the whole thing. Here is Candace Owens explaining some new antisemitic fever dream to Russell Brand:
Sigmund Freud came from a Sabbatian family. This is Jewish mysticism. And they believe that this man Shabbatai Tzvi was their messiah. He was a homosexual psychopath who believed in practicing incest as a sacrament. This is how they were going to move forward in the world. And Sigmund Freud discovered that the reason that they do this is because it conditions the child to grow up to be a psychopath, because of what they have to go through trying to understand why their parents did this. This is all real. All of these authors are Jewish. They support the Jewish movement. The second author, David Bakan, I think actually regrets writing his book ’cause he thought it was gonna be this, like, exposé of why the Jews in Europe should be sympathized for and then people went “Wait, what’s going on here?” It’s right in your face what’s going on. They have a tremendous amount of power. They’ve always had power. And it is because what they believe in is “evil is okay.” They believe in the doctrine of evil, that you must lower yourselves and commit the most depraved acts of evil to prove that evil doesn’t actually exist, and then you can ascend in society. That, to me, seems to be the guiding philosophy of people in Israel, I would say. Like, this idea that you can commit acts of evil to get ahead in society. When I see what’s happening in Gaza—how do you look at this and not understand this is evil?
Ma’am, this is a Panera Bread. Meanwhile, this is now how every leftist launches their campaign:
There’s no platform aside from being against Israel. There’s no passion aside from being against whatever the hell is going on in the Upper West Side.
*On FB yesterday I came across a post by Laura Helmuth, the former editor of Scientific American who had a social-media fit after the last election, calling young voters “fucking facists” as well as bigots, racists, and dumb (see my posts here and here) and subsequently resigned, perhaps under pressure from above (the magazine’s President said that it was Helmuth’s decision to leave). What’s she doing now? For one thing, wiring a column on “work advice” for Slate, and pieces on The Last Word on Nothing site, a place related to science. I already had my say about Helmuth’s running of Scientific American, and don’t want to go over that again. I was just curious to see what she’s up to, and let other people know as well.
Here are some of her columns at Slate, but you can’t access them without being a paid member, so I couldn’t see them. Click on the screenshot if you have such access:
. . . and some from The Last Word on Nothing site. I was interested in
I was especially interested in the “How can we sleep through all this?” column because, like me, Helmuth says she has a tendency to wake up in the middle of the night and start worrying. Here are some of her solutions:
. . . . There’s so much to worry about in the middle of the night. Missing a flight. Bodily aches and annoyances. Propaganda stomping all over facts and humanity. The reckless, narcissistic, belligerent dictator who has control of U.S. nuclear weapon codes.
So I try to wear out my mind like you would do with a cranky toddler. I try counting down from 100 by sevens. Or counting up by orders of two: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc., until I lose my place and briefly worry about that rather than transgender people who are just trying to be their authentic selves but are being denied basic health care by the worst bullies in the world.
Bland, irrelevant, or quirky words can help. I often pick a category of things and then go through the alphabet thinking of examples that start with each letter. So, for animals: aardvark, bonobo, cutthroat trout, etc. FYI for when you get to the hard letters, there is a mammal called a quokka, which is adorable, and a bird called a Xantus’s murrelet, which, same.
If you play Wordle, you can go through the alphabet thinking of good starting words: audio, bayou, cause, delay, etc. Try words that start and end with the same letter: Alaska, blurb, chic, dud, etc. You can list foods: apple pie, borscht, crepes … but beware that it might make you hungry.
The categories have to be cheerful, and sometimes the category I pick is “cheerful words.” Amazing, beautiful, creative, depressing… argh, start over.
I’ve tried breathing exercises but feel like I’m hyperventilating. I’m probably doing it wrong.
Don’t test your memory with world capitals or other facts you used to know, although it may help to read Billy Collins’s wonderful poem Forgetfulness, which begins: “The name of the author is the first to go / followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion…” and describes memories like the capital of Paraguay slipping away. (It’s Asunción.)
Actually, I’ve tried many of these except counting down or thinking of Wordle words. None of them have worked for me, and Helmuth is still asking readers for suggestions. As for politics or wokeness, there’s only one sentence at the end of the piece:
Volunteer. Mentor. Build stuff. Make bad art or bad music. Go to trivia night with friends, and lose. Tell someone you enjoyed their work. Read mysteries — it’s so satisfying that there is an answer at the end. Read SciFi to get the heck offa this planet. Laugh about how bad it is. Plant things. Cook for people. Thank people, whether you know them well or not. And please take care of yourselves as best you can. We’ve got to outlast these demagogues.
Helmuth’s replacement as Editor-in-Chief, who began in June of this year, is David Ewalt. This description is from Springer Nature, which owns Sci. Am. now:
Ewalt is a longtime advocate for data-driven reporting, has authored two books including the acclaimed history of Dungeons & Dragons, Of Dice and Men, and formerly served as Editor-in-Chief of Gizmodo. His editorial career includes key roles at The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Forbes Magazine. A lifelong reader and dedicated subscriber to Scientific American with a distinguished background in revitalizing media brands, Ewalt brings a profound enthusiasm for science and technology, along with experience spanning both legacy and digital-first media properties.
Not a scientist. My guess: the magazine will become less scientific and will cater more to gee-whiz and culture stuff.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is upset that nothing is going on:
Hili: I can’t believe my eyes…
Andrzej: Why?
Hili: Nothing important happened today.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie wierzę własnym oczom…
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Nic ważnego się dziś nie stało.
Two related posts from Masih today, both are about the oppressive Iranian regime:
The regime has killed a lawyer who stood with the people of Iran, yet it is trying to claim he died of natural causes. Meanwhile, at his funeral, they sent security forces to intimidate and arrest people. If you didn’t kill him, then what are you so afraid of?#IRGCterrorist… pic.twitter.com/wHMusaqlJT
This father carrying the coffin of the lawyer who defended his murdered son, today arrested for attending a memorial.
Welcome to Islamic Republic of Iran; First they killed his son for protesting Mahsa Jina Amini’s murder in the hand of Hijab Police.
Then they… pic.twitter.com/N230KFbpkx
From Luana. Did Sacks make up stuff in his famous books? Looks like it. This links to a New Yorker article, and Pinker has written a thread about it, also blasting The New Yorker for publishing Sacks’s work for years without fact-checking it.. I will read the article and report more this weekend:
Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime…
And two from Dr. Cobb. This first one, if true, is really ham-handed!
My university paid a marketing company a lot of money to tell us that, give the global recognition of #Dublin as a brand, we should call ourselves ‘UCD Dublin’. So we are now University College Dublin Dublin. 🫠 #UCD #TrueStory
I am glad to see PCC(E)’s positive experience in giving oral exams. I found myself on the receiving end of one from the Physics Dept chair who was my classical mechanics professor, junior year when I missed several weeks of school with an illness…including the classical mechanics mid-term. Upon return, I went to his office to take a make-up exam, and was surprised to discover that it would be oral. After 90 minutes of sweating like a farm animal (h/t robin williams) under question after question, I knew I had failed in this class that I had thought I understood well. I asked about my grade as I walked out the door and was surprised when he said that I had gotten an A. I thanked him and said I was surprised because it seemed that I could never satisfy his queries on any question. He said that was because he kept asking questions until I was stumped, but that I had demonstrated sufficient knowledge for an A halfway through my answers. Much as Jerry said about some benefits that he noticed.
And regarding Oliver Sacks: No…say it ain’t so, joe. I will read the full article later, but had there been suspicions of this over the years? As a “not a life sciences guy”, I am continually startled by the breadth of observations in that world, but now will have to question what I read from a guy I thought to be an honest icon. Would like to see more from Pinker.
Happy to have avoided oral exams except in languages. “Blue book” struck a chord of nostalgic anxiety in me.
Pinker is pretty lit about the Oliver Sachs-gate. Sachs is a near icon here, his famed house/apartment is close by me. He was ….very Greenwich Village.
I’m not sure the scandal is as big as people seem to believe… we’ll see.
best to you Jim,
D.A.
NYC
On the morning after the last of the finals papers in our Physics degree course, my best friend was summoned to a meeting. About four hours later he joined us in the JCR bar looking shocked, and demanded a beer before he would tell us what had happened. It seems that the lecturers could not read his writing and he had to go through his answers orally.
He got a First, went on to a PhD, and ended up on the permanent staff at Cern.
Any security guarantee requires large numbers of men and women willing to die to make that guarantee credible. Good luck finding them in the United States. (For that matter, good luck finding them aged 18-24 in Ukraine, which refuses to lower its conscription age below 25 and which has a huge desertion problem—understandably so.) Russia does not motivate many prospective US military members to serve in the way that “terrorists” did in the aftermath of 9/11. Cold War memories have no resonance with young people today. I don’t think that is going to change, especially since it is more than obvious that, despite lots of talk, most of Europe outside of Poland and the Baltics has little appetite for prolonged investment in a credible military deterrent. Talk and paper are only worth the blood one is willing to spill to underwrite them.
“Any security guarantee requires large numbers of men and women willing to die to make that guarantee credible.”
I don’t see that. NATO’s air superiority over Russia is HUGE. NATO could effortlessly control the air and bomb Russian assets at will.If Russia committed aggression in violation of a treaty and NATO was obliged to respond with force, it would not involve sending ground troops.
It always involves ground troops. It falls to the infantry to go in to make sure the enemy is really dead.
Note that even in the current mutual security guarantee among the NATO signatories no one is “obliged to respond with force”. Rather, under Article 5, each signatory pledges to regard an attack on one of them as equivalent to an attack on itself. But each signatory determines its own national sovereign response to that attack. Canada, for instance, would say, “If Russia attacked us, we would be obliged to surrender to prevent our destruction. So if Russia attacked Poland or Latvia, our troops would simply leave the field.”
What you are calling for in your version of a security guarantee is a greater obligation to a non-NATO state than to NATO’s own collaborative. Not going to happen. No sovereign nation will ever submit to a higher authority that binds it to put its armed forces into combat. No country ever obligated itself to so much as reduce its CO2 emissions. It’s not going to go to war on an obligation from a piece of paper.
I don’t share your optimism that NATO could effortlessly control the airspace and bomb Russia at will. Maybe effortlessly for you. Maybe it could if American stealth aircraft completely degraded Russian air defences in the first two or three days, allowing non-stealth aircraft to prowl at will. But then all the losses in that intensely dangerous and expensive work (with US aviators inevitably taken prisoner) would be be born by Americans. And if they were unsuccessful, Europe would be off the hook for the same reason there is so little air combat in Ukraine now.
Why not just nuke the Kremlin on Day 1 and be done with it, if bombing Russian territory is so effortless?
Do you really trust Putin not to start lobbing tactical battlefield nukes around if things are going badly owing to NATO air power and Ukrainian ground troops?
Re nukes — M.A.D. has been a successful deterrent so far¹, despite (and because of) its apparent suicidal irrationality and moral depravity. Bluster about lobbing nukes is cheap; actually doing it is risky; a forceful response to that is riskier still….
Equally risky would be to be seen as the lesser lunatic in this suicide pact. So far Don and Vlad seem about tied (which in this context is a good thing). The price of an Appeasement Plan might be far greater than is generally realised. Once a tiger is seen to be just paper, you can’t unsee that.
. . . . .
¹ It may be that we have just been very lucky and that 98% of the civilisations elsewhere in the galaxy which tried this quickly killed themselves off. Survivor sampling bias.
And re the Peace Prize and the Christmas season, a relevant repost:
The Peace Nobel some scholars did say
Was to salve Alfred’s conscience with hopes that it may
Encourage those who are striving for peace
Who might manage to increase what he had decreased.
Nobel, Nobel, Nobel, Nobel
Not good deterrence, instead unleashed hell.¹
. . . . .
¹ “I am convinced that the invention of dynamite will sooner or later lead to more deadly wars, but that at the same time it will make war so terrible that nations will be forced to seek peace.”
(Alfred Nobel, 1865. Oops.)
Neither Trump nor Putin is a lunatic. That underestimates them. MAD assumes and requires that both players are rational calculators.
MAD covers only the game of total nuclear exchange. Each side holding the other side’s civilians hostage makes it irrational for either to strike first. But in theatres the calculus is different. If Ukrainian ground forces (supported by NATO air attacks deep into Russia) opened a large salient into territory currently held by Russia, Putin might rationally conclude that he could get away with obliterating that salient (in Ukraine, note) with small nuclear weapons. Or even large ones. Airbursts create little durable fallout to drift into Russia, as with Hiroshima which was rapidly rebuilt and became lush again. Because no NATO countries were being attacked, they would have every reason (MAD) not to retaliate with nuclear strikes on the Russian homeland. Putin could reassure them that he wasn’t going to attack them as long as they didn’t use nuclear weapons first, and as long as they didn’t, he wouldn’t.
This is nearly the identical “first-use” scenario that NATO maintained all during the Cold War: they were betting that the the three nuclear NATO militaries could use battlefield weapons as a last resort to blunt an attack until reinforcements could arrive in Europe from America, and crucially, that the Soviets would not retaliate beyond the West German battlefield hellscape.
So Putin could conclude rationally, no bluster, that using nuclear weapons in Ukraine was better than the alternative, which might be his taking a bullet to the head from his cabal if he was facing defeat and the shaming of Russia. He has a freer hand here than NATO does. Unlike in MAD, the game is asymmetrical. And so is the price of appeasement.
The reason why Ukraine requires so stringent security guarantees? Because the US failed to honor the guarantees it gave in order to ensure Ukraine would return their nuclear weapons.
The US wanted a non-nuclear Ukraine, but when the chips were down the US folded and failed to uphold their promise. No wonder Ukraine wants a more serious commitment.
In the end, if Trump wants peace on Ukraine so much that he willing to shill for Putin, he needs to offer something to Ukraine. He has ensured, that he has less and less influence over Ukraine when he stopped the material military aid.
“Requires” is doing a lot of work there, FX. A requirement implies a reciprocal obligation which I don’t see here. The state requires me to stop at red lights by writing and passing a highway code.. It uses its police to enforce the obligation on me to comply. Where is the source of force that compels an obligation on the part of President Trump, or anyone else, to come good on the security guarantee that Ukraine “requires”?
There is no such obligation as a moment’s reflection will show. The reneging on Budapest — an accord that got those nukes out of Ukraine before some terrible accident happened — far from “requiring” a stronger guarantee this time, underlines why there isn’t, never was, and never shall be any kind of enforceable security guarantee at all.
The US want Ukraine to hand over land Russia has not set a foot on – namely the fortress belt in the northern Donbas.
Giving up the best available defensive advantage and exposing sparsely populated flat land ideal for quick advances is stupid if your enemy can attack at will.
The US wants Ukraine to expose its soft belly to Russia – for Ukraine to even consider this, they need safety.
Saying “there isn’t, never was, and never shall be any kind of enforceable security guarantee at all.” is correct at the most basic level, but there is always a price to pay for abandoning such commitment.
Nuclear proliferation is one such price as NATO is dead if Article 4 is just hope and dreams – as is the US Japan mutual defense treaty. Japan is rumored eying their own nukes and if the EU cannot rely on the UK and France (since Trump is set to undermine the EU) then you can be sure that Germany and probably Italy will follow as well.
So the “source of force” compelling behavior is the tradeoff that the US might not want to take.
I read an article at the WSJ that interviewed men in a Ukrainian POW camp. Here’s an example of how the Russians recruit:
“Frank Dario Manfuga, a musician from Cuba, says it was an ad on Facebook recruiting for carpenters in Russia that led him to board a plane in January bound for Moscow.
“But when he landed, Manfuga says, he was handed a military uniform and within weeks began fighting on the front line against Ukraine.”
When I was doing my math PhD at U Chicago in the early 90s, the math department had oral exams for the first year grad students. Students would sweat and suffer over intensely hard questions, but would pass. The professors were more interested in seeing how well you grapple with hard questions rather than if you could get the answer exactly right.
But turnabout is fair play. They had a tradition where the second year grad students gave public oral exams to the professors. So we could ask the expert on functional analysis hard questions of algebraic topology, or ask the differential geometry professor hard questions about bounded functionals on Banach spaces and so forth. The event was fun. The professors took it in good humor if they were stumped by a question outside their expertise. And we would applaud if the analysis professor was able to correctly answer a subtle question about group theory.
Here’s a cat-related clip from the DVDS episode “100 Terrible Hours”. This is a flashback to Rob Petrie’s days as a disc jockey. As a PR stunt for the station, he’s trying to stay awake and on the air for 100 hours; here he gets emotional reading local news about a kitten stuck in a tree:
(I’m watching The Dick Van Dyke Show now. It’s running through the weekend on “Catchy Comedy”, which is a channel available via antenna, though I imagine it’s also available via cable.)
Good deep dive into Covid origins and how lab leak got amplified and politicized. It is Professor Dave Explains in his usual style, and he brings in Philipp Markolin (author of “Lab Leak Fever”) in at the end to discuss:
When it comes to discussing origin of Covid and certain other things, most people make a stupid fallacy that goes like this:
I think that A is more likely than B. Therefore I shall assume that A is true.
It was always stupid to dismiss lab leak as impossible, as Fauci and others did early in the pandemic. It is equally stupid for someone who thinks lab leak is the likeliest cause of Covid to feel certainty about it.
+1. Before the technology for ‘lab leaks’ existed, all epidemics were zoonotic. The days it (barring a confession), it’s hard to say. Note that the intelligence agencies only claimed that a ‘lab leak’ was more likely than a strictly natural origin. Note that it sometimes takes decades for the host animal of a zoonotic epidemic to be found. For example, for MERS, the host animal is Camels.
Thank you for introduction to Professor Dave. Had never seen or heard of him before. After sampling several of his videos this morning, it looks like he has taken on a very important task.
I’m mixed on him, Jim. (Learned about him here also – h.t. Michael).
I’ve watched him on some topics but he seems to be… misguided.. on the Israel/Pal issue which disappointed me. I don’t want to be monomaniacal but that’s a litmus test for me.
Still… the guy is undeniably bright and has some good ideas.
C+
best,
D.A.
NYC
Thanks David. I just looked at several of his STEM-adjacent videos and they seemed interesting but a bit lengthy (90+ minute) even for me. But it is good to know about him and as with zdoggmd, will likely take a dip in his you tube pool from time to time.
I used to watch a lot of his stuff. He was great on anti-ID, but then went a bit woke on themes outside his area of expertise. I gave up on him a year ago.
Perhaps Professor Dave will care to interview Matt Ridley on the lab leak matter.
From my experience listening to him on “The Thinking Atheist” podcast, Professor Dave gratuitously, egregiously indulges in name-calling, as if that constitutes rational and reasonable analysis.
Written exams under traditional exam conditions (no internet) are surely still viable? And they have the advantage that they are scalable, whereas oral exams are not.
Glasses that answer questions are quite possible. Indeed, such glasses may have already been developed. Quote from Google AI
“Yes, there are documented cases of individuals using high-tech “smart glasses” with hidden cameras to cheat on major exams in Asia, including a notable case involving Chinese nationals cheating on Japanese TOEIC tests in 2025 and a Japanese student using them for university entrance exams, with these glasses capturing test questions and transmitting them to outside accomplices for answers via smartphones and other devices, leading to nullified results and arrests, indicating an organized cheating ring.”
Type “Glasses cheat Chinese exams” into Google for some more information.
I am in a continual Struggle with staving off the use of AI by my students. I win some, and I think I lose some. I think I see it I can sometimes prove it, and sometimes not.
I don’t know why Mohammadi was re-arrested in Iran. But my first suspicion is that the regime hopes to use her release as a bargaining chip.
“[David Ewalt is] not a scientist. My guess: the magazine will become less scientific and will cater more to gee-whiz and culture stuff.” This is exactly what happened to National Geographic, where they also serve a big side of religious mysticism.
Instead of defending rhubarb pie, I’ll just note that the first time our host posted that lovely photo of carrot cake I thought, “Gee, crumbled bacon on carrot cake, I wouldn’t have thought of that, but what a great idea!”
I glanced through Helmuth’s articles on the Last Word and found one that was related to science – an article about the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial. In the article, she writes:
You know who else hates evolution? Sexists, homophobes, transphobes, anybody who insists that sex and gender are the same thing and are a simple binary (they’re not).
So, evolutionary biologists who believe that sex is binary actually hate evolution. That makes sense!
In the article, Helmuth attaches every reprehensible label she can think of to people who believe in the sex binary: they are not only transphobes, homophobes, and racists; they are also white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, climate-change deniers, and fascists. I may have left some out.
This woke strategy of globally denigrating anyone who disagrees with even ONE position of the woke plank has been a powerful strategy for silencing all criticism from the inside.
Helmuth also writes:
As Agustín Fuentes writes in Sex Is a Spectrum, the whole entire evolutionary point of sexual reproduction is variety. Nature abhors a binary.
You don’t need variety in sexual reproduction itself in order to get genetic variety in the offspring! Indeed, since any mutations that cause a departure from the sex binary will tend to make the individual infertile, ‘variations’ are an evolutionary dead end.
Agreed Brooke. And of course Helmuth is wrong that “the whole entire evolutionary point of sexual reproduction is variety.” The point of sex is to make offspring with a partner that might have a combination of traits (half from each parent) that are better than the traits of offspring one could make alone by parthenogenesis or cloning. If all the sexually produced offspring of those two parents were identical to teach other but had higher fitness than either parent, that would be an evolutionary win for the parents but would reduce variety in the next generation. Parents want high fitness for their offspring, not variety in fitness among their offspring.
The other point of sex is recombination within one’s own genome so that some of one’s gametes get a lot of one’s deleterious mutations, and some gametes get few of those mutations. The offspring from the latter gametes will have fewer deleterious mutations than the parent. This is how recombination during sex helps populations to escape Muller’s ratchet (the accumulation of harmful mutations over time). Here one does generate variety among one’s offspring, but not the kind of rainbow variety that Helmuth imagines.
This is the kind of confused and misleading journalism one gets when a committed ideologue writes about science.
The sex binary – trans thing is apparently the most important topic going. From the article by Helmuth that PCC(E) quotes about fighting insomnia:
“…Or counting up by orders of two: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc., until I lose my place and briefly worry about that rather than transgender people who are just trying to be their authentic selves but are being denied basic health care by the worst bullies in the world.”
What to say about FIFA assigning the Iran versus Egypt match to Seattle, especially scheduling it for that week? Was FIFA aiming for this conflict to happen, winding people up? It has worked, as both countries have formally protested to FIFA, not that such a corrupt organization will care much. But it was more likely just random obliviousness.
Is it further appeasement of Trump in keeping that game as far away from DC and the East Coast as possible? Of course they could have placed it in Vancouver and gotten it out of the US entirely, so I guess that doesn’t wash. The Pride conflict aside, I am a bit surprised that Iran was scheduled to play in the US at all, I’m sure they could have been shuffled off to Canada or Mexico.
BTW, I live in Seattle and can affirmatively say that I neither paint my face and dye my cat (no d-gs) rainbow colors, nor do I engage in “leather play”. I am generally oblivious as to when Pride Week (or month) happens anyway, so I suppose I should excuse FIFA for that not knowing that too. But I won’t.
But Nellie shouldn’t worry, I’m sure she’ll look fine in a burqa.
hAHHA! She’s a great writer.
Ah the joys and everyday complexities of living in wildly “blue” cities!
A distant friend of mine who was a big shot in the Boston Pride Parade – one of the US’s oldest and most storied was telling me about a coup d’etat in the organization a few years ago after an insurrection to make it totally about black trans lives. Quite the kerfuffle! Wonder how they’d handle an Islamic football match! 🙂
I share your enthusiasm for cream cheese icing. A friend who was icing a carrot cake asked me if there was enough icing. I replied telling her I was the wrong one to ask because for me the icing was the point of carrot cake.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned. -Heinrich Heine, poet, journalist, and essayist (13 Dec 1797-1856)
I am glad to see PCC(E)’s positive experience in giving oral exams. I found myself on the receiving end of one from the Physics Dept chair who was my classical mechanics professor, junior year when I missed several weeks of school with an illness…including the classical mechanics mid-term. Upon return, I went to his office to take a make-up exam, and was surprised to discover that it would be oral. After 90 minutes of sweating like a farm animal (h/t robin williams) under question after question, I knew I had failed in this class that I had thought I understood well. I asked about my grade as I walked out the door and was surprised when he said that I had gotten an A. I thanked him and said I was surprised because it seemed that I could never satisfy his queries on any question. He said that was because he kept asking questions until I was stumped, but that I had demonstrated sufficient knowledge for an A halfway through my answers. Much as Jerry said about some benefits that he noticed.
And regarding Oliver Sacks: No…say it ain’t so, joe. I will read the full article later, but had there been suspicions of this over the years? As a “not a life sciences guy”, I am continually startled by the breadth of observations in that world, but now will have to question what I read from a guy I thought to be an honest icon. Would like to see more from Pinker.
Happy to have avoided oral exams except in languages. “Blue book” struck a chord of nostalgic anxiety in me.
Pinker is pretty lit about the Oliver Sachs-gate. Sachs is a near icon here, his famed house/apartment is close by me. He was ….very Greenwich Village.
I’m not sure the scandal is as big as people seem to believe… we’ll see.
best to you Jim,
D.A.
NYC
On the morning after the last of the finals papers in our Physics degree course, my best friend was summoned to a meeting. About four hours later he joined us in the JCR bar looking shocked, and demanded a beer before he would tell us what had happened. It seems that the lecturers could not read his writing and he had to go through his answers orally.
He got a First, went on to a PhD, and ended up on the permanent staff at Cern.
Wow. One last hazing. Sounds like it built character.
I agree. I’ve read Sack’s work and thought highly of him. He was a good writer. Sad to learn the truth. I’ll go find what Pinker had to say.
Bummer
Any security guarantee requires large numbers of men and women willing to die to make that guarantee credible. Good luck finding them in the United States. (For that matter, good luck finding them aged 18-24 in Ukraine, which refuses to lower its conscription age below 25 and which has a huge desertion problem—understandably so.) Russia does not motivate many prospective US military members to serve in the way that “terrorists” did in the aftermath of 9/11. Cold War memories have no resonance with young people today. I don’t think that is going to change, especially since it is more than obvious that, despite lots of talk, most of Europe outside of Poland and the Baltics has little appetite for prolonged investment in a credible military deterrent. Talk and paper are only worth the blood one is willing to spill to underwrite them.
“Any security guarantee requires large numbers of men and women willing to die to make that guarantee credible.”
I don’t see that. NATO’s air superiority over Russia is HUGE. NATO could effortlessly control the air and bomb Russian assets at will.If Russia committed aggression in violation of a treaty and NATO was obliged to respond with force, it would not involve sending ground troops.
It always involves ground troops. It falls to the infantry to go in to make sure the enemy is really dead.
Note that even in the current mutual security guarantee among the NATO signatories no one is “obliged to respond with force”. Rather, under Article 5, each signatory pledges to regard an attack on one of them as equivalent to an attack on itself. But each signatory determines its own national sovereign response to that attack. Canada, for instance, would say, “If Russia attacked us, we would be obliged to surrender to prevent our destruction. So if Russia attacked Poland or Latvia, our troops would simply leave the field.”
What you are calling for in your version of a security guarantee is a greater obligation to a non-NATO state than to NATO’s own collaborative. Not going to happen. No sovereign nation will ever submit to a higher authority that binds it to put its armed forces into combat. No country ever obligated itself to so much as reduce its CO2 emissions. It’s not going to go to war on an obligation from a piece of paper.
I don’t share your optimism that NATO could effortlessly control the airspace and bomb Russia at will. Maybe effortlessly for you. Maybe it could if American stealth aircraft completely degraded Russian air defences in the first two or three days, allowing non-stealth aircraft to prowl at will. But then all the losses in that intensely dangerous and expensive work (with US aviators inevitably taken prisoner) would be be born by Americans. And if they were unsuccessful, Europe would be off the hook for the same reason there is so little air combat in Ukraine now.
Why not just nuke the Kremlin on Day 1 and be done with it, if bombing Russian territory is so effortless?
If NATO got involved with air power, Ukrainian soldiers would act as ground troops.
We don’t nuke the Kremlin because they would feel forced to nuke us back.
Q.E.D.
Do you really trust Putin not to start lobbing tactical battlefield nukes around if things are going badly owing to NATO air power and Ukrainian ground troops?
Re nukes — M.A.D. has been a successful deterrent so far¹, despite (and because of) its apparent suicidal irrationality and moral depravity. Bluster about lobbing nukes is cheap; actually doing it is risky; a forceful response to that is riskier still….
Equally risky would be to be seen as the lesser lunatic in this suicide pact. So far Don and Vlad seem about tied (which in this context is a good thing). The price of an Appeasement Plan might be far greater than is generally realised. Once a tiger is seen to be just paper, you can’t unsee that.
. . . . .
¹ It may be that we have just been very lucky and that 98% of the civilisations elsewhere in the galaxy which tried this quickly killed themselves off. Survivor sampling bias.
And re the Peace Prize and the Christmas season, a relevant repost:
. . . . .
¹ “I am convinced that the invention of dynamite will sooner or later lead to more deadly wars, but that at the same time it will make war so terrible that nations will be forced to seek peace.”
(Alfred Nobel, 1865. Oops.)
Neither Trump nor Putin is a lunatic. That underestimates them. MAD assumes and requires that both players are rational calculators.
MAD covers only the game of total nuclear exchange. Each side holding the other side’s civilians hostage makes it irrational for either to strike first. But in theatres the calculus is different. If Ukrainian ground forces (supported by NATO air attacks deep into Russia) opened a large salient into territory currently held by Russia, Putin might rationally conclude that he could get away with obliterating that salient (in Ukraine, note) with small nuclear weapons. Or even large ones. Airbursts create little durable fallout to drift into Russia, as with Hiroshima which was rapidly rebuilt and became lush again. Because no NATO countries were being attacked, they would have every reason (MAD) not to retaliate with nuclear strikes on the Russian homeland. Putin could reassure them that he wasn’t going to attack them as long as they didn’t use nuclear weapons first, and as long as they didn’t, he wouldn’t.
This is nearly the identical “first-use” scenario that NATO maintained all during the Cold War: they were betting that the the three nuclear NATO militaries could use battlefield weapons as a last resort to blunt an attack until reinforcements could arrive in Europe from America, and crucially, that the Soviets would not retaliate beyond the West German
battlefieldhellscape.So Putin could conclude rationally, no bluster, that using nuclear weapons in Ukraine was better than the alternative, which might be his taking a bullet to the head from his cabal if he was facing defeat and the shaming of Russia. He has a freer hand here than NATO does. Unlike in MAD, the game is asymmetrical. And so is the price of appeasement.
The reason why Ukraine requires so stringent security guarantees? Because the US failed to honor the guarantees it gave in order to ensure Ukraine would return their nuclear weapons.
The US wanted a non-nuclear Ukraine, but when the chips were down the US folded and failed to uphold their promise. No wonder Ukraine wants a more serious commitment.
In the end, if Trump wants peace on Ukraine so much that he willing to shill for Putin, he needs to offer something to Ukraine. He has ensured, that he has less and less influence over Ukraine when he stopped the material military aid.
“Requires” is doing a lot of work there, FX. A requirement implies a reciprocal obligation which I don’t see here. The state requires me to stop at red lights by writing and passing a highway code.. It uses its police to enforce the obligation on me to comply. Where is the source of force that compels an obligation on the part of President Trump, or anyone else, to come good on the security guarantee that Ukraine “requires”?
There is no such obligation as a moment’s reflection will show. The reneging on Budapest — an accord that got those nukes out of Ukraine before some terrible accident happened — far from “requiring” a stronger guarantee this time, underlines why there isn’t, never was, and never shall be any kind of enforceable security guarantee at all.
The US want Ukraine to hand over land Russia has not set a foot on – namely the fortress belt in the northern Donbas.
Giving up the best available defensive advantage and exposing sparsely populated flat land ideal for quick advances is stupid if your enemy can attack at will.
The US wants Ukraine to expose its soft belly to Russia – for Ukraine to even consider this, they need safety.
Saying “there isn’t, never was, and never shall be any kind of enforceable security guarantee at all.” is correct at the most basic level, but there is always a price to pay for abandoning such commitment.
Nuclear proliferation is one such price as NATO is dead if Article 4 is just hope and dreams – as is the US Japan mutual defense treaty. Japan is rumored eying their own nukes and if the EU cannot rely on the UK and France (since Trump is set to undermine the EU) then you can be sure that Germany and probably Italy will follow as well.
So the “source of force” compelling behavior is the tradeoff that the US might not want to take.
I read an article at the WSJ that interviewed men in a Ukrainian POW camp. Here’s an example of how the Russians recruit:
“Frank Dario Manfuga, a musician from Cuba, says it was an ad on Facebook recruiting for carpenters in Russia that led him to board a plane in January bound for Moscow.
“But when he landed, Manfuga says, he was handed a military uniform and within weeks began fighting on the front line against Ukraine.”
https://www.wsj.com/world/for-a-cuban-prisoner-of-war-peace-in-ukraine-would-mean-returning-to-russia-1e65333a
Would U.S. sanctions against Cuba, at least a wee bit, have something to do with his decision? Doesn’t the U.S. want lowest possible wage carpenters?
Could well be. But the others were from more inexplicable places. One was from Italy.
They were tricked by apparent job offers.
Can’t Putin use up all his able prisoners? And let the sentence for any conviction be time at the front, assuming that they are able to fight 🙂
When I was doing my math PhD at U Chicago in the early 90s, the math department had oral exams for the first year grad students. Students would sweat and suffer over intensely hard questions, but would pass. The professors were more interested in seeing how well you grapple with hard questions rather than if you could get the answer exactly right.
But turnabout is fair play. They had a tradition where the second year grad students gave public oral exams to the professors. So we could ask the expert on functional analysis hard questions of algebraic topology, or ask the differential geometry professor hard questions about bounded functionals on Banach spaces and so forth. The event was fun. The professors took it in good humor if they were stumped by a question outside their expertise. And we would applaud if the analysis professor was able to correctly answer a subtle question about group theory.
Wonderful!
You bastards! 🙂
Today is the one hundredth birthday of Dick Van Dyke, a true gem of the past century.
Here’s a cat-related clip from the DVDS episode “100 Terrible Hours”. This is a flashback to Rob Petrie’s days as a disc jockey. As a PR stunt for the station, he’s trying to stay awake and on the air for 100 hours; here he gets emotional reading local news about a kitten stuck in a tree:
https://youtu.be/jSs5xgqYtiM?si=Y5xeH5hSqeeIhecu
(I’m watching The Dick Van Dyke Show now. It’s running through the weekend on “Catchy Comedy”, which is a channel available via antenna, though I imagine it’s also available via cable.)
Good deep dive into Covid origins and how lab leak got amplified and politicized. It is Professor Dave Explains in his usual style, and he brings in Philipp Markolin (author of “Lab Leak Fever”) in at the end to discuss:
When it comes to discussing origin of Covid and certain other things, most people make a stupid fallacy that goes like this:
I think that A is more likely than B. Therefore I shall assume that A is true.
It was always stupid to dismiss lab leak as impossible, as Fauci and others did early in the pandemic. It is equally stupid for someone who thinks lab leak is the likeliest cause of Covid to feel certainty about it.
+1. Before the technology for ‘lab leaks’ existed, all epidemics were zoonotic. The days it (barring a confession), it’s hard to say. Note that the intelligence agencies only claimed that a ‘lab leak’ was more likely than a strictly natural origin. Note that it sometimes takes decades for the host animal of a zoonotic epidemic to be found. For example, for MERS, the host animal is Camels.
Thank you for introduction to Professor Dave. Had never seen or heard of him before. After sampling several of his videos this morning, it looks like he has taken on a very important task.
I’m mixed on him, Jim. (Learned about him here also – h.t. Michael).
I’ve watched him on some topics but he seems to be… misguided.. on the Israel/Pal issue which disappointed me. I don’t want to be monomaniacal but that’s a litmus test for me.
Still… the guy is undeniably bright and has some good ideas.
C+
best,
D.A.
NYC
Thanks David. I just looked at several of his STEM-adjacent videos and they seemed interesting but a bit lengthy (90+ minute) even for me. But it is good to know about him and as with zdoggmd, will likely take a dip in his you tube pool from time to time.
I used to watch a lot of his stuff. He was great on anti-ID, but then went a bit woke on themes outside his area of expertise. I gave up on him a year ago.
Perhaps Professor Dave will care to interview Matt Ridley on the lab leak matter.
From my experience listening to him on “The Thinking Atheist” podcast, Professor Dave gratuitously, egregiously indulges in name-calling, as if that constitutes rational and reasonable analysis.
Like it or not, Oral exams are the future. ChatGPT and other AI tools are not going away. For better or worse, the age of written essays is over.
Written exams under traditional exam conditions (no internet) are surely still viable? And they have the advantage that they are scalable, whereas oral exams are not.
So will oral exams be in a few years, done by LLMs. This is not a joke.
Glasses that answer questions are quite possible. Indeed, such glasses may have already been developed. Quote from Google AI
“Yes, there are documented cases of individuals using high-tech “smart glasses” with hidden cameras to cheat on major exams in Asia, including a notable case involving Chinese nationals cheating on Japanese TOEIC tests in 2025 and a Japanese student using them for university entrance exams, with these glasses capturing test questions and transmitting them to outside accomplices for answers via smartphones and other devices, leading to nullified results and arrests, indicating an organized cheating ring.”
Type “Glasses cheat Chinese exams” into Google for some more information.
UCD has been UCD dublin for well over a decade. UC DAVIS was sensible, Dublin wanted to keep UCD. One of my lecturers pointed out that years ago.
I thought they were simply Dublin down.
Larry wins! The internet can shut for today.
Btw, Larry, you owe me for a new keyboard. Mine got covered in coffee spray.
Better avoid URL links to PDF format documents about the HIV virus, to read on your LCD display. Also, don’t forget your ATM machine PIN number.
I’m glad that Helmuth is flailing away in the blogosphere, and is no longer at SciAm. Good luck to her.
I am in a continual Struggle with staving off the use of AI by my students. I win some, and I think I lose some. I think I see it I can sometimes prove it, and sometimes not.
I don’t know why Mohammadi was re-arrested in Iran. But my first suspicion is that the regime hopes to use her release as a bargaining chip.
According to my ex-Dean friend, you (and he) are on the losing side of it.
I was going to say, “Laura, you spelled it wrong; it’s ‘quagga’.” But then I looked, and it turns out that quokka is also an animal! :-O
“[David Ewalt is] not a scientist. My guess: the magazine will become less scientific and will cater more to gee-whiz and culture stuff.” This is exactly what happened to National Geographic, where they also serve a big side of religious mysticism.
Instead of defending rhubarb pie, I’ll just note that the first time our host posted that lovely photo of carrot cake I thought, “Gee, crumbled bacon on carrot cake, I wouldn’t have thought of that, but what a great idea!”
Also, taking all the slices from the buffet and stacking them up.
I glanced through Helmuth’s articles on the Last Word and found one that was related to science – an article about the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial. In the article, she writes:
So, evolutionary biologists who believe that sex is binary actually hate evolution. That makes sense!
In the article, Helmuth attaches every reprehensible label she can think of to people who believe in the sex binary: they are not only transphobes, homophobes, and racists; they are also white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, climate-change deniers, and fascists. I may have left some out.
This woke strategy of globally denigrating anyone who disagrees with even ONE position of the woke plank has been a powerful strategy for silencing all criticism from the inside.
Helmuth also writes:
You don’t need variety in sexual reproduction itself in order to get genetic variety in the offspring! Indeed, since any mutations that cause a departure from the sex binary will tend to make the individual infertile, ‘variations’ are an evolutionary dead end.
Agreed Brooke. And of course Helmuth is wrong that “the whole entire evolutionary point of sexual reproduction is variety.” The point of sex is to make offspring with a partner that might have a combination of traits (half from each parent) that are better than the traits of offspring one could make alone by parthenogenesis or cloning. If all the sexually produced offspring of those two parents were identical to teach other but had higher fitness than either parent, that would be an evolutionary win for the parents but would reduce variety in the next generation. Parents want high fitness for their offspring, not variety in fitness among their offspring.
The other point of sex is recombination within one’s own genome so that some of one’s gametes get a lot of one’s deleterious mutations, and some gametes get few of those mutations. The offspring from the latter gametes will have fewer deleterious mutations than the parent. This is how recombination during sex helps populations to escape Muller’s ratchet (the accumulation of harmful mutations over time). Here one does generate variety among one’s offspring, but not the kind of rainbow variety that Helmuth imagines.
This is the kind of confused and misleading journalism one gets when a committed ideologue writes about science.
I have always found considerable mirth in the A. Fuentes article “Sex Is a Spectrum”. The associated illustration shows the sexual binary in detail.
The sex binary – trans thing is apparently the most important topic going. From the article by Helmuth that PCC(E) quotes about fighting insomnia:
“…Or counting up by orders of two: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc., until I lose my place and briefly worry about that rather than transgender people who are just trying to be their authentic selves but are being denied basic health care by the worst bullies in the world.”
What to say about FIFA assigning the Iran versus Egypt match to Seattle, especially scheduling it for that week? Was FIFA aiming for this conflict to happen, winding people up? It has worked, as both countries have formally protested to FIFA, not that such a corrupt organization will care much. But it was more likely just random obliviousness.
Is it further appeasement of Trump in keeping that game as far away from DC and the East Coast as possible? Of course they could have placed it in Vancouver and gotten it out of the US entirely, so I guess that doesn’t wash. The Pride conflict aside, I am a bit surprised that Iran was scheduled to play in the US at all, I’m sure they could have been shuffled off to Canada or Mexico.
BTW, I live in Seattle and can affirmatively say that I neither paint my face and dye my cat (no d-gs) rainbow colors, nor do I engage in “leather play”. I am generally oblivious as to when Pride Week (or month) happens anyway, so I suppose I should excuse FIFA for that not knowing that too. But I won’t.
But Nellie shouldn’t worry, I’m sure she’ll look fine in a burqa.
hAHHA! She’s a great writer.
Ah the joys and everyday complexities of living in wildly “blue” cities!
A distant friend of mine who was a big shot in the Boston Pride Parade – one of the US’s oldest and most storied was telling me about a coup d’etat in the organization a few years ago after an insurrection to make it totally about black trans lives. Quite the kerfuffle! Wonder how they’d handle an Islamic football match! 🙂
best Steven,
D.A.
NYC
I’m sorry that our host never had a piece of my Aunt Velma’s green tomato pie. I haven’t had it in about 80 years but I can still taste it.
I share your enthusiasm for cream cheese icing. A friend who was icing a carrot cake asked me if there was enough icing. I replied telling her I was the wrong one to ask because for me the icing was the point of carrot cake.