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.
Just before and during my trip to Savannah, I started noticing that people are asking for tips everywhere, including when you buy bread at a bakery or food at McDonald’s. And by “asking”, I mean that when you pay with a credit card directly or on your phone, a lit-up sign appears at the register asking “Do you want to leave a tip?” And then, helpfully, suggesting tips, usually starting at 20% and going up to 30%. (There’s an option for a “custom tip”.) This is a form of unwarranted pressure on consumers to tip for things that, historically, didn’t require tips. It’s the capitalistic equivalent of grade inflation.
Here are a few of the places that asked me for tips in the last ten days. I left a tip for only the last one:
A $3.00 baguette I bought at a local Hyde Park bakery (from the counter, for crying out loud)
Ice cream served from the counter at Leopold’s in Savannah
Two double cheeseburgers from McDonald’s in the Savannah airport (takeaway counter service). And don’t shame me about McD’s: my plane was leaving and I needed food after a 7-hour wait. I haven’t eaten this kind of fast food in over a year, but I needed nourishment—if you call that “nourishment”. Actually, it did the job, but my tip was zero.
My Uber ride from Midway Airport to home.
Now I always leave a tip for Uber drivers, even though only 20% of customers tip and Uber itself says that tips can be given, but only for exceptional service. Tips make up only 10% of the salaries of Uber and Lyft drivers, while they constitute about half the incomes of those who deliver food and groceries. And yes, I tip when I am delivered cooked food at home, but that happens only about once very two years. (To me, food delivery feels too much like I’m a king or something.)
Because Uber rides are pleasant and cheaper than taxi fares, I usually leave about 10% of the fare as a tip. But in the past you would leave the Uber tip some hours after the ride, and after the driver had rated you as a passenger. In this last case, however, a screen was affixed to the back seat asking me to leave a tip for the driver, whose name was Muhammed. That was unfair, as that makes you tip before the driver rates you, and you’re supposed to be rated on your conduct as a passenger, not for how much extra money you give. NeverthelessI left a tip as usual, though not until the next day.
The services I usually tip for, and about 20% on average, are haircuts, non-Uber taxi rides, sit-down service in a restaurant, the people who service my cabin on cruises (less than 20% of the price!, plus a group tip for the service staff), and a few other services I can’t remember. But I refused to tip when just buying a hamburger or getting ice cream or bread to take away. I usually don’t tip when I carry out food, either, but it varies.
If this importuning for tips reflects a real deficit of salary in an establishment, I would much prefer that they raise their prices than put me in a guilt-trippy situation where I have to tip on the spot.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. I found this story in USA Today about tip inflation in American institutions. Click below to read the story for free.
A few exccerpts:
Has tipping gotten out of hand?
In a new survey by Popmenu, more than 3 out of 4 people or 78% said they believed that tipping practices have become ridiculous. Forty-four percent say they’re tipping less this year than last year.
Consumers aren’t shy about expressing their tip fatigue online and on social media sites.
“I can’t enjoy a weekend without at least 5 prompts to tip for doing absolutely nothing,” one user on Reddit said about tipping fatigue. “The anxiety that comes from this false pressure to tip a percentage on every bill is ludicrous.”
. . .People feel that “tipping has become maybe ubiquitous and that now we’re being asked to tip for everything all the time, even for things that we didn’t feel were customary or normal,” Brendan Sweeney, CEO of Popmenu, told USA TODAY.
Popmenu, which is a restaurant tech company, has been surveying customers about tipping for more than five years, Sweeney said.
Tipping really increased during the COVID-19 lockdown era and after when the hospitality industry was hurting and consumers started leaving tips for take-out or tipping more “as a warm and fuzzy” feeling, Sweeney said.
“But then I think we got to a point where it was like, wait.. is this still an emergency? Is it still we’re helping people? At the same time, people are really feeling the pinch of inflation,” he said.
But tip fatigue is starting to tell!
And more digital register systems at businesses have the tipping screen built into the software, Sweeney said.
Still, Sweeney said guilt tipping, or feeling guilted into leaving a tip to avoid the awkwardness, is a thing.
When a digital screen asks for a tip, 59% of the respondents said they feel compelled to leave one. But that’s down from 66% in September 2025. And the share of people who say they tip on a weekly basis at places where it isn’t warranted also fell from 44% to 39%. Over the last 12 months, consumers estimate they spent about $130 on tips they didn’t think were necessary, down from $150 when the same question was posed in September 2025.
. . . The percentage of consumers tipping 20% or higher for restaurant servers and delivery drivers fell over the last six months:
41% of consumers tip restaurant servers 20% or more, which is down from 45% in September 2025. Twenty nine percent of people said they tip servers 15%, which is similar to September 2025.
15% tip restaurant delivery drivers 20% or higher, down from 23% in September 2025.
27% tip delivery drivers 15%, which is similar to September 2025.
Tips at places other than restaurants also changed.
39% of consumers tip at coffee shops, down from 46% in September 2025.
27% tip at food trucks, down from 32% in September 2025.
22% tip at fast food restaurants, down from 27% in September 2025.
Separate from the survey, Popmenu also tracked tipping on online orders received through its platform. Pickup orders with a digital tip declined from 78% in 2022 to 62% in 2026.
. . . Three in four consumers (74%) say they have noticed restaurants raising the minimum suggested tip on digital screens. Here’s what people said they did when they saw that screen:
36% typically leave a custom tip
17% choose the lowest suggested tip
32% choose the mid-tier tip
7% choose the highest tip
9% don’t typically tip
Consumers in the survey said they were willing to pay higher prices instead of tipping. If given a choice, 56% of consumers are willing to pay more for meals and beverages to provide higher wages for workers and eliminate gratuities.
What’s that, you say? If I buy an ice cream cone, there is labor involved in making the ice cream and scooping it out to put in a cone. Shouldn’t we pay for that labor? No—the workers should get a decent wage and costs should be folded into the prices. In the past I’ve heard arguments that if labor is involved, tips should be given, but that’s always the case and, at any rate, such sentiments were covid-related.
I much prefer the French system, which applies especially at restaurants. The menu says explicitly that labor costs are included in the menu prices, and if you like the service, you can leave a couple of euros on the bill plate, regardless of what the meal cost. There the pressure is off, and you don’t feel guilty about having to choose between a 15% tip and a 30% tip. And you never are expected to tip when you take food away.
Of course you’re welcome to weigh in. How much and when do you tip, and do you feel pressured to tip in circumstances where you don’t think it’s necessary?
Today we have photos of stick-mimicking insects from Trinidad and Tobago, all taken by Ephraim Heller. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
I remember the fascination I felt as a child on the rare occasions when I was taken to a zoo that had a terrarium containing stick insects. I still feel that way. In researching this post, I discovered that stick insects are even more remarkable and unusual than I anticipated. For example, parthenogenesis is common; they regrow lost limbs; and the world’s longest insect is Phryganistria chinensis, found in China and measuring 36 cm in body length (62 cm or 2 feet with legs extended, photo here).
I photographed two species. The first four photos are the Trinidad log insect (Phanocles keratosqueleton), known in regional folklore as the “god horse” or “hag’s horse.” It appears in folklore as an omen of death, despite being a harmless herbivore.
I never found a stick insect during our daytime hikes. During daytime, stick insects press themselves flat against plants and remain motionless, rendering them camouflaged and invisible. After dark, they walk out onto exposed vegetation to feed, molt, and mate. They are easily spotted with a headlamp due to their eyeshine:
Their camouflage can incorporate three distinct adaptations: cryptic coloration and background matching; cryptic body shape and texture; and behavioral crypsis (swaying when disturbed, mimicking a twig moving in a breeze). Not only are the insects themselves camouflaged, but many species evolved eggs that look like plant seeds:
Stick insects are in the order Phasmatodea, which contains over 3,500 species. Phasmids sits under Polyneoptera, which contains other winged insects such as grasshoppers, mantises, stoneflies, and earwigs. They are found on all continents except Antarctica. Against my expectations, Phasmatodea is monophyletic: the group evolved once from a single common ancestor, rather than through convergent evolution:
The next six photos are of the Trinidad twig or Trinidad stick (Ocnophiloidea regularis). More details on this species are at the end:
The oldest phasmid fossil is about 165 million years old, but recent studies claim that Phasmatodea first evolved 252 – 299 million years ago. This suggests that they evolved in response to the radiation of early insectivorous vertebrates such as parareptiles, amphibians, and synapsids. A major diversification occurred in the late Cretaceous, with the rapid spread of flowering plants (providing new foliage types to mimic) and the emergence of early birds:
Stick insect species’ reproduction ranges from sexual to obligate parthenogenesis, and much in between. Parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization) is common and has evolved independently many times among phasmids. Parthenogenic offspring are almost always females, producing all-female or near-all-female lineages. The offspring are not true clones of the parent, but are typically homozygous and have reduced genetic diversity, which can impair their ability to adapt to new stresses. Some species are facultatively parthenogenetic, meaning females can switch between sexual and asexual reproduction depending on conditions:
Phasmids can voluntarily shed a leg when grabbed by a predator. The leg is broken off at a specialized weak joint. Phasmatodea is the only insect order known to regenerate lost legs. Regeneration is restricted to nymphs because it requires molting. Cells at the wound site dedifferentiate and form a mass called a blastema, which then rebuilds the limb segment by segment through successive molts. The same molecular signaling pathway (ERK/CK2) involved in vertebrate limb regeneration drives the process in stick insects, which has attracted research interest for regenerative medicine. Regeneration is not free. Regrowing a leg during development results in disproportionately smaller wings and measurably reduced flight performance in adults. The body appears to divert resources away from wing development to fund limb repair:
The Trinidad twig (photos above and below) reproduces sexually:
The photo below shows two males attached to a female. Phasmids don’t do polycules and this is not standard reproductive behavior, but research on a closely related species has documented this scenario. While one male is guarding a female by remaining clasped to her abdomen, a rival male can approach and attempt to insert his genitalia while the first mate is momentarily repositioning or feeding. If the rival succeeds in attaching, both males end up simultaneously clasped to the female. This can result in a slow-motion “boxing-like” confrontation, with both males leaning backward and suspended from the female while trading blows with their forelegs until one of the males is eventually displaced:
Welcome to the last Monday in April: it’s April 27, 2026 and National Babe Ruth Day, celebrating the man who many people consider the greatest baseball player of all time (Shohei Ohtani, who also both pitches and hits, may take his place!). It was on this day in 1947 that Ruth, dying of cancer, made a farewell appearance at Yankee Stadium, Here’s a recording of his words on that day; the ravages of throat cancer is clear in his gravelly speech:
Here’s the world’s largest Gummi Bear. It weighed Weighing a total of 1728 kg (3810 pounds), and AI says, “This record-breaking candy measures approximately 2.2 x 2 x 1 meters and is equivalent to about 850,000 standard-sized gummi bears.”
Finally, I saw two bunnies on my way to work today. With eight rabbits’ feet in view, I thought it might be a lucky day, but the only thing I want is for my ducklings to return, and that ain’t gonna happen:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 27 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*It’s Noon in Israel suggests that Qatar, long a refuge for members of Hamas, isn’t going to put up with the terror group any more:
Traveling abroad comes with a standard set of anxieties: missed connections, lost luggage or, if you’re Israeli, a regional war erupting just before the holidays. But spare a thought for Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’ chief negotiator, who left his five-star exile in Qatar for what was intended to be a quick diplomatic trip to Cairo. After summarily rejecting a U.S.-backed disarmament proposal that offered a staged Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, he received a text message notifying him that he had been evicted from his luxury lodgings and was officially barred from re-entering the country. It is every vacationer’s worst nightmare.
It appears that Hamas’ latest bout of intractability has finally broken its patron’s back. After 20 years, Qatar is pulling its investment in the terror group. According to my sources, Doha will no longer play the role of host and negotiator, and most of Hamas’ leadership has already departed the country.
After two decades, the obvious question is: Why now?
The decisive turning point wasn’t Cairo, nor was it October 7—if anything, the latter represented a major appreciation of Doha’s investment. The breaking point was Operation Roaring Lion. After 16 agonizing days of silence, torn between their two patrons, Hamas ultimately issued a statement defending Iran’s “right of self-defense,” but asked Tehran to refrain from targeting “neighboring countries.” For Qatar, a nation whose sovereign territory was actively being struck by Iranian missiles, this relatively weak, delayed condemnation from the group they had been funneling cash and support to for decades was not endearing.
This isn’t just about moral clarity or hurt feelings. In exchange for their luxury accommodations, Hamas provided Qatar with a highly marketable service: terrorist mediation. Alongside their shared ideological alignment, this mediation is precisely why Qatar reached out to Hamas after the group’s 2006 electoral victory when the rest of the world cut contact. Doha cornered an unserved market. But the value of that service is in steep decline—not only because a new status quo is settling over Gaza, but because the primary consumer of Qatar’s service, the United States, has developed a distaste for such intimate terrorist ties.
About time, I say. And perhaps this portends a lessening of all the encampments and pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the West. Don’t forget that at least a majority of Palestinians support Hamas, and they support the group over Fatah, the political party of Mahmoud Abass and the Palestinian Authority. This means that supporting Palestine means, by and large, supporting a territory whose inhabitants favor terrorism.
Investigators were still working to determine the motive in the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner that sent Secret Service agents rushing President Trump from the stage inside a Washington hotel, the acting attorney general said on Sunday. But a preliminary review indicated that members of the administration, “likely including the president,” had been the target, he said.
Mr. Trump told Fox News that the suspect had written what he described as a “manifesto,” without offering details. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” earlier Sunday that investigators gathering evidence about the suspect “know there were some writings” but cautioned that the analysis of his motivation could change.
The suspect, identified by two law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., was taken into custody after the police said he ran through a security checkpoint and exchanged gunfire with the authorities inside the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. Officials said he did not reach the ballroom, where Mr. Trump, top administration officials and hundreds of journalists had gathered.
Late Saturday night, federal authorities in the Los Angeles suburbs surrounded a two-story home where records show Mr. Allen lives. Residents gathered nearby on darkened sidewalks as police helicopters circled overhead and law enforcement vehicles with flashing red and blue lights blocked the street.
The suspect was armed with knives, a shotgun and a handgun, the interim Washington, D.C., police chief, Jeffery W. Carroll, told reporters on Saturday night. Mr. Blanche said the man had purchased the two weapons he was carrying “within the last couple of years.”
There were no metal detectors set up at the hotel’s entrances on Saturday, and a secure perimeter was only established closer to the ballroom. Mr. Blanche defended the security at the event, noting that the suspect did not enter the ballroom where Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and cabinet officials were among the guests.
The 31-year-old suspect in the shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is a Caltech grad who recently won a “teacher of the month” award.
Cole Allen, of Torrance, Calif., has been identified as the man suspected of opening fire Saturday night near the ballroom where President Trump was in attendance, according to two law-enforcement officials briefed on the investigation. Allen was armed with a shotgun, handgun and knives and was a guest at the Washington Hilton where the dinner was taking place, police said. One law-enforcement officer was wounded in the attack.
I doubt this is a setup. If the shooter was in on it, why would he risk the certainty of years in jail? And what if he actually killed the law-enforcement official rather than hitting him in a bullet-proof vest? No, you have to be nuts to broach a conspiracy theory like that.
Sabastian Sawe made history on the morning of April 26, 2026, when he crossed the finish line in a time of 1:59:30 at the 2026 London Marathon. Sawe, a 31-year-old from Kenya, became the first person to ever run under 2 hours for a marathon … officially.
The term “officially” is important here. Sawe isn’t the first runner to break the 2-hour barrier for 26.2 miles. That distinction belongs to Eliud Kipchoge, the most decorated—and arguably the greatest—marathoner to ever live.
In 2019, Kipchoge, 34 on race day, ran 1:59:40 at the INEOS 1:59 Challenge in a tree-shaded park in Vienna, Austria. At the time, it was the fastest marathon ever run. But it didn’t count as a world record. That’s because standard competition rules for pacing and fluids were not followed.
Here’s a news report on the Marathon, showing Sawe’s victory and his reaction to the win (which also shaved 56 seconds off the world record):
An Ontario town has been fined $10,000 and its officials ordered to complete mandatory “human rights” training after it refused to celebrate Pride Month.
Emo is a township of about 1,300 people located in the far west of Ontario, along the border with Minnesota.
In a decision handed down last week, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ruled that Emo, its mayor and two of its councillors had violated the Ontario Human Rights Code by refusing to proclaim June as “Pride Month.”
The town was also cited for failing to fly “an LGBTQ2 rainbow flag,” despite the fact that they don’t have an official flag pole.
The dispute began in 2020 when the township was approached by the group Borderland Pride with a written request to proclaim June as Pride Month.
Attached to the letter was a draft proclamation including clauses such as “pride is necessary to show community support and belonging for LGBTQ2 individuals” and “the diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression represents a positive contribution to society.”
Emo was also asked to fly an “LGBTQ2 rainbow flag for a week of your choosing.”
Borderland Pride then asked Emo to “email us a copy of your proclamation or resolution once adopted and signed.”
Although symbolic proclamations are standard fare in larger municipal governments such as Toronto or Hamilton, this didn’t happen all that often in Emo.
“The record indicated the Township did not receive many requests for declarations or proclamations or requests for display of a flag,” the subsequent Tribunal decision would read. In a single 12-month period they received only four — two of which were from Borderland Pride.
Tribunal hearings would also reveal that Emo doesn’t really have a central flag pole, aside from a Canadian flag angled over the front door of the Emo Municipal Office.
Nevertheless, Borderland Pride’s draft proclamation was tabled before a May 2020 meeting of the Emo Township Council, where it was defeated by a vote of three to two.
The claim of discrimination ultimately hinged on a single line uttered by Emo Mayor Harold McQuaker. When the proclamation came up for consideration, McQuaker was heard to say in a recording of the meeting, “There’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin … there’s no flags being flown for the straight people.”
As Human Rights Tribunal vice-chair Karen Dawson wrote in her decision, “I find this remark was demeaning and disparaging of the LGBTQ2 community of which
Clearly the town is being punished for the whataboutery of Emo’s mayor, which may reflect bigotry, ir it may not. It may just reflect ideological neutrality. Whatever the cause, a town should not be compelled to celebrate any sex or gender diversity and then fined if it doesn’t. O Canada!
*The WSJ reports on the ubiquity of AI videos these days, many of them using Chinese programs.
In a scene from Amazon’s biblical series “House of David,” human actors portray fallen angels and mortal women. The surrounding landscape—a moody tableau of steel-gray skies and jagged mountains—is the work of AI.
Of the 850 visual-effect shots in the show’s first season, 73 were built using generative artificial intelligence, including a tool developed by one of China’s most popular social-media sites. That saved money on expensive on-location shoots, according to Wonder Project, the studio behind the series.
From Hollywood productions to short social-media videos, video makers are increasingly using AI to create content that once required sprawling crews.
“As production costs fall, it becomes more affordable for creators to experiment and test new ideas,” said Zeng Yushen of Kuaishou, the Chinese company whose AI model was used in “House of David.”
China plays a big role in this business, though it wouldn’t be obvious to most Americans watching television or scrolling through videos on their phones. Chinese labs claimed seven of the top 10 spots for video-generation models on rating platform Artificial Analysis, competing with those from Google and Elon Musk’s xAI.
This month, a video-generation model called HappyHorse went viral after beating American rivals in blind quality tests. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba later disclosed the model was its own.
And Seedance 2.0, the latest AI video generator from TikTok parent ByteDance, won attention earlier this year for its ability to turn script prompts into realistic short-movie scenes. ByteDance’s Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok, competes with Kuaishou’s video-sharing app, which has hundreds of millions of users in China.
Such platforms “naturally have large volumes of labeled short-video data that can be used for training,” said Tilly Zhang, a technology analyst at research house Gavekal. “This creates a data barrier that most companies cannot easily replicate.”
I don’t mind people using AI in movies or videos, but I think it’s incumbent on them to tell us when it’s used. It’s not like animation in which you know that it’s not reality. Instead, AI sometimes either represents itself as reality or could be mistaken for reality. There outghta to a law, if not an ethical rule. I think the day will come when nearly all video made by professionals (and a lot by amateurs) will involve AI, and that’s a bit sad. They’re already resurrecting dead actors and putting them in movies.
*In 1990 the biggest art heist in history took place: in the wee hours of March 18, over $500 million worth of paintings were rem0ved at night from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Wikipedia totes up some of the stolen works:
The stolen works were originally procured by art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) and were intended for permanent display at the museum with the rest of her collection. Among them was The Concert, one of only 34 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer and thought to be the most valuable unrecovered painting in the world. Also missing is The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt‘s only seascape. Other paintings and sketches by Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Govert Flinck were stolen, along with a relatively valueless eagle finial and Chinese gu. Experts were puzzled by the choice of artwork, as more valuable works were left untouched. As the collection and its layout are intended to be permanent, empty frames remain hanging both in homage to the missing works and as placeholders for their return.
In 2013, the FBI said it knew who was responsible for the Boston museum heist but declined to name them, fueling speculation that persists today.
A former FBI agent who led the investigation for more than two decades is now offering the first detailed account of how investigators reached that conclusion — and publicly identifying the men he believes were involved. In a new book, Geoff Kelly traces how the artworks moved through criminal networks, where violence took the lives of key suspects and witnesses, and challenges long-circulating theories by revisiting key details.
. . . In the decades since the robbery, several people believed to have ties to the heist were killed, and another died under suspicious circumstances.
Robert “Bobby” Donati, a Boston mob associate long suspected in the case, was found stabbed to death in 1991, his body left in the trunk of a car after his home had been ransacked.
Years earlier, Donati visited the Gardner with another known art thief, Myles Connor, to scope it out for a robbery and said that if he ever took the museum’s Napoleonic finial, it would be his “calling card.” Years later, a jeweler told investigators Donati tried to sell a finial from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum but backed off, saying it was “too hot.”
A separate line of evidence centered on George Reissfelder, who investigators believe owned the getaway car.
Kelly tracked down Reissfelder’s brother, a retired military officer who had initially not believed his brother was involved. He broke down after being shown Manet’s “Chez Tortoni,” saying he recognized it as a painting he himself hung above his brother’s bed.
Reissfelder later died under suspicious circumstances. When investigators searched his home, the painting was gone.
Both men had ties to TRC Auto Electric, a Dorchester shop linked to Charles “Chuck” Merlino’s crew.
Kelly personifies the missing artworks and describes them as “perfect fugitives.”
“They don’t go to the doctor. They don’t get stopped for speeding. They don’t leave fingerprints,” he said. “They can just disappear.”
Unlike human fugitives, he said, artworks can also be copied.
Over the years, that has meant chasing down false leads — including paintings spotted in a Reno antique market, hanging in private homes and even one that appeared in an episode of the TV show “Monk.”
Because the works are so recognizable, it’s nearly impossible to sell them publicly.
“Stealing the artwork from the museum, that’s the easy part,” Kelly said. “Profiting from it, that’s the difficult part.”
He imagines the paintings will surface one day — outliving those who carried out the heist.
“I have no doubt they still exist,” he said
Of course they still exist, either hidden by the thieves or in some rich private collector’s hands. You don’t pull a job like that and destroy $500 million worth of paintings. Here’s “The Concert,” the Vermeer painting that was stolen:
Johannes Vermeer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And here’s the missing Rembrandt, which is a good one:
From Masih; Iranian officials and their offspring enjoy luxury while protestors get shot and blinded (sound up, and translations from Spanish welcomes):
Just yesterday and again today, they executed another Iranian while they send their children abroad to enjoy safety and luxury.
This is the son of another Islamic Republic of Iran official who served as a diplomat of the Islamic Republic in Venezuela.
From J. K. Rowling. Biological men don’t belong in women’s prisons:
The Scottish government is responsible for this sexual assault. The Supreme Court has confirmed women’s right to single sex spaces, a ruling the SNP continues to flout. If the victim wishes to sue, https://t.co/iyohnrgVZN can assist with all costs. https://t.co/rnyKbWXhj5
The Daily Mail just published testimonies of Gazan children being raped by Hamas-affiliated clerics at local mosques — and then threatened into silence by the Qassam Brigades.
One from my feed; the “community note” says that pelicans like this are common in Greece, but this one isn’t 37 years old:
A pelican, around 37 years old, shows up every day at a Greek restaurant to get its portion of fish. The bird has become a well-known local figure along the seafront pic.twitter.com/FqHAAANMag
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was four years old. She would be 88 today had she survived. https://t.co/VqBPPZHwAF
And a sad tale of the death of Florida’s citrus industry. I used to collect Drosophila in Florida, concentrating on orange groves where flies were common:
Totally off-topic, but did y'all the know the Free State of Florida's citrus industry is basically dead??This is quite a story:slate.com/business/202…
If I was asked ten years ago to explain this difference and also the trend over time, I wouldn’t have been able to give an answer, though now various places have suggested self-selection: academia by its very nature of free expression and (supposed) favoritism of argument and open ideas, favors liberals over conservatives. Here’s from The Independent Review:
The very nature of political inquiry is implicated here as well. Some argue that because academia focuses on expanding ideas, it is inherently opposed to conservatism, which seeks, in a nod to Buckley, to yell “Stop!” In some respects, a liberal-leaning academia should be expected to some degree. The confounding reality now, though, is that many liberal academics agree it is vital to limit ideas they deem harmful.
Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas.
Now what does that mean? I suppose you can interpret it as another way of saying what’s above: universities, whose job is to find out the truth (“reality”) tend to attract liberals. But I don’t think that’s what the phrase is supposed to mean. I think that Colbert meant, and others mean, that reality itself has a tendency to buttress Left-wing views. That’s what Grok says when asked to explain how the Left uses the phrase:
Often deployed earnestly (or semi-earnestly) to argue that empirical evidence on topics like climate change, inequality, public health data, or social issues tends to support center-left policy conclusions more than conservative ones. The implication: “Stop calling facts ‘liberal bias’—reality just doesn’t align with your priors.”
And that may indeed be true, but it reverses the causes of what’s meant: “the views of liberals are more often supported by the facts than are the views of conservatives or moderates.”
Well, one can argue about even that (e.g., climate change on one hand and Israel on the other), but what bothers me is that the quote implies that reality itself leads to liberalism. But reality has no ideology: it’s simply what’s true about the Universe. Evolutionary biology itself gives just the facts, though those facts can be accepted by liberals or rejected by conservatives like religious creationists. How one deals with the facts depends on one’s upbringing and predisposition.
Actually, anyone studying reality—trying to find the truth—had best abandon any ideological slant beforehand, as ideology impedes the search for truth. The methodology of science itself—hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, double-blind testing, the use of math and statistics, publication and communication, and empirical observation—is not ideological, and does not lead one to either the Left or Right.
This paper from BioScience, written by a philosopher and an evolutionary molecular biologist, shows that studying reality itself is best done in an atmosphere of ethnical neutrality. Click screenshot to read.
The authors argue first that ideological neutrality is important in finding the truth:
Arguably, a more feasible solution to the new demarcation problem is an old solution: when engaging in the core activities of scientific research, scientists should strive to eliminate the influence of all non-epistemic (e.g., ethical and political) values from the work they are conducting and (importantly) reviewing—at least to the extent that this is humanly possible. Like the ideal of a perfect democracy, the ideal of perfect ethical or political neutrality is probably never attainable in practice. Nonetheless, it is an ideal that motivates scientists to identify and hold each other accountable for any non-epistemic biases that might infiltrate and potentially distort scientific reasoning.
They then say that science is best conducted employing four Mertonian norms (Robert Merton was an American sociologists who wrote a lot about the sociology of science):
Merton’s first norm, perhaps inappropriately called “communism,” “prescribes the open communication of findings to other scientists and correlatively proscribing secrecy” (Zuckerman and Merton 1971).
. . . Merton’s second norm—universalism—states that personal attributes of a scientist, such as race, gender, nationality, religion, class, or political affiliation, are irrelevant when evaluating their scientific work. This norm functions epistemically as a corrective against all possible forms of discrimination other than merit.
. . . Merton’s third value, organized skepticism, encourages scientists to remain open to future falsification. This involves considering “all new evidence, hypotheses, theories, and innovations, even those that challenge or contradict their own work” (Anderson et al. 2010).
. . . Merton’s fourth norm called “disinterestedness” is perhaps the most controversial. Taken literally, this norm seems to require of scientists that they set aside personal goals in the pure pursuit of truth. Even the most careful scientist is vulnerable to confirmation bias (Wiens 1997). The expectation that scientists should behave as if they had no stake in the outcomes of their research is meant to counteract the effects of wishful thinking.
Now the authors discuss the opposition to these norms, and problems that arise when using them, but I think it’s useful to recognize that setting aside ideology is the best and fastest way to understand reality.
I suppose this post is a long-winded way of exporessing what I see as a self-aggrandizing phrase, and one that distorts the way that finding truth really works, but I’ve heard the phrase often enough to dissect it a bit.
The upshot: neither morality or ideology can be derived from reality, but those of a certain ideological or moral bent may rely on reality more than those of other stripes.
I think this was news commentary, but I didn’t hear the whole show: just a snippet on my car radio. At any rate, one commenter said this:
“Joe Biden is probably the last Democratic President for generations who will be in favor of Israel.”
One could say that the Democrats are taking a position of neutrality, favoring neither Israel or its opponents (e.g., Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, or Hamas), but I doubt that is the case. The Democratic Party is being taken over by so-called “progressives,” and they are opposed to Israel in general—not just “Zionism” (which means Israel’s existence as a state), and not just Netanyahu. This, according to a poll of Palestinians taken in the West Bank and Gaza two years ago, is who the Democrats are and will be favoring:
According to the poll, only seven percent of Gazans blamed Hamas for their suffering. Seventy-one percent of all Palestinians supported Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on October 7 — up 14 points among Gazans and down 11 points among West Bank Palestinians compared to three months ago. Fifty-nine percent of all Palestinians thought Hamas should rule Gaza, and 70 percent were satisfied with the role Hamas has played during the war.
Before October 7, Fatah would have defeated Hamas in a head-to-head vote of all Palestinians 26 to 22 percent. If elections were held today, Fatah would lose to Hamas 17 to 34 percent. Eighty-one percent of respondents were dissatisfied with Abbas, up from 76 percent before the war. Sixty-two percent did not view the recent resignation of former PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh as a sign of reform. And 65 percent of Palestinians think the PA is a burden on the Palestinian people. Among likely voters, 56 percent supported Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life sentences for his role in the murder of Jews during the Second Intifada. Thirty-two percent supported Qatar-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and 11 percent supported Abbas.
Only 5 percent of Palestinians think Hamas’s massacre on October 7 constitutes a war crime.
The poll was taken by a Palestinian organization, “the Ramallah-based non-profit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.” And we have this breakdown of Democratic support (almost nil) from The Arab Center:
On April 15, 2026, the United States Senate considered two resolutions to block nearly $450 million of arms sales to Israel over concerns about human rights violations and the US-Israel war on Iran. With pro-Israel Republicans controlling the Senate, the defeat of these resolutions, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), was predictable. Indeed, the first resolution, to stop a $295 million sale of bulldozers that Israel has used in the past to destroy civilian homes, lost in a 59-40 vote; the second, to halt a $151 million sale of 12,000 1,000-pound bombs, failed 63-36. The surprise was that more than three-quarters of the 47-member Democratic caucus voted to halt at least one of the sales—an unprecedented number.
Jews were reliably Democratic before the war, and Democrats were reliable friends of Israel. Brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, those days are gone. Democrats are not only ignoring Hamas’s war crimes and avowed desire to destroy Israel, but also favoring an oppressive, misogynistic, and truly genocidal regime against the only democratic state in the Middle East. And no, I don’t think it’s just animus against Netanyahu or “Zionism” that’s motivating this change. I think that Democratic opposition to Israel would be nearly as strong if Israel had some other Prime Minister. And it’s not “Zionism” they oppose, either, for that’s just the new euphemism for “Judaism”, for Zionism is just the recognition of the validity of the state of Israel as a refuge for Jews. (Do these people oppose the many explicitly Muslim states as examples of “Islamism”? If so, I haven’t heard about it.)
Israel (and Jews) are now seen as oppressors in the “oppressor-victim” narrative that’s behind wokeness. And the “oppression” by Israel involves the Two Big Lies: Israel is “genocidal” and “an apartheid state.” (For a refutation of the “genocide” canard go here, and of the “apartheid” canard go here). We are seeing the Democratic Party becoming more antisemitic and anti-Enlightenment. For Democrats like me, this is depressing. I’m not a one-issue candidate but I’m still Jewish, and how am I to vote for someone who is anti-Israel?
I now have three batches plus some singletons, and so we’ll have semi-regular photos for a while, at least. Today’s batch of tidal invertebrate photos, and one video, comes from math professor Abby Thompson at UC Davis. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. The video is also hers.
April tidepools, and a mystery den.
Starting with a video of a Ctenophore, Pleurobrachia bachei (Pacific sea gooseberry, a ‘comb jelly’). All appearances to the contrary, this is in a different phylum (Ctenophora) from the “jellyfish” of my earlier post, which are in the phylum Cnidaria. The flashing lights are the cilia in the “combs” that run down the sides, used for locomotion. This one wasn’t moving very much, but I was surprised it was moving at all. I picked it up off the sand quite a way above the water line, and dumped it into a shallow pool to take a photo. It seemed to be recovering pretty well from what I thought was death. It’s about the size of a walnut.
Phoronis ijimai(tentative- the white things). This is a species of horseshoe worm, which lives in tubes. I haven’t seen this species before, and it was in an awkward spot, so it was hard to get a good photo. The photo below that is from a few years ago of a worm from the same family, so you can see their general shape better:
Lastly the mystery den. Our entire front yard seems to have been tunneled under, with at least three major entrances- this pair of holes is just one of them. The holes are large, about 10 inches across. We’re dreaming of badgers, would be very happy with foxes, and really hoping it’s not skunks (I love skunks, but not in the front yard). A wildlife cam is the next purchase:
Camera: Olympus TG-7. Thanks as usual to some experts on inaturalist.
The Turkmen Racing Horse Festival is annually held on the last Sunday in April. This year, it takes place on April 26. While it is an important holiday, one of national pride, it remains a working Sunday for many in Turkmenistan, with schools and offices remaining open. Before we plunge into the why of this holiday though, a brief geography lesson. Turkmenistan — not to be confused with the separate nation of Turkey — is a country located in the southwest region of Central Asia. Its neighbors are Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Uzbekistan. It also touches the Caspian Sea, along its western border. Horses are an integral part of Turkmenistan’s history and culture, hence there is an entire season dedicated to horse racing. The pride and joy of Turkmenistan is the Akhal-Teke breed of horse, said to be one of the oldest breeds in the world.
Here’s a one-minute video abut the Festival:
It’s also Alien Day, celebrating the 1979 movie Aliens, and “Alien Day is held on April 26 because one of the planetoids or moons in the Alien films is named LV-426″. Audurbon Day (the illustrator and ornithologist, now in bad odor, was born on this day in 1785), National Pretzel Day, and World Intellectual Property Day (I just got a few hundred bucks because some bot stole from my trade books and got sued).
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 26 Wikipedia page.
Investigators were working on Sunday to determine a motive in the shooting that sent Secret Service agents rushing President Trump from the stage at the White House correspondents’ dinner, an attack that raised questions about how a gunman was able to get close to one of Washington’s most heavily guarded events.
The suspect, identified by two law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., was taken into custody after running through a security checkpoint and exchanging gunfire with the authorities inside the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. Officials said he did not reach the ballroom, where Mr. Trump, top administration officials and hundreds of journalists had gathered.
Late Saturday night, federal authorities in the Los Angeles suburbs surrounded a two-story home where records show Mr. Allen lives. Residents gathered nearby on darkened sidewalks as police helicopters circled overhead and law enforcement vehicles with flashing red and blue lights blocked the street.
The suspect was armed with knives, a shotgun and a handgun and had been staying at the Washington Hilton, the interim Washington, D.C., police chief, Jeffery W. Carroll, told reporters on Saturday night. He said that the authorities were still investigating whether the suspect had targeted the president, but that they believed he had acted alone.
Trump and Melania were escorted out of the event. A Secret Service agent was hit, but apparently saved by his bulletproof vest.
President Trump on Saturday called off a trip by two of his top negotiators to Islamabad, Pakistan, just before they were set to leave for talks about a potential deal to end the war in Iran.
“I’ve told my people a little while ago, they were getting ready to leave, and I said, ‘Nope, you’re not making an 18-hour flight to go there. We have all the cards,’” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “They can call us anytime they want, but you’re not going to be making any more 18-hour flights to sit around talking about nothing.”
Steve Witkoff, the special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had been scheduled to travel to Pakistan on Saturday, along with top aides to Vice President JD Vance. Officials in Pakistan have been mediating between the United States and Iran to try to end more than a month of war in the Middle East.
The cancellation of the trip is the latest sign that Iran and the United States are far from reaching a deal to end the war. A previous trip to Islamabad by Mr. Vance proved unsuccessful, and the Americans appear no closer to achieving the administration’s political goals, including convincing Iran to turn over its nuclear stockpile and curtail its future program. The two sides are also locked in a stalemate over control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows.
Mr. Trump’s decision came after Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who had been in Islamabad for talks with Pakistani officials, left the country and traveled to Oman. No direct meetings had been scheduled with U.S. officials.
After leaving Islamabad, Mr. Araghchi said in a social media post that he had shared with Pakistani officials Iran’s position on a “workable framework to permanently end the war on Iran.” He did not give details of the latest proposal. “Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy,” he added.
Given the distance between the negotiating parties, and the untenable nature of Iran’s demands, right now it seems useless to try negotiating. Let’s see what happens. Prices throughout the world will go up (gas prices in Chicago are already about $5.25 per gallon), so this remains a test of the ability of each side to play a game of what amounts to economic chicken.
*The NYT has an interview with three entitled people (including the wealthy and odious antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker) about why it’s okay to steal from capitalists: “The rich don’t play by the rules. So why should I?” Here we see the antisemitic content streamer Hasan Piker, The NYT Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman (daughter of graphic novelist Art Spiegelman), and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino discuss the circumstances in which they’d break the law to steal from the rich (see also the Free Press article on this unsavory trio; the NYT article is archived here). There is also a video. We can assume that at least two of these discussants are rich. Piker is a multimillionaire, and The FP says that Tolentino:”lives in a $2.2 million brownstone in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn when she’s not at her second home upstate”, and Grok reports that Spiegelman ears a six-figure income as well as being co-owner of two NYC properties, including a SoHo condo. We can assume they are not starving, but they’re willing to steal—and not always for a good cause.
A couple of quotes:
Spiegelman: Would you pirate music from an indie band?
Tolentino: Is it 2005 and I’m using LimeWire? Because yes.
Spiegelman: I feel like every millennial has at some point.
Tolentino: I mean, I feel like, fundamentally, Spotify is kind of deleterious to the musician livelihood, and I use that, but then I go to the shows.
Piker: Yeah, I’m pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board. Would you pirate a car? Yes. You know, if you could.
Spiegelman: What would it mean to pirate a car?
Piker: It was just a classic thing back in the day. The government-funded antipiracy initiatives would be like: Would you steal a car? I’m like, yeah, sure. If I could get away with it, if it was as easy as pirating intellectual property, I would do it.
. . .Spiegelman: Yeah. Would you steal a book from the library?
Tolentino: Never.
Piker: No.
Spiegelman: Would you steal from the Louvre?
Piker: Yes.
Tolentino: I would not be logistically capable of executing such a fact, but would I cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it? Absolutely.
Piker: I think it’s cool. We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.
Spiegelman: Would you steal from Whole Foods?
Tolentino: Yes. And I have, under very specific circumstances. I will say, I think that stealing from a big box store — I’ll just state my platform — it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action. But I did steal from Whole Foods on several occasions.
Tolentino steals from Whole Foods (she calls it “mircrolooting”), but only to give the food to others:
Tolentino: But I didn’t feel bad about it at all.
Spiegelman: And was part of it because of how you feel about Whole Foods as a corporation?
Tolentino: Yeah. It already felt like a bit of a compromise. At the time I was like, I had not been to Whole Foods. I had a bit more consumer discipline about where I was spending my money then, and I already felt like I was in the hole, even by shopping there. And it certainly felt, in a utilitarian sense, I was like, this is not a big deal. Right, guys?
. . .Spiegelman: There’s one thing that’s stealing when you are a teenager and you want the adrenaline rush. And part of it is about testing the rules and getting away with something. But what I’m seeing on TikTok and social media is people saying that they’re stealing from Whole Foods not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification. Because the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I? And Jeff Bezos has too much money — he’s a billionaire — so why should I have to pay for organic avocados?
My friends and I have started calling this microlooting, because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something. Have you noticed this around you online? Have you noticed more people talking about stealing in this way?
Murder, they say, seems justified by many:
. . . Spiegelman: But then when you feel this much anger — and it doesn’t feel like there’s hope for it to be changed in a regulatory way — I think that’s when you get to things like Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing the C.E.O. of United Healthcare, and there being an outpouring of glee for murder online, because it feels like, finally, someone can actually do something about health care.
I think 41 percent of Gen Z-ers felt that murder was morally justified. But it’s scary to be in a society where people feel that murder is morally justified. And I’m curious how we thread that line.
Piker: Yeah. Friedrich Engels wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare C.E.O., was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care in this country — and the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths. And that was a fascinating story for me, because Americans are very draconian about crime and punishment. They’re very black and white on this issue.
And yet, because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.
. . . Tolentino: One thing that should be legal that isn’t — it’s interesting, because I have to regularly explain this stuff to a small child, and have so thoroughly explained to her that some things are against the rules, but they’re OK, depending on who you are. And some things are not against the rules, but they’re not OK. There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action. I have taken so many planes for so many pleasure reasons; I have acted in so many selfish ways that are not only legal, but they’re sanctioned and they’re unbelievably valorized, culturally. So, maybe things like blowing up a pipeline, let’s say that.
These are the people who will lead the Revolution, and who are active on the “progressive” Left.
I was placed on an SPLC blacklist in October 2016. The document was called “A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” My name appeared beside Maajid Nawaz, a reformed radical who ran a counter-extremism organization, and an array of figures also dedicated to combating Islamism and antisemitism, such as David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes. The list handed journalists a ready-made roster of 15 people whose views were to be seen as toxic. But to call it a mere reference guide is to understate what it was.
It was published at the peak of a jihadist campaign of terror against the West. The ISIS caliphate still held territory across Syria and Iraq. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was issuing hit lists of writers and cartoonists in its English-language magazine. In January 2015, two of AQAP’s followers walked into the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and murdered 12 people, some of them cartoonists whose offense was drawing. Ten months later, a coordinated ISIS cell killed 130 at Paris’s Bataclan theater and the cafés around it. Terror attacks in Brussels, Nice, Berlin, and Manchester soon followed.
This was the climate in which the SPLC chose to publish the names, faces, and affiliations of 15 people it accused of “anti-Muslim extremism.” The list endangered everyone it named. I know the threat of Islamist violence all too well. In 2004, a jihadist named Mohammed Bouyeri murdered my friend and collaborator Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street. Bouyeri shot him, cut his throat, and pinned a five-page letter to his chest with a knife. The letter was a fatwa against me. I have lived under armed protection for more than two decades because men with weapons and conviction want me dead—for apostasy; for writing about Islamist-driven antisemitism and the subversive actions of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the West; for drawing attention to practices such as honor killings and female genital mutilation; for arguing that Muslim women deserve the same protections under the law as other women.
The SPLC considers all of this beyond the pale, and accused me of using “the political bully pulpit to bash Muslims.”
Thus, an organization founded to combat bigotry chose to place me on a list together with others whose lives were already under threat from the same movements, just for having the audacity to combat Islamist bigotry.
Nawaz sued the group, and won. In June 2018, the SPLC settled for $3.4 million and issued a written apology. The field guide vanished from its website. No apology was ever extended to me or to the others unfairly placed on that list.
. . . But ruining reputations was, and remains, only one of many offenses.
In 2000, the journalist Ken Silverstein published a long investigation in Harper’s Magazine describing the SPLC as the wealthiest civil rights organization in America, one whose fundraising had grown to dwarf its legal work. CharityWatch later gave the organization an F for stockpiling donations it did not spend on its stated mission. Tax filings uncovered by reporters in 2017 showed millions in SPLC money parked in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. Think of it for a moment: an anti-poverty organization, headquartered in Alabama, hiding millions offshore while positioning itself as the nation’s moral conscience. That should have ended it. Instead, the donors kept giving, and the lists kept growing.
I’m surprised that Hirsi Ali didn’t sue the SPLC like Nawaz did. The organization apparently ran out of civil rights cases to prosecute, and so began sniffing out what they construed as “hate groups” that didn’t violate anybody’s civil rights.
*Speaking of the SPLC, the conservative National Review says that even if the government charges against it are bogus, “The SPLC was always awful” and “deserves to be shunned and marginalized” (archived article).
A grand jury returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with financial crimes, suggesting that the organization — which claims its mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and fight discrimination broadly — has secretly paid informants to participate in the groups it deemed “racist” or hateful, as well as organize activities under the guise of these groups, such as the “United the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. If the allegations are true, then it means that SPLC has been coordinating some of the very events it raises funds to fight against — and as anyone familiar with the organization knows, it then construes those demonstrations as representative of the entire right-wing coalition.
But here’s a challenge: Engage in a hypothetical and assume, purely for the sake of argument, that absolutely everything alleged in the indictment is completely false. Even if the SPLC neither committed financial crimes nor helped orchestrate bogus “hate” events to create bad optics for conservatives, the organization has long been deserving of ire. The SPLC is societal poison dedicated to disparaging any individual or group perceived as even mildly right-wing. Rather than bashing the SPLC because it allegedly misrepresented its organizational activities and use of funds, we should emphasize that the SPLC misrepresents everything all the time.
For those unfamiliar, the SPLC is well known for awarding the “hate” label to certain organizations or individuals. While these designations might seem negligible, they have facilitated actual hate: Floyd Lee Corkins II was motivated to attempt a mass shooting and “kill as many people as [he] could” at the Family Research Council’s headquarters, in part because he had identified the organization as anti-gay from the SPLC website.
One might have hoped such an awful incident would have prompted the SPLC to reconsider its “hate” labels, and that the mainstream media would refrain from referencing such designations carelessly. However, high-profile publications routinely cite the SPLC-issued “hate” badge as if it is some sort of assessment grounded in a rigorous methodology. An article will read as follows: “[Right-Wing Organization], which has been named a “hate group” by the SPLC, blah blah blah.” (See here for an example about the Family Research Council in the New York Times, which was published after the terrorist attack on the organization.)
The scandal raises urgent questions about the integrity of the SPLC’s broader work, particularly its influential Hate Map, which began as a tool for tracking armed militias and skinhead gangs. Over time, it expanded to include mainstream conservative and religious organizations such as the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, and the Center for Immigration Studies. In August 2012, a man named Floyd Lee Corkins walked into the Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C., carrying a gun. A security guard named Leo Johnson stopped him and was shot in the process. Corkins told the FBI he chose his target using the SPLC’s map. The organization never acknowledged what its list had set in motion.
The SPLC promulgates falsehoods — or what progressives might call “misinformation” — not only when borderline defaming individuals and organizations, but in its attempts to refute the claims set forth by those people and groups. In one article, the SPLC insists that “sterilization” is merely “an alleged medical risk” (emphasis mine) of “gender-affirming health care for children,” which is based on “myths, pseudoscience, and flawed historical comparisons to eugenics.” The SPLC further asserts that children are not receiving procedures that would render them infertile, nor does hormonal therapy pose fertility risks. This is difficult to reconcile with the fact that a reality-television show revealed to the world that Jazz Jennings, a male, underwent (botched) surgeries to construct a pseudo-vagina before age 18. Then there’s all the scientific data and personal anecdotes about how hormonal therapy can lead to infertility. Even Planned Parenthood produced materials for students as young as middle-schoolers conceding that puberty-blocking drugs may have long-term fertility consequences, saying they “might change someone’s body permanently, like affecting whether they can get or cause a pregnancy when they are older.” In another post, the SPLC claims that “anti-transgender” and right-wing individuals rely on “junk science” and “disinformation” — ignoring piles of evidence to prove that the so-called studies in support of medicalized gender interventions are not only wrong, but entirely nonsense. (For more thorough descriptions of large-scale scientific reviews on “gender-affirming care,” see some of my reporting here and here and here.)
Like the ACLU (which still does good stuff), the SPLC was once engaged in a honorable mission, but that mission has become ideologically tainted. It’s not clear whether the government’s charges that the organization gave money to informants, enriching the very organizations it was spying on, will hold water. But even if they don’t, the SPLC has outlived its usefulness, and I would be glad if it disappeared.
Three people in California have been sentenced for insurance fraud in a bizarre scam that involved someone dressed in a bear costume damaging luxury cars.
The California Insurance Department said the three used a person in a bear suit to stage fake attacks inside a Rolls-Royce and two Mercedes in 2024, then submitted fraudulent claims seeking nearly $142,000 in payouts from insurance companies. The department called it “Operation Bear Claw.”
Two Los Angeles-area men and a woman pleaded no contest to felony insurance fraud and were sentenced to a weekend jail program, followed by probation, the department said in a news release Thursday. Two of them were ordered to pay over $50,000 in restitution.
A fourth person faces a court hearing in September.
The group is accused of providing several videos from the San Bernardino Mountains of a bear moving inside the vehicles to the insurance companies as part of their damage claims, the department said. Photos provided by the insurance department show what appeared to be scratches on the seats and doors.
AD
A California Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist reviewed the footage and concluded it was “clearly a human in a bear suit,” the insurance department said.
After executing a search warrant, detectives found the bear costume in the suspects’ home, the department said.
A news video showing the suit. Opposable thumbs!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, two geezers commiserate:
Hili: Once, the world was better.
Andrzej: Not exactly, but we were younger and stronger.
In Polish:
Hili: Dawniej świat był lepszy.
Ja: Nie bardzo, ale my byliśmy młodsi i silniejsi.
From Masih; four Iranian women protestors waiting to be hanged (for protesting):
These 4 women receive death sentences simply for demanding freedom in Iran and right now sitting in prison, waiting to be hanged.
Where are the left and Liberal in America?
Why are the leaders of feminists movement so quiet?
Where are the progressive leaders?
From Luana: I’m not a huge fan of Francis Widdowson, but it’s wrong, and a violation of free speech (which Canada apparently doesn’t allow) to demonize (and arrest) her for questioning whether the bodies of indigenous people have been buried when there is simply no evidence that this claim is true.
This is a political arrest. There are NO MASS GRAVES of indigenous students.
Questioning the narrative is heresy.
Shut people up by arresting them for trespassing. https://t.co/5RWlmOvyft
From Matthew; Katie Mack is a physicist and science communicator. See the link for the quoted post, which is about relativity being necessary to use GPS satellites accurately.
When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it.Anyway: fund basic research.
