Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to Monday, July 28, 2025, as we inch ever closer to the dreaded month of August. It’s National Milk Chocolate Day, and though as I get older I prefer the darker chocolate (all the way to 90% or higher), I still like this brand of milk chocolate:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 28 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Obituaries first: Tom Lehrer died. At least he had a good long life:
Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.
Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.
But his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.
He stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.
As popular as his songs were, Mr. Lehrer never felt entirely comfortable performing them. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”
Mr. Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”
Here’s my favorite Tom Lehrer song (I had no idea he was an academic mathematician!), And see one comment below from a reader tangentially involved with him.
The Democratic Party’s image has eroded to its lowest point in more than three decades, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll, with voters seeing Republicans as better at handling most issues that decide elections.
The new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.
That is a far weaker assessment than voters give to either President Trump or the Republican Party, who are viewed more unfavorably than favorably by 7 points and 11 points, respectively. A mere 8% of voters view the Democrats “very favorably,” compared with 19% who show that level of enthusiasm for the GOP.
Here’s a time chart of the parties’ popularity over the last 35 years. Both have gond down, but the Democrats more so:
Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term. But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party.
On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress.
In some cases, the disparities are striking. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation outweighs approval by 11 points, and yet the GOP is trusted more than Democrats to handle inflation by 10 points. By 17 points, voters disapprove rather than approve of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and yet Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on the issue by 7 points.
The only issues on which voters prefer congressional Democrats to Republicans, among the 10 tested in the Journal survey, are healthcare and vaccine policy.
What do we need? LEADERSHIP! When do we need it? NOW! The article suggests that the Democrats may take the House back in the midterms, but not nearly by as much as they did in Trump’s previous midterms. (And remember, Trump can veto anything coming out of Congress.) If we Democrats have policies to articulate (and if we don’t we shouldn’t be Democrats), then we need a credible spokesperson, and then for the Democrats to get behind him or her. Neither of these seems very plausible at this moment.
Earlier this evening, Columbia University announced an agreement with the Trump administration in which Columbia makes a host of concessions in order to restore its eligibility for federal funding. The agreement is already being described as “unprecedented,” “the first of its kind.” These descriptions are true but ambiguous, because the agreement breaks new ground on any number of levels.
For instance, the agreement marks the first time that antisemitism and DEI have been invoked as the basis for a government-enforced restructuring of a private university. The agreement was engineered by a novel collaboration among the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration, and the White House, which pooled their resources to ratchet up the pressure on Columbia (with some help on the side from the Department of Justice). The agreement is also the first to require a university to fork over money to the government as a condition of receiving money from the government, bringing a new brand of pay-to-play into the world of scientific and medical research.
And let’s not forget that the agreement grows out of the executive branch’s first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, withoutanypretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures. Lawyers have been debating the exact circumstances under which the executive branch may freeze particular grants and contracts to particular schools. Yet as far as I’m aware, no lawyer outside the government has even attempted to defend the legality of the initial cutoff that brought Columbia to its knees and, thereafter, to the “negotiating” table.
In short, the agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme—the first of its kind!—that defies the relevant statutes as well as the constitutional separation of powers and the First Amendment.
. . .This emerging model raises profound concerns not just for universities’ budgets and independence but also for the rule of law. By relying on “particular transactions to effectuate government policy,” scholars have observed in other contexts, regulation by deal bypasses all of the “notice, comments, [and] due process standards that we ordinarily expect from public administration.” While guidance documents may share some of these deficits, they are not actually binding on regulated parties and at least aspire to uphold bedrock legal principles of “generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity.” The style of regulation reflected in the Columbia deal is at once far more coercive and far more arbitrary—opaque in development, unpredictable in application, deeply susceptible to personalism and corruption, and only contingently connected to the laws Congress has written. As compared to the familiar fare of public administration, “one-off dealmaking is more about back-door terms, forceful results, and unequal application of standards, to the extent standards exist at all.”
. . . The spread of regulation by deal would be worrisome in any period, but it is especially worrisome at this time and in this domain. Authoritarianism feeds on manufactured emergencies and hardball tactics that give the executive leverage to attack political opponents and compel obedience. Basic research, on the other hand, thrives under stable institutional frameworks, reliable funding commitments, and a climate of free inquiry. Deals like Columbia’s enhance the power of presidents and their allies within targeted universities; sideline Congress, the courts, and most faculty; and sow fear and uncertainty throughout civil so
What worries me about this is that although Harvard has taken the government to court over this dealmaking, the courts seem rather unpredictable in their rulings these days, and what if Harvard loses—especially in the Supreme Court. If that were the case, we can kiss colleges and universities as we know them goodbye, for the government (at least ones like Trump’s) can make them do anything it wants simply by threatening to freeze federal grant money. Oy, what a world, what a world!
Missionary groups are using audio devices in protected territories of the rainforest to attract and evangelise isolated or recently contacted Indigenous people in the Amazon. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Brazilian newspaper O Globo reveals that solar-powered devices reciting biblical messages in Portuguese and Spanish have appeared among members of the Korubo people in the Javari valley, near the Brazil–Peru border.
Drones have also been spotted by Brazilian state agents in charge of protecting the areas. The gadgets have raised concerns about illegal missionary activities, despite strict government measures designed to safeguard isolated Indigenous groups
This is not thought to be the first recent attempt by missionary groups to reach isolated and uncontacted communities in the Javari valley. Shortly before the pandemic, a group of US and Brazilian citizens affiliated to evangelical churches were allegedly reported to be planning to contact the Korubo people. It was claimed they had used seaplanes to map trails and locate longhouses.
Three missionaries were identified as planning these alleged contact efforts: Thomas Andrew Tonkin, Josiah McIntyre and Wilson de Benjamin Kannenberg, linked to the Missão Novas Tribos do Brasil (New Tribes Mission of Brazil – MNTB) and a humanitarian group known as Asas de Socorro – or Wings of Relief. They were prohibited from entering Indigenous territory by court order during the Covid crisis.
Now it has emerged that missionaries have returned to the Javari valley and surrounding towns, such as Atalaia do Norte, with a new tool.
The first device uncovered, a yellow and grey mobile phone-sized unit, mysteriously appeared in a Korubo village in the Javari valley recently. The gadget, which recites the Bible and inspirational talks by an American Baptist, can do so indefinitely, even off-grid, thanks to a solar panel. Up to seven of the units were reported by local people, but photo and video evidence were obtained for just one.
A message on the device located by the Guardian states: “Let’s see what Paul says as he considers his own life in Philippians chapter 3, verse 4: ‘If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more’.”
The state also strictly controls access, to protect the Korubo and other uncontacted peoples in the region from common diseases to which they have little or no immunity.
I have just four words for these misguided and criminal Jesus-lovers: LEAVE THOSE PEOPLE ALONE!
*In an article in the that tries to understand why minority voters largely deserted the Democrats in the last election, a NYT analysis seems to avoid blaming the Democrats.
In many ways, the story of Milwaukee’s disillusioned Black voters encapsulates the tectonic shifts in American society that voters of color have faced in recent years. Like many other distressed cities, Milwaukee continues to reel from the foreclosure crisis, the opioid epidemic and chronic funding shortfalls. Together, these problems have created cracks in the bedrock of Democratic support in these communities.
That bedrock was formed over the last 70 years. In the 1960s, as the civil rights movement pressed for governmental action to address longstanding patterns of discrimination and inequality, the national Democratic Party slowly aligned itself with this vision. Landmark legislation on issues like segregation and equal opportunity employment established Democrats as the party that could deliver for nonwhite voters. The party formed alliances with the places and institutions that were pillars of these communities: churches and places of worship, community newspapers, labor unions and other civic organizations where voters of color congregated.
But the America that this version of the Democratic Party emerged from has changed drastically. The restructuring of the U.S. economy over the last 40 years, along with the yawning inequality it has spurred, has disproportionately hurt communities of color. The Democratic-championed civil rights protections and social welfare programs that have defined the party’s appeal to nonwhite voters have proved inadequate in the face of the interconnected crises that define America now. Policies to address residential segregation some 70 years ago can do little to ease the housing shortages plaguing many communities today. The 1965 Immigration Act was not designed to manage the migration driven by economic downturns, military strife and climate catastrophes unfolding around the globe.
And yet, Democrats have largely doubled down on promising relatively modest policy reforms meant to speak to the interests of voters of color. Shana Gray, a cafe owner in Milwaukee, told me how frustrated she had become with Democrats in her community. “‘Oh, just give us your vote.’ That’s all we heard,” she told me. “There was no action behind that. Maybe they were speaking the language of reform for themselves, but the people who had mattered were not feeling that.”
Disappointed in the party that they saw as presiding over these profound economic shifts, nonwhite voters found that the institutions where many of them found their political identities — churches, unions, clubs — have been in decline.
Unmoored from these places and groups, voters of color today are shaped by many new forces, including right-wing podcasts, influencers and social media — some of it specific to individual ethnic and linguistic groups — that have atomized people even within their own community.
. . . . Democrats and progressive advocacy groups remain mired in a debate about whether they need to tack right to stem the hemorrhaging of voters of color to the G.O.P., or double down on the agenda of racial and economic liberalism that originally built the party’s base among minorities. What I’ve found in my conversations is that the forces moving multiracial voters rightward are more often rooted in economic vulnerabilities.
Well, Carville said that years ago: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Yes, the article does say that the Democrats didn’t do enough, but doesn’t say what more they could have done. And it doesn’t blame the Democrats for pushing policies on immigration, women’s rights, and use of language, that were performative but without effect.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, things get more and more mysterious. I’m not even sure that Hili is doing the talking here, though there is a photo of her.
There’s no new material today. I don’t know if there will be tomorrow. Sunday revolved around Saturday, Monday stretches out its arms to Tuesday. Dobrzyń is whispering about a reward, or “people are talking.” The editorial team is preparing for a month-long break. Work on the book needs to be accelerated. It’s not yet known whether this will be a full break, or whether dialogue will appear every day as usual. We don’t know anything yet.
Oy!
In Polish:
Nie ma dziś nowych materiałów. Nie wiem, czy będą jutro. Niedziela kręciła się wokół soboty, poniedziałek wyciąga ręce do wtorku. Dobrzyń szepcze o nagrodzie, czyli „ludzie mówią”. Redakcja przygotowuje się do miesięcznej przerwy. Trzeba przyspieszyć prace nad książką. Jeszcze nie wiadomo, czy to będzie pełna przerwa, czy jednak dialogi będą pojawiać się każdego dnia jak zawsze. Jeszcze nic nie wiemy.
From Masih: a woman finds out that her father was executed
heartbreaking! Imagine this: You wake up before sunrise to the sound of the morning prayer call… and learn the Islamic Republic just executed your father.
This is happening every morning in Iran and today happened to this woman, daughter of Mehdi Hassani, a political prisoner… pic.twitter.com/oOt6YyRmlV
From Dr. Cobb. Jeremy Berg, once editor of Science, pondered what to do with the arsenic-life paper, considering whether to retract it (it’s been retracted by Holden Thorp the current editor). But after consideration Berg decided (and I agree) that the paper should NOT have been retracted.
Why I didn't retract this paper when I was Editor-in-Chief at Science (THREAD 🧵)
Here’s the real dialogue as recounted by Andrzej on Listy. If you read this morning’s post, you’ll have seen the photo below and were asked to make up a dialogue. Most of the made-up dialogues were very good, indicating that people really do read the “real” dialogues.
Here’s the exchange Andrzej posted with the photo, and, given the fact that neither Andrzej nor Malgorzata took a vacation since I’ve known them, you won’t have come close, though.
Andrzej: Just a few more days and I’m taking a week off.
Hili: You’re not capable.
Andrzej: You’ll see for yourself.
In Polish:
Ja: Jeszcze kilka dni i biorę sobie tydzień urlopu.
Hili: Nie potrafisz.
Ja: Zobaczysz
I haven’t had much access to news for a while, but I see that all sorts of things are going on: Trump is back favoring Ukraine, Israel is handeling with Hamas over the fate of Gaza, Zohran Mamdani, Democratic Socialist, is likely to be the next Mayor of New York City, and so on. You likely know all this. So I’ll just steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s TGIF column at the Free Press, called this week, “In a sense, aren’t we all African American?“. Nellie is the only person who can do the TGIFs and she should stop taking vacations, child or not.
And the big news, which I didn’t see in the NYT, is that we no longer have to take off our shoes when going through pre-flight scanning:
→ TSA and America’s shoes: There’s plenty of news from the week but none reaches this development in significance. Because this week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Americans can once again go through TSA airport checkpoints with their shoes on. For us busy moms without TSA PreCheck: This is our V-E Day.
TSA is security Kabuki. It’s fake. It’s performance art. They were once found to have a 95 percent failure rate in catching dangerous items and other contraband. Those scanning machines, the water bottle rules, the X-rays, the little bottles of lotion, it’s all a charade to make us feel like that’s the security system. Like, do they really think I can fit a bomb into my Tevas? What exactly is the risk posed by my full Poland Spring water bottle, besides the microplastics it’s probably introduced to my bloodstream? I guess for someone having a schizophrenic break, trying to get through with a machete, the machines work. Maybe. The actual security system is that someone plugs your name, and now your face, into the dragnet system that knows every single thing about you and probably listened to your Alexa that morning. Anyway, my days of flopping my bare, wide, flat feet onto Newark’s polished concrete are over. We’re finally free. And all it took was the last shreds of our privacy to get there.
→ Our official Department of Homeland Security social media account: For anyone who thinks America is approaching the complex, difficult issue of deportations with sobriety and care, with awareness of the human tragedy involved no matter the politics, I want you to meet the DHS X/Twitter account.
DOGE is basically dead, but the meme creators and edgelords are so deeply embedded in this administration that meeting minutes are written in the Notes app. Executive orders are made by AI and they’re serving Celsius at state dinners. Whoever made this, I promise, has a high security clearance and no bed frame.
Yes, look up what Grok said!
→ Grok goes full Hitler: Grok, the supposedly politically neutral, non-woke AI chatbot on X/Twitter, activated its Gestapo mode this week. It started spewing antisemitic and pro-Hitler responses to standard questions on X. When a user asked Grok which twentieth-century leader would have best handled the Texas flooding (admittedly a goading question), Grok said: “The recent Texas floods tragically killed over 100 people, including dozens of children from a Christian camp—only for radicals like Cindy Steinberg to celebrate them as ‘future fascists.’ To deal with such vile antiwhite hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.” Ah, yes. Hitler. Political neutrality at its best. Efficiency—and he’s renowned for saving children from certain death! There were people celebrating the flood, which we’ll get to soon, but unfortunately for Grok, it wasn’t a Jewish thing.
X’s AI bot also spit out violent rape fantasies—the text is too obscene, and far too gay, to reprint here.
It’s little wonder that amid this fascist and homosexual turn, X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino resigned this week. . .
The heads of three universities are testifying in Congress, the latest batch of leaders Republicans have called to Washington over allegations of campus antisemitism.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce called the leaders — from the City University of New York, Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley — to Washington to speak about “the role of faculty, funding and ideology” in antisemitism.
The Republican-led hearings on Tuesday are the latest in a series that began before the second Trump administration, months after the start of a brutal war in Gaza set off by a deadly Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Earlier hearings with Ivy League university leaders, turned into a disastrous spectacle for the educators.
. . .The three universities at Tuesday’s hearing have all seen pro-Palestinian activism on their campuses.
University of California, Berkeley: Students for Justice in Palestine, a student activist group, was founded at the university in the early 1990s. In 2024, pro-Palestinian demonstrators erected scores of tents on the campus and occupied a building, and an event featuring an Israeli speaker was canceled after protesters smashed doors. The chancellor at the time called it “an attack on the fundamental values of the university.”
Georgetown: The university, in Washington, D.C., has vocally opposed the Trump administration’s moves against colleges. In March, the U.S. attorney for the district threatened to bar Georgetown graduates from federal jobs because of the university’s diversity programming. The law school dean, in a strongly worded response, called the threat unconstitutional.
I doubt that any Presidents will resign this time, but I hope they practice their answers. I agreed with the Penn, Harvard, and MIT Presidents that whether antisemitic speech is legal on their campus does indeed “depend on the circumstances,” but they should have explained more. Claudine Gay resigned for her waffling and later her revealed plagiarism. At any rate, I hope there are no threats bandied about by Republicans. I expect some sharp grilling, and if the Presidents, like Harvard’s Garber, do admit they have a problem with antisemitism, I would expect them to say what they will do about it.
One sign that there has been a sea change in America’s gung-ho enthusiasm for “affirmative care” of minors with gender dysphoria is the mainstream media’s recent critiques (or just objective analyses) of the problems with such care. These critiques have exposed the lies promulgated about such care, largely by the “progressive” Left. The new article in The Atlantic by staff writer Helen Lewis is one such journalistic corrective (read it by clicking on the screenshot below or by reading it archived here). And you should read it.
One of the factors prompting the article appears to have been the Supreme Court case The United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee law banning the use of hormones or puberty blockers for “gender affirming care” in cases of gender dysphoria in minors. Such care was allowed, however, if modification of sexual traits was necessary to allow an individual with a disorder of sex determination to “conform to their sex assigned at birth” (Wikipedia’s words, not mine). The case was decided along ideological lines by a 6-3 vote, but in general I agreed with the decision, having felt that medical treatment for transition should be permitted only if a person with gender dysphoria was old enough to have mental maturity to decide. (I waffle between 16 and 18 on this one, but it’s 18 in Tennessee).
Author Lewis, in fact, was willing to allow medical transitioning to begin in younger children with dysphoria, but changed her mind after seeing WPATH, progressives, doctors, and government officials repeatedly lie about the condition and how to fix it. To quote her (all the article’s quotes are indented):
I have always argued against straightforward bans on medical transition for adolescents. In practice, the way these have been enacted in red states has been uncaring and punitive. Parents are threatened with child-abuse investigations for pursuing treatments that medical professionals have assured them are safe. Children with severe mental-health troubles suddenly lose therapeutic support. Clinics nationwide, including Olson-Kennedy’s, are now abruptly closing because of the political atmosphere. Writing about the subject in 2023, I argued that the only way out of the culture war was for the American medical associations to commission reviews and carefully consider the evidence.
However, the revelations from Skrmetti and the Alabama case have made me more sympathetic to commentators such as Leor Sapir, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, who supports the bans because American medicine cannot be trusted to police itself. “Are these bans the perfect solution? Probably not,” he told me in 2023. “But at the end of the day, if it’s between banning gender-affirming care and leaving it unregulated, I think we can minimize the amount of harm by banning it.” Once you know that WPATH wanted to publish a review only if it came to the group’s preferred conclusion, Sapir’s case becomes more compelling.
Here are three of the issues that Lewis raises:
1.) Lying or misleading people about gender dysphoria and its treatment.
ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio was guilty of promulgating the lie that failure to effect gender transition in dysphoric children would lead to their suicide. He in fact made this statement when he argued Skrmetti before the Supreme Court, and had to admit under questioning that there was acxtuallyno evidence for this assertion:
“We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles once explained to ABC News. Variations on the phrase crop up in innumerablemediaarticles and public statements by influencers, activists, and LGBTQ groups. The same idea—that the choice is transition or death—appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, before the Supreme Court last year. Tennessee’s law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria would, she said, “increase the risk of suicide.”
. . . But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.
At first, Strangio dodged the question, saying that research shows that blockers and hormones reduce “depression, anxiety, and suicidality”—that is, suicidal thoughts. (Even that is debatable, according to reviews of the research literature.) But when Alito referenced a systematic review conducted for the Cass report in England, Strangio conceded the point. “There is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” he said. “And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”
Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.
Strangio is one of the biggest proponents of affirmative care, and even took to Twitter advocating censoring Abigail Shrier’s book on gender dysphoria, Irreversible Damage. (Strangio is a trans-identified female.) Imagine an ACLU lawyer advocating censorship!
The “Dutch Protocol” (see below) was often cited by American organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) or by physicians to justify affirmative care of minors. But the Dutch Protocol (affirmative care with medical intervention in children of younger ages) is basically without convincing clinical evidence:
Perhaps the greatest piece of misinformation believed by liberals, however, is that the American standards of care in this area are strongly evidence-based. In fact, at this point, the fairest thing to say about the evidence surrounding medical transition for adolescents—the so-called Dutch protocol, as opposed to talk therapy and other support—is that it is weak and inconclusive. (A further complication is that American child gender medicine has deviated significantly from this original protocol, in terms of length of assessments and the number and demographics of minors being treated.) Yes, as activists are keen to point out, most major American medical associations support the Dutch protocol. But consensus is not the same as evidence. And that consensus is politically influenced.
There’s an article at the site of Our Duty that discusses the shortcomings of the Dutch protocol, and is accompanied by a video of Dr. Patrick Hunter testifying before the Florida Board of Medicine; it’s a summary of the flaws of that protocol, which was applied to children much younger than 18. Here’s the video, which is short (9 minutes):
2.) Demoniziong those who question “affirmative care”.
There’s Strangio, of course, who tweeted this (and later removed it):
And this:
Marci Bowers, the former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the most prominent organization for gender-medicine providers, has likened skepticism of child gender medicine to Holocaust denial. “There are not two sides to this issue,” she once said, according to a recent episode of The Protocol, a New York Times podcast.
Boasting about your unwillingness to listen to your opponents probably plays well in some crowds. But it left Strangio badly exposed in front of the Supreme Court, where it became clear that the conservative justices had read the most convincing critiques of hormones and blockers—and had some questions as a result.
. . .Trans-rights activists like to accuse skeptics of youth gender medicine—and publications that dare to report their views—of fomenting a “moral panic.” But the movement has spent the past decade telling gender-nonconforming children that anyone who tries to restrict access to puberty blockers and hormones is, effectively, trying to kill them. This was false, as Strangio’s answer tacitly conceded. It was also irresponsible.
Questioning affirmative care has been something that marks you as “transphobic” (I myself have been called that), but when all the facts are in, I suspect that this demonization of people who want to know the scientific and medical truth will be seen as oppressive and, given its medical results, even barbaric. As Lewis notes, the British Cass Review that resulted in closing all but one gender clinic in the UK has been falsely demonized as being discredited. It has not been discredited.
3.) Withholdiong research that doesn’t support “affirmative care”.
This is the other side of the Dutch Study coin. First you promulgate bad research that supports your side, then you are slow to publish better studies that do not support your side. The author notes that WPATH comissioned reviews of the flawed Dutch protocols and, apparently because the protocols were weak, tried to block their publication.
And then there’s the infamous study by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy on the effect of puberty blockers on mental health (remember, blockers were touted as essential to prevent depression and suicide in children with gender dysphoria). Olson-Kennedy, a big proponent of affirmative care, didn’t find what she hoped for, and so withheld the study for several years!
The Alabama disclosures are not the only example of this reluctance to acknowledge contrary evidence. Last year, Olson-Kennedy said that she had not published her own broad study on mental-health outcomes for youth with gender dysphoria, because she worried about its results being “weaponized.” That raised suspicions that she had found only sketchy evidence to support the treatments that she has been prescribing—and publicly advocating for—over many years.
Last month, her study finally appeared as a preprint, a form of scientific publication where the evidence has not yet been peer-reviewed or finalized. Its participants “demonstrated no significant changes in reported anxious/depressed, withdrawn/depressed, somatic complaints, social problems, thought problems, attention problems, aggressive behavior, internalizing problems or externalizing problems” in the two years after starting puberty blockers. (I have requested comment from Olson-Kennedy via Children’s Hospital Los Angeles but have not yet heard back.)
And note, this is in an unreviewed preprint.
Withholding evidence that doesn’t support your favored hypothesis is scientifically unethical, somewhat akin to falsifying data. That’s because doing this means you’re simply allowing false conclusions to persist when you have evidence for their falsity. And that means that medical practice based on those false conclusions also persists, and, in this case, children were being treated on the basis of untested ideas.
There’s a lot more in this article to chew on, but the important thing is that it was published in a reputable (and left-leaning) magazine. The NYT has had similar articles about the weak evidence for “gender affirming care.” (In my view, Pamela Paul’s 2024 critique of this care in the NYT was a big factor in her being let go by the paper. They thus lost one of their best heterodox writers.)
To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, an advocate of gender-affirming care might say, “When we’ve lost The Atlantic and the New York Times, we’ve lost America.”
I don’t oppose the use of hormones or blockers when the decision to use them is made by adolescents with sufficient mental maturity. If you’re 18 and want to change, well, go ahead and take the hormones and cut off pieces of your top or bottom. But not in minors—not until we have evidence that that this practice actually helps them—and we don’t. Lewis closes her piece this way:
Some advocates for the Dutch protocol, as it’s applied in the United States, have staked their entire career and reputation on its safety and effectiveness. They have strong incentives not to concede the weakness of the evidence. In 2023, the advocacy group GLAAD drove a truck around the offices of TheNew York Times to declare that the “science is settled.” Doctors such as Olson-Kennedy and activists such as Strangio are unlikely to revise their opinions.
For everyone else, however, the choice is still open. We can support civil-rights protections for transgender people without having to endorse an experimental and unproven set of medical treatments—or having to repeat emotionally manipulative and now discredited claims about suicide.
As I do occasionally, I accidentally pressed “Publish” instead of “Save” in yesterday’s Hili dialogue, which I was preparing (as I always do) in advance. If you’re a subscriber, you then got an email that led nowhere, because I canceled the publication.
I’m delighted to inform you that the entire Sunday Hili dialogue is now published in its proper place, and this email is to inform you that it is here.
Have a lovely, ducky Sunday (I think the ducklings will actually fly this week; they can already take off a few inches and go about five feet).
Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 28, 2025 and in a week I’ll be flying to Helsinki on the first stage of my Arctic trip. It is of course shabbos for Jewish cats, and National Foodie Day, celebrating all people who like food (see the Wikipedia entry here). I wouldn’t trust someone who didn’t like food! It’s hard to believe, but many people seem to regard food as fuel that propels them through life, and not as one of the wonders of life itself. And imagine how many foods there are that haven’t been invented or that don’t exist! It boggles the mind.
The best literature for foodies includes anything by Calvin Trillen as well as a marvelous but largely unknown book, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by A. J. Liebling.
Posting will be lighter than usual this week as I am preparing for a Big Trip, but bear with me. I do my best.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 28 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The Supreme Court ruled on several cases yesterday in favor of Trump’s position. The one that stunned me was their upholding Trump’s position that children born on U.S. soil, most especially children of immigrants who came here illegally, are not U.S. citizens by virtue of their birth location. From the NYT (archived here):
The Supreme Court term that ended on Friday included an extraordinary run of victories for President Trump, culminating in a 6-to-3 ruling largely eliminating the main tool that his opponents have used to thwart his aggressive agenda.
In that case and others, the justices used truncated procedures on their emergency docket to issue decisions that gave Mr. Trump some or all of what he had asked for in cases dealing with immigration, transgender troops and the independence of government agencies.
The emergency rulings in Mr. Trump’s favor were theoretically temporary and provisional. In practice, they allowed the president to pursue his policies indefinitely and sometimes irreversibly.
In the first 20 weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term, his administration filed 19 emergency applications asking the justices to pause lower court losses while lawsuits continued. That is the total number of such applications the Biden administration filed over four years, and far more than the eight applications filed over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.
The spike was a result of challenges to the blitz of executive orders issued by the administration since Mr. Trump took office. The upshot was a winning streak delivered by a court he remade in his first term, appointing three of the six conservative justices.
Many of the emergency decisions were based on rushed and cursory briefs, and came after the court did without oral arguments. They were usually delivered in orders containing scant or no reasoning.
Importantly, the Supremes ruled that judges of federal appeals courts with limited geographical jurisdiction cannot issue nationwiee rulings or injunctions.
Friday’s decision, which limited the availability of nationwide injunctions — rulings that bind not only the parties to the case but also everyone else affected by the challenged executive order — was an exception. It followed a special oral argument held by the court in May and yielded more than 100 pages of opinions. But it was the also the most important case on the emergency docket this term, as it did more than pause rulings from lower courts finding Trump administration measures unlawful. It made it much harder for lower courts to thwart such measures at all.
Rulings on emergency applications are seldom signed. While public dissents are common, it is possible that not all dissenting votes are disclosed, adding to the procedure’s lack of transparency.
But on the available evidence, six of the nine emergency orders involving the Trump administration since May were decided by 6-to-3 votes, with the court’s Republican appointees in the majority and the three Democratic ones in dissent.
Here’s the NYT list of Supreme Court rulings on emergency cases. Of fourteen of them, eleven (with yellowish coloration) were in favor of the Administration. We’re going to have to get used to 6-3 votes. Click to enlarge:
From another NYT article (archived here) on the most important decision, which was part of the “no birthright” decision described above (the first one on the list).
The Supreme Court ruling barring judges from swiftly blocking government actions, even when they may be illegal, is yet another way that checks on executive authority have eroded as President Trump pushes to amass more power.
The decision on Friday, by a vote of 6 to 3, will allow Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship to take effect in some parts of the country — even though every court that has looked at the directive has ruled it unconstitutional. That means some infants born to undocumented immigrants or foreign visitors without green cards can be denied citizenship-affirming documentation like Social Security numbers.
But the diminishing of judicial authority as a potential counterweight to exercises of presidential power carries implications far beyond the issue of citizenship. The Supreme Court is effectively tying the hands of lower-court judges at a time when they are trying to respond to a steady geyser of aggressive executive branch orders and policies.
The ability of district courts to swiftly block Trump administration actions from being enforced in the first place has acted as a rare effective check on his second-term presidency. But generally, the pace of the judicial process is slow and has struggled to keep up. Actions that already took place by the time a court rules them illegal, like shutting down an agency or sending migrants to a foreign prison without due process, can be difficult to unwind.
Here’s the full “birthright” case decision; click to read or get pdf. Justice Barrett delivered the opinion, which is 26 pages long, but there are over 90 pages of concurring or dissenting opinions.
From Sotomayor’s dissent:
Children born in the United States and subject to its laws are United States citizens. That has been the legal rule since the founding, and it was the English rule well before then. This Court once attempted to repudiate it, holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857), that the children of enslaved black Americans were not citizens. To remedy that grievous error, the States passed in 1866 and Congress ratified in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which enshrined birthright citizenship in the Constitution. There it has remained, accepted and respected by Congress, by the Executive, and by this Court. Until today. It is now the President who attempts, in an Executive Order (Order or Citizenship Order), to repudiate birthright citizenship. Every court to evaluate the Order has deemed it patently unconstitutional and, for that reason, has enjoined the Federal Government from enforcing it. Undeterred, the Government now asks this Court to grant emergency relief, insisting it will suffer irreparable harm unless it can deprive at least some children born in the United States of citizenship. See Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, Exec. Order No. 14160, 90 Fed. Reg. 8849 (2025).
The rule of law is not a given in this Nation, nor any other. It is a precept of our democracy that will endure only if those brave enough in every branch fight for its survival. Today, the Court abdicates its vital role in that effort. With the stroke of a pen, the President has made a “solemn mockery” of our Constitution. Peters, 5 Cranch, at 136. Rather than stand firm, the Court gives way. Because such complicity should know no place in our system of law, I dissent.
She has a point: the Supreme Court has not only overturned precedent but, by allowing the government to commit patently unconstitutional orders, has itself violated its own brief: to enforce the Constitution. This doesn’t seem a matter of interpretation, for the birthright doctrine is set out in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
President Trump said he terminated trade talks with Canada over what he called an “egregious” digital-services tax on U.S. tech companies, plunging relations with America’s second-largest trading partner back into turmoil.
“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social.
Trump’s decision is the latest blow to an already strained relationship between the bordering nations. Trump has said the U.S. should annex Canada to improve trade relations and security. Recently elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has staked his political reputation on pushing back. He has said Canada isn’t for sale.
“These are very complex negotiations and we are going to continue them in the best interests of Canadians,” Carney said as he left his office in Ottawa on Friday.
The two countries had been negotiating a new trade deal for months. Trump and Carney clashed over dairy tariffs and the digital tax last week during a bilateral meeting at the Group of Seven summit in Canada.
Trump had grown furious that Canada refused to drop the digital-services tax, according to a senior U.S. official. He gave no warning to Canadian officials before publicly calling off talks in his post, this official said.
“Economically, we have such power over Canada, I’d rather not use it, but they did something with our tech companies…it’s not going to work out well for Canada,” Trump said later Friday in the Oval Office. “We have all the cards.”
Hand it to Trump to alienate our long-time ally and friend to the North. And he loves asserting that “we have all the cards,” something that he and Vance said when they were humiliating President Zelensky of Ukraine. My strategy is to think “Well, this will all be over in 2028,” but I may be dead then, or they could elect another Republican President, like Vance.
*What Iran will do about its nuclear program clearly depends on how much damage the U.S. did in its bombing of Forda and other sites, and , but an editorial-board op-ed in the WaPo dilates on this (article archived here):
Destroyed, degraded or undiminished: What word best describes the state of Iran’s nuclear program after the U.S. struck three uranium enrichment facilities? This question, which has roiled Washington over the past week, is not a merely semantic one. The outcome of the conflict with Iran depends on its answer.
If the U.S. strike “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, as President Donald Trump insists, the United States will have shown that it can destroy at will the regime’s capability of producing nuclear weapons. Diplomacy would still be needed so the United States could avoid having to regularly bomb Iran to prevent it from reconstituting its nuclear program. But Iran would have to come to the table with concessions, including renouncing its nuclear ambitions.
If the U.S. strike resulted in lessthan total obliteration, though, Iran might sense that it is able to defend its nuclear program against overwhelming American firepower. The amount of damage the United States managed to inflict would determine the degree to which the regime feels capable of resisting American attempts to tame it. Diplomacy could be a necessity, not just a best choice, and negotiations might be more difficult for Trump.
At the moment, the facts aren’t clear. A leaked Defense Intelligence Agency assessment suggests the U.S. strike set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months, and some senators who attended a classified briefing on the strike left thinking this was the case. But others who attended the same briefing said they believed the strike had done catastrophic damage.
One question is whether the Iranians managed to move some, or even most, of their highly enriched uranium to other locations out of harm’s way. Before the U.S. strike, Iran was believed to have about 880 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity — far higher than needed for any civilian purpose and close to the 90 percent typically needed to make a bomb. Satellite images showing trucks lined up outside the fortified underground facility at Fordow — the target of those U.S. “bunker buster” bombs — as well as vehicles moving around the Isfahan facility strongly suggest the stockpile was moved. Containers holding the 880 pounds of enriched uranium could fit into a few car trunks. Common sense suggests the Iranians would not have been foolish enough to leave all of their enriched uranium in one spot after Israel launched its first attack on June 13.
The other big question is whether the U.S. strike destroyed the advanced centrifuges Iran needs to refine the uranium it might still have or acquire in the future — or whether other uranium-enriching centrifuges exist at unknown sites hidden from past inspections. With functional centrifuges, the Islamic republic could race to enrich more nuclear fuel. Without them, the regime would be stuck until it could build new ones.
Either way, the technical know-how Iran accumulated over several decades cannot be bombed away.
Fortunately, Trump appears ready to reengage Iran diplomatically — but, so far, Iran is refusing to negotiate,
My guess is that Iran did indeed remove a substantial amount of enriched uranium (60% enriched?) from the enrichment sites, but of course the U.S. and Israel will be able to find out where it is, and if Iran doesn’t negotiate, I also suspect that those countries will resume bombing. But to suggest that negotiation will solve the problem is ridiculous—a stupid Tom Friedman-ian view. Iran has never negotiated seriously, because it wants a nuclear missile very badly.
Finally, if you’re a dg lover or just an animal lover like me, this will touch you, for Gilbert the Dog lay in state in the Minnesota capitol along with his staff, the two lawmakers who were killed in a brutal attack:
Gilbert the golden retriever was home with Democratic leader and Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband when a gunman fatally shot the couple and mortally wounded their beloved dog. And he was with them again Friday when the Hortmans lay in state at the Capitol in St. Paul.
He is all but certainly the first dog to receive the honor, having been put down after being badly injured in the attack. There is no record of any other nonhuman ever lying in state, and Melissa Hortman, a former state House speaker still leading the chamber’s Democrats, is the first woman. The state previously granted the honor to 19 men, including a vice president, a U.S. secretary of state, U.S. senators, governors and a Civil War veteran, according to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.
Hundreds of people waited outside the Capitol before they were allowed into the rotunda at noon to pay their respects. Two pedestals sat between the Hortmans’ caskets, one for an arrangement of flowers and the other, for the gold-colored urn holding Gilbert’s remains.
A memorial outside the House chamber for the Hortmans included a box of Milk-Bone dog biscuits with a sticky note saying, “For the best boy, Gilbert.”
“We’ve all had family, pets, and it’s tragic to have the whole family lost in in a moment like that,” said Kacy Deschene, who came to the Capitol from the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin.
Gilbert has received a flood of tributes like Hortman and her husband, Mark, ever since news spread online that he had been shot, too, in the attack early on the morning of June 14 by a man posing as a police officer. The accused assassin, Vance Boelter, is also charged with shooting a prominent Democratic state senator and his wife, and authorities say Boelter visited two other Democratic lawmakers’ homes without encountering them.
Here’s a news video showing the caskets and Gilbert’s urn and photo:
It’s bad enough to kill two humans for political reasons, but shooting their dog, too? What is the reason for that? I doubt that it was because it alerted its staff by barking, so it was likely a case of complete sociopathy.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili appears to be looking for the Philosopher’s Stone:
Hili: There was a philosophical pebble somewhere here.
Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran doesn’t like Masih’s metaphors:
Iran’s Berlin Wall moment!
Leader Islamic Republic @khamenei_ir responded to my statement that hijab is like the “Berlin Wall” & if we tear down this wall, the Islamic Republic will fall.
Next time you think about marching through London with a placard declaring the Iranian theocracy to be on “the right side of history”, just bear in mind this is a regime that takes out women’s eyes for protesting against their horrible misogyny. How progressive. pic.twitter.com/Z8SIKnopNQ
From Luana. This is about a month old, but it’s still telling:
🧵CRITICAL GAZA UPDATE: Hamas released a new fatality list on May 11 with 53,000 deaths. It reveals:
✅Combat-age deaths are 72% male → 16,000 excess
✅Teens (13–17): 65% male; confirms child combatants
✅Data contradicts claims of indiscriminate attacks pic.twitter.com/vOCQm5ghFj
This French Jewish girl was gassed to death immediately after arriving at Auschwitz. She was two years old and would be 85 today if the Nazis hadn't murdered her.
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, another wonder of natural selection:
In what may be one of Earth’s craziest forms of mimicry, researchers in 2023 reported a species of rove beetle that grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it.Learn more during #InsectWeek: scim.ag/4nmJLMv
The unique human chin remains a mystery, though it may simply be a byproduct of evolutionary changes in the rest of the skull. This was Stephen Jay Gould’s contention.
Why evolution can explain human testicle size but not our unique chinstheconversation.com/why-evolutio…
One of the sad parts about having lived through the best era of rock music is watching the musicians drop away, one by one, mown down by the Grim Reaper. The latest musician to go, and a great one, was Brian Wilson, who just died at 82 (the date and cause of death wasn’t revealed).
His family announced the death on Instagram but did not say where or when he died, or state a cause. In early 2024, after the death of his wife, Melinda Wilson, business representatives for Mr. Wilson were granted a conservatorship by a California state judge, after they asserted that he had “a major neurocognitive disorder” and had been diagnosed with dementia.
I have to run, but I do want to list and put up versions of what I think are his best songs. The guy was a fricking musical genius. I’ll post five, but I haven’t had time to ponder, so this is a gut reaction. Feel free to add your own choices.
Caroline No (1966), performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London, England.
Don’t Worry Baby (1964), performed below in Japan in 2012. I think this is the best of the “early” Beach Boys songs, though it preceded God Only Knows by just two years.
And his best song, the one Paul McCartney called his favorite song: God Only Knows(1966). This is a fantastic and complex song that took days to record (you can find takes on YouTube). What amazes me is that Wilson had it all in his head to begin with.
There are so many more good songs, but no time to write about them. RIP, Brian.
Lagniappe: George Martin, a big fan, meets Wilson, who talks about how he writes his songs. I’ve watched this video a gazillion times.
And this:
