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.
I decided to go on both Bluesky and Twitter, and leave Twitter only if it goes belly up. In the meantime, I’m at my usual Twitter site ( https://x.com/Evolutionistrue?lang=en), but now have this one, too:
And my first tweet was my latest post giving two videos of Molly Tuttle. Notice that Hili is still my avatar. If you don’t like Bluesky, just keep following me (if you do) on Twitter.
Two songs from the immensely talented bluegrass picker and singer Molly Tuttle. whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/11/22/t…
Bill Maher, rebuking the Democrats for losing the election, knocks it out of the park in this week’s 8-minute comedy/news bit. Although many people (viz., Laura Helmuth) are calling Republicans “stupid” for voting for Trump, Maher shows that there’s no shortage of stupidity among Democrats, either—especially in the “progressives.” As he says, “What good is liberalism if you don’t win elections?” According to Maher, the entire Democratic party has become “a Portlandia sketch.”
Maher excoriates Trump, of course, but I agree with him: if we’re going to win future elections, Democrats need to figure out why they lost an election that should have been a walk in the park. (I have to mention, because readers will bring it up, that Maher also implies that science showed that the covid virus spread because it escaped from the Wuhan lab, something that now seems improbable.)
Maher’s lesson is now familiar: make Democrats more centrist than progressive, and find out what’s going on with the other side. As he says, “Stop screaming at people to ‘get with the program’ and instead make a program worth getting with.” At the end he expresses his own disaffection at losing the chance of fixing the two things he cares most about: the environment and democracy.
After today’s photos, we have only tomorrow’s photos, the regular Sunday contribution by John Avise. After Sunday: bupkes! Please send in your wildlife photos.
Today we have the fifth and final set of photos taken by reader Chris Taylor on his recent trip to Queensland (see here for earlier photos). Chris’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
This is the final part of the photographs from Queensland.
In the final week of the trip, we spent the time back on the coast, visiting a number of locations.
This is the white form of the Pacific Reef Heron, Egretta sacra, seen on the rocks at Flying Fish Point.
There are a number of Mistletoes in Australia, most of which are parasitic on other trees and shrubs such as Eucalypts. The seed needs to be deposited on the branch of the host tree where it can germinate and grow its roots under the bark of the host tree. Mistletoes have coevolved with the Mistletoe Bird and a strategy has developed to ensure this is not left to chance. The seeds of the plant are enclosed in a fruit that attracts the bird to eat it. The seed quickly passes through the gut of the bird, which then defecates the seed onto the host plant. The seed retains a sticky coating which fixes the seed onto the branch, ready to grow and infect the host.
Nearby was one of the Clearwing Swallowtail butterflies, Cressida cressida. Unusually for a butterfly, they have few scales on the front wings, giving them a translucent appearance
Next, we went south to the area at the foot of the Wooroonooran range. The two highest peaks in Queensland, Mt Bartle Frere and Mount Bellenden Ker, are in this range. Although not tall by comparison to other mountain ranges, at only 1622m and 1593m elevation respectively, the range undoubtedly has a big effect on the weather of the Wet Tropics. We stopped in the town of Babinda, claims to be the wettest place in Australia, a distinction also claimed by the nearby town of Tully. Both of these towns have an annual average of more than 4.25 metres of rain. Because of the high rainfall, there are a number of pristine rivers flowing out of the range, such as Babinda Creek, here flowing out of the rainforest cloaking the slopes of the mountains
The mountains are made up of a lot of hard granitic rocks, and so there are a number of waterfalls in the range; these are the Josephine Falls
On the flatlands below the range is the Eubenangee Swamp. There is a small nature reserve here with a short hike through the rainforest. Lots of birds were calling, along with a colony of Fruit Bats. But they all kept up in the canopy, where they were well hidden, so the smaller denizens were the ones that caught our attention. For some reason most of the insects we saw here were dark in colour!
This butterfly is the Evening Brown, Melanitis leda. This insect is remarkable in that it takes two different forms, dependent upon the season. This is the Dry season form, which resembles a dried-up leaf. The Wet season form has a lighter brown colour and black and white spots.
Even the dragonflies here had dark wings! This is the Painted Grasshawk, Neurothemis stigmatizans.
In the dim light of the rainforest canopy, there was an exception to this rule. This is the Red-banded Jezebel, Delias mysis.
We left Eubenangee in the late afternoon, as the sun was making a light show through the Wooroonooran range, a finale to our stay in Queensland. Next day we caught the plane to fly back to Canberra.
Welcome to shabbos for Jewish cats: Saturday, November 16, 2024, and National Fast Food Day. Below is the fast-food buffet that Trump served the Clemson University football team. The commentators were horrified, because of course it’s Trump. I think it’s kind of cute and, of course this stuff is what Trump loves to eat (I’m amazed he hasn’t yet had an infarction):
*I can’t bear to summarize this tired but probably correct thesis over again, but David Brooks repeats it in his postmortem of the Democratic election loss, “Why we got it so wrong.” (see archived article here). Answer: it’s identity politics, Jack: something that turned off voters. His sagacious solution: Democrats should give up identity politics.
From the dense jungle connecting Panama and Colombia to the banks of the Rio Grande, human smugglers are spreading a message to U.S.-bound migrants: Hurry up and sneak in before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
Trump’s second term is creating an incentive for migrants to try to reach U.S. soil before the Jan. 20 inauguration, because many anticipate the president-elect will dismantle legal pathways to entry. Those paths include a U.S. government app that allows people to apply for U.S. asylum while in Mexico and then cross legally when they have an appointment—a system created last year that some migrants think will be upended by Trump.
Beatriz Fuentes, who manages the Casa Fuente shelter for women and children in Mexico City, said her shelter began emptying out even before the election. “They were told to hurry up in case of a possible change,” she said.
While there is no evidence yet that a migration surge is materializing, people smugglers are using WhatsApp and social-media groups to tell immigrants it is now or never. Known as “coyotes” or “polleros,” the smugglers’ business model becomes more lucrative during migrant surges, and business slows down right after policy changes are implemented.
. . . In southern Mexico near the Guatemala border, some 4,000 migrants formed three caravans last week and set out for the U.S., volunteers and Mexican officials said. But many of them dispersed after being quickly “hooked,” or lured, by human smugglers, said Luis Villagrán, a Mexican migrant advocate who organizes caravans in the city of Tapachula. Caravans offer safety in numbers for migrants, but are easy targets for authorities, while smugglers offer faster routes to the U.S.
It’s sad to see the desperation with which these would-be immigrants are moving north. Some start in South America and cross Central America, including the Darien Gap, and then March all the way north through Mexico to the U.S. border. But of course there are legal procedures for immigrating, one of which is that economic motives don’t count nearly as much as persecution. What happens when this wave reaches the border—and it will take a long time—will say a lot about whether the Democrats have learned anything from the election. Of course, Biden and Harris now have little to lose by opening the border, but the Democratic Party sure does.
*The Jerusalem Post let slip that during Israel’s retaliation against Iran in late October, it actually hit one of Iran’s nuclear-weapons facilities, something I hoped Israel would do but which the U.S. “banned.” I guess the ban wasn’t serious.
The Israel Air Force allegedly struck one of Iran’s secret nuclear research facilities as part of an operation that took place at the end of October, according to a Friday Axios report that cited former and current US and Israeli officials.
According to the report, the attack caused significant damage to the site in the Parchin military complex, about 20 kilometers southeast of Tehran.
The strike dealt a severe blow to Iran’s nuclear development efforts, the officials cited in the report claimed.
The facility was allegedly part of the Iranian Amad nuclear weapons program until 2003. It was then used for testing explosives needed to set off a nuclear device, the report added, citing the Institute for Science and International Security.
Iran declines to comment
Axios also noted that a former Israeli official briefed on the strike said Israel destroyed sophisticated equipment that was required and necessary for the nuclear devices.
Additionally, the report said that Iran has allegedly denied using nuclear weapons. It also mentioned that the Iranian mission to the UN declined to comment on the Axios report.
*As always, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly summary of the news on the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Department of eat my shorts“, referring of course to Trump’s cabinet picks. They will be longer than usual because of the cabinet picks:
→ Trump’s aloha admin takes shape: At first, things seemed normal. Republican, but normal. He brought on Marco Rubio as secretary of state. Okay, well. He’s a senator. Susie Wiles has been around Republican White Houses since the Reagan era, so that makes sense. Stephen Miller, okay, we know him. But then: Pete Hegseth. As the secretary of defense? Interesting. A veteran and Fox News personality who once threw an ax on TV, missed the target entirely, and almost killed a West Point drummer (there is, of course, a TMZ clip of it). Pete is a handsome bro with a tattoo sleeve and a few ex-wives, and he once proudly said that he “hasn’t washed his hands in ten years.” But okay. He’s a man in a suit, so I guess this is all tracking. But then: Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democrat who represented Hawaii, is to be the director of national intelligence? Here’s what Tulsi Gabbard once said about the war in Ukraine:
Dear Presidents Putin, Zelensky, and Biden. It’s time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country—i.e., no military alliance with NATO or Russia—thus alleviate the legitimate security concerns of both U.S./NATO countries and Russia, because there would be no Russian or NATO troops on each other’s borders (non-Baltic). This would allow the Ukrainian people to live in peace. Aloha.
Every day, if you want to avoid the watchful eye of the national intelligence community, I need you to ask yourself: Are you aloha today? Was that email sent with the proper aloha? Are you tracking that terrorist with an aloha mindset? Otherwise it’s Abu Ghraib but you’re hogtied with leis and you hear pahu drums all night.
Later in the week, Trump gave the base some real red meat: Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Yes, Gaetz as the nation’s top cop. His potential future employees were just recently investigating him for allegedly paying underage escorts, so if you’re one of those guys, I recommend scrubbing your computer and getting your family into hiding. Gaetz also apparently was just a gross colleague. Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin has said this about Matt Gaetz: “We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor. . . of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.” Now Senator Mullin is getting in line with: “I completely trust President Trump’s decision-making on this one.” If you heard Gaetz talking about his sexual rituals before a roll call, no you didn’t.
Here’s a nice primer on Gaetz’s various scandals, but I guess my favorite is when Gaetz brought Chuck Johnson—a real internet freak, a guy who said the Holocaust gas chambers were fake, that sort—to the 2018 State of the Union.
→ He really did it: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been nominated to be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. We have crossed the Rubicon. We are in the new era. We went from the most extreme control freaks ruling us to a doing-my-own-research free-for-all. Bras are banned and RFK is burning them in the streets. If food requires a label, now it’ll just say POISON. It will soon be illegal to eat gummy bears, so folks, stock up now. In preparation for this appointment, I’m getting every measles vaccine I can find. Any needle I see is jabbing me, and fast. I’m gonna need a full-body X-ray while I can still get it. You know you’re just a little bit of a contrarian when last month you were winking at the pediatrician like “Is all this really necessary” and now you’re all “I think you’re missing the rubella booster, Doc, let’s do another just in case.”
As Trump had said in his victory speech: “He’s going to help make America healthy again. . . . He wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him go to it. Go have a good time, Bobby.”
Do you have Teflon pans, little Madison? Do you want to go to jail? Every single woman in America just got 15 minutes of steel wool scrubbing added to her day. A man just knocked on my door wanting to know if I have a black plastic spatula, but I’ve hidden it here in my desk. There’s about to be a new Red Scare, but it’s going to be a list of people who keep their laptop on their groin too long. So many bros are going to get into ball tanning, there will be a ball sunscreen boom (my next company, but this has been so fun while it’s lasted). Heroin will be legal, but anyone caught with movie theater butter popcorn is to be executed on the spot.
This freaks me out: Harris, a Presidential candidate, paid celebrities (without either party disclosing it) to endorse her on live appearances:
→ You spent how much, Kamala? KamalaHarris’s campaign is $20 million in debt. Those are washed-up Hollywood actress numbers. How is that even possible? How could the campaign have possibly blown through a billion dollars? To be sexist for a moment, this is what I call girl math. It’s my sweet wife thinking that when she doesn’t open the bill, it goes away. Do you think they were just like “Okay, the shoes were on sale, so really it’s like we’re saving money,” but times a hundred? “The truth is this is just an epic disaster, this is a $1 billion disaster,” said Lindy Li, a DNC National Finance Committee member. But literally, how? Well, rumors are coming in hot. How much did Beyoncé cost? Megan Thee Stallion? Lizzo? Eminem? Geez, I guess smoke machine operators are unionized. And we know it was $1 million for the Oprah appearance (mind you, this cash doesn’t go directly to the celeb, but to their production companies). Then $500,000 for Al Sharpton, which is crazy because these days, he’s really only a third by volume of the original. I’m not saying any of these celebs took inappropriate payments: I’m saying that producing a Megan Thee Stallion concert and paying for that was a strange way to spend campaign dollars.
The campaign paid six figures to build a new set to appear on the sex and relationship podcast Call Her Daddy. A flight to Austin from South Florida is like 400 bucks. It was, as The Spectator put it, the Fyre Festival of campaigns.
. . . and lagniappe:
→ Wow, that’s so beautiful:
Oh, did you guys pivot too hard into insanity? Did that not work out for you?
*Bernard-Henri Lévy is a famous philosopher in France (and Jewish), but I know him primarily as the husband of the gorgeous French actress and singer Arielle Dombasle. To be sure, he’s both handsome and rich as well, so perhaps a real “catch”. But he’s also a pro-Israeli activist, and this is the first time I’ve seen an article in the MSM by him in English, a WSJ op-ed called “Antisemitism in America: My Campus Tour.” (It was translated by someone else from the French, and you can find it archived here.) What he’s describing (and read the archived version if you don’t subscribe) is a 10-day campus tour of America, and the diverse things he saw pertaining to the war in Gaza.
The University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles. Two prestigious institutions where the spirit of antisemitic hatred has been raging in the U.S. since Oct. 7, 2023. These students claim to follow French theory and Michel Foucault. Well, I am here to talk to them about the Foucault I knew: the one who had just returned from California and who, in 1975, was among the first, alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, to protest the United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism.
Los Angeles is the first stop on my 10-day campus tour of North America, which I announced on these pages last month. Next is the Claremont Colleges, where a group of woke activists are outraged that the author of “Israel Alone” is invited. It’s a double occasion: A Holocaust studies professor has invited me to guest-teach her seminar, and there’s a meeting where I urge students not to succumb to intimidation: “Israel, this multiethnic and multireligious democracy that has endured 75 years of war without falling into the abyss of the state of emergency, can and should be defended—not in spite of but because of your progressive beliefs.”
. . . . A stop in Vancouver, then Toronto, where Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur who relentlessly accuses Israel of “genocide,” is scheduled to speak. I don’t want her to have the last word, but her supporters seem equally determined not to let me have a word at all. That is why my address takes place in a heavily secured basement auditorium, guarded by student leaders worried about an incident. I say that I know from experience what a genocidal project is—Bangladesh, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Ukraine. An army that, just this morning, coordinated the transfer of 231 Gazan children with rare diseases to Emirati hospitals obviously has nothing to do with genocide.
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is among those where the anti-Zionism that disgusted Sartre and Foucault is most entrenched academically. Law classes, film, art history, economics, geography, literary disciplines—all are breeding grounds for rants against Israel and “genocide,” Israel and “apartheid,” Israel and “colonialism.” To members of the Board of Regents visibly overwhelmed by the scale of the upheaval: “Why not take these people at their word, invite the best experts in the world, and schedule true, comprehensive colonial, apartheid, or genocide studies courses?”
My theory of the day, developed at Columbia University in front of a hundred young people gathered at the campus’s Chabad House: The Jews of Europe and the U.S., until today, enjoyed, with the Enlightenment’s triumph, unconditional protection. What happens now when they are told, “You have the right to be protected, but only if you aren’t openly or excessively Zionist”? Or when, on the other side, Donald Trump warns in his September speech before the Israeli American Council that Jewish voters will be to blame, and the Jewish state can’t survive, if he loses? In both cases, the protection granted to the Jews is subject to conditions set by the would-be protector. Therein lies, in the new Jerusalem envisioned by the Founding Fathers, a terrifying moral regression.
The University of Pennsylvania is where this madness has done the most damage—up to the resignation of President Liz Magill, unable to answer the question posed during her congressional hearing: Is calling for the murder of Jewish students a violation of your institution’s rules? I listen to the assembly of professors who have come to share their distress as eminent scholars humiliated by “public ruffians” (Nietzsche) interrupting their lectures with chants of “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the intifada!” Didn’t my generation also have its share of aspiring Red Guards? Certainly. But Benny Lévy, their leader, stopped short when anti-Semitism reared its head.
Levy is a bit wrong here: Magill and others answered the question with the proper First Amendment answer: “It depends.” But Harvard, MIT and Penn are private universities and need not adhere to the Constitution, and their hypocrisy in dealing differently with different kinds of Constitutionally-permitted speech is what brought down Magill and Claudine Gay. In the end, Levy is for some reason heartened, and he ends this way:
How should we respond, a brilliant and distressed student of Ohio University asks me, to professors who tell us that Israel is a “colonial creation”? You need to interrupt them. Impeach them. You need to treat them the way the students of May 1968 treated the most reactionary teachers. Explain to these ignoramuses that half of the Jewish founders of Israel were indigenous and that, if the others did indeed often come from Europe, they weren’t conquerors but refugees—escapees whom Europe regarded as garbage.
. . . George Washington University is the final stop on the tour. Michael Feuer, the dean, introduces me to his 100 or so students. Fatigue. Melancholy. But when I see the determination of these brave Jewish students standing tall, there’s hope.
At least we have a French philosopher, and one who knew Foucault, saying that the postmodernist philosopher was not an antisemite.
The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer (1931; a later edition was a gift from my parents). This was for me the most useful general cookbook I ever had.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child (1961). I have both volumes and have cooked from it but oy! is it complicated. It took me two days to make their mushroom soup once for Thanksgiving when I was in grad school
A Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (1968). This was a very popular book in the seventies, as it was “hippie food,” but I haven’t used it in some time
An Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey (1973). For a short while I was on an Indian-cooking kick, and bought all the requisite spices, but discovered that I couldn’t do both that and my all-time speciality, Szechuan cooking, at the same time. The recipe I made most often (and I hope it’s in that book!) is oily toor dal.
The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen (1974). This again was a huge success with hippies, as it was vegetarian. I even insisted on being taken to the Moosewood Restaurant when I gave a seminar at Cornell, though I found it somewhat disappointing.
The Silver Palate Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins (1982). For some reason I never used this much
The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz (2012). I was given this book and read it avidly, but have never cooked from it.
Seven out of 25 isn’t bad, is it? Especially for a guy! I also have a ton of Chinese cookbooks, but not the one on the list. The best of them all is Mrs. Chiang’s Chinese Cookbook, which is out of print but still can be had. It’s the best Szechuan cookbook I can find, with useful introduction and lots of good detail. It’s out of print but you can find inexpensive copies on the internet.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains today’s dialogue.
Hili is super sarcastic. The UN is a disaster even greater than the League of Nation was, and Hili knows that. The League of Nations was dissolved because it was such a disaster, but immediately “wise” people decided that they needed another one, just with a different name.
Hili: The creation of the League of Nations was salutary.
A: Really?
Hili: Of course, that’s why immediately after WWII the UN was created to work equally well or even better.
In Polish:
Hili: Stworzenie Ligi Narodów było zbawienne.
Ja: Naprawdę?
Hili: Oczywiście, to dlatego po drugiej wojnie światowej natychmiast stworzono ONZ, żeby działała tak samo, albo nawet lepiej.
From Masih, who tells us that Iran is now regarding women who refuse to wear a hijab as mentally ill, as they did the woman who stripped down to her skivvies in protest.
In the 21st century, the Islamic Republic is opening a so-called “hijab clinic” in Tehran, where women who bravely defy the regime’s oppressive dress code are to be treated as mentally ill. This isn’t healthcare, it’s yet another tactic of gender apartheid. The regime wants to… https://t.co/9RCKOdpdWPpic.twitter.com/OnOYdJMGuv
I passed these leaves on the way home, which immediately recalled this song about the waning of the year—and of life. And the most plaintive version, of course, is by Willie Nelson:
Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 12, 2024, and it’s National French Dip Day, celebrating not a swim in the Seine but, as Wikipedia notes, a ” hot sandwich consisting of thinly sliced roast beef (or, sometimes, other meats) on a “French roll” or baguette.” Here’s one with fries, au jus, ketchup, and beer. Hungry?
Here I am feeding a squirrel at Botany Pond. The handful of resident “tree rats” have become tame, and have learned to climb up the leg of my jeans to get a prized walnut. Video by Peggy Mason:
*I had hoped to announce the winner of the Booker Prize this morning, but I guess it’s a bit early for them to have been awarded. At any rate, here are the six finalists, and if you want to guess or give your take on any you’ve read, please do so in the comments:
‘James’ by Percival Everett
The favorite for this year’s prize, according to British bookmakers, “James” is a retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the Black man fleeing enslavement in Twain’s novel.
‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey
The second favorite, according to the bookmakers, “Orbital” is about six astronauts working on a space station racing around Earth.
‘Creation Lake’ by Rachel Kushner
Kushner’s novel is about a spy-for-hire who infiltrates a commune of environmental activists in France — apparently, though she doesn’t know who’s employed her, on behalf of agricultural conglomerates that want the commune’s members jailed.
‘The Safekeep’ by Yael van der Wouden
In some literary quarters, “The Safekeep” has garnered attention for one main reason: It includes a lot of sex. In fact, as one Times reviewer has noted, it features a whole “sex chapter.”
The Booker Prize’s judges have said they shortlisted the book, van der Wouden’s debut novel, for far more than its eroticism. “The Safekeep,” they said in a news release, is “a compelling and atmospheric story of obsession and secrets.”
‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood
In Wood’s seventh novel, which Riverhead Books will publish in the United States on Feb. 11, a woman leaves her job at a wildlife nonprofit, apparently overcome with despair at her work’s lack of impact, and retreats to a convent where her solitude is interrupted by, among other things, a plague of mice.
‘Held’ by Anne Michaels
Bookmakers’ long-shot for this year’s award is “Held,” a novel that starts with a soldier in the trenches of World War I and then jumps back and forward through time, to touch on four generations of the man’s descendants, including a war correspondent and a worker in a refugee camp.
I’m betting on James, which not only has had good reviews, but the subject matter is ideologically salubrious.
*I’m keeping an eye on the House of Representatives, as the final tally hasn’t yet been made, and I’d prefer a Democratic House so that Trump doesn’t get a trifecta (the legislative, administrative, and judicial branches. Here’s the latest:, with the Republicans needing 4 more votes to control the House but the Democrats needing 15.
However, 270 to Win gives this breakdown, with Dems needing only 9 but Republicans needing only two. I guss this is a difference in how the sites call races.
At publication time of this article, Republicans lead 216-209 in elections where a winner has been projected, just short of the 218 needed to retain the majority. The party will need to win two of the remaining 10 uncalled races.
A breakdown of the party holding each of the ten remaining races follows. Incumbents are running in all but CA-47.
Democrats: AK-AL, CA-09, CA-21, CO-08, CA-47
Republican: AZ-06, CA-13, CA-27, CA-41, CA-45
Thus far, 12 seats have flipped, six from each party. Six incumbents – three Republicans in New York, two Democrats in Pennsylvania, and one in Oregon – have been defeated. See the Changing Parties table >
The Alaska election will go to a ranked choice tabulation if no candidate gets a majority. If needed, that will take place on November 20.
Of the ten still uncalled elections whose percentages are given, the GOP narrowly leads in five, creeping ever closer to that 218 mark—in which case we can all move to Canada.
The question: how is it the BBC consistently platform witnesses who are publicly aligned with Hamas (a few examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)?
Yesterday, the BBC ran another story about a ‘massacre’ in Gaza. We have now seen it countless times – Hamas propaganda make an empty claim – and the BBC rush to promote it.
The latest headline covered both Gaza and Lebanon.
‘Israeli strikes on north Lebanon and Gaza kill dozens, officials and rescuers say’.
The only named Gazan based source for the claims in the BBC article was a Dr Fadel Naim, director of the Al-Ahly hopsital:
The report from the good doctor is grim. Of the 17 bodies his facility received ‘nine’ were women – thus strongly implying this was a random attack that killed women – not terrorists.
But is there any reason the BBC should not have reproduced the claim of Fadel Naim? Did the BBC do the slightest bit of due diligence on this witness, before sharing his lies to the world?
The answer is no. They could not have checked at all.
If the BBC journalists had even bothered to look – they would have seen that this man openly supports terrorism and should not be trusted. In the end, it is left to people like me to do their job for them.
The doctor, besides being director of a Gazan hospital and a supporter of terrorism (see his social-media posts in the article), rubs elbows with the leadership of Hamas:
From scanning the photos on his own public timeline, it soon becomes apparent that this doctor is no idle supporter of terrorism. This is an image from his daughter’s wedding. The top table at the event included not just Fadel Naim, the BBC ‘witness’ – but also Ismail Haniyeh – the (then) leader of Hamas in Gaza:
Such are the reliable sources used by the BBC
*As if there’s not enough to be depressed about now, three big guns in national security and public health have published a WaPo editorial called “The U.S. could soon face a threat ‘more powerful’ than nuclear weapons.” It’s biological weapons, Jake, made more dangerous with genetic engineering, (Article is archived here.)
President Richard M. Nixon’s bold 1969 decision to renounce biological weapons and spearhead a treaty to ban them helped contain the threat of a man-made pandemic for half a century.
But our inheritance from Nixon is now fading. And in this age of synthetic biology, unless we act quickly to deter our adversaries from making and using bioweapons, we could face disaster in the near future.
The nightmare of a biological holocaust is far from fanciful. A recent Post investigation showcased Russia’s reopening and expansion of a military and laboratory complex outside Moscow that was used during the Cold War to weaponize viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola and other diseases. In China, senior military officers have been writing for years about the potential benefits of offensive biological warfare. One prominent colonel termed it a “more powerful and more civilized” method of mass killing than nuclear weapons. An authoritative People’s Liberation Army textbook discusses the potential for “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”
At the same time, breakthroughs in gene-editing technology and artificial intelligence have made the manipulation and production of deadly viruses and bacteria easier than ever, for state and non-state actors alike. The 2019 outbreak of covid-19 in Wuhan, China, which might have involved an accidental leak of an artificially enhanced coronavirus, offers a sense of the stakes: Some 27 million people have died as a direct or indirect result of that virus. And researchers around the globe — civilian and military — are tinkering with viruses far deadlier than that one.
So the U.S. is not supposed to be making bioweapons, but the tenor of the article is that we’d damn well better, as Russia and China could be doing it. (Many people take issue with the “lab-leak” hypothesis.) So what do we do?
Treaties and conventions alone cannot solve this problem. Nor are nuclear deterrence models quite up to the task. The prospect of mutually assured destruction is unlikely to inhibit death-obsessed terrorists who have a better shot at acquiring bioweapons than nuclear weapons. Dictatorships might be tempted to unleash a bioweapon if they are confident the nations they target would struggle to pinpoint the source of the attack — and if the attackers believe they can do more damage to their enemies than to their own population. They might, for example, covertly vaccinate their people before launching an attack. Or they might succeed in developing pathogens capable of disproportionately affecting specific ethnic groups, as envisioned by Chinese generals.
No, the authors suggest that we develop better intelligence and an early-warning system:
This is why biological surveillance, detection and attribution must become a core national security function, and not merely a public health activity, of the United States and friendly nations. Congress, working in consultation with the Defense Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, should immediately establish and fund a new intelligence discipline: biological intelligence, or BIOINT, to mobilize allied governments and private companies to detect and assess high-risk scientific research and incipient biological threats.
. . . The United States must also show that it has the will to impose steep costs on those that pursue, much less employ, bioweapons. We must also learn how to respond to pandemics with vastly greater speed and dexterity than during the coronavirus pandemic. We must improve on the success of Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership that delivered coronavirus vaccines in record time, and replicate that model to mass produce rapid tests, protective equipment and therapeutics quickly enough to mitigate the death and disruption that could be caused by a biological attack.
They don’t suggest that we start developing bioweapons, but toward the end of the article they do speak darkly of “countermeasure” development, and it’s not clear what that means. Deterrence must entail some form of reprisal. Perhaps via nuclear weapons?
*According to the Wall Street Journal, the antisemitic violence in Amsterdam was highly organized, beginning with calls for a “Jew hunt” (article archived here):
Ziv and scores of other Maccabi supporters had traveled to the Dutch capital for a match with local team Ajax on Thursday night. Little did they know that, earlier in the day, they had become a topic of discussion on popular messaging apps, where users were calling for a Jodenjacht, or “Jew hunt.”
From late Thursday and into the early hours of Friday, Dutch authorities said, mobs unleashed a wave of violence, chasing Israelis through the streets on motorbikes and beating them. The attacks came after videos circulated online of Maccabi fans pulling down a Palestinian flag and chanting about Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Police said 25 to 35 people were injured in Amsterdam.
The campaign was organized, Dutch authorities said, and the attackers were equipped with fireworks and moved quickly, targeting Israeli fans with “hit-and-run” assaults. Police said they were investigating who instigated the assaults and how they were coordinated.
. . . .More than 60 people were arrested before and during the soccer match, prosecutors said. Only one arrest has been disclosed since then. Four suspects, including two minors, remained in custody on suspicion of participating in violence, the prosecutors’ office said. Officials declined to identify the arrested suspects.
Maccabi fans interviewed by The Wall Street Journal said the violence came to a boil after two days in which they were stalked and harassed in Amsterdam—during a week that the Dutch commemorate Kristallnacht, when German Nazis attacked Jewish people and property on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10 in 1938. Some Maccabi fans said they saw taxi drivers using their phones to document their whereabouts.
Messaging app Telegram was used to talk about “going on Jew hunts,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said. “This is so shocking and despicable that I cannot get over it yet. It is a disgrace,” she said.
A screenshot of a pro-Palestinian WhatsApp group chat, viewed by the Journal, called for a “Jew Hunt” on Thursday and referred to a standoff on Wednesday night in which a group of Israeli fans were cornered by a crowd that police said included taxi drivers who had responded to an online call to mobilize.
“They knew everything,” said Shachar Bitton, a 30-year-old Maccabi fan. “They knew exactly where we stayed. They knew exactly which hotels, which street we were going to take. It was all well-organized, well-prepared.”
This was organized by Muslim immigrant to Amsterdam, and similar attacks (not this organized, though) have happened in other European countries. It’s part of a larger scheme to make the entire West into an Ummah, starting by making it Judenfrei. I’ve already heard from two people who said they will no longer go to Amsterdam. I can’t share that sentiment, as it’s a wonderful city, but it’s gotten somewhat less wonderful in the last week.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Editor-in-Chief Hili is driving his employees hard!
From Masih, who has escaped another assassination plot. Here she calls out a German journalist for Der Spiegel who dons a hijab when interviewing an Iranian official. That bowing to misogynistic dress codes by Westerners has always irked Masih:
I’m in Berlin celebrating the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a powerful symbol of resistance against tyranny. Yet, it deeply troubles me to see Spiegel’s journalist don the forced hijab and obediently interview the regime’s foreign minister. This plays into the… https://t.co/RBa8ryDi59pic.twitter.com/QcVtLk5XEA
Here are some progressives losing it when someone maintains that men who identify as women should be allowed to compete against biological women. That claim has to have played some role in the debacle that affected the Democrats last week. No, opposing that claim is NOT “transphobia.”
“I am NOT going to listen to transphobia at this table!”
CNN panelist loses their mind over “slur” used by Republican strategist during trans sports debate. pic.twitter.com/5PXnSJW4A0
From Luana; one that I retweeted. It will get pushback for sure.
It’s a misguided effort to insert into nature what we think is ideologically good. But activists never seem to realize that one can say that sex is for all intents and purposes binary without being transphobic. The former is a biological fact, the latter a bigoted viewpoint. https://t.co/2NAUGOyYwN
From my feed. What a great idea, and also a lucrative job!
There’s a guy on tiktok who owns a company where you can complain about your boss anonymously and he goes to your work and cuss them out for you 😂 pic.twitter.com/m8SOA97mWv
Two Bluesky “tweets” from Dr. Cobb. First, an attentive mother squid:
Y’ALL! Scientists at Schmidt Ocean just captured this rare video of an open-ocean squid caring for its young. That pearl-packed black bag between its tentacles is a brood pouch, each pearl is a developing baby squid (you can see a few hatch out at the end). Nature is so cool. 🧵🪼🦑🐙🌿🧪
There are two jokes here, but I can see only the first one:
Two nuns are driving through Transylvania in the dead of night. Suddenly a vampire lands on the hood of their car. He's pounding on the glass!One nun says to the other, "Show him your cross!"The other nods firmly. She sticks her head out the window and yells, "Get the fuck off the windshield!"
After Trump won the election, Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American, went ballistic on BlueSky (Twitter for progressives). She issued the three posts below, decrying her generation for being “fucking fascists” and telling some of her high-school classmates to “fuck them to the moon and back” (note to editor: “moon” is usually capitalized).
I have to say that this sounds a bit like Helmuth was a bit tipsy, but I won’t blame alcohol for this. After all, if you’re drunk, you’d better stay away from social media! I wrote about these “tweets”, and about Scientific American‘s “progressive” editorial slant, in a piece I posted yesterday. (This is part of a long series of posts I’ve done about her and the magazine.)
At any rate, after what must have been a bunch of pushback, and perhaps realizing that her job was in jeopardy, Helmuth issued an abject response yesterday, to wit:
After making a series of fiercely ideological and political statements on social media in the wake of Trump’s win and being pilloried for doing so, @SciAm editor in chief Laura Helmuth is now back pedaling. She claims she is committed to editorial objectivity. pic.twitter.com/qwTsaiyKLE
Well, I’m trying to be more charitable these days, striving to put myself in my opponents’ shoes and imputing to them the best motives I can think of, but I couldn’t do it this time. And that’s because Helmuth has left a paper trail during her editorship—a paper trail of progressive leftism and wokeness that has demonized many people (including Mendel!) as racists and bigots. Thus I’m not convinced by her assertion that she “respects and values people across the political spectrum.” No, she seems to despise people on the right, and that’s what came out in her first set of tweets above.
Further, what is the “mistake” here? She’s is the editor of a major magazine, for crying out loud, and should know how to control herself. “Shock and confusion” doesn’t, at least to me, excuse her behavior. “Shock,” perhaps, but what is she “confused” about?
Her statement that her unhinged tweets “do not reflect the position of Scientific American or my colleagues,” really means, of course, “Please don’t fire me! I’ll be a good girl from now on,” I doubt, however, that her bosses at Springer really care about her eroding reputation. They probably care more about the bottom line, and I have no idea how the magazine is doing.
The sentence that irked me the most is “I am committed to civil communication and editorial objectivity.” Indeed! The whole magazine has violated both tenets for years. It gave Michael Shermer a pink slip for simply questioning accepted (woke) wisdom in his column, and couldn’t wait to accuse E. O. Wilson of racism, nearly before his body had gone cold. The many biased and slanted columns do not bespeak Helmuth’s commitment to objectivity, and here’s one example that I mentioned yesterday.
After the magazine published its hit piece on E. O. Wilson, accusing him (as well as Mendel and others) of racism, thirty evolutionary biologists and I cobbled together a letter to Scientific American, rebutting the hit piece’s claims and defending Wilson and his legacy (you can see the letter here). Helmuth rejected the letter. She also rejected my personal appeal to “consider an op-ed about how extreme Leftist progressivism is besmirching science itself by distorting the truth? (Example: arguments that sex is not bimodal in humans, but forms a continuum.) I could make a number of arguments like that about biology that, contra McLemore, have truth behind them.” That letter didn’t fly, but Luana Maroja and I turned the idea into a paper for Skeptical Inquirer.
So much for Helmuth’s editorial objectivity!
Unfortunately, the readers are almost unanimously unimpressed by the apology. Go see for yourself, but I’ll put up a few screenshots of responses:
