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.
Today’s photos and videos come from reader/physicist/origami master Robert Lang in California. Robert’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the two DUCK photographs by clicking on them.
The creek named Arroyo Seco runs from Red Box Saddle in the San Gabriel mountains down past the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), through western Altadena and Pasadena, and then on to Los Angeles, joining the Los Angeles river near downtown L.A.; the historic Pasadena Freeway (now State Highway 110) follows its channel much of the way. True to its name, it’s dry much of the year, but above JPL, it runs year-round, providing lush, verdant and shady hiking any time of year. Since the Eaton Fire resulted in the closure of much of the front range of the San Gabriels, the still open Arroyo Seco and its Gabrielino Trail have been my go-to spot for a quick, regular getaway.
It’s also been a regular source of wildlife sightings, some of which have made it to RWP (for example, here, here, and here), but today I have an offering particularly near and dear to our host: ducklings and their momma!
This was at Brown Mountain Dam falls, which is about 3.5 miles up the trail from JPL. The dam was built in the 1940s, and quickly filled up its basin with sediment (there is now a forest of full-grown trees at the level of the top of the dam), but it provides a 40’ waterfall with a deep pool at the base and is a popular destination for bikers, hikers, and runners, especially on a hot day. Today, it had some unusual visitors: a momma mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) and her seven ducklings, who followed her up the creekbed to the pool where they then proceeded to feed, play, and shower under the falls.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 27, 2026; it’s shabbos for Jewish cats and Helen Keller Day, celebrating the anniversary of her birth in 1880 (she lived for 88 years). Here’s Anne Sullivan Macy, the woman who supposedly taught Helen to talk with her hands (there are doubters who suggest that Keller’s writings were actually facilitated communication from Sullivan).
Why are some players wearing pink cleats in the World Cup? Click on the new Google Doodle below to see the answer:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Footy news: In another miracle, the team from Cape Verde, a tiny archipelago nation with a population around half a million, reached the knockout stages of the World Cup by tying Saudi Arabia 0-0.
After the full-time whistle Cape Verde’s players formed a huddle around their head coach, Bubista, eyes straining at the tiny moving images on a mobile phone. They sought the certainty that a dream had come true and, when the outcome nearly 1,000 miles away in Guadalajara was confirmed, erupted in unfathomable joy. Dailon Livramento, the centre-forward, leapt on to the back of his teammate “Diney” Borges. Everyone in view grabbed the nearest person to embrace and then came all the flags, the islands represented by their 10 stars made famous during one of the World Cup’s most compelling underdog stories in decades.
One of them was waved in the stands by Ana Cândida Évora, the mother of their remarkable goalkeeper, Vozinha. Others made their way on to the pitch and what a sight it was when the entire squad, visibly buzzing to a man, stayed still for long enough to pose for photographs in front of a disbelieving support. They drummed and sang into the night because never has the most formidable of tasks seemed so glorious. Cape Verde, the country of 530,000, will take on Lionel Messi and Argentina in the last 32.
Respect will need paying to a veteran of barely imaginable global fame. Yes, Argentina will have to acknowledge fully the prowess of Vozinha, the 40-year-old who has become a sensation in real life and online since the display that thwarted Spain. The meeting between Vozinha, who was playing in the São Vicente island league at the age of 29, and the tournament’s highest goalscorer of all time [Lionel Messi] will be one for the history books.
Here are the highlights of the game, but I doubt Cape Verde can beat Argentina. Still, for a country that small to make it to the knockout round is amazing.
Cape Verde had several great chances, but didn’t manage to score.
Iran’s armed forces struck a container ship that was passing through the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, according to U.S. and Iranian officials, undermining efforts to restore shipping traffic through the crucial waterway.
The attack came hours after Iran, demonstrating its hold over the strait, had warned ships that the only route through the vital pathway for oil and natural gas was through its waters. Many ships had been using a route on the southern side of the strait, hugging the Omani coast.
The strike halted traffic through the crucial waterway, contradicting President Trump’s claim that Iran did not control the strait and his assurances that it was open once again to shipping. Oil prices jumped after the attack, with the cost of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rising over 2 percent to about $75 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, also rose over 2 percent, to around $72 a barrel.
A U.S. official, who spoke anonymously in order to share details of the strike, said the vessel had been hit by a drone. The attack prompted the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, to suspend its plan to evacuate seafarers from hundreds of ships that had been stranded in the Persian Gulf.
It was not clear how the strike would affect the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran over control of the strait and over Iran’s nuclear program. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met on Thursday with Gulf Arab leaders in Bahrain to try to allay their security concerns.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had warned ships earlier on Thursday that they must coordinate with its navy and that they should not take an alternative route, in an apparent reference to Omani territorial waters. The threats came just as shipping in the waterway was surging this week after months of near-paralysis.
The U.S. retaliation:
The U.S. military said it launched strikes on Iran on Friday in retaliation for an Iranian attack in the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier, hours after President Trump called the Iranian action a “foolish violation” of the fragile cease-fire between the two countries.
U.S. Central Command said in a statement that it had struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites as a “powerful response” to the Iranian attack on Thursday.
The extent of damage from the new U.S. strikes was not immediately clear. A U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly, described the strikes as a retaliatory measure and not a restart of major combat operations.
The strikes on Friday concluded after about 90 minutes, a U.S. official said, and included strikes by American fighter jets against four Iranian sites along the Strait of Hormuz and on Qeshm Island, a U.S. official said.
Iran’s security forces claimed that in response to the American attacks on Friday, Tehran had struck U.S. Army positions in the region. There was no immediate confirmation from the U.S. military of such strikes.
It looks as if Iran really is trying to control the Strait of Hormuz. If it specifies that ships cannot transit in international waters, or in waters controlled by Oman if Oman permits it, then, yes, Iran is controlling—or trying to control—the Strait. What gives them the right to say that ships must go through Iranian territorial waters? It’s starting to look as if the vaunted cease-fire deal is not going to happen any time soon, for the 60-days specified to iron out the remaining differences will slip by quickly.
And though each side is striking the other (and each retaliates for a strike in a never-ending cycle), they have “not resumed combat operations.” Well, we’re told it will all be settled in two months.
. . .Ukraine is swamping Russia’s air defenses with a growing armada of long-range drones that target refineries, port infrastructure, military industries and those air defenses themselves.
The escalating campaign is leading to restrictions on fuel sales in Russia, surging gasoline prices and regular images of black smoke clouds over parts of the country that thought the war in Ukraine was far away.
On Thursday, Ukraine hit two oil refineries in Ufa, a city in Russia that is over 930 miles from the front line, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a social-media post.
Ukraine’s cities have been under fire from Russian missiles and drones since the fall of 2022. When Moscow began its strategic bombing campaign, it aimed at breaking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, military-related industries and will to continue the country’s defense. Since last year, the Russian barrages have inflicted a rising toll of civilian deaths and injuries in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
Ukraine has been trying to hit back for over two years, targeting primarily Russia’s oil infrastructure to hurt its economy, government finances and military logistics. But a lack of long-range firepower has limited Kyiv’s efforts.
This year, Ukraine is producing more and better long-range drones, and is adding domestically made cruise missiles to the mix—inflicting growing damage deep inside Russia. Since March, more than two dozen strikes on Russian oil refineries have knocked out some 20% of the country’s refining capacity, analysts estimate.
“The strikes have become more effective because the technology is better and Ukraine has the ability to put together more large strikes than they could before,” said Michael Kofman, a military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.
Here’s a plot from the article showing the increase since January of Ukrainian long-term drone strikes on Russia. They’re gone up at least eighfold.
I doubt that these strikes will turn the tide against Russia, but we can hope that they’ll eventually tire out the Russian people by hurting the economy. But remember that Putin is still in charge.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, a “senior insider” (presumably in Israel)explains why the ceasefire deal isn’t all that bad. The premise is that Trump can’t afford to lose the House of Representatives, for if he does he’ll spend the rest of his term being investigated and impeached. And if the price of oil skyrockets, that (as the narrative goes) is what will happen.
. . . So Trump is, in fact, fighting the Iranians with one hand tied—without the Kurdish invasion, without a ground operation, and without striking the energy infrastructure, at least until the elections.
And so the deal was born. This is not a nuclear agreement but a deal about Hormuz. And here, says the senior Israeli source, one must pay attention to something very significant regarding the clause that goes beyond Hormuz matters and into money: it’s a temporary easing of the sanctions on Iran, not their permanent removal.
What this means is that from the moment of signing, one hundred percent of the economic pressure on the United States comes off, but only a few percent of the economic pressure on Iran. There’s disagreement over what damage Iran suffered in the war—those who minimize it estimate three hundred billion dollars, those who maximize it, a trillion. Either way, the benefit to Iran is like filling an empty pool one cup at a time.
Senior figures in the Mossad expressed deep pessimism after the signing of the agreement about the chances of an uprising in Iran while the wind blows at the regime’s back. The senior source is more optimistic: “It’s worth remembering that even before this enormous damage, the masses went out into the streets with nothing to lose. What will Iran’s citizens do in another six months when they understand the harsh economic situation is here to stay? What will the regime do?”
In the past week people have been comparing Trump’s deal to Obama’s agreement. The former president even needled the current one, saying it’s worse. “It’s not just that Israel has poor messaging—the Americans do too,” the source replied. “The most important part is that the Iranians have now signed a commitment to freeze the nuclear program. That’s dramatic. In a situation of ‘no deal and no war,’ as, for example, after Operation ‘Lion’s Roar’ in June 2025, they kept advancing their nuclear program. Under Obama’s deal they could continue, with permission and authority, with many elements of the nuclear program.”
And as for Hormuz? For now everyone is finding workarounds. The weapon of closing the strait will only work for the Iranians if they use it and Trump does nothing. But what would happen, for example, if they closed the strait a month before the elections? One can only imagine the president’s reaction. Here is the fundamental clash of interests between Trump and Netanyahu: both face elections in the fall. The first needs an agreement to keep his chances of winning; the second needs to avoid an agreement for that very same purpose. Trump, unsurprisingly, chose himself.
. . .The Lebanon issue remains. The main difference now compared to the situation twenty years ago, at the end of the Second Lebanon War, and a year and a half ago, at the end of the previous round, is that the IDF is deep inside the country. “Quiet will be answered with quiet” is not Israel’s desired conclusion for the long term, but it is for the short term, because of Hezbollah’s difficult condition and the complex situation of the US president.
“The Israelis have to understand that there is no scenario in which Israel alone dismantles Hezbollah without conquering all of Lebanon or Iran collapsing, and therefore, until further notice, the story is deterrence. You can create a situation in the coming months in which you’ve preserved the relationship with the US, let the agreement with Iran collapse on its own without giving an excuse, locked in the reality that no one fires into your territory, and the soldiers keep operating against military buildup in the new security zone. You need to wisely secure the American green light to act—not act nonstop and get cast as the neighborhood bully who has to be reined in.
There’s no good news, though, but Segal’s source recommends that Israel sit tight and take no initiatives save self-defense, saying this:
“Here’s one piece of advice for Israel: what would happen if, for once, we stayed silent? True, this week Trump also attacked Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and she replied sharply. But Italy doesn’t have a two-front war on its head, and it can also count on the support of America’s Democrats. For us it’s nothing but a loss. Stay quiet, breathe, give it time. That’s what needs to be done.”
In other words, the Israel Dude should abide.
*Sadly, this week’s TGIF column is written not by Nellie Bowles but by Will Rahn, who isn’t nearly as snarky. However, I’ll still steal a few items from his column, “TGIF: This is why I can’t have friends.”
First, on the anti-Israel mishigass that’s going on in NYC:
—>You don’t need to be Bibi Netanyahu’s number-one fan to conclude that this has all become totally deranged. Criticize the Israeli government all you want. Stand against the settlements. Plenty of Israelis certainly do so. But why was the Sunrise Movement—a supposedly environmentalist organization—gleefully posting photos this week of some poor woman who apparently elected to get a “FUCK AIPAC” tattoo on her forehead?
Call me old-fashioned, but I associate face tattoos with meth, mental illness, and Mike Tyson. Not. . . anti-Israel political posturing?
And what’s this lady going to do when the left inevitably moves onto its next cause du jour? I’m not a big fan of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the two Weather Underground leaders who had plum seats at the opening of Barack Obama’s ugly-as-hell presidential center last week. Yes, they were communists who carried out a bombing campaign against the government. Yes, Dohrn was a big fan of the Manson Family’s murder spree. But at least they had the good sense not to get “VICTORY FOR THE VIETCONG” tattooed on their foreheads. Such a thing might well have cost them their post-terrorism posts in snobby academia.
→ Checking in on P-Hustle: The Graham Platner scandals just keep on coming, this week in the form of a Reddit joke he told that is too vulgar and too unfunny to repeat in this family newsletter. The only funny thing about this guy is that he sexted with “up to six” women right after he got married in 2023, which is just perfect. Up to six. Like he’s placing a bulk toilet paper order at Costco. His whole schtick is that he’s a working-class guy (not really) who’s a different and better person than he was, what, six months ago?
Platner is just an exhausting figure. And we’re going to spend the next several months learning more and more unpleasant things about him. And then, God willing, Susan Collins, the long-serving moderate Republican he’s facing in November, will add him to her throne of skulls.
→ Leave Caitlin Clark alone: Caitlin Clark isn’t just the biggest star of the WNBA, she is the WNBA. She’s the reason they’re now making the medium bucks. And fans say the league isn’t giving her the star treatment she deserves.
Clark was knocked to the floor during a game this week and roughed up in a way that does look pretty intentional. One player, Alyssa Thomas, pressed her fist against Clark’s throat, but no foul was called. Clark exited the game early with a reported back injury. Clark’s supporters say the league allows her to be attacked without calling any fouls, but Caitlin would be fouled if she hit back. What’s going on here?
Meanwhile the NBA’s biggest star, Victor Wembanyama, gets to flail his limbs around Gumby-slapping everyone up and down the court, and isn’t fouled, either. The guy throws the shorter, better, cooler Jalen Brunson to the ground and the refs just shrug it off. Why is basketball like this? Though to its partial credit, a day after the photo of Thomas’s fist going into Clark’s neck made its way all over the media, the WNBA did suspend Thomas for one game and gave her a flagrant foul penalty.
Here’s a video of Caitlin getting roughed up. I have no idea why Clark, a player who doesn’t rough up others, is the target of so much physical violence. She’s very good; are they trying to get her off her game?
On Tuesday, the Democratic establishment suffered a crushing defeat when nine out of 10 candidates endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) coasted to victory in their primaries. In some instances, long-serving progressives were caught in the crosshairs, including Representative Adriano Espaillat, a five-term House member who lost the Democratic nomination to a 32-year-old socialist. A House staffer for a New York Democrat told me that in progressive cities like New York, the DSA is “the new establishment.”
Hasan Piker, the far-left Twitch streamer, squealed with excitement at an East Williamsburg watch party when he saw yet another Democratic Socialist clinch the Democratic nomination.
“Brother,” he said, “the Democratic Party machine in the blue stronghold of New York City was thoroughly defeated tonight.”
The night was a major test for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who pulled off his own upset almost a year ago against Democratic Party giant Andrew Cuomo. The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier. Meet the Mamdani-backed candidates who soared to victory last night.
A bit on each of the three primary winners for Democratic House seats:
Claire Valdez Age: 36 Seat: New York, District 7
With about 92 percent of the results in, Valdez, a first-time state legislator, trounced Representative Nydia Velázquez’s preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, by a margin of more than 20 points. When the news broke at Valdez’s watch party in East Williamsburg, “DSA!” chants erupted.
“Solidarity forever,” she told her supporters last night. “Abolish ICE. Free Palestine. Organize your union, and join DSA.”
Brad Lander Age: 56 Seat: New York, District 10
Brad Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist Jew. At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel.
“We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” he said in the speech, which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. “But even then, we hope you will appreciate this absence of nationalist privilege in your inscribed identity.”
. . . Although many New York City races on Tuesday centered around Israel, none became more of a de facto referendum on the Jewish nation than the showdown between Goldman and Lander, a self-described “progressive Zionist” who has accused Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and “forced starvation.” Only a few years ago, Goldman would’ve been considered a safe seat as a progressive center-left legislator in a deep-blue district—and yet, with about 90 percent of the results in, Lander is poised to win the Democratic nomination by more than 30 points.
An “anti-Zionist Jew” is about a credible a label as “a segregationist black person.”
And one we’ve met already:
Darializa Avila Chevalier Age: 32 Seat: New York, District 13
Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old PhD candidate with no prior experience in office, toppled Representative Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent.
On Tuesday night, Avila Chevalier told the crowd at her watch party at a Puerto Rican restaurant about her fight against the “Democratic machine.”
Avila Chevalier’s social media history is chock-full of offensive content. In 2020, she called Joe Biden a “rapist” and “war criminal” and referred to the U.S. as a “fucking disgrace.” According to CNN, in 2021, she also retweeted posts declaring that the border should be abolished and that “all deportation is wrong.”
Perhaps no other candidate in American history has been so brazenly hostile toward Israel and made it this far. As a student at Columbia University, Avila Chevalier was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that took over the South Lawn and was ultimately disbanded by the police. The day after the October 7 attack, she attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square—a decision she has since defended.
“I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” she told City & State when asked about her attendance at the rally.
Yes, it was a referendum against Israel, as well as against the mainstreatm Democratic Party (if there still is one). Who woulda thunk that three Israel-hating candidates could be handily elected in New York?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is contemplating a tipple:
Hili: Amazing.
Andrzej: What’s so amazing?
Hili: Cherry wine. I’ve never seen anything like it before.
Andrzej: Me neither, but it’s actually quite good.
In Polish:
Hili: Zdumiewające.
Ja: Co jest takie zdumiewające?
Hili: Wiśniowe wino, takiego jeszcze nie widziałam.
From Masih. I don’t agree with her about World Cup matches (or any sports matches) displaying ideological symbols, but she does make a good point about Islamist hypocrisy. Read more about the Pride Match between Iran and Egypt here, which includes this information:
This so-called “Pride Match” was planned before the World Cup draw was made back in December. After it took place, though, it quickly became apparent that the match would be played between Egypt and Iran.
Homosexuality is still illegal in Iran and punishable by the death penalty. And while homosexuality isn’t outlawed in Egypt, members of the LGBTQ+ community can be prosecuted for violating public decency laws.
Wow, now Iran’s regime and Egypt have objected to Seattle’s Pride Match and urged FIFA to remove Pride-related symbols.
This is exactly what I’ve been warning about: authoritarian Islamists never stop at asking for tolerance.
First: “Respect our religious practices. Respect our…
This is Richard. He's sometimes accused of not being a real dog because of his weird paws and inability to bark. Thinks his pack would say otherwise. 12/10 for all (IG: richardandtheguardians)
A few days ago I got a “pingback” from a site on the “Skeptic Society Magazine,” showing that someone had linked to my post that criticized ID advocate Michael Egnor’s video defense of libertarian free will. I went to the Skeptic Magazine site, and, as you’ll see, became puzzled. First of all, I’d never heard of the Skeptic Society. Here’s a bit from the Society about its mission and the magazine
Skeptic Society is an independent, secular online magazine dedicated to original ideas, free thought, and freedom of speech. We regularly publish articles on a variety of subjects, including politics, religion, book reviews, science, and technology. We welcome any material that is truly thought-provoking.
We are not affiliated with Skeptic Magazine or The Skeptics Society. This blog started as half joke and half serious notion about promoting scientific articles that are worth reading.
We don’t have membership, and we don’t discriminate no matter what political orientation you may have. If you have a valid point that is rational, we would love to hear about it.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to publish here.
And then I read the pinbacked article in that magazine, which you can also read by clicking below. As you can see, the piece says that it’s “written by Jenni Sidey”. (I’ve archived the article here).
This article is apparently the first in a four-part defense of Egnor’s talk and a critique of my piece I posted on my website. What struck me immediately, beyond its misleading arguments, was that it was written in the first person, as if it was produced by Egnor himself. I goes on and on using the first-person “I” in the response. Here are a couple of excerpts showing that:
University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has now posted, at his blog, Why Evolution Is True, a reply to a talk I gave in March at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. In the talk, presented by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, I discussed the reality of free will, and criticized the coterie of scientists, specifically neuroscientist Sam Harris, primatologist Robert Sapolsky, and Coyne himself, who deny it.
. . .I offer four strong arguments to support that view:
Everyone believes in free will. Even free will deniers do.
Denial of free will is self-refuting.
Determinism, which is the ideological basis for contemporary free will denial, has been disproven by modern physics.
Neuroscience supports the inference that free will is real.
Those are Egnor’s arguments, not “Jenni Sidey’s”. At any rate, the first part of “Sidey’s” four-part critique maintains that I don’t “walk my talk” when it comes to free will. “Sidey’s” accusation is that although I have argued that you can still have morality without libertarian you-could-have-done-otherwise free will, that view makes me a hypocrite, for nobody can be held “morally responsible” unless you have free will. From “Sidey’s” piece (indented):
First, morality presupposes free will. No person can be held morally accountable for an act he did not choose. It is self-evident that every sentient human being invokes morality. Even serial killers get offended if you steal from them. Everyone invokes moral law in everyday life. Everyone has a moral sense, of varying degrees, so everyone at some real level believes in free will. What we believe is not merely what we say. What we believe is how we live our lives. Every free will denier, Jerry Coyne included, invokes moral law day in and day out. Morality presupposes freedom to choose right and wrong.
Apparently “Jenni Sidey” (you’ll see the reason for the quotes shortly) hasn’t read my own work on free will. I have never said that people are or should be deemed “morally responsible” for their good and bad acts. That would assume the ability to freely choose to be moral or immoral, but I am a determinist who rejects that kind of “choice.” What I have said, and which anybody who reads what I’ve written will know, is that you should be held responsible for what you do, but not morally responsible. That is, you are responsible if you are the person who performed the act. That, to anyone with two neurons to rub together, is absolutely compatible with determinism.
You can also have a morality without determinism, for morality is just the social code that deems actions good (a consequentialist would say “having overall good consequences for society”) or bad. In my view, you are “immoral” if you kill someone without a good reason like self-defense. That means you’re doing something that society deems not only bad but worthy of punishment, but you don’t have to have made a libertarian decision to kill or not to kill. And society enforces its “morality” through punishment and reward, both of which can change people’s behavior, whether they be the person at issue issue or onlookers.
Changed behavior is also perfectly compatible with determinism: if you’re rewarded for good behavior or punished for bad—or see someone else undergo these consequences—you will be more likely to do good things and less likely to do bad things. I’m sure that “Jenni Sidey” would agree that rewarding dogs for good behavior or punishing them for bad behavior will, in the future, change their behavior; and yet I don’t think that “Sidey”, being religious (see below), would say that dogs have free will.
I explain this again because “Sidey” attacks me for going after people who do bad things and praising people for doing good things, even though I deny free will. That, “Sidey” thinks, is me not “walking the talk.” “Jenni” gives an example:
In Coyne’s case, there is an element of self-contradiction. Some years ago, he authored a blog post lamenting the moral impropriety of a guy who dented his car in a parking lot and drove off. If Coyne is right that there is no free will and we are meat machines, then all that happened is that a meat machine in a car machine collided with a parked car machine owned by a subsequently unhappy meat machine. If free will isn’t real, the guy who hit Coyne’s car and drove off is no more morally culpable than the car he was driving. Coyne, in his justified moral indignation at the other driver’s moral lapse, affirms his own belief in free will, at least free will in parking lots.
But my chastising someone for hitting my car does not mean I’ve sneakily “affirmed free will ,” nor did I say it at the time. If you read my post, I say nothing about free will or morality. Instead, I talk about selfish and altruistic behaviors, though I could have used “immoral” in the way I construe above. It makes no difference, for what I call “selfish”, “altruistic” or “immoral” has nothing to do with libertarian free will. “Sidey” continues:
Second, in some sense Coyne is right that I am making an argumentum ad populum. But it is actually better understood as an argumentum ad omnes — I’m arguing that everyone believes in free will, including Coyne. I’m saying that Coyne doesn’t walk his talk. On the one hand, he writes sophistry denying free will and on the other hand, he rails at the moral reprobate who dented his fender. In general, his blog is full of moral proclamations — Coyne is a moralizing scold on everything you can imagine. Of course, the fact that Coyne doesn’t really believe his own arguments against free will doesn’t prove that the arguments are wrong. But, as Carl Sagan noted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Coyne’s claim that every human being, including Coyne himself, is always wrong about the experience of free will is a very extraordinary claim, for which Coyne offers no ordinary, let alone extraordinary, evidence. My suggestion to Coyne is: if you want to be taken seriously in your denial of free will, stop invoking morality. Walk your talk.
Note the “I” in the first sentence, which seems to come not from a “Jenni Sidey” but from Egnor himself. Once again, if I, Jerry, criticize or praise someone, that doesn’t mean I believe in libertarian free will. I may not have been able to do something other than criticize or praise, but merely deeming something good or bad is not a “choice” I made freely. I had no such choice. I am constituted so as to defend actions I think are salubrious and damn those that I deem harmful. I do not understand why “Sidey” doesn’t get this—it’s not rocket science.
Anyway, you have probably concluded that “Jenni Sidey” is none other than Michael Egnor himself, perhaps writing under a pseudonym. And you’d be partly right: all the words in that article do indeed come from Egnor, as I found out when I got a second pingback from the Discovery Institute site Mind Matters—this time to a piece identical to “Sidey’s” at the Skeptic Society Magazine site, but written by Egnor himself (click screenshot to read:
So yes, Egnor did write the talk at the Skeptic Society Magazine site. But who, then, is Jenni Sidey? Is she a pseudonym for Egnor himself, writing at Skeptic Society Magazine, or was the article stolen by Skeptic Magazine and given another title?
I don’t think so. What seems to be the case is that Skeptic Society Magazine is simply plagiarizing articles from other places and changing the author to a nonexistent “Jenni Sidey.” That is outright plagiarism: attributing Egnor’s words to someone else (“written by Jenni Sidey”). That’s why I archived the article as well as the one below, because it’s proof that Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism.
You can see the plagiarism simply by Googling sentences from Jenni Sidey’s articles and seeing where they came from. Here’s another article that was plagiarized; it came from the site Artnews.comand you can read it by clicking on the link below:
Here are the first two paragraphs of Vollaard’s article:
Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”
Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.
And it’s easy to find that Lua Vollaard is a real person. But Jenni Sidey, on the Skeptic Society Magazine site, has plagiarized Vollaard’s piece, too. Click below to see the plagiarism, which I’ve archived here. Note that “Sidey” has changed the title of the article, but the content is the same:
“Sidey’s” first two paragarphs are identical to those of Vollaard’s piece. This is big-time plagiarism, attributing Vollaard’s words to someone else.
Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”
Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.
Note again the authorship: “written by Jenni Sidey.”
What can we conclude? First, that Egnor is not writing at a different place using a pseudonym. Second, that “Jenni Sidey” is a pseudonym—for someone who re-publishes articles stolen from other places, and attributing them to an author at Skeptic Society Magazine. (I haven’t checked “Jenni’s” other articles, but you can bet that they are also stolen from elsewhere and given Jenni’s name as an author.)
The upshot: Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism. Nowhere does it say that it’s republishing articles from other sites and giving them a new author. Real authors, like Egnor and Vollaard, should go after the magazine for stealing their words. Readers might want to investigate the website and see if other authors’ words are being stolen.
And of course this form of plagiarism is IMMORAL, whether or not you believe in libertarian free will. The magazine should first admit what it did, and then vanish.
We can keep going for two days after this, but if you got photos, please send ’em. Thanks.
Today’s batch is from Ephraim Heller, continuing his photos from a recent trip to Namibia. Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them. Don’t miss the chameleon with its tongue extended!
Today I continue my series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems. My last post focused on the Namib desert. This post focuses on my next destination, Swakopmund, a cold, fog-covered town along the Namib desert’s Atlantic coast.
Annual rainfall is less than 20 mm, but the town experiences ~180 days/year of thick fog, generated offshore when the cold Benguela Current contacts warm desert air. The fog typically settles in the early morning hours and burns off by mid-morning. The fog provides moisture that enables some vegetation to grow in a strip along the ocean. In addition, there is a small, brackish estuary at the mouth of the ephemeral Swakop River that supports marine birds. This photo, taken with my iPhone on an after-dinner stroll from a restaurant to our hotel, gives you a sense of the fog:
A herd of dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) grazing along the shoreline often startles visitors to Swakopmund. Dromedaries are not native to Africa. The species was domesticated on the southeastern Arabian Peninsula about 4,000 years ago and has not occurred naturally in the wild for nearly 2,000 years. They were imported to Namibia by the German colonial troops in 1889 for use as military pack animals in what was then German South West Africa. The animals I saw grazing along the shore are used by a local company for tourist rides. This is a handsome individual:
However, not everyone gets to ride the camels:
The most impressive aspect of our stay in Swakopmund was a short “living desert” safari. A guide took us on a walk and drive in the sand dunes immediately around the town. Where I saw pristine sand, the guide saw the telltale marks of animals burrowed in the sand.
The first individual he unearthed was a desert sidewinding adder (Bitis peringueyi), a small, ambush predator. The one he found was about 15 cm (6 in) in length. The eyes are positioned on top of the head rather than on the sides, adapted to allow the adder to bury itself in loose sand, leaving only the eyes exposed at the surface while waiting for prey. Prey includes sand lizards and barking geckos, which also provide most of the adder’s water needs. I took these close-up photos with my macro lens – kids, don’t try this at home:
Next, our guide uncovered a buried Namib sand gecko (Pachydactylus rangei), certainly the most charismatic of the desert critters. The large feet with webbed toes are good for running on loose sand and for excavating burrows. They burrow into dunes by day to escape the heat, emerging after dark to hunt insects and spiders.
These geckos also emerge during fog events and allow droplets to condense on their skin, then lick water from their own faces and bodies. In 2021 researchers reported that P. rangei produces a neon-green biofluorescence under UV and moonlight conditions using a new mechanism in terrestrial vertebrates. I wish I had known this at the time so I could have photographed them under moonlight. Regardless, these are clearly very happy creatures:
Of course, no visit to the Namib desert dunes is complete without a FitzSimon’s burrowing skink (Typhlacontias brevipes). The FBS is blind, legless, just a few inches long, and spends its entire life burrowed in the sand. The species has reduced eyes without eyelids and no visible external ear openings. It detects prey (ants, termites, ant-lions, and small beetles) by sensing the vibrations they produce when moving through sand:
Finally, our living desert guide found surface critter: a Namaqua chameleon (Chamaeleo namaquensis). The Namaqua chameleon is one of the largest chameleons in southern Africa (up to 25 cm or 9.8 in), and unusual in the family for being terrestrial rather than arboreal. In the early morning, this chameleon darkens to near black to maximize heat uptake; as body temperature rises, it lightens toward grey-brown to reduce absorption. Water is obtained through the diet, from morning dew, and through hygroscopic skin that absorbs moisture by capillary action (wow!). Nasal salt glands excrete excess sodium chloride and potassium, allowing salts to be processed without renal water loss:
The eyes can move independently, looking in different directions:
The tail is shorter than those of arboreal chameleons, and has lost its prehensile abilities:
The guide had some mealworms with which to entice the chameleon. It’s tongue was so fast its movement was hard to see with the naked eye:
Now for the birds. First up, a colorful common waxbill (Estrilda astrild):
Next, a common but lovely speckled pigeon (Columba guinea) with an excellent hair stylist and makeup artist:
A portrait of another common but colorful bird, the helmeted guinea fowl (Numida meleagris). This one looks pensive:
We took a tourist boat cruise to see the Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) colony near Walvis Bay. The Cape fur seal population along the southwest African coast is estimated at 1.5 – 2 million animals, roughly two-thirds of which occur along the Namibian coast.
Cape fur seals are eared seals (family Otariidae) rather than true seals. Unlike true seals, which move on land by undulating their bodies, otariids can rotate their hind flippers forward and walk on all four limbs, giving them considerably more agility.
During breeding season, bulls fight to establish territories and maintain harems of 5 to 25 females. A bull may lose nearly half his body mass over the six-week breeding season without leaving his territory to feed. Mothers leave their pups on shore while they feed in the ocean. When they return to shore, mothers and pups find each other by making unique vocalizations, amazing in colonies of tens of thousands of animals.
Seal colonies on land are predated by black-backed jackals and brown hyenas, who target pups. At sea, they are preyed upon by white sharks and killer whales. Here’s a photo from the boat:
I’ll have more cape fur seal photos in a future post.
Our guide on the boat feeds fish to the great white pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus). While I don’t support baiting, one of the pelicans landed on the boat for its free meal, enabling me to get this portrait:
Today’s Jesus and Mo is a Friday flashback from 11 years ago called “here“. The caption is relevant: “cracked this one out just over 11 years ago.” Mo doesn’t hear Jesus’s diatribe because he’s “praying” in the loo.
Welcome to Friday, June 26, 2026 and National Barcode Day, a great innovation that is now universally used.
Barcodes became commercially successful after they were adopted to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task for which they have become almost universal. The Uniform Grocery Product Code Council had chosen, in 1973, the barcode design developed by George Laurer. Laurer’s barcode, with vertical bars, printed better than the circular barcode developed by Woodland and Silver.
And the June 26 date comes from this:
The modern linear Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode (a refined, standardized version) was first used commercially when a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum was scanned at a supermarket in Ohio on June 26.
Here’s one example. You can see these at all stores, in hospitals, where they’re on your wristband, and on my faculty ID card, which I scan at the library to retrieve or check out books.
toguro, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
There are many other types of abstract codes shown on the Wikipedia page, but the barcode above is the most popular. Imagine how much it improved the lives of cashiers!
Mauricio Pochettino said he was happy. He said it in English, he said it in his native Spanish. He swore he was happy.
He didn’t sound happy. And really, there wasn’t much of a reason to be.
A little more than an hour before his post-match press conference in the bowels of SoFi Stadium, Pochettino watched his USA team give up a last-second goal to Turkey that ensured a 3-2 defeat in this final match of the group stage. A weakened US side – nine changes were made from the team that faced Australia last week in Seattle – had scored quickly, gave up two first-half goals and then equalized in a strong second half.
But a goal from Kaan Ayhan, scored with the last kick of the game, handed the US its first defeat after two dominant victories to open the tournament. And with it, he may have ended the honeymoon for this USA team.
Pochettino’s surly mood after the game – brushing off questions about momentum, chastising American journalists for not congratulating him for winning Group D – was a marked change from the gregarious figure who sat in the same chair a little more than 24 hours before. The question now is if that mood was indicative of the vibes around this US team changing ahead of the knockout stages now that the bubble of invincibility has been popped.
U.S.A. is still in the knockout round, which means that the American team could still win the World Cup. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. Here are the highlights, with goals on the video at 1:30, 2:37, 5:10, 8:27, and Turkey’s last-minute winning goal at 14:43:
Rescue teams clawed through collapsed buildings across Venezuela on Thursday in a desperate hunt for survivors after two powerful earthquakes left at least 164 people dead, with thousands more feared dead.
The U.S. Geological Survey warned the earthquake had the potential to become one of the deadliest and costliest in the country’s history, projecting a death toll in the tens of thousands and billions of dollars in losses.
Felt as far away as Brazil and Colombia, the quakes were the strongest to hit Venezuela in more than a century, ripping through a country already battered by years of economic collapse and political turmoil just as Washington was trying to stabilize the South American nation. The quakes were measured at magnitude 7.2 and 7.5.
At least 100 buildings collapsed in the worst-hit coastal state of La Guaira, according to the United Nations, while at least 10 buildings were toppled in the capital Caracas some 20 miles south. Nearly 1,000 people were injured in the quakes, according to an initial estimate by Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez early Thursday.
The U.S., China and countries from Germany to Qatar rushed to pledge support, but damaged roads and bridges, power outages and the closure of the country’s main international airport have complicated early rescue efforts.
President Trump said the U.S. stood “ready, willing, and able to help” and had ordered federal agencies to prepare a rapid response. The reconstruction effort is also expected to create opportunities for Washington and U.S. companies to play a larger role in rebuilding Venezuela after years of Chinese influence. The Defense Department is expected to play a major part.
Venezuela has been in a fragile political transition since U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro in January, leaving Rodríguez, who has worked with the Trump administration to reopen the country’s oil sector, now facing the daunting task of leading the disaster response.
I have no editorial comment on this save to say that it’s horrible. As of this morning, the death toll is 188 and the headline says “thousands feared dead.”
For more than two years, a barefoot cartoon boy was the mascot of “Handala,” a self-described pro-Palestinian hacktivist collective that leaked the private photos of Israeli generals, wiped the servers of a Fortune 500 company, and broke into the personal inbox of the FBI director. The group insisted it was a grassroots resistance movement. It was not—and the IRGC has now confirmed that the man who actually ran it faced kinetic consequences for his digital warfare.
Here’s that mascot:
Seyed Yahya Hosseini Panjaki, who operated under the alias Yahya Hamidi, was killed in early March 2026 during the opening phase of Israel’s strikes on Iran. The Israeli military confirmed he died in a strike on the headquarters of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), part of a wave of precision operations against senior intelligence figures.
What was the leader of a grassroots hacktivist collective doing inside Iran’s intelligence nerve center? The answer is that he had never really been one. As Western intelligence had long suspected, “Handala” was a front for the MOIS. Cybersecurity firm Check Point named the underlying unit Void Manticore; others label it Banished Kitten, Storm-0842, Dune, Red Sandstorm, or TAG-145. The names differ, but they converge on the same entity: a state cyber-warfare unit embedded within Iran’s intelligence ministry.
Yesterday, for the first time, an IRGC-linked channel publicly tied Panjaki to the leadership of the hacking operation—a rare instance of Tehran acknowledging what Western intelligence had assessed for years. His death marks one of the most significant blows in years to Iran’s cyber-espionage apparatus and its overseas covert-operations network.
Handala surfaced in December 2023, just weeks after October 7, taking its name and imagery from the barefoot child drawn by Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali in 1969, a symbol of the Palestinian national movement. Early posts cast the group as “a small fighter” aligned with Hamas before it pivoted to broader anti-Israel and anti-American messaging.
Its notoriety came from a relentless cadence of breaches and leaks designed to humiliate Iran’s enemies. In April 2026, it published what it said were more than 19,000 confidential images and videos pulled over years from the phone of former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—including imagery from undisclosed meetings abroad. Earlier leaks targeted former PM Naftali Bennett, former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, Netanyahu’s chief of staff Tzachi Braverman, and figures such as Benny Gantz and Natan Sharansky.
In March 2026, it claimed to have breached the personal Gmail of FBI Director Kash Patel. Washington, in response, offered up to $10 million for information on the group’s members. The most consequential operation, however, was a destructive wiper attack on Stryker Corporation, the Michigan-based Fortune 500 medical-device maker, which reportedly wiped devices across the company’s global footprint—described as the most significant wartime cyberattack ever carried out against the United States.
Panjaki’s reach went well beyond cyber, into the wider machinery of Iran’s “grey-zone” warfare; that murky space that is neither open war nor peace, where a state attacks its enemies but stays just below the line that would trigger a military or legal response.
In Iran’s case—and Panjaki’s specifically—that meant operations to assassinate Iranian dissidents living abroad, along with kidnappings and sabotage against regime opponents and Israeli targets around the world. His fingerprints are on a recent wave of Iranian plots that hire local criminal gangs to attack Jewish targets globally—schemes that have been broken up in Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, and even Sweden. That outsourcing is a microcosm of the whole grey-zone game: by paying a hired crew to do the killing instead of using its own officers, Tehran can deny involvement, make the attack hard to trace back, and slow down any response.
As the article says, cyberwarfare is sometimes ambiguous under international law. As Grok told me, “Cyber operations that cause (or are reasonably likely to cause) physical damage to property, loss of life, or injury to persons — directly or indirectly — generally qualify as a prohibited use of force.” And operations to kill people in other countries or attempts to kill or kidnap “regime opponents” or non-combatants in other countries clearly violate that. The report that Punjaki faces “kinetic consequences” of his actions includes a euphemism I’ve not heard before.
*You may well have heard about the terrible heat wave that’s affecting Europe. At first I thought it was just warm-on-the-verge-of-hot, and that Europeans simply couldn’t tolerate high temperatures, but no, it’s worse than that: it’s really hot, and Europe, lacking extensive air-conditioning, is experiences deaths by both heat and water:
As Europe broiled under heat that is testing the continent’s ability to adapt to extreme weather, temperatures in Britain on Thursday broke records that were set just a day prior. In southwest England, temperatures of 36.4 degrees Celsius, or 97.5 Fahrenheit, were recorded in the early afternoon and were expected to rise.
The stifling heat wave — the second in two months — has disrupted education, transportation and other aspects of daily life for millions of people, with officials warning that older people or those who work outdoors, like on construction sites, are most vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat.
The heat has also proved deadly.
In Spain, where temperatures soared past 38 degrees Celsius, or 100 Fahrenheit, over several days, government statistical models suggest more than 200 deaths ultimately could be attributed to the heat wave. The institute cautioned that the figures were estimates but officials and experts say there is a clear correlation between extreme temperatures and serious health issues.
In Italy, five people have died from heat exposure this week, according to the country’s main news agency, ANSA. Several of the victims died while they were working outside, and a homeless man died in Naples, highlighting the vulnerability of those who had little choice but to be outside. In France, at least 40 people have drowned since the latest heat wave began in the middle of last week, many of them teenagers swimming in unsupervised areas.
Across much of Western Europe, temperatures remained in the high 30s to low 40s Celsius, or around 100 Fahrenheit, on Thursday afternoon. Paris reached 39.6 Celsius, or 103.3 Fahrenheit, and was forecast to reach 42 Celsius later in the day.
More than a dozen countries were under high-level heat warnings on Thursday, including Austria, Belgium, Britain, Croatia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Serbia and Sweden.
Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common and severe because of climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels, experts say.
Europe is warming faster than any other continent, including in countries that are some of the least accustomed to extreme heat. In Britain and France, for instance, many buildings don’t just lack air conditioning — they are also designed to retain heat.
Today is clearly a day to feel sorry for people in both Europe and South America who are victims of circumstances beyond their control (though of course global warming is anthropogenic). Here’s a temperature map for yesterday from Fox Weather. Look at those temperatures in France!
*In one of the first Supreme Court decisions that will soon come out on Trump’s actions, the Justices have voted along ideological lines to allow Trump to deport immigrants temporarily here for humanitarian reasons.
The Trump administration can cancel temporary humanitarian protections for Haitian and Syrian immigrants living legally in the United States, the Supreme Court found on Thursday, a decision that could allow the government to deport hundreds of thousands of people starting this year.
The effects are likely to be immediate and ripple beyond Haitians and Syrians to affect approximately 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries who had temporary protected status when President Donald Trump took office. Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has sought to eliminate protections for 13 of those countries, including Haiti, Syria and several others that the State Department considers highly dangerous.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the conservative justices found that courts do not have authority to review determinations by DHS to end temporary protected status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
Congress created temporary protected status (TPS) in 1990 to shield immigrants in the United States from being deported to countries engulfed in armed conflict, a natural disaster or another extraordinary crisis, allowing them to work legally in the U.S. for up to 18 months.
Applicants to the program cannot have serious criminal records, and they must pay fees and pass a background check.
The U.S. government can renew the protections — and it has, multiple times, for several countries. That has provoked criticism from Trump and his base for allowing the provisional status to last for years, even decades.
“Keep in mind, this is temporary protected status,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court during oral arguments in April. “The word temporary is used again and again in the statute, including its title.”
The cases tested a key part of Trump’s immigration agenda, which has not only sought to deport undocumented immigrants but also to narrow the legal pathways for immigrants to reside in the U.S.
. . . The justices also decidedThursday that migrants on the Mexican side of the southern border are not entitled to apply for asylum.
I presume that the migrants in the last sentence above also refer to those fleeing Haiti and Syria. I can understand why Haitians want to apply for asylum, as that country is lawless, poor, and dangerous, but unless you have a personal or political reason to fear recriminations, you don’t qualify for permanent asylum. Of course many migrants claiming asylum are immigrating for economic reasons, but it still seems coldhearted to, say, deport Haitians back to a moribund country that’s dangerous for everyone. On the other hand, these were legally temporary visas, and the government can do what it wants. Because of the Democrats’ total failure to do anything about immigration, I have mixed feelings about this decision. Other decisions coming up are clearer to me, like birthright citizenship, which Trump tried to ban but is clearly described as a right the Constitution.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is now the Democratic Party’s candidate for New York’s 13th congressional district, has some rather ambitious goals. She wishes to prevent all deportations of illegal immigrants, irrespective of the severity of the crimes they have committed; she hopes to abolish prisons entirely, including for convicted murderers; and — oh yes, this one jumped out at me — she is “fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization.” “Our intifada,” she said two years ago, while at Columbia (where else?), “is an Internationalist one.”
I see. Question: Do I get a vote on that?
I ask because, all told, that seems somewhat extreme. Western civilization is me. It’s my wife and children. It’s my town, my state, my country. It’s the Constitution to which I have taken an oath. “Intifada,” in Arabic, means “to shake off.” Were Western civilization to be shaken off, all that I cherish would fall with it. I’m against that.
By and large, I am an ecumenical sort of chap. I have strong political views, but they are grounded in a classically liberal outlook and an understanding that pluralism is the fastest road to peace. “Intifada,” however, is not on my bingo card. Which leads me to wonder how I am supposed to react to this. In recent years, calls such as Chevalier’s have become common within the DSA set, and yet I have noticed that they engender far less outrage than other provocative views that seem comparatively innocuous. In the present era, at least, there seems to exist an assumption not only that the progressive movement will occasionally go completely crazy, but that when it does, it should be treated as if it were filled with impetuous children. Thus we are expected to ignore the fact that many current candidates for office embraced abolishing the police or suggested that white people are a virus or waved around a Hamas headband while insisting that 9/11 was America’s fault — and to ignore them on the grounds that those words were uttered in the past, as if the mere passage of time grants one immunity, provided that one is really left-wing.
Well, it doesn’t. Chevalier is seeking a federal position in the federal legislature that makes the federal laws by which I am bound. And she is crazy. For various reasons, a good number of our commentators seem to have become inured to this, so let me say it once again in slightly different words: Pretty much nobody who has lived in the United States during its 250-year history would ever, under any circumstances, have said or thought that they were “fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization.” I am not talking here about Congress, which is a much smaller subset. I am talking about the entire population of this country, from sea to shining sea, in every moment since the convention at Philadelphia. Chevalier’s declarations are the product of a diseased mind. They represent an unequivocal confirmation that the speaker is incapable of participating in society and of engaging with her fellow citizens on equal terms. So far as I can tell, she has never had a job outside of left-wing activism, which is appropriate, because her worldview ought to make her unemployable in every other arena. That her foray into the world of work may be as one of 435 U.S. representatives defies belief.
The literal answer to my question — “Do I get a vote?” — is that I do not. Thankfully, I do not live in New York’s 13th congressional district. But I do get to decide whether to tolerate this trend as if it were a curiosity or a foible or, instead, to use my voice to characterize it for what it is. I choose the latter. There is nothing charming or interesting or harmless about Darializa Avila Chevalier. She is not amusing. She is an enemy of the American creed. Those who wish to keep the sickness that she represents from spreading outside of New York ought to begin the process of repudiation posthaste.
Avila Chevalier is the most extreme Democratic candidate I’ve seen, but yes, the Democrats have a tendency to excuse lunatics like her because, after all, Trump is worse. That is likely true because, after all, she will probably be only a Representative while Trump as President has immense power. But I for one don’t want a less extreme “progressive” like AOC as President, and it’s likely that neither do other Americans, including many Democrats positioned more towards the center. It’s a Hobson’s choice, but at least we should have the guts to call out lunacy and irrationality when we see it in in our party. Or are the Democratic Socialists really our party (see third tweet below)?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Editor has lost patience with Andrzej’s parsing of words:
Hili: Don’t you have any other problems than arguing over whether the sentence should use the word “more quietly” or the phrase “less firmly”?
Andrzej: At the moment, no.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy wy nie macie innych problemów jak spierać się o to, czy w zdaniu ma być słowo „ciszej”, czy określenie „mniej stanowczo”?
Ja: Chwilowo, nie.
From the DSA co-chair. That party is no longer hiding its aims, so shouldn’t it count as a third party?
This is the DSA co-chair. Let me summarize what he says in this video:
We’re using the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle, not because we share its goals. We build our own organization, get elected under the Democratic label, caucus with Democrats when it’s useful,… pic.twitter.com/zYwsv4J8Bt
Two from my feed. First, an elephant is born and the herd helps it to its feet:
The second the baby was born, the herd closed ranks without hesitation. 🐘❤️
No one told them what to do. Instinct, love, and protection took over. Moments like this remind us that family isn’t just a human thing. 🥹 pic.twitter.com/0ZtCGSIbRC
Two very different-looking ghost pipefish. Sometimes it can be very difficult to determine the exact species, as there’s a lot of visual overlap between halimeda, robust, and velvet.#ghostpipefish #tulamben #tulambenbali #muckdiving #scubadiving
If you follow political news at all, you’ll know that three Democratic candidates, all progressives and all endorsed by Bernie Sanders and NYC antisemite mayor Zohran Mamdani, just won their primaries. And with New York being a Democratic state, that means that, with near certainty, they’ll all be seated in Congress next year.
The mayor made a much bigger bet in backing Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist challenging Espaillat, a five-term incumbent whom Mamdani had initially promised to endorse. Avila Chevalier has taken positions that could make her the most far-left Democrat elected to Congress in the past decade; she has said that “all deportations are wrong,” describes herself as a prison abolitionist, and attended a rally on the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that was widely perceived as expressing support for the attack. (Lander, who now accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, condemned the event at the time.) Avila Chevalier narrowly defeated Espaillat, who had the support of Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, among other establishment figures.
Now left-centrist and centrist Democrats, like me, might be distressed by this, as all the winning candidates were not only “progressives” (we need a new word for that ilk), but also opponents of Israel, desiring Palestine to expand from the river to the sea, forcing Jews to don inner tubes. But perhaps Avila Chevalier’s kind of lunacy is limited to deep-blue states like New York, so Jews don’t need to start applying for citizenship in Israel. Still, the Democrats as a whole are turning against the only democratic country in the Middle East, and that’s worrisome. When they get power, like Avila Chevalier, it’s more worrisome.
One reaction is to wring your hands and wail. Another, which is a purgative, is sarcasm, and that’s the direction Jeff Maurer takes in his website post below. Read and laugh (or weep). Quotes are indented, and I quote in extenso because the guy is good and may induce literal LOL:
It’s funny and might offend some, but look at her record (this was written before she won):
How crazy is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Zohran Mamdani-backed socialist trying to unseat incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th congressional district in the Democratic primary today? Well…how much time do you have? My challenge in this article is not to establish that Chevalier is crazy; my challenge is to find words to describe just how bonkers this Cirque du Soleil-level shit shows truly is.
Like virtually every socialist candidate, Avila Chevalier has a social media feed full of statements crazy enough to make their as-yet-unborn descendents [sic] feel shame. Here are some of her greatest hits:
She called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders.
She clarified her position on defunding the police by writing that her vision “means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”
She retweeted posts saying “yes, literally abolish the border” and “all deportation is wrong”.
She called the United States “a fucking disgrace”, referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land, and joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag.
She wrote favorably about communism, wrote “seize the means of production”, called for nationalizing utilities, pharmaceutical companies, and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords”, and wrote that “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.”
She called Joe Biden a “rapist” and a “war criminal” and said she wouldn’t vote for him, said “fuck Kamala Harris”, and criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being too pro-Israel.
She retweeted a post saying “Israel doesn’t exist”.
She wrote that Black and Arab men “[fetishize] ugly colonizer women”.
This type of stuff is why I’ve argued that we need to bring back the word “retard”. “Moron” or “ninny” doesn’t capture the intensity of what we’re dealing with here — those words are a pea shooter when we need an elephant gun. And, just as I use the words “moron” and “idiot” in a non-literal way, my use of “retard” does not refer to anyone with a cognitive impairment, but only to people who could lead normal lives but choose to have cognition similar to that of an oyster or a termite-infested log.
That being said: Chevalier’s posts are deep retard stuff. This is a type of retard that we don’t normally encounter; physicists have previously only theorized that this level of retardation might exist somewhere in the universe. Beyond the event horizon of this level of retard, the laws of space-time are ripped apart, and each new particle of retard that crosses the event horizon destroys intelligence somewhere else in the universe. Chevalier is less of a politician and more of fascinating phenomenon of the physical world — kind of like the Higgs-Boson particle or Ötzi the Iceman — and every newspaper should be running Pearl Harbor-sized headlines that read “QUANTUM RETARD ACHIEVED!!!”
Chevalier says that she has “grown considerably” since those tweets. She also hilariously accused her opponent of “re-litigating social media posts from half a decade ago” — yeah, who can even remember as far back as half a decade!?!?!? Half a decade ago is the early 2020s, a mostly-forgotten, black-and-white era so antiquated that many of us had slightly different haircuts and our around-the-house jeans were still our out-on-the-town jeans. Five years ago, I was a Mormon communist who thought that the global economy was run by the Keebler Elves — just like everybody back then!!! It was the early ‘20s, baby! Chevalier wants us to believe that people change dramatically in five years, and would also like us to elect her to represent a D+32 district, which has an expected incumbency period of 70-90 years.
Go listen to the embedded video in which she recounts the “apartheid” she witnessed when visiting the West Bank and Israel. (I should add that people never explain what they mean by Israel’s apartheid, especially given that 20% of Israeli citizen are Arabs, and of course totally neglect the serious apartheid of Palestine and other Arab states. How many Jews live in Gaza–a land that used to be almost completely Jewish? What would happen to a Jew who wished to live in Gaza?)
It actually seems that Chevalier hasn’t changed her extreme views at all. The New York Editorial Board tried to get Chevalier to sanewash her position on prison abolition — they did the thing that Fox News does with Trump where they try to walk him towards sanity but he stubbornly refuses — but Chevalier couldn’t give a straight answer to questions as simple as “What happens to the murderer?” Chevalier has maintained that it is always wrong to deport anyone, even if they’ve committed a crime. And Chevalier failed to get the endorsement of a left-wing New York group (that endorsed Zohran Mamdani) because when they met with her, she “[refused] to condemn Hamas or anything about it.” (my emphasis!) Really…she didn’t have any criticisms of Hamas? Not even, like…the outfits? Just “five stars, no notes” across the board? Even Sgt. Pepper has a few ho-hum tracks — the fact that Chevalier couldn’t find anything to criticize about Hamas forces me to conclude that she’s either unbelievably ignorant or should be contained by some sort of Hannibal Lecter-type prison setup.
So, pick you adjective of choice — “half-wit”, “lunatic”, “certified, notarized nut job” — this person should obviously not have power. I think that anyone who votes for a candidate like Chevalier should have to wear a diaper and a frilly bonnet, and be made to skip around town holding a big lolly and singing “I went boom boom at the ballot box!” Because that is just how egregiously that person has shirked their responsibilities as an adult. I could only imaging voting for Chevalier in the unlikely event that her opponent was somehow worse, such as if she was running against Reanimated Hitler or a robot programmed to skin and eat every human it encounters.
Maurer gives Avila Chevalier his highest rating for lunacy: five Marjorie Greenes.
But now for the bad news: These three — especially Chevalier — are a glorious gift to Republican flaks. What Michael Jordan was to Nike, Chevalier is to anyone whose job is to portray Democrats as radical, anti-America lunatics. And that is because she is a radical, anti-America lunatic; I hope normie Democrats loudly denounce her bullshit instead of trying to sanewash it [JAC: remember the sanctification of Kamala Harris?). I would also remind Democrats that considerations about party unity and maintaining a big tent don’t really apply when the core thesis of the person you’re dealing with is that you, personally, are a corrupt monster who is abetting genocide. In fact, you look like a dickless loser when Chevalier calls you a handmaiden of the Epstein class and you respond by saying “I’m more focused on opposing the failed presidency of Donald Trump.”
I also think that this makes the AOC presidential run that I’m dreading like a prostate exam during an earthquake more likely. For starters: Socialists are riding high, they’ll surely want to turn that (real or perceived) mojo into a presidential run. And it’s also probably true that Chevalier is such a freak show that AOC looks downright stateswoman-like in comparison. There is a (maybe true) story that the actress Marlene Dietrich wanted to appear in a scene with a camel because juxtaposing her with a camel would make her look beautiful. I think the same logic applies here; AOC seems sensible when compared to one of the most delusional weirdos our society has ever produced.
And one of the main downsides of an AOC presidential run also just got worse: Democrats will face pressure to take unpopular policy positions. It will be 2020 all over again; we’ll recreate the dynamic of that year’s primary, in which Pete Buttigeig was denounced as a neoliberal monster because he only wanted to create a public health care option (that would not have passed in a zillion parallel universes). The DSA will have a laundry list of terrible ideas, and they’ll push candidates to speak to those ideas, and some candidates will take the bait and make the Democratic brand so toxic that candidates would be better off running as part of the Anal Bleaching For Seniors Party.
Finally, there’s the rather banal belief that our country should not be governed by crazy people. I really am baffled by people who say “This is our Tea Party!”in a positive way!!! The Tea Party was bad! It’s a problem that our government contains so many delusional nincompoops! And that problem got a little worse yesterday. Time will tell just how bad this development turns out to be, but — in the immortal words of Pete Campbell — it’s not great, Bob!
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Below is the candidate explaining all her old “bad tweets”. She deleted her entire Twitter account but doesn’t really apologize for her sentiments. Instead, she fabricates “regrets” about her past language, saying “I certainly wouldn’t use a lot of language that I used back then today. If you think she’s recanted the views that she expressed in that language, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you. In another radio interview, conducted in Spanish, she walked out in a huff when confronted with those old social media posts (there’s a video at the site).
Maurer has a good sense of humor and is willing to tell it like it is. You should read his website, as I’ll be doing as the midterms approach. (His X feed identifies says he “wrote for John Oliver back when his show was…different.”)
