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’m hanging in there by my fingernails, and we have about four days’ worth of photos left. This is a hint to send yours in. . .
Today we have a short but very sweet series of three photos from reader Alex Skukas. The captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Something to hopefully make you smile (and maybe wistful) as you wait for your campus pond to reopen. We have two ponds in our backyard and one of them has a large rock in the middle.
The rock:
Zooming in:
Turtles are often found sunning themselves on the rock. But not this year:
This is a great place to build a nest free from terrestrial predators, and also gives the ducklings a safe place to dry off and sleep. I’ll try to report back on their progress.
And yes, the photo did make me wistful. The pond is still under construction, and look a long way from being finished. Ten to one we will have no water in it this year, and then it needs to be enriched with fauna before the ducks and turtles can thrive there. This may mean a 2025 without ducks, which makes me sad.
Welcome to Wednesday, June 12, 2024, a Hump Day ( “День Горба” in Ukrainian) as well as National Peanut Butter Cookie Day. Here’s how they make peanut butter, an essential ingredient in these cookies (and in many people’s sandwiches):
A jury in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday found Hunter Biden guilty of three felony counts of lying on a federal firearms application in 2018, a grievous blow to the Biden family as his father enters the final months of his re-election campaign.
Mr. Biden, 54, said in a statement that he was “disappointed” by the verdict, but that he was grateful for the love and support of his family and friends. He could face up to 25 years in prison, but first-time offenders who did not use their weapons to commit a violent crime typically receive no jail time. No sentencing date was set.
The verdict brought an end to an extraordinary trial that made painfully public Mr. Biden’s crack addiction, reckless behavior and ruinous spending — narrated by three former romantic partners, including the widow of his brother, Beau Biden.
Here’s what else to know:
The president’s reaction: In a statement, President Biden said he and the first lady, Jill Biden, were proud to see their son be “so strong and resilient in recovery” from his addiction. “Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support,” he added. “Nothing will ever change that.”
Sentencing could be months away: The judge in the case, Maryellen Noreika, said sentencing would typically be about 120 days after the verdict — that’s early October, or about a month before the election. Although the maximum possible sentence Mr. Biden faces is more than two decades behind bars and $750,000 in fines, federal sentencing guidelines call for a fraction of that penalty. Here’s a look at the charges.
Inside the courtroom: Mr. Biden stood with arms crossed, grimly surveying the jury as the verdict was read — although some members of his family were unable to get into the courtroom in time to hear it. Mr. Biden held the first lady’s hand as he left the courthouse and did not speak to reporters. “Recovery is possible by the grace of God, and I am blessed to experience that gift one day at a time,” Mr. Biden, who has said he’s been sober since mid-2019, said in his statement. Read about the scene at the courthouse.
Biden has indicated that he won’t pardon his son (these are federal charges, so he could), but Hunter isn’t out of the woods yet, as the NYT adds this:
The Delaware case, brought by the special counsel David C. Weiss, is widely regarded as the less serious of the two federal indictments against Hunter Biden brought last year. He still faces serious tax charges in Los Angeles stemming from his failure to pay the government during a yearslong crack, alcohol and spending binge; the trial is scheduled to start in September.
*Another NYT article, looking at sentences for crimes similar to Biden’s, suggests that there’s a substantial probability that Hunter will go to prison:
According to themost recent manual published by the United States Sentencing Commission, which sets recommended sentencing guidelines, someone in Mr. Biden’s position would typically face 15 to 21 months’ imprisonment for offenses related to the unlawful receipt, possession, or transportation of firearms.
From 2019 to 2023, just 52 defendants were sentenced in a similar category as Mr. Biden, and 92 percent were sentenced to serve prison time with a median prison term of 15 months, according to the commission’s data. Around 8 percent of people in that category received probation or a fine.
But judges frequently depart from the suggested guidelines when handing down a sentence and may reduce the time spent in prison in light of the particular circumstances unique to each case.
Mr. Biden, as a nonviolent first-time offender and as someone who was not accused of using the weapon in another crime, did not commit any of the aggravating factors that a judge might normally consider in setting a harsher sentence. (Examples would include making a straw purchase to transfer a gun to somebody who could not buy one legally.)
At the same time, the people who face charges similar to Mr. Biden often plead guilty and rarely go to trial, a fact that could further muddy the judge’s determination.
By a judges calculation, a guilty plea from a defendant can count strongly toward an acceptance of responsibility for their crimes, substantially lowering, in some cases, the so-called base offense level that informs the sentencing.
According to the commission’s data, a defendant comparable to Mr. Biden who received credit for accepting responsibility would see a suggested range of just 10 to 16 months in prison, and in practice, 30 percent of people sentenced in that category from 2019 to 2023 were sentenced to probation with no prison time.
Yes, he may get reduced prison time, but it’s still prison time. I have no dog in this fight, so I don’t particularly care, but you know how people argue about ”lawfare”.
*The WSJ has a piece on Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas, and the brutal and bloody route he’s forging to keep Hamas ahead of Israel. It’s long so I’ll just give a taste.
For months, Yahya Sinwar has resisted pressure to cut a ceasefire-and-hostages deal with Israel. Behind his decision, messages the Hamas military leader in Gaza has sent to mediators show, is a calculation that more fighting—and more Palestinian civilian deaths—work to his advantage.
“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar said in a recent message to Hamas officials seeking to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials.
Fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas units in the Gaza Strip’s south has disrupted humanitarian-aid shipments, caused mounting civilian casualties and intensified international criticism of Israel’s efforts to eradicate the Islamist extremist group.
For much of Sinwar’s political life, shaped by bloody conflict with an Israeli state that he says has no right to exist, he has stuck to a simple playbook. Backed into a corner, he looks to violence for a way out. The current fight in Gaza is no exception.
In dozens of messages—reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—that Sinwar has transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others, he’s shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas. The messages were shared by multiple people with differing views of Sinwar.
More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, most of them civilians, Palestinian officials say. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants. Health authorities said almost 300 Palestinians were killed Saturday in an Israeli raid that rescued four hostages kept in captivity in homes surrounded by civilians—driving home for some Palestinians their role as pawns for Hamas.
In one message to Hamas leaders in Doha, Sinwar cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “these are necessary sacrifices.”
. . .Even without a lasting truce, Sinwar believes Netanyahu has few options other than occupying Gaza and getting bogged down fighting a Hamas-led insurgency for months or years.
It is an outcome that Sinwar foreshadowed six years ago when he first became leader in the Gaza Strip. Hamas might lose a war with Israel, but it would cause an Israeli occupation of more than two million Palestinians.
“For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist writing in 2018 in an Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.
Yes, the odd thing is that although the world and many Palestinians decry the death toll of civilians in Gaza, which is unknown, Sinwar and Hamas want it higher, just the opposite of what Israel wants. That’s the irony of the whole affair, and yet Western pro-Palestinian progressivists are blind (perhaps willfully so) to the fact that Hamas revels in the blood of Palestinian civilians. He sees clearly that the higher the death toll, the more pressure there is on Israel to stop the war and even give Palestine a country. To Sinwar, the blood of civilians lubricates the path to victory. Those who support Hamas and at the same time criticize the death toll of Gazan civilians don’t realize the irony of their position.
*As I’ve noted before in the Nooz, many retailers raised prices too fast during and after the pandemic, and consumers are cutting back on spending. This accounts for recent falls in prices of stuff like cars, toilet paper, and grocery staples like milk and eggs, are dropping. The WaPo discusses whether this will last.
Does this mean that inflation is gone?
Not quite. Most of the announced price cuts are on goods, such as cars, furniture, appliances, sporting goods and dairy products — all of which have already gotten cheaper in the past year, according to federal inflation data.
The part of the economy where prices are still rising too fast is in services, like housing, health care and insurance. Those have been much harder to bring down, in part because they rely so heavily on workers, who have recently gotten pay raises. Overall, prices are 3.4 percent higher than they were a year ago, though some services are still notching double-digit growth.
“It won’t affect inflation because inflation now is in housing, medical services and gas,” said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst for Forrester. “But it will impact perceptions of price when consumers shop in mass retail and that perception is what is most important.”
What does this mean for my next shopping trip?
You might start to notice things are cheaper, but experts say it won’t happen all at once. Even if some items cost less, it’s possible others will cost more, leaving you with a similar tab at the checkout line.
“This will be a very gradual process that is not a straight line or linear or orderly,” said Cohen of Columbia. “Just when a consumer might see some relief in one place — ‘wow, my groceries cost less’ — they’ll likely encounter something else that is inflated. There’s so much that goes into how we experience inflation and the things we buy are just one part of it. It’s also your rent, your health bills, your electricity costs, tuition.”
What does this mean for the economy?
The spate of lower prices, combined with slowing spending, suggests the economy is losing some steam after last year’s rapid momentum. That could create room for the Fed to start cutting interest rates by the end of the year. Some Wall Street economists say rate cuts could begin as early as September, especially if inflation continues its descent.
But the economy’s direction is still very much up in the air. Fresh jobs data on Friday showed that employers added 272,000 jobs in May — far more than expected — suggesting that growth is still running hot.
As for me, I have a freezer full of steaks, which somehow don’t seem to have dropped in price during the pandemic. On the other hand, I’ve cut down on eating eggs, as they more than doubled in price. I buy toilet paper in huge packs from Costco, and the local produce store has reasonable fruits and vegetables. I eat a lot of black beans and rice, which I happen to love. I have enough dosh to be comfortable, but I really notice the price changes when I shop for groceries. (However, nuts for squirrels and duck food–for next year–will be purchased whatever the cost.)
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is heard questioning whether compromise between the left and right is possible in a conversation posted on social media. The conservative justice is also heard agreeing with a woman who says the United States should return “to a place of godliness.”
The audio was posted Monday on X by liberal filmmaker Lauren Windsor. She said it was recorded at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner last week.
“One side or the other is going to win,” Alito said. “There can be a way of working, a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”
Windsor then told Alito: “I think that the solution really is like winning the moral argument. Like, people in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that, to return our country to a place of godliness.”
“I agree with you,” Alito responded.
Windsor also spoke with Chief Justice John Roberts, who rejected a similar argument. When Windsor suggested the court should lead the nation on a “Christian” path, Roberts responded, “I don’t know if that’s true.”
The court declined to comment on the recordings.
. . . In an interview with Rolling Stone, Windsor said she recorded the conversations with Alito and Roberts because “the Supreme Court is shrouded in secrecy, and they’re refusing to submit to any accountability in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious ethics breaches, I think that it’s justified to take these types of measures.”
And from CNN:
Asked how the country can become less polarized, Alito responded: “I wish I knew. I don’t know. It’s easy to blame the media, but I do blame them because they do nothing but criticize us. And so they have really eroded trust in the court. … American citizens in general need to work on this to heal this polarization because it’s very dangerous.”
Altio said he doubted the court was in a position to bring the country together.
“I don’t think it’s something we can do,” he said. “We have a very defined role and we need to do what we’re supposed to do. But this is a bigger problem. This is way above us.”
It’s illegal in some places to record people without their knowledge and permission, but I guess it wasn’t in this case. But really, although I disagree with Alito’s view of the importance of “godliness”, and of his rulings in general, did he say anything headline-worthy here? And I guess reporters are allowed to misrepresent their own views to draw out the views of their ideological opponents, but this seems a bit sneaky to me.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being a good naturalist:
Masih was on my favorite t.v. show, 60 Minutes! Here’s the whole segment, and shows how much danger she’s in—constantly.
My Fight to Stay Alive in America: This is my harrowing journey on 60 Minutes CBS.
I’ve endured Iran’s regime, kidnapping, and assassination plots. The FBI relocated me to 19 safe houses. Yet, I have no home, not even in America, for giving voice to the voiceless.
A while back, the paper by Anderson et al. appeared in PLOS One, and caused a bit of a stir in the press because of its claims that women contributed far more to hunting in various societies than anthropologists thought. The metrics involved what proportion of foraging societies women participated in hunting (79%) and in what proportion of societies women hunted “large game” (33%). This was seen as surprising, but was also sold in the media as showing that women had been unfairly denigrated as the “weaker sex”, doomed to stay home and take care of babies, gathering plants and roots, and only rarely doing the “man’s work” of killing animals. (Of course a sexual division of labor says nothing about inferiority or superiority of the sexes only that they do different things, which are equally important in keeping society going.)
Click the title to read this paper if you haven’t already:
But then a group headed by Vivek Venkataraman (he’s at the University of Calgary) carefully scrutinized the data used and conclusions advanced by Anderson et al., and published a paper in bioRχiv which showed that the Anderson et al. paper was shoddy, containing a number of methodological and numerical errors, all of which conspired to make Anderson’s conclusions false: women appeared to hunt much less than men in both senses. (Note that the rebuttal is very polite, a model of how rebuttals should be written.
Here, for example, is a tweet I posted then listing the many problems with Anderson et al.
I wrote about Venkataraman’s paper on this site, but of course then it was a preprint that had not yet been published, so it didn’t have the imprimatur of publication. Now it has appeared, which i found after reader djc mentioned in a comment that it was accepted in a respectable journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. The paper, which is essentially the same as the preprint, can be found in published version (well, as a corrected proof in press) by clicking on the link below, or accessing the pdf here:
I’m not going to reproduce all the criticisms I and others leveled at Anderson et al. What’s new in the published paper is a figure that summarizes all the issues that Venkataraman et al. find with Anderson et al.’s data (click to enlarge):
The conclusions, if the second paper is right, is that women hunted far less often than Anderson et al. concluded, both in the frequency of foraging societies in which women hunted and the frequency of such societies in which women hunted large game. The related conclusion is that the Anderson et al. paper was not thoroughly reviewed (I’ll give the reviewers a break here: it would be a lot of trouble to look up some of the original data), and at the very least Anderson et al. were inexcusably sloppy. At the most they could have even been tendentious, tweaking and massaging the data so it looks like women hunted more than they did. Here are two paragraphs from the second paper showing the problems of the first:
Insufficient search for source material:
Fourth, though Anderson et al. (2023) investigated each society “by searching through the original references cited in D-PLACE (Binford, 2023; Kirby et al., 2016), and by searching digitized databases and archives,” there are instances in which well-known authoritative sources were not consulted. For example, Anderson et al. (2023) coded the Batek of Malaysia as having female hunters based on Endicott (Endicott, 1984). However, a more recent book by the same author provides quantitative information on female contributions. Endicott and Endicott (2008) wrote: “Still, women procured 2 percent by weight of the animals hunted by nonblowpipe methods and 22 percent of all bamboo rats.” Women procured no animals using the blowpipe (Table 4.1, p. 76) (Endicott and Endicott, 2008). The!Kung were also coded by Anderson et al. (2023) as having female hunters. Yet in her famous ethnography Nisa: The Life and Words of!Kung Woman, Shostak (1981, p. 220) wrote: “!Kung women cannot be considered hunters in any serious way…” A similar case prevails for the Tsimane horticulturalists of Bolivia. The authors cite Medinaceli and Quinlan (Medinaceli and Quinlan, 2018), but they ignore a recent case study on Tsimane women hunting (Reyes-García et al., 2020).
Pseudoreplication:
The fifth issue concerns pseudoreplication, in which the same case is counted more than once. This leads to inflated and inaccurate estimates. There are several examples. The!Kung and Ju/’hoansi are treated as independent points, but these terms refer to the same population (Lee, 1979). The same holds for the Agta and Ayta of the Philippines (Goodman et al., 1985). Moreover, the Efe, Sua, Mbuti (BaMbuti), and Bambote, and the Mardujara and Martu (Martu), are each counted independently despite being members of closely related groups (Bahuchet, 2012; Myers, 1979). We recognize that these errors by Anderson et al. (2023) are not deliberate. Indeed, in at least one case it may be valid to count these as independent data points. The Efe and Mbuti live nearby but are known to have divergent hunting strategies. The Efe are traditionally bow hunters, whereas the Mbuti are traditionally primarily net hunters (Bailey and Aunger Jr., 1989). However, due to the potential for cultural autocorrelation to inflate the frequency of women’s hunting, such decisions should be acknowledged and justified.
These are just two of many problems, and I’d be really embarrassed if I were an author on the first paper. But perhaps Anderson et al. will reply, though I think Venkataraman, given that they use quotes, have them dead to rights.
But really, the Anderson et al. paper got a lot of publicity because it was considered “feminist,” showing that women did more hunting than previously thought, with the implication that anthropologists, because of an anti-female bias, unduly neglected women’s hunting. Unfortunately, that kind of popular analysis is misguided, since women, even if they hunt less often than men, are not inferior: they just have a different role, and one that is essential in preserving societies and cultures.
And I predict that the rebuttal of that paper will probably be ignored by the press, simply because it dismantles a conclusion that was considered “progressive”. I hope not, but we shall see. But anyone calling the second paper “anti-feminist” is dead wrong; it’s just correcting the science, and it says nothing about how we regard women’s rights and value.
UPDATE: Prediction verified: see comment #2 below by one of the authors of the second paper.
My co-deplatformee Maarten Boudry has announced in Quillette that he’s written an open letter (with coauthor Prof. Mark Elchardus) against the growing worldwide call to boycott Israeli universities. Although it’s called a “faculty open letter”, you don’t have to be an academic to sign it, though the signatures will be vetted to keep out trolls. You can read about the letter at the first link (it presents an earlier version of the letter), and then click the second headline to actually sign the latest and most comprehensive letter if you agree with its sentiments.
From Maarten’s introduction in Quillette (I won’t reproduce the whole thing):
Universities across the world are facing pressure—from students but also from academic staff—to cut ties with Israeli institutions over the war in Gaza. In the US, a dozen universities have struck agreements with activists and partly conceded to their demands, including divestment from Israeli companies. In Europe, dozens of Spanish universities and five Norwegian universities have resolved to sever all ties with Israeli partners deemed “complicit” in the war in Gaza. Several Belgianuniversities have now suspended all collaborations with Israeli universities because of their collaborations with the IDF. Even without a formal boycott, pressure from anti-Israel protests and the BDS movement has already led to pervasive exclusion of Israeli scientists and students. In the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, over 60 academics have testified what this amounts to: cancelled invitations to lectures and committees, desk rejections of papers on political grounds, freezing of ongoing collaborations, disrupted guest lectures, and withdrawn co-authorships.
And then, since Maarten is a philosopher, he goes into the arguments for and against such a boycott.
On the “con” side he criticizes the Netanyahu government and its policy of settlement on the West Bank, but in the end, as you must have guessed, he concludes that a blanket boycott of Israeli universities is counterproductive, not just for Israel but for the liberal Western values that universities are supposed to represent.
In liberal democracies such as Israel, universities are indispensable parts of civil society, which facilitate the critical examination and questioning of government policies. Despite the country’s flaws, such criticism is still very much possible in Israel. Those who oppose the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners will find numerous allies among Israeli academics. Many of them took the lead in the protests against Netanyahu’s dangerous judicial reforms of 2023, which threatened Israel’s democratic character. Finally, Israeli universities enrol tens of thousands of Palestinian and Arab students, often supported by government programs. They too will be targeted by a blanket boycott of Israeli universities, which will in no way contribute to peace, but will instead further weaken the constructive and liberal forces in Israeli society.
Let me add that Bob Zimmer, the late President of the University of Chicago, was pressured to divest from Israel and also engage in an academic boycott against its country’s universities He responded in 2016 by issuing this statement:
The University of Chicago will not divest from companies for doing business in Israel and opposes academic boycotts aimed at specific nations, including Israel. The University is restating its policy to address questions regarding its institutional position.
The University does not take social or political stances on issues outside its core mission. Using investments or other means to advance a social or political position held by some segment of the University community would only diminish the University’s distinctive contribution – providing a home and environment for faculty and students to engage freely and openly on the widest range of issues. The Kalven Report outlines this approach and the values behind it, concluding that preserving the freedom of individual scholars to argue for or against any issue of political controversy requires “a heavy presumption against” collective political action by the University itself.
The University has been consistent in its opposition to proposed academic boycotts, issuing statements in 2007 and again in 2013. The University has from its founding held as its highest value the free and open pursuit of knowledge. Faculty and students must be free to pursue their research and education around the world, and to form collaborations both inside and outside the academy, encouraging engagement with the widest spectrum of views. For this reason, the University continues to strongly oppose boycotts of academic institutions or scholars in any region of the world, including recent actions to boycott Israeli institutions.
QED. Now click below to go to the letter itself, and then, if you want to append your name, click again on the “sign the open letter” boxes at top right or bottom—or just click here.
Of course I asked Maarten what would become of the letter so that readers who sign it aren’t simply engaging in a performative gesture. Maarten said this:
What will become of it? Obviously we want to send a signal to universities across the world that plenty of academics firmly oppose any form of boycott, so that the cowards won’t follow the path of least resistance and cave into the loudest protestors (as my uni had done already). I like to think that our well-publicized letter in Dutch (in two newspapers) played some role in the public announcement by the Dutch rectors that they reject a boycott, two weeks later.
The more people sign, especially academics, the stronger the signal.
JAC: Note that the anti-boycott announcement in the Netherlands involved 15 Dutch universities, including the University of Amsterdam. These comprise the totality of the Association of Universities of the Netherlands, so it’s a very strong signal of opposition to boycotts. But this is only one country, not the world, and, as Maarten notes in his Quillette piece, calls for academic boycotts of Israel are numerous and ubiquitous.
Reader Divy, who runs a Florida vet operation with her husband Ivan (Mobile Veterinary Services; Instagram page here), produced this wonderful collage of animal eyes. Your job: guess the animals. Divy’s notes:
All these animals have been seen by us in one capacity or another, either as patients, or part of a collection check.
Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, June 11, 2024, and National Corn on the Cob Day. I used to have a picture of Matthew Cobb with a can of corn on his lap, which I called “Corn on the Cobb”, but I can’t find it. This photo of elote, the tasty Mexican version, will have to do:
SimpleFoodie, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 11 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*On Sunday French President Emmanuel Macron experienced a humiliating defeat when, after the elections for the EU parliament, his own Renaissance party’s representatives were roundly defeated (31.4% to 14.6%) by Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally Party (it seems that all of Europe is moving sharply rightward). In respond, Macron made a gamble: he summarily dissolved one of the two houses of the French Parliament and called for new elections. From the NYT:
On the face of it, there is little logic in calling an election from a position of great weakness. But that is what President Emmanuel Macron has done by calling a snap parliamentary election in France on the back of a humiliation by the far right.
After the National Rally of Marine Le Pen and her popular protégé Jordan Bardella handed him a crushing defeat on Sunday in elections for the European Parliament, Mr. Macron might have done nothing. He might also have reshuffled his government, or simply altered course through stricter controls on immigration and by renouncing contested plans to tighten rules on unemployment benefits.
Instead, Mr. Macron, who became president at 39 in 2017 by being a risk taker, chose to gamble that France, having voted one way on Sunday, will vote another in a few weeks.
“I am astonished, like almost everyone else,” said Alain Duhamel, the prominent author of “Emmanuel the Bold,” a book about Mr. Macron. “It’s not madness, it’s not despair, but it is a huge risk from an impetuous man who prefers taking the initiative to being subjected to events.”
Shock coursed through France on Monday. The stock market plunged. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, a city that will host the Olympic Games in just over six weeks, said she was “stunned” by an “unsettling” decision. “A thunderbolt,” thundered Le Parisien, a daily newspaper, across its front page
The risk, of course, and it’s substantial, is that the National Rally Party would win the elections, national ones this time. From an earlier NYT article:
If the National Rally repeats its performance in national elections, the country could become nearly ungovernable, with Mr. Macron confronting a Parliament hostile to everything he believes in.
“It’s a serious, weighty decision,” he acknowledged. “But above all, it’s an act of trust” in French voters, he said.
French parliamentary elections take place in two rounds. The second round will be held on July 7, less than a month from now.
Given France’s important place at the heart of the European Union, the European election result was a significant sign of a strong rightward drift in Europe, driven mainly by concerns over uncontrolled immigration. The nationalist right has also been far more ambivalent than Mr. Macron and other Western leaders about supporting Ukraine.
. . . A National Rally triumph in the legislative elections that Mr. Macron just called would not topple him from office. But depending on the results, it could force him to appoint a prime minister from his political opposition — perhaps even from the National Rally.
And France would be in chaos. Why is Macron doing this? He didn’t have to dissolve Parliament; he decided to. I don’t know enough about French politics to give an answer, and the NYT says just this:
“France is a country of the discontented, but Mr. Macron has provoked an acute form of personal resentment,” Mr. Duhamel said. “He has given many French people the feeling of being inferior, and they detest that.”
Such is the animus that Mr. Macron may have encountered, he might well have been forced to dissolve a Parliament where he does not have an absolute majority in the fall anyway.
I asked Matthew’s opinion, as he knows a lot about France, and here’s his answer:
[Macron] is trying to regain the initiative. His party has a fragile majority in parliament, and has been ruling by decree for the last year. This way he hopes he can oblige the right to unite around him, and the left to vote for his party in the second rpund of the elections where they face an RN candidate. That’s how he got elected President, twice, with the voters of the Left gritting their teeth and voting for him against the Le Pen. He has never had a majority of French people *for* him. But he has created such havoc and compromised with the politics of the RN (except on Europe and Ukraine) over the last 6 years that he may have used up that political capital. We will see….
He added this, too:
“Perhaps more significant in Macron’s eyes, and it seems to have worked: he has destroyed what remains of the old right wing party, which claims to be the inheritor of de Gaulle. They have just said they will stand in the election with the RN (the inheritors of Petain…) They will be shattered forever. (They are now called Les Républicains. Used to be called the RPR [Chirac’s party]. Macron’s project has always been to get rid of the old parties of right and left. )
*NBC News reports that the U.S. is contemplating cutting a side deal with Hamas (without the presence of Israeli representatives) to free the American hostages. (h/t: Bill)
Biden administration officials have discussed potentially negotiating a unilateral deal with Hamas to secure the release of five Americans being held hostage in Gaza if current cease-fire talks involving Israel fail, according to two current senior U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials.
Such negotiations would not include Israel and would be conducted through Qatari interlocutors, as current talks have been, said the officials, all of whom have been briefed on the discussions.
White House officials declined to comment.
The Biden administration has said it believes Hamas is holding five American hostages who were abducted during the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. U.S. officials are also hoping to recover the remains of three additional U.S. citizens who are believed to have been killed on that day by Hamas, which then took their bodies into Gaza.
The officials did not know what the United States might give Hamas in exchange for the release of American hostages. But, the officials said, Hamas could have an incentive to cut a unilateral deal with Washington because doing so would likely further strain relations between the U.S. and Israel and put additional domestic political pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
One of the former officials said the internal discussions have also taken place in the context of whether the possibility of the U.S. cutting a unilateral deal with Hamas might pressure Netanyahu to agree to a version of the current cease-fire proposal.
I haven’t thought at length about this, but it sounds to me like a bad idea. We are allies with Israel and should be solving this problem together, nor should the U.S. be helping Hamas (note: this isn’t Palestine they’re bargaining with) in any way. What could the U.S. give Hamas that wouldn’t help them? On the other hand, I can see that it’s a way to give five human beings their freedom, and Biden’s real brief is to help Americans if he can. On the other hand, it seems like an election-year stunt, and ideally the U.S. would be working with Israel to get ALL the hostages freed. (But we’re not in agreement on the negotiations.) On the third hand, Thailand did cut a side deal to get its hostages back by releasing Palestinian prisoners. (I am not sure how many Hamas members are in U.S. prisons, and whether Hamas would want them back badly enough.) This is a diplomatic and moral dilemma, and I can see both sides. I just don’t think Biden should be helping Hamas, though if they’ll let Americans go in return for a handful of Arab terrorists being released from prison, perhaps it’s worth considering. Readers should weigh in.
Hamas terrorist leaders have given standing orders to operatives who are holding hostages saying “that if they think Israeli forces are coming, the first thing they should do is shoot the captives,” according to Israeli officials quoted by The New York Times on Monday.
Two days after the Israel Defense Forces’ rescue of four hostages from Nuseirat in central Gaza, the newspaper reported that if other hostages were killed on Saturday, as Hamas has claimed, “it might have been at the hand of the [terrorists], not because of an Israeli airstrike.”
The IDF has directly rejected a Hamas claim that three hostages were killed by Israeli airstrikes, the report noted.
The two buildings where the four hostages were kept were about 200 meters apart, and a decision by security forces to go for both simultaneously on Saturday was due to the concern that Hamas may murder the hostages after identifying the rescue operation at the other location.
The Times also reported on Washington’s contributions to hostage-rescue efforts since almost immediately after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel, quoting US officials as saying that “the sheer numbers of American aircraft” gathering intelligence over Gaza have been able to surface information that Israeli drones missed.
“At least six MQ-9 Reapers controlled by Special Operations forces have been involved in flying missions to monitor for signs of life,” the officials were quoted as saying.
Well, I’m delighted that the U.S. is sticking with Israel and helping it gather intelligence. My question is what Hamas has to gain by shooting hostages if the IDF shows up. It loses bargaining chips, for one thing. Their response might be that there’s no surviving an encounter with the IDF, and why give up hostages that Israel wants if you’re going to die. Another thought I had was, “Just surrender if the IDF shows up. You may have to give up your hostages, but you don’t die.” Then I remembered that true Muslims want to die, as you get eternal benefits in heaven from martyrdom. I asked Malgozata earlier, and she, like me, didn’t have a cut-and-dried answer. A half hour later she sent me this:
The answer to your question of why Hamas they kill hostages when the IDF shows up came to me after we finished talking. They keep hostages alive only as long as they need them to extract some benefits from Israel. Otherwise, why let those infidels live? Killing infidels is pleasing to Allah. Then we went for a walk and I told Andrzej about your question. He reminded me about the Nazis in the last weeks of the war. They needed men and fuel for fighting but they still used a substantial portion of both to kill Jews. Their aim was to kill all Jews on Earth and they tried to kill as many as possible even when they could see Russian tanks on the horizon. And this was pure, earthly ideology, no heavenly rewards were promised. So pure hate can achieve such an outcome.
Readers are of course invited to weigh in on this issue.
*The Washington Post has an op-ed called “A scientific controversy at the Supreme Court“, which of course got my antennae waving. It turns out that while nearly all studies show that the abortion drug mifepristone is safe, a couple of studied highlighted problems. Recently those papers showing problems were retracted by the publisher. Remember, the whole basis for banning the drug in Texas came from those who say the FDA ignored problems with the drug!
In March, the Supreme Court heard a case about access to mifepristone, one of two pills used for a medication abortion. Just weeks before that, though, a scientific controversy roiled the debate: Some of the scientific studies underlying the legal challenge to the abortion pill were retracted by Sage, the academic publishing company, over methodological and ethical concerns. The Supreme Court is expected to rule in a matter of days or weeks.
This is a big deal. Removing a published article from a scientific journal doesn’t happen because of some small error. It’s unusual for a paper to be retracted (about 1 in 500), but the rate is increasing — and misconduct accounts for the majority of such instances. A retraction can be decided by the authors (after realizing a huge error) or by the publisher (over fraud, plagiarism, ethics, etc.).
The legal challenge was set off by a group of antiabortion doctors who argued that the Food and Drug Administration ignored safety concerns when it eased restrictions on mifepristone’s availability. They relied on scientific studies claiming the medication is dangerous, citing the number of emergency room visits after mifepristone use. After publication, though, other scientists voiced major concerns about the statistical methods and thus questioned the conclusions.
The article mentions some of the other errors in the papers, and I assume the review was conducted objectively. There is more:
The experts identified major ethical issues and scientific errors, including: A peer reviewer knew at least one of the authors of all three studies, and several are members of the same pro-life advocacy organizations, despite declaring no conflicts of interest in the study. The Sage review also concluded there were “unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions,” “material errors” and “misleading presentations” of data that “demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor and invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part.”
Then there’s this:
Clinical guidance and policy are (ideally) built on decades of research and consideration of the totality of evidence. In the case of mifepristone, more than 100 studies show it’s safe — in fact, safer than Tylenol — with only a few discordant studies. However, big mistakes can make it past the peer-review process, and, in some rare cases, “mistakes” are intentional and egregious. Even if studies are retracted, they can do a lot of harm. (Just look at the Wakefield study on autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.)
If that’s the case, then the Supremes should say the drug is safe. We don’t want judges deciding what sound science is; we want them to defer to the scientific consensus, as they do when ruling against creationism as a subject in public schools. If the Supreme Court starts judging the safety of drugs, we’re in trouble.
*Finally, Hunter Biden’s case has gone to the jury:
Jurors in Hunter Biden’s gun trial began deliberating Monday to decide whether the president’s son is guilty of federal firearms charges over a revolver he bought when prosecutors say he was addicted to crack cocaine.
He is charged with three felonies in the case that has laid bare some of the darkest moments of his drug-fueled past. Prosecutors have used testimony from former romantic partners, personal text messages and photos of Hunter Biden with drug paraphernalia or partially clothed to make the case that he broke the law.
“No one is above the law,” prosecutor Leo Wise told jurors in his closing argument as first lady Jill Biden watched from the front row of the Wilmington, Delaware, courtroom.
Jurors deliberated for less than an hour before leaving the courthouse for the day. Deliberations were to resume Tuesday morning.
. . .Before the case went to the jury, the prosecutor urged jurors to focus on the “overwhelming” evidence against Hunter Biden and pay no mind to members of the president’s family sitting in the courtroom.
“All of this is not evidence,” Wise said, extending his hand and directing the jury to look at the gallery. “People sitting in the gallery are not evidence.”
I’m guessing that the verdict will be “guilty”.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the bad news has put Andrzej in a bad mood:
Hili: You have been reading the news again.
A: Is it visible?
Hili: Yes, You look as if you wanted to say something unpleasant to somebody.
In Polish:
Hili: Znowu czytałeś wiadomości.
Ja: A to widać?
Hili: Tak, wyglądasz jakbyś chciał komuś powiedzieć coś przykrego.
Albanese is an odious person. Look at the language she uses:
.@FranceskAlbs This is to serve notice that your statement below constitutes a material breach of the United Nations Code of Conduct for Special Procedures Mandate-Holders of the Human Rights Council, specificially for violating your duties under Article 3 to act through a… https://t.co/eIfvTsGvGq
Here’s Bill Maher’s monologue from his latest episode of Real Time. It’s a serious (but humorous) look at America’s deeply dysfunctional prison system, but beginning with speculation about Trump getting raped in prison.
As I’ve written ad nauseam, America deliberately creates prisons to be horrible, demoralizing, and—in the extreme form of SuperMax prisons—liable to drive their inmates insane. All of this comes from the belief that prisoners had free will when they did their crime, and thus must undergo severe retribution. Yes, incarceration can be useful for keeping bad people out of society, helpin reform them, and even detering others from criminality, but retribution? If you’re a determinist, it doesn’t make sense. That’s why enlightened countries like Norway treat their prisoners like human beings. That may explain why Norway’s recidivism rate is about a quarter of America’s (rates mentioned in the video below).
The whole justice system—not just in America but nearly everywhere—is based on the assumption that criminals could have avoided doing their crimes—that they have libertarian free will. Thus they must be punished for making the wrong “choice.” Both Robert Sapolsky and I, diehard determinists, think that one of the biggest implications of determinism is the pressing need for judicial reform. And this attitude als0 pervades Maher’s monologue.
This is really a video op-ed, and I can’t help but believe that, at least for the video generation, it’s more effective than a serious piece in the New York Times.
