Friday: Hili dialogue

November 7, 2025 • 6:45 am

It’s also Welcome to the end of another “work” week: Friday, November 7, 2025, and National Doughnut Appreciation Day. Here I am in 2005 appreciating the largest donut I’ve ever seen, the “Big Dat” from Dat Donuts, not far from the University. And I ate the whole thing:

It’s also  American Football Day, Eat Smart Day, and National Chinese Take-out Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In the NYT’s morning newsletter, there’s a section called “An all-out war” about the spate of politically-motivated gerrymandering going on as each party furiously tries to draw congressional districts that will maximize its seats in the House:

Lawmakers realized in the 19th century that they could increase their party’s political power by redrawing legislative districts. The term of art is gerrymandering, named after the map for the Massachusetts State Senate drawn under Gov. Elbridge Gerry. (One district looked like a salamander. Get it?) Typically, legislators gerrymander once a decade, after the census.

Today, gerrymandering is a weapon of constant political warfare. State legislators, both red and blue, are furiously redrawing congressional maps in a quest to control the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections.

The skirmishing began in August, when Trump persuaded Texas lawmakers to redraw congressional districts, which will probably let them send five more Republicans to Congress. California fought back on Tuesday and will probably deliver five seats to the Democrats. Missouri, Ohio and North Carolina have also drawn new maps. A dozen or more other states are considering it.

Each side believes it is at an unfair disadvantage unless it rejiggers its maps.

Why it matters

This is a crisis with few parallels in American history, election lawyers told my colleagues Richard Fausset and Nick Corasaniti. “The wheels are coming off the car right now,” Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who has studied gerrymandering, told them. “There’s a sense in which the system is rapidly spiraling downward, and there’s no end in sight.”

Here’s what he means: If the cycle continues, gerrymandering could happen before every midterm election, in any state, to the benefit of whatever party’s in charge. The turnabout could confuse voters, deepen their cynicism and create a situation in which House delegations from some states don’t reflect the political diversity of their residents.

All this spells trouble for representative democracy. It lets politicians with Sharpies pick their voters, instead of the other way around. New districts that are considered “safe” for one party are more likely to elect a partisan warrior. Incumbents are less likely to be voted out of office. That’s great news if you’re in power. Less so if you’re not.

“I don’t think this is pearl-clutching,” Nick said when we spoke yesterday. “It’s pretty dark.”

These problems are already evident across the country. Earlier this year, The Times looked at the nearly 6,000 congressional and state legislative races in November 2024. Very few were true contests. “Nearly all either were dominated by an incumbent or played out in a district drawn to favor one party overwhelmingly,” my colleagues wrote. “The result was a blizzard of blowouts, even in a country that is narrowly divided on politics.”

“Dominated by an incumbent” is not something I consider unfair, unless I don’t know what they mean.  Incumbents have been tested, and if they did a good job they have an advantage, and probably have an advantage even if they were so-so.  However, districts drawn to favor a specific party is another matter, and now it’s leading to wars between states: Texas draws districts to favor Republican congresspeople, while California retaliates by redrawing districts to favor Democrats.  The only way to stop this is to adopt no-redistricting laws, but that would have to be done state by state, not by Congress. Or so I think.

*Reader Loretta sent a link (archived here) to a Torygraph article about how the “objective” BBC (does anybody trust it anymore?) grossly slanted coverage of gender issues, including flat-out omission of important stories (covered by other media) about those issues.

The BBC’s trans coverage is subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters who refuse to cover gender-critical stories, one of the broadcaster’s own advisers has warned.

BBC staff have expressed concerns that the LGBT desk – which is shared by all the corporation’s news programmes – has been “captured by a small group of people” promoting a pro-trans agenda and “keeping other perspectives off air”.

This has led to “a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories … celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”, a leaked internal BBC memo concludes. It said it reflected a “cultural problem across the BBC”, which treats issues of gender and sexuality as “a celebration of British diversity” rather than a complex and contentious subject.

The latest accusations of BBC bias come after The Telegraph revealed that a Panorama documentary doctored footage of a Donald Trump speech, and that the corporation minimised reports of Israeli suffering in the Gaza war to “paint Israel as the aggressor”.

. . . The debate around transgender rights, and children being given irreversible medical interventions such as puberty blockers, has been one of the most highly charged issues in politics, society and medicine in recent years.

It led to a Supreme Court ruling that “sex” referred to biological sex rather than gender identity, and the independent Cass Review of gender identity services, which resulted in the closure of the controversial Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock clinic in London.

But stories reflecting the views of people who challenged the concept of gender identity were largely suppressed by the BBC’s LGBT reporters, according to a memo written by a former member of the broadcaster’s editorial guidelines and standards committee.

The Telegraph has seen a copy of the 19-page memo, which was sent to members of the BBC Board last month and is now circulating in government departments.

It was compiled by Michael Prescott, who until June was an independent adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, and sent to executives because of his “despair at inaction by the BBC executive when issues come to light”.

It warns that the BBC is not only risking bias in its coverage of trans issues, but is confusing viewers by failing to make it clear that transgender women are biological males, or even transgender at all.

You can read the memo archived here (h/t S Wes). Other relevant articles include one by columnist Suzanne Moore saying she’s not going to pay the t.v. license fees because “the BBC’s trans lies are grotesque” and another article about a BBC newsreader who, by rolling her eyes when she said “pregnant people” instead of “women”, broke the Beeb’s rules and was subject to a complaint (she wasn’t punished).

This is the start of a tweet thread from a reporter who tried to warn the BBC (“DG” is Director General):

. . . and a summary of the leaked dossier, which you can read in full at the link above:

*In his latest op-ed, “Do dumb ideas ever die?” NYT columnist Bret Stephens takes on what he sees as a tried-and-true clunker of an idea: socialism. The motivation, of course, was the election of Zohran Mamdani, Democratic Socialist, as NYC mayor. Many of his highly-touted programs are explicitly socialistic and Stephens has some beefs.

it isn’t just the Trump administration that is reawakening the moral and intellectual zombies of the past. Everywhere one looks there are policy necromancers.

The platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America calls for a 32-hour workweek “with no reduction in pay or benefits”; “free public universal child care and pre-K”; “college for all”; the cancellation of “all student-loan debt”; “universal rent control”; “massive public investment to transition away from fossil fuels”; “guaranteed support for workers in the fossil fuel industry,” and “expansive paid family leave.” Not only would American workers stand to benefit, but so would everybody else, since the D.S.A. wants to offer these benefits to anyone who wishes to come to United States through an open-borders policy.

How would the D.S.A. pay for all this? By soaking the rich, along with “for-profit corporations, large inheritances, and private colleges and universities.” Why did nobody think of this before?

Oh, wait — many did. “Bolivarian socialism,” welcomed by the Jeremy Corbyns of the world, took Venezuela from being South America’s richest country to a humanitarian catastrophe. Sweden attempted a form of socialism in the 1970s and ’80s, only to reverse course after it experienced massive capital flight and a financial crisis during which interest rates hit 75 percent. France’s Socialist government imposed a 75 percent tax on earnings over one million euros in 2012; it dropped the tax two years later as the wealthy packed their bags. Britain’s National Health Service, whose advocates chronically complain is “underfunded,” is in a state of perpetual crisis even as health care, according to the BBC, gobbles up roughly one third of government spending.

“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” Margaret Thatcher once observed. To put it another way, you can’t abolish billionaires, as Zohran Mamdani, the D.S.A.’s poster child, would like, and still expect them to keep footing your bills.

But Stephens doesn’t just single out Democratic socialism as a dumb idea; he also goes after the antisemitism of the Right:

If socialism is foolish, there’s something worse: the “socialism of fools,” antisemitism, now rapidly ascendant on the MAGA right.

Consider last week’s interview of Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist, by Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned podcaster. Among Fuentes’s core beliefs: “I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler. I think there’s a Jewish conspiracy. I believe in race realism.”

As for Carlson, he lobbed softball questions at Fuentes, found much to agree on when it came to their shared hatred for Christian supporters of Israel, and then draped his arm around his guest for a cuddly photograph. And even that wasn’t quite as repulsive as the passionate defense of Carlson mounted by Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. As Roberts saw it, Carlson had done nothing wrong in making nice with Fuentes. Rather, it was “the globalist class” and their “mouthpieces in Washington” who were the real bad guys.

“Globalist class”? Whoever could Roberts have in mind?

Roberts later tried to distance himself from Fuentes without reference to Carlson’s role in boosting and promoting him — a case, as it were, of trying to have your Jew and eat him, too. But the deeper issue with the Heritage Foundation and its allies isn’t that they have an antisemitism problem. It’s that they have a surrender problem — surrender to any dreadful idea, so long as it has a critical mass of supporters on the ever-growing fringe.

Nick Fuentes is the real thing: a latter-day Nazi (or Ku Klux Klanner), and it’s sad that antisemitism is increasing on both the right and the left.  Or perhaps it was always there, but lay dormant until Israel tried to defend itself against Hamas. I don’t know about Carlson, and I don’t use “antisemite” lightly, but if there is one, it’s Nick Fuentes. Carlson, of course, has been a bad piece of work for a long time. I’m getting emails from people who give me examples of socialism working in certain areas (buses, childcare) in other cities of the world. They’re not NYT, but we will have to see if Mamdani can keep his campaign promises.

*The filibuster rules requires 60 votes in the Senate to shut down debate and pass a bill, which makes it hard for the majority (now the Republicans) in closely-divided Senate to do anything.  Only doing away with the filibuster would allow the dominant party in a closely divided Senate to pass legislation if it votes as a bloc. Now the rule has put Trump at odds with Senate Republicans, something that doesn’t happen too often, as Trump wants the Senate to end the filibuster to rubber-stamp his wishes:

President Trump has picked the one fight with the Republican-led Senate that he might not be able to win.

All year, Republican senators have mostly managed to find their way to yes when Trump asked, blessing everything from controversial nominees to tariffs to foreign strikes. Most recently, the president has doubled down on his demand that GOP senators do away with their chamber’s longtime filibuster rule to bypass Democrats and end the record-setting government shutdown.

But many Republicans are saying no—for now—with implications for Trump’s agenda. It also marks the most direct break GOP senators have made with the White House during his second term in office.

At breakfast Wednesday with Republican senators at the White House, Trump had made a case on live TV that doing away with the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold was the only way to end the record-breaking impasse. He also said it would help Republicans—who have a 53-47 majority in the Senate—win next November by enabling them to move bills along party lines to restrict mail-in voting and require voters to present identification before casting ballots.

The change would also open the door for Republicans to pass any number of contentious bills this Congress that the filibuster—or threat of a filibuster—has blocked.

. . . . . Resisting, Trump told Republicans, would be a “tragic mistake,” and argued Democrats would kill it anyway if Republicans don’t.

After Trump made his case, the cameras panned to show Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.), who has promised to defend the filibuster, listening to Trump’s argument in silence.

Once the media left, Trump continued his pitch, said one senator who attended the breakfast. But the president didn’t demand a vote to get rid of the filibuster, “and Thune’s not going to do it unless he’s pushed,” the senator said.

Back at the Capitol later that day, Republican senators mostly dug in. Some dodged when asked how they would personally vote, but stressed that there aren’t enough Republican votes to kill the filibuster. Other GOP lawmakers were adamant they would never flip from no to yes, even if they understood Trump’s argument.

And that’s where it stands now. The Senate could end the filibuster by a simple minority vote, and it looks like some Senate Republicans are softening, but this may be one case in which Trump simply doesn’t get his way. A majority party could become a minority party in the next election, and if the filibuster is there to ensure a solid majority, both parties should support it.  One thing that Trump cannot do is override that rule in the Senate (the House has no filibuster rule).

*Nancy Pelosi, 85, has been in Congress for 39 years, was the first female Speaker of the House, and held that position for a total of 8 years over two separate terms. She’s just announced that she’ll be retiring after next year:

Representative Nancy Pelosi announced on Thursday that she will retire when her term concludes in early 2027, ending a remarkable career in which she rose to become one of the most powerful women in American history.

Ms. Pelosi, 85, was the nation’s first and only female House speaker, and she will have represented San Francisco in Congress for 39 years when she leaves office. She has served during an era of seismic change for American society and her own city, from the throes of the AIDS crisis to the legalization of gay marriage, and through the meteoric rise of the tech sector and the nation’s extreme polarization.

She entered political office later in life and became a hero to Democrats for the way she wielded immense power to push Obamacare, climate change legislation and infrastructure programs through Congress.

“With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative,” she told her constituents in a nearly six-minute video posted on X early Thursday morning, with clips of San Francisco’s iconic cable cars and colorful Victorian homes flashing in the background.

“My message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power,” she continued. “We have always led the way, and now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”

Ms. Pelosi, who likes to use the phrase “resting is rusting,” led the House Democrats for 20 years, eight of which she spent as speaker. She has also been a prodigious fund-raiser and raised more than $1.3 billion for Democratic campaigns, according to her aides.

I am a fan of Pelosi, both for her ability to keep the Democrats together, resist extremism, and push through legislation.  If and when the Democrats take the House again, I hope they get someone of her tenor. In today’s NYT, Michelle Goldberg thinks that more Congressional Democrats should retire, as she thinks that an infusion of new, young blood, as instantiated by future Mayor M_md_ni, is what we need to win elections.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is importuning Andrzej again:

Hili: I’m trying to think.
Andrzej: About what?
Hili: About what else you could buy me.

In Polish:

Hili: Próbuję sobie wyobrazić.
Ja: Co próbujesz sobie wyobrazić?
Hili: Co byś mi jeszcze mógł kupić.

*******************

From Clean, Funny, and Cute Animal Memes:

From Jesus of the Day:

From The Language Nerds:

Masih and Rowling are pretty quiet. Here’s some humor from Simon:

From Luana. This program was characterized as a back door to becoming a tenure-track faculty member, and to get one of these fellowships you had to show dedication to DEI:

From Malcolm; cat rescue in Ukraine (yes, the left picture is a video):

Two from my feed. Look at this lovely video!

The d*g wants a brewski!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was imprisoned in Auschwitz at age fifteen. She did not survive.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-11-07T12:01:47.683Z

Two from Dr. Cobb, who speaks about Crick at Cambridge (UK) tomorrow. This post he calls “‘Twas ever thus”:

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

— Dr Selena Wisnom (@lswisnom.bsky.social) 2025-11-03T10:04:16.468Z

. . . and look how fast those cilia go!

Cool rotifer feeding with it's cilia beating🐙🧪

— Heather Bruce (@arthropodlegs.bsky.social) 2025-11-01T20:41:13.155Z

My interview with Scott Jacobsen, Part 1

November 6, 2025 • 11:15 am

Just to keep the record complete, and at the risk of being self-aggrandizing, here’s an interview I did some time ago with writer and publisher Scott Jacobsen, an interview coming out in two parts. You can read it for free by clicking on the screenshot below, which goes to the Substack site A Further Inquiry. I haven’t yet read it, as I hate both hearing and reading my own interviews, but I’ll try to pick out a few quotes at lunch now.

Oh hell, here’s one exchange:

Jacobsen: Do you ever get pushback—not on the facts, evidence, or the validity of your arguments—but on your tone? People who position themselves as the “tone police,” saying that you come across too aggressively? H. L. Mencken might have faced this if he were writing today, perhaps to an even greater extent. People might say, “We appreciate the sophistication and flair of your language, but it’s too sharp, and you’re turning people off.” Do you get that kind of response?

Coyne: All the time, man. It’s because you cannot criticize religion, however indirectly, without it being perceived as an attack on religion itself. About 60 to 70 percent of Americans believe that God played a role in evolution, so if you make any statement about evolution, you inevitably have to touch on creationism. When I wrote my book Why Evolution Is True, I aimed for a mild tone; I didn’t want to offend religious people. But you can’t discuss the evidence for evolution without discussing the evidence against creationism.

It’s all interconnected. In the “one long argument” in On the Origin of Species, Darwin repeatedly addresses creationist ideas, acknowledging creationism as the alternative hypothesis to evolution. So, if you’re defending evolution, at some point, you have to critique creationism. When you do that, you’re challenging religious belief, and no matter how mild the critique, people will accuse you of using the wrong tone.

What they’re essentially saying is that you should shut up. One example is when I point out the existence of dead genes—we have, for example, three genes for making egg-yolk proteins in the human genome that are nonfunctional because we don’t make egg yolk anymore—so they’re remnants from our reptilian ancestors. Suppose you mention this to convince people that evolution is true. In that case, you must also ask why a creator would put nonfunctional genes in our genomes. Making this argument is thus a quasi-scientific discussion.

When arguing for evolution, you have to present your case while addressing the alternative, which means critiquing creation. That gets people defensive and makes them criticize the tone of the argument. Sometimes, for fun, I try to write like H. L. Mencken because creationism is fundamentally as baseless as flat-earth ideas. There’s so much evidence against creationism that it’s laughable to espouse it. Usually, I am not Mencken-esque when I give evidence for evolution. I choose to either wear my atheist, anti-religious hat or my scientific hat when lecturing, but not both at the same time.

I’ve always been convinced that when teaching the mandatory evolution segment required for biology majors, it was imperative for me to begin with a segment on “why scientists accept evolution”: several lectures on the evidence. I did that because I wanted the students to leave at least knowing that there’s copious and diverse evidence supporting evolution and natural selection. After graduation, they’ll enter a society in which 71% of Americans see the hand of God in human evolution, and I wanted them to know that the truth of evolution dispels the need for supernatural intervention.

I’ll post on part 2 when it appears.

 

Once again: Why there are two sexes and no more

November 6, 2025 • 9:50 am

In a recent post on his site “Reality’s Last Stand,” Colin Wright reprints an article he published a few months ago in Archives of Sexual behavior, outlining why there are exactly two sexes and dismantling five common arguments that biological sexes actually comprise either more than two types or a spectrum. Click below to read it or find the free pdf here.

If you’re already familiar with the rebuttals of the more-than-two-sexes arguments, you may want to skip this, but it’s a very short piece and worth refreshing yourself. And it was, of course, peer-reviewed.

I’ll give a few excerpts, listing the five arguments supposedly fatal to the only-two-biological sex view and making a few of my own comments. Wright’s excerpts are indented, and my own commentary is flush left.

He begins with what we all know is true: the two-sex definition (really a “recognition of reality”), based on differences in gamete size, was the accepted view until recently, when gender transformation became common, making people want to redefine biology to conform to their own views or identity.

In recent years, however, this previously uncontroversial fact has been challenged in popular discourse (Fuentes, 2023; Kralick, 2018; Viloria & Nieto, 2020) and now increasingly in scholarly scientific publications (Ainsworth, 2015; Fuentes, 2025; McLaughlin et al., 2023; Velocci, 2024), seemingly driven by cultural and political debates surrounding the concept of “gender identity” and transgender rights. Popular outlets now routinely publish articles asserting that there are more than two sexes or that sex is a nonbinary “spectrum” conceived as a continuum or as a multivariate cluster of traits. Scholarly articles have amplified this framing by characterizing the sex binary as overly simplistic, outdated, and even oppressive, urging its replacement with broader and putatively more nuanced models (Ainsworth, 2015).

Here I synthesize evolutionary and developmental evidence to demonstrate that sex is binary (i.e., there are only two sexes) in all anisogamous species and that males and females are defined universally by the type of gamete they have the biological function to produce—not by karyotypes, secondary sexual characteristics, or other correlates.

“Anisogamous” species are those having different sizes of gametes, and comprise all animals and vascular plants. That of course includes humans. And again, although the sperm vs. egg dichotomy is called a “definition” of biological sex, it recally should be called a concept because, like biological species, it simply recognizes an existing dichotomy and does not impose arbitrary human views onto nature.

Wright goes on to define biological sex, which has evolved several times independently. But isn’t it curious that each time it does—no matter what determines sex—there are only two classes that result? That’s an insight that has led to the creation of good theories for why the sexes are always two.  Here’s what Wright sees as the most common attempts to refute the sex dichotomy, and why they fail. Bold headlines are my characterizations.

a.) There are more than two “sexes” in organisms that have gametes of equal size (“isogamous species”), including some fungi and slime molds

. . . . sexes in anisogamous taxa are defined by gametic dimorphism—the production of small gametes (sperm) versus large gametes (ova). Some anisogamous species may also possess mating-type systems layered on top of male and female functions, but isogamous species, by definition, lack sexes.

Claims of hundreds or thousands of sexes thus refer to many mating types in isogamous systems, not to sexes. Where reproduction is anisogamous, the number of sexes remains two—male and female—defined by gamete type (Lehtonen, 2021).

This may seem like a slippery definitional ploy, but in fact biological sexes were recognized as being of only two types in anisogamous species, not isogamous species. Still, if someone insists on saying that there are many sees in isogamous species, I am not going to argue with them too vehemently. The claim of more than two sexes, of course, is invariably used to apply to animals and plants, especially humans. And there we see only two mating types.

b.) If you define sex by chromosome types, there could be more than two sexes. (Note, though, that many species with two sexes do not have them determined by chromosomes: in turtles sex can be determined by temperature, and in some fish by social hierarchies. ) In humans, for example, the typical XX (female) and XY (male karyotype) are supplemented by rare karuyotypes like XO, XYY, XXY, and others.

Colin:

The fundamental flaw is conflating how sex is determined with how it is defined (Capel, 2017; Griffiths, 2021; Hilton & Wright, 2023). In developmental biology, sex determination refers to the mechanisms that trigger and regulate sexual development. These mechanisms vary widely across taxa (Bachtrog, 2014). Examples include chromosomal (e.g., SRY gene on Y chromosome in mammals), temperature-dependent (e.g., higher temperatures produce males in many reptiles), haplodiploidy (e.g., unfertilized haploid eggs yield males in most Hymenoptera insects), or environmental (e.g., chemical cues in Bonellia viridis).

Yet, regardless of the mechanism by which sex is determined, an individual’s sex—male or female—is universally defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) their reproductive system has the biological function to produce (Goymann et al., 2023). Sex chromosome aneuploidies therefore represent variations within the two sexes, not additional sexes.

c.) Sex is a spectrum because individuals have a continuity of male and female traits, as exemplified by individuals having DSDs (differences/disorders of sex development.  As I’ve noted before, the frequency of “intersex” individuals, which supposedly cause the spectrum, is quite low: about 1/5600 individuals—close to the probability that if you toss a nickel in the air, it will land on its edge. Yet we don’t see people flipping coins saying, “Call it: heads, tails, or edge.”

. . .The primary evidence invoked to support the spectrum model is the existence of disorders/differences in sex development (DSDs) (Sax, 2002), including forms of genital or gonadal atypicality, often presented visually along a continuum from “typical female” to “typical male.”

However, the existence of such conditions does not undermine the binary nature of sex, because the sex binary does not entail that every individual can be unambiguously categorized as male or female. Rather, the claim is that in anisogamous organisms there are only two gamete types, sperm and ova, and thus only two sexes. Sexual ambiguity is not a third or intermediate sex because developmental variation does not correspond to producing new gamete types.

These next two objections are those I see most often in the literature, and they both have the problem that they don’t set out criteria for defining or recognizing someone as male or female.

d.) In reality, sex is a “polythetic” category, which Colin defines as “one in which members share overlapping characteristics, with no single feature necessary or sufficient for membership. Inclusion is based on “family resemblance”. This is the objection raised, for example, by people like Steve Novella and Agustín Fuentes.

Proponents of a polythetic sex model draw on this idea to portray sex as multivariate (rather than univariate, as in a simple “spectrum”). On this view, “sex” is an aggregate of traits—chromosomes, gonads, gametes, hormones, neuroanatomy, secondary sex characteristics, and other sexually dimorphic traits—and individuals are assigned degrees of maleness or femaleness according to how their overall profile aligns with what is considered male-typical or female-typical (Dreger, 2000; Fausto-Sterling, 2000).

However, male and female are not polythetic categories. They are reproductive classes defined by a single criterion: The type of gamete (sperm or ova) an organism’s reproductive system has the biological function tomproduce. All other traits—karyotype, genital morphology, hormone profiles, neurological and somatic dimorphisms—are typically causes, proxies, or consequences of that functional distinction. Treating those correlates as jointly definitional blurs the determinants and downstream effects of sex with sex itself.

e.) You can be a member of different sexes depending on which trait you’re looking at (chromosomes, genitalia, hormones, and so on).

As articulated by McLaughlin et al. (2023), sex is framed as “a constructed category operating at multiple biological levels,” with four focal levels: genetic, endocrine, morphological, and behavioral. This framing conflates the determinants and correlates of sex with sex itself (Bachtrog, 2014; Capel, 2017). Genes and gene networks initiate and regulate sexual differentiation; hormones mediate downstream development and phenotypic dimorphisms; morphology and many behaviors are influenced by an organism’s sex. Yet none of these traits defines sex. Sex is an organism-level reproductive class anchored to the type of gamete that organism has the biological function to produce. Treating upstream regulators (e.g., SRY activity, hormonal milieu) or downstream outcomes (e.g., dimorphic morphology, behavior) as coequal “levels” of sex is a level-of-analysis error.

And the kickerm which shows the fact that critics really do recognize two sexes (and use them in their own scientific papers!):

Moreover, the multilevel account inherits the same circularity as the polythetic model. Traits are labeled “male-typical” or “female-typical” only because they correlate with organisms already identified as male or female—an identification that, in anisogamous species, is made ultimately by reference to gametes. Once that reference is removed, the typology loses its interpretive footing. As a descriptive framework to integrate genetic, endocrine, and morphological findings in clinical differential diagnosis, the multilevel schema has pragmatic value; as a definition of sex, it is incoherent.

Why is this important biologically? Colin explains:

The scientific value of clear and precise definitions is enormous (Dawkins, 2025). A gamete-based definition prevents error propagation across comparative biology, physiology, ecology, and medicine. It preserves the interpretability of sex-linked phenomena—sexual selection, dimorphism, and life-history trade-offs—and maintains conceptual discipline by keeping determination mechanisms (e.g., SRY pathways, ZW systems, temperature-dependent determination, social cues) in their proper explanatory lane. It also secures cross-taxon coherence: Whether a species is gonochoric or hermaphroditic, and whether determination is chromosomal, environmental, or social, “male” and “female” remain meaningfully comparable because those terms are anchored to reproductive function rather than to a bundle of traits that shift widely from taxa to taxa.

I like to summarize this by saying that the biological sex definition/concept is both universal and explanatory. No other concept of sex, for example, can explain sexual selection and the differences in behavior and phenotype that appear in animals.

It’s important to recognize that the recent reframing of the two sexes as needing revision did not result from any new discoveries about biology. All the things about sex determination and differentiation have been known for a long time. What has changed is not biology but ideology. It is perfectly clear that arguing that there are more than two sexes is derived from the desire to give solace to those who don’t feel or identify as male or female,  But there’s no need to  change your view of nature to bring such solace. As Wright says:

The societal and ethical stakes are also significant. Accurate biology is distinct from questions of dignity, rights, and how we treat one another. Policy disputes should not be adjudicated by redefining—or defining away—the reproductive realities that make sex a useful scientific concept in the first place. When categories are blurred for nonscientific reasons, we invite downstream harms: muddled clinical protocols, compromised epidemiology, eroding and/or conflicting legal protections, and diminished public trust in science.

It is not transphobic to recognize the two sexes that biologists have known for decades, but, unfortunately, we are dealing with ideologues who are largely impervious to both facts and reason, and so the five points above are aimed largely at those who don’t know a lot about the way biologists conceive of sex.

Reader’s wildlife photos

November 6, 2025 • 8:15 am

Today I’ve stolen another batch of photos (with permission) from Aussie biologist Scott Ritchie, a great photographer whose Facebook page is here. Today we get to see flowers, including several amazing orchids. Scott’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The Stirling Range is home to some beautiful spring flowers. Rare, unusual orchids endemic to the area are a highlight. Here are some of the flowers I saw from a recent visit. I hope I have the names correct!

Spider Orchids:

Zebra Orchid:

Yellow flowers. Common, but unknown:

Bearded Bird Orchid. Get it?:

Cowslip orchids:

Everlastings:

Fringed Mantis Orchid:

Golden Dryandra:

Pink Candy Orchid:

More Spider Orchids:

Sugar Dragon Orchid. This one attracts a small species of wasp with a “phermonal mimic lure”:

 

The wasp attempts to mate with the orchid (the dark part in upper right that mimics a female wasp). The part of the flower to the immediate left then bobs down in response to the wasps weight, attaching a pollen packet to the back of the wasp:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 6, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, November 6, 2025, and National Nachos Day (didn’t we just have that day?). This tasty dish, perfect for watching sports on t.v., was named after its creator:

Nachos originated in the city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila in Mexico, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas in the United States. Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya created nachos in 1943 at the restaurant the Victory Club when Mamie Finan and a group of U.S. military officers’ wives, whose husbands were stationed at the nearby U.S. Army base Fort Duncan, traveled across the border to eat at the Victory Club. When Anaya was unable to find the cook, he went to the kitchen and spotted freshly fried pieces of corn tortillas.  In a moment of culinary inspiration, Anaya cut fried tortillas into triangles, added shredded cheese, sliced pickled jalapeño peppers, quickly heated them, and served them. After tasting the snack, Finan asked what it was called. Anaya responded, “Well, I guess we can just call them Nacho’s Special.” In Spanish, “Nacho” is a common nickname for Ignacio.

They would not be good breakfast food, though (although, in you crave Mexican food for breakfast, try  chilaquiles).  Nachos:

Simranjeet Sidhu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Each time you dig into nachos, you’re paying tribute to this man:

Ignacio Anaya; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Basketball Day, International Stout Day, and Men Make Dinner Day. For a “”, I prefer Murphy’s to Guinness, as the latter is more like a meal than a pint you can quaff in bulk. Sadly, Murphy’s is going extinct. Maybe Colossal Biosciences can resurrect it by putting Murphy genes into a Guinness egg.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In its hearing yesterday, the Supreme Court seemed to express doubt about the legality of Trump’s tariff levies:

Supreme Court justices on Wednesday morning expressed skepticism about the legality of aggressive tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump against most of the world’s nations.

Conservative and liberal justices sharply questioned Solicitor General D. John Sauer on the Trump administration’s method for enacting the tariffs, which critics say infringes on the power of Congress to tax.

Lower federal courts have ruled that Trump lacked the legal authority he cited under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose the so-called reciprocal tariffs on imports from many U.S. trading partners, and fentanyl tariffs on products from Canada, China and Mexico.

Sauer, who is defending the tariff policy as grounded in the power to regulate foreign commerce, said “these are regulatory tariffs. They are not revenue-raising tariffs.”

“The fact that they raise revenue was only incidental,” Sauer said, shortly after oral arguments in the case began.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s three liberal members, told Sauer, “You say tariffs are not taxes, but that’s exactly what they are.”

“They’re generating money from American citizens, revenue,” Sotomayor said.

She later noted that no president other than Trump has ever used IEEPA to impose tariffs.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of six conservatives on the court, pressed Sauer on the fact that Trump had unilaterally imposed the tariffs, citing purported international emergencies of trade imbalances and the flow of fentanyl into the United States, without Congress authorizing them.

“What happens when the president simply vetoes legislation to take these powers back?” Gorsuch asked.

“So Congress as a practical matter can’t get this power back once it’s handed it over to the president,” Gorsuch said. “It’s a one way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people’s elected representatives.”

Other conservatives — Chief Justice John Roberts and the justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito — also pressed Sauer.

It’s time that Trump got his tushy spanked by the Supremes, for there is no recourse if they tell him that his method of enacting tariffs was illegal. He’ll either have to find a legal way, which seems doubtful given the Justice’s points, or defy the Supreme Court, which means it’s impeachment time. (Would Congress dare impeach him again?) Further, Americans already don’t like Trump’s tariffs, defying a Court order would just make him more unpopular.

*Trying to make the best out of a bad outcome for him (yesterday’s Democratic victories), Trump is now urging the Republicans to end the government shutdown:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday blamed his party’s bruising election night losses on the government shutdown and urged Republicans to end the funding gridlock, displaying fresh urgency as sweeping Democratic victories portended midterm trouble for the GOP.

“We have to get the country open. And the way we’re going to do it this afternoon is to terminate the filibuster,” Trump said during a meeting with Republican senators at the White House. “We will pass legislation that you’ve never seen before, and it’ll be impossible to beat us.”

The directive marked a shift in tone for Trump, who has laid the responsibility for ending the shutdown on Democratic leaders, even as it eclipsed past records and disrupted food aid for millions of Americans. He warned the group of Republican leaders on Wednesday that if they did not move to eliminate the filibuster, a procedural rule in the Senate that essentially requires 60 votes to pass most legislation, Democrats would.

“And when they do [abolish] the filibuster, they’re going to pack the court,” Trump said, in an apparent reference to the U.S. Supreme Court, which currently has a conservative majority.

Both parties have been reluctant to eliminate the rule, which historically has served as a potent check on the majority in a chamber where the balance of power frequently shifts.

The pointed remarks come as Democrats found success in framing key contests across the country — including in New York, New Jersey and Virginia — as a rebuke of Trump’s second term and a warning to his party ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Republicans had expected a tough Tuesday across the country as polling showed increasingly negative feelings about Trump. And much of Democrats’ messaging in big-ticket campaigns focused on the Republican standard-bearer. For his part, Trump had done little to campaign in many of the marquee races. But on Wednesday, he said the government shutdown was prominent in voters’ minds. And his remarks will likely give lawmakers hope in a path to end the impasse.

I’m not sure this will make him more popular, though a slight majority of Americans blame Trump and the Republicans more than the Democrats for the shutdown. His popularity, which is all he cares about, will depend heavily on what Congress does when it resumes activity. Will it extend the healthcare subsidies? If not, Trump’s reputation will suffer more.

*I’m pretty pleased about the outcome of yesterday’s elections, but am not sure that Mamdani is a good candidate, and perhaps presages an era of intolerant progressivism that might cause problems.  Heather Mac Donald agrees, and published a piece in the Spectator called “The cost of Zohran” (h/t Luana).  If you want a critique of Mamdani’s program from a conservative, this is the one to read. A few quotes. First, an explication of his roots:

Mamdani fashions himself a champion of the working class. He chose not to attend New York’s most storied working-class college, the public City College of New York (then $6,330 a year), however, in favor of the private Bowdoin College, a bucolic, secluded retreat in Maine (then $59,900 a year). The centuries-old New England institution grew out of the finest ideals of America’s Founders; it boasts Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, US president Franklin Pierce, Supreme Court justices, decorated Civil War generals, abolitionists and industrialists among its graduates.

Today, however, a Bowdoin education is awash with victim ideology, as documented by the National Association of Scholars in 2013, the year before Mamdani graduated. As an Africana studies major, Mamdani would have taken courses along the lines of “Race, Land and (Dis)/(Re)possession: Critical Topics in Environmental (In)justice and Subaltern Geography,” which examines how “race, gender, and class operate under racial capitalism and settler colonialism both in ‘the past’ and in ‘the contemporary.’” This is a new offering, but the high theory-based fields have been ossified since Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology burst onto the American scene in 1967. The rhetoric of 2025 is identical to that of 2014.

Had Mamdani attended college ten years later, he would probably have led chants of “globalize the intifada” from an anti-Zionist encampment on his campus quad. Instead, he did an arguably even more important thing for the pro-Palestinian cause: he founded Bowdoin’s inaugural chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). From his leadership position with SJP, the keffiyeh-wearing undergraduate tried to jumpstart a Bowdoin boycott of Israeli universities. Israeli higher education, he wrote, was “both actively and passively complicit in the crimes of both the Israeli military and the Israeli government in all its settler-colonial forms.” Mamdani had well absorbed his intellectual patrimony.

Then Mac Donald discusses his program, which she divides into four major items, taking apart each one. They are rent control, free buses, free childcare for all New Yorkers, and city-run grocery stores. Here’s the beginning of one critique:

He was elected to the New York State Assembly for Queens in 2020 on the Democratic Socialists of America ticket. As a member of the State Socialists in Office bloc in Albany, he can take credit for a negligible three bills and a lot of missed Assembly votes. Next up: the New York mayoralty. Mamdani’s governing philosophy can be encapsulated in the slogans beloved of undergraduates confronting supposed injustice for the first time in human history: “People before profits!” “Fight corporate greed!” “Housing is a human right!” His campaign focused on four proposals, all inspired by the city’s alleged affordability crisis: he would freeze rents; make city buses free; offer free universal childcare; and open a government-operated grocery store in each of the city’s five boroughs.

These four proposals run the gamut from sweeping to weirdly narrow. But they all treat urban governance primarily as a means of shrinking the role of for-profit enterprise, expanding public control and redistributing wealth from its creators to the so-called poor. They may be quickly disposed of.

Proposal one: decommodify housing!  Mamdani’s rent freeze would apply to nearly half of all rental units in the city: those whose rents are set by an appointed “Rent Guidelines Board,” not by the housing market. Those million or so rent-stabilized apartments make up one-third of the city’s homes, including owner-occupied homes.

Even left-wing economists have concluded that rent controls produce only housing shortages. Yet for those with an undergraduate mindset, landlords are greedy for wanting to earn a market rent, whereas tenants enjoying a below-market rent are merely receiving their due.

The four-year freeze would decimate New York’s housing stock. . .

Now Mandami may be the best of the four candidates, but I can’t work up a lot of enthusiasm for him.  And the glee that greeted his election by many reminds me of the ridiculous “joy” attending the candidacy of another unqualified Democrat: Kamala Harris.  Yes, Mandami may be the best of a bad lot, but his socialist programs and what I see as his antisemitism are a really crappy model for what kind of Democrats we should be putting up for President.

*When I heard on the NBC News two nights ago that Tom Brady had his beloved dog cloned, I thought “Colossal Biosciences strikes again.” And, sure enough, it did, though it costs $50,000 to get a dog cloned ($85,000 for a horse). This has been doing on for a while (remember Dolly the Sheep?), but now celebrities are engaging in this costly practice. And, sure enough, it’s Colossal who is doing it.

Tom Brady says he has been given “a second chance” with a clone of his beloved family dog.

The Fox Sports broadcaster and retired NFL legend revealed on Nov. 4 that his dog, Junie, is a clone of his family’s previous dog, a pitbull mix named Lua, who died in 2023.

Brady shared the details about Junie as part of a news release by Colossal Biosciences, which announced it has acquired Viagen, a company that specializes in animal cloning.

“I love my animals. They mean the world to me and my family,” Brady said in a news release. “A few years ago, I worked with Colossal and leveraged their non-invasive cloning technology through a simple blood draw of our family’s elderly dog before she passed.”

“In a few short months, Colossal gave my family a second chance with a clone of our beloved dog,” he continued. “I am excited how Colossal and Viagen’s tech together can help both families losing their beloved pets while helping to save endangered species.”

Brady is not the first celebrity to have a dog cloned.

Paris Hilton, who is also an investor in Colossal along with Brady, had a dog cloned in 2023 by Viagen, the company Colossal acquired. Barbra Streisand revealed in 2018 that she had her beloved dog cloned twice.

The world’s first cloned dog was produced by researchers in South Korea in 2005. The first cloned animal in history was a sheep named Dolly that was produced in 1996 at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland using an adult cell.

Colossal said in the news release on Nov. 4 that Viagen has successfully cloned 15 species, including a black-footed ferret and a Przewalski’s horse.

I didn’t get the Colossal press release, though I’m signed up to get their announcements, nor can I find an announcement of this cloning on Colossal’s website. Why? I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s Colossal’s investors who are getting priority to have their pets cloned by company.   What’s next? Gene-edited babies? That’s legal in the U.S., but not in most other countries, and you can do it here so long as you don’t use government money. In fact, there are several gene-cloning companies (not including Colossal) exploring this ethically dubious proposal.

Here’s video about Brady’s $50,000 d*g:

*In a Free Press article, multibillionaire Jeff Yass announced that he just gave a huge financial donation to the University of Austin (remember, it’s not the University of Texas at Austin). This will enable the University to make all tuition free and guarantee that it won’t any take government dosh.

I am giving $100 million to the University of Austin because the feedback mechanisms of higher education are broken.

Almost every system that works, works because of feedback. Evolution works because helpful mutations survive while harmful ones die off. Democracy works because voters support effective leaders and remove ineffective ones. Markets work because prices tell producers when to ramp up or scale back. Science works because the data from an experiment tells the scientist how likely their hypothesis is to be false.

Most systems or institutions that don’t work have broken feedback mechanisms. Think corrupt politicians, or crony capitalists, or ideological echo chambers. Unfortunately, higher education belongs in this category.

The purpose of higher education should be to instill students with knowledge, skills, judgment, and character, so they can flourish and contribute to society. By that standard, success should be measured by how graduates are doing.

That’s not happening anymore. Here’s what went wrong: First, students must pay almost all of their tuition before anyone knows whether the education will pay off. In other words, the school is paid regardless of students’ outcomes, while the student shoulders the risk.

Second, much of that tuition is paid up-front by third parties—through loans and grants from the government or foundations—whose stake in students’ success is indirect and diffuse. The graduate carries the debt whether or not the education delivers results.

Third, massive endowments insulate many of these institutions from healthy financial pressure to deliver results to their students.

All of these factors combine into a clear conclusion: In American higher education, there is no direct feedback loop between the success of graduates and the success of the institution.

. . . This gift is intended to kick-start a virtuous cycle: UATX will prepare students to become the next generation’s leading entrepreneurs, innovators, scientists, and philanthropists. In turn, these successful graduates will financially support future generations of students, ultimately making UATX tuition-free. This would create an unprecedented level of accountability and alignment of incentives within the school. The university will only be able to achieve financial sustainability if it delivers genuine value to its students.

I’ve never been a big booster of UATX, as it seems to be ideologically motivated, too, but in an antiwoke direction. While I could be described as antiwoke, I wouldn’t enforce my ideology on the direction of a school. It might improve, but it has to hire a diversity of permanent faculty that are really good (the dosh should help ensure that). The refusal to take government money, however, is a more serious issue. Who is going to fund scientific research, particularly pure research that has no practical consequences (though it may someday) and that simply satisfies curiosity? My own past work on speciation in Drosophila, for example, would not be fundable by private companies, though it was relatively cheap, and so someone like me could not work at UATX. The school must find a way to permanently fund pure research, some of which is quite expensive.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili philosophizes and Andrzej kvetches:

Hili: At times, optimism is right on the edge of despair.
Andrzej: I’m aware of that, though I’ve always been a pessimist.

In Polish:

Hili: Czasem optymizm graniczy z rozpaczą.
Ja: Wiem o tym, chociaż zawsze byłem pesymistą.

*******************

From Jesus of the Day:

. . . and another from Jesus of the Day:

From CinEmma, a few days late for Halloween:

 

The regulars are quiet today. But, via Simon, here’s Titania with a link to her latest Critic piece. (People still think she’s serious!)

From Luana, an angry woman gets booted from her gym simply for objecting to a biological male displaying his penis in the gym locker room. Here’s the story in the NY Post. In the video, the guy appears to blithely stroll back into the women’s room after the heated exchange.

From Malcolm. I can’t embed the tweet, but click on the image (with sound up) to see a terrific 9-year-old breakdancer:

Two from my feed. First, a nonhuman primate tying a double knot:

I LOVE raccoons!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was one year old. Had she lived, she'd be 83 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-11-06T11:49:49.714Z

Two posts from Matthew. The first is a cartoon about DNA he saved. He must have gotten it from Sydney Brenner:

Brenner's copy of a New Yorker cartoon that was repeatedly moved around various noticeboards (note the pin holes)

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-11-04T18:02:09.299Z

Matthew’s giving a talk at Cambridge on Crick this Friday. Here’s one of the slides he’ll be presenting (read Crick’s Moon-centric poem):

The draft of the never-completed 'Scale' book included a poem that Crick composed in the bath, about the Moon and Earth seen from the point of view of a lunar colonist who lived on the far side. Here is the beginning and the end.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-11-05T18:17:22.245Z

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ ethics

November 5, 2025 • 8:50 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “joy2,” came with the artist’s comment, “I also prefer it.”

This bears on a dispute I’m having with a famous thinker (not Sam Harris), who maintains that ethical precepts are objective, not subjective, using the argument that there’s no justification for treating anybody differently from how you’d wish to be treated (a Rawlsian form of the golden rule).

Sam Harris proposed an objective system of ethics in his book The Moral Landscape, arguing that the moral thing to do in any situation is the thing that increases the overall well being of conscious creatures (note that, since he refers to a “landscape,” he means overall well being, not the well being of individuals acting or being acted on).  Sam thinks that what is ethnical can be determined, in principle, scientifically.

This is a form of utilitarianism, and is a valuable aid to our thinking about how we judge what is right and wrong, but I’ve criticized it, and so have many philosophers (see Russell Blackford’s critique here).  In the end, while I think Sam’s criterion for ethical or unethical acts generally conforms to our own notions of right and wrong, it has too many problems to serve as a “scientific” way to decide ethical questions.  And I still believe that, at bottom, what’s right and wrong depends on subjective preferences. Though these preferences will coincide for many, they won’t for many others, and thus morality cannot be reduced to a “science”.

If you agree with Sam, then tell me why it’s moral to eat meat given that the well being of a conscious pig or cow cannot be judged against the well being of a human.  (Remember, we have to know which creatures are conscious, too.) And if it IS immoral, why are you eating meat?

But I digress. Here the boys go after the barmaid’s view of why we have morality in general.

Wedneday: Hili dialogue

November 5, 2025 • 7:20 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Lá an Droma” in Irish): Wednesday, November 5, 2025, and National Donut Day. Here’s a poster from WWI, with the caption, “World War I propaganda poster featuring The Salvation Army, which made doughnuts for soldiers in Europe”. The boys in the trenches wanted coffee and donuts, but I think I see a pie on the platter as well:

St John, J Allen (artist), Illinois Litho Co, Chicago (printer), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Chocolate Fondue Day, National Fart Day,  and World Nutella Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

I posted the nooz about the big Democratic win earlier today.

*Obituaries first: Dick Cheney died at 84. Given his heart problems, I’m amazed he lived this long:

Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the most powerful vice president in American history, who was George W. Bush’s running mate in two successful campaigns for the presidency and his most influential White House adviser in an era of terrorism, war and economic change, died Monday. He was 84.

The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.

Plagued by coronary problems nearly all his adult life, Mr. Cheney had five heart attacks from 1978 to 2010 and had worn a device to regulate his heartbeat since 2001. But his health issues did not seem to impair his performance as vice president. In 2012, three years after retiring, he underwent a successful heart transplant and had been reasonably active since then.

A consummate Washington insider, Mr. Cheney was an architect and executor of President Bush’s major initiatives: deploying military power to advance, they said, the cause of democracy abroad, championing free markets and deregulation at home, and strengthening the powers of a presidency that, as both men saw it, had been unjustifiably restrained by Congress and the courts in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

As Mr. Bush’s most trusted and valued counselor, Mr. Cheney foraged at will over fields of international and domestic policy. Like a super-cabinet official with an unlimited portfolio, he used his authority to make the case for war, propose or kill legislation, recommend Supreme Court candidates, tip the balance for a tax cut, promote the interests of allies and parry opponents.

But it was the national security arena where he had the most profound impact. As defense secretary, he helped engineer the Persian Gulf war that successfully evicted Iraqi invaders from Kuwait in 1991, and then took a leading role a decade later in responding to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. To prevent future attacks, he advocated aggressive policies including warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention and brutal interrogation tactics. And he pushed for the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, completing the unfinished job of his previous stint in power but leading to years of warfare.

For a more critical view of Cheney’s accomplishments, see the Guardian’s obituary, which starts this way:
Dick Cheney, the divisive US vice-president under George W Bush who helped lead the country into a disastrous invasion of Iraq, died on Monday, his family has said. He was 84.

And a NYT comparison of Trump with Cheney by Ron Suskind, The tragedy of Dick Cheney, which contains this

Fresh off a briefing about Qaeda leaders looking for fissile materials to build a bomb, Mr. Cheney uttered what would come to be known as his 1 percent doctrine: If there’s a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, we need to treat it as a certainty. This low-probability absolutism became a guiding doctrine of U.S. foreign policy. It has cost blood and treasure in staggering amounts.

Before the war started, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were informed that Saddam Hussein did not in fact have weapons of mass destruction. They saw no reason to inform the public. Once Baghdad fell, what would it matter?

For those who tried to tell the truth, the consequences were swift. When Ambassador Joseph Wilson undercut some of the administration’s justifications for going to war, Mr. Wilson’s wife was outed as an undercover C.I.A. officer. And when Mr. Cheney’s top aide, Lewis Libby, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in relation to that outing, Mr. Cheney pressed the president to pardon him, barking, “You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.” (Mr. Bush held his ground, but Mr. Trump has since obliged.)

Yep, he was not a man who, despite his low-key demeanor, any liberal would want to have in power.

*Today the Supreme Court will hear in full the first major case inspired by Trump’s antics: the impositions of tariffs on everyone, including Canada.

President Trump’s global tariffs hang in the balance as the Supreme Court hears one of the most consequential economic cases in decades.

On Wednesday, the nine justices will weigh whether the president lawfully invoked his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to levy the global tariffs without Congress’s approval, as well as a set of tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico related to fentanyl.

Challengers, a group of small businesses and states, say he exceeded his legal powers. Lower courts have agreed, and now it is up to the Supreme Court to decide the ultimate fate of a cornerstone of the president’s agenda.

Prediction markets anticipate the Supreme Court will most likely reject Trump’s arguments. On Polymarket, bettors assessed the president’s chances of victory at 39% early Wednesday. Ahead of the hearing, S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures slipped; markets stumbled Tuesday.

Trump called the case “literally, LIFE OR DEATH, for our Country” in a Truth Social post on Tuesday. He is expected to watch proceedings, but not attend in person.

Arguments begin at 10 a.m. ET in Washington, and audio from the hearing will be livestreamed. Our reporters will be covering it live.

What’s at stake: If the court overturns the tariffs, the Trump administration has warned it will need to repay tens of billions of dollars it has already collected. It will also undercut a core legal justification for a large chunk of Trump’s tariffs and potentially remove leverage in trade talks.

What to expect: The court will hear from lawyers for the Trump administration and the challengers. While a decision isn’t expected immediately, the arguments could provide important clues about which way justices are leaning.

What to watch: What indication, if any, justices give about how they will rule on this vital question.

Remember that the Court’s decision won’t come down until June of next year at the latest, but perhaps as early as next Spring. I have no idea how they’ll rule, but perhaps the questions posed by the Justices will give a clue.  You can hear the court hearing on this case at 10 a.m. Eastern time at the link below (click on screenshot):

*The Washington Post emphasizes properly that any reconstruction of Gaza, if it’s at last to bring peace with Israel, must tackle the problem of Palestinian schoolchildren being taught to hate Jews and Israel, teaching that is promoted, of course, by UNRWA, a UN agency. This is from an op-ed by Todd L. Pittinsky, a professor at Stony Brook University:

For decades, billions have been poured into Gaza. It has been well documented how these funds have been used to construct tunnels, build rockets and fund other military infrastructure. But the biggest scandal isn’t what’s been built, it’s what’s been taught in Gaza’s schools — in large part funded through Western largesse.

Every generation in Gaza grows up memorizing the language of martyrdom. Schools, summer camps, mosques and media channels work in concert to instill an uncompromising worldview: violence is virtuous, compromise is weakness and the annihilation of Israel is a sacred duty. Hamas’s rockets are the visible expression of decades of indoctrination of the next generation.

Gaza’s children are the victims of this violent ideology. Few parents in London, Paris or Washington would tolerate their child being taught that violence is noble or that neighbors are subhuman. Yet the international community has subsidized precisely that curriculum for Palestinian children — and then has acted shocked when violence perpetuates itself. It’s time for that to end.

Academic critics have long alleged that Western funding for education is just a thinly veiled cover for cultural imperialism. Such arguments badly overreach. After World War II, Germany’s education system was overhauled to remove Nazi propaganda while preserving German culture. Postapartheid South Africa reformed its curriculum to promote reconciliation. Postwar Japan replaced militarism with civic education. Defanging destructive ideologies is not imperialism, cultural or otherwise.

The scale of the problem today is well documented. A 2021 report by IMPACT-se, an education nongovernmental organization, found ample evidence of textbooks produced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency containing militaristic themes alongside maps that erase Israel from the region. A 2019 UN Watch analysis identified over 100 UNRWA social media posts supporting militant groups. Another 2025 UN Watch report documents that more than 15 percent of UNRWA’s senior educators in Gaza are affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Other investigations have found that curriculum materials violate UNESCO standards and that schools have been used to store weapons. This is clearly a systemic problem.

UNRWA has operated for decades with minimal oversight. But each revelation produces the same response from the organization: acknowledgment of concern, promises of reform — and then business as usual once the cameras leave. The massacres of Oct. 7, 2023 were the gruesome cost of inaction. Several UNRWA employees may have participated in the violence. The agency responded by treating it as an isolated personnel issue rather than the logical endpoint of decades of hateful indoctrination.

The Trump administration is right to insist in its 20-point peace plan that “the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence” are critical for long-term success. To ensure that hate does not take root again, reconstruction aid must come with nonnegotiable conditions: independent curriculum oversight by external auditors with direct access to materials and classrooms, teacher vetting for extremist affiliations and full donor transparency. When Western taxpayers fund schools, they have every right to insist those schools don’t teach children to become terrorists. Indeed, they have every obligation to do so. We now know what failure looks like.

In the past I’ve shown some of the material taught to Palestinian children, as well as play-acting that mimics attacks on Jews. Here’s a short video about the indoctrination of Palestinian students, partly funded by the UN:

Can it be fixed? I think so, as long as you keep UNRWA out of it and design a curriculum that doesn’t teach hatred. It was done in Germany, and I’m optimistic it can be done in Gaza.

*Speaking of the Middle East, the Times of Israel reports that the Trump Administration has put together a multinational plan for ensuring peace in Gaza, a plan that will last two years and includes giving the U.S. some governance over the territory.

The Trump administration’s draft United Nations Security Council resolution on establishing an international force in Gaza would reportedly give the US and other participating countries a broad two-year mandate to govern Gaza and be in charge of security there.

According to a copy of the draft published by the Axios news site on Monday, the so-called International Stabilization Force will be in charge of securing the Gaza Strip’s borders with Israel and Egypt, ensuring the safety of civilians and humanitarian zones, and training and partnering new Palestinian police officers.

The force’s mandate will apparently include disarming Hamas, with the draft saying that the ISF will “stabilize the security environment in Gaza by ensuring the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, including the destruction and prevention of rebuilding of military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, as well as the permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.”

This clause could well be subject to debate, as countries that have offered to contribute troops to the ISF are not interested in sparring with Hamas in Gaza, two Arab diplomats reiterated to The Times of Israel last week.

The draft resolution also states that the ISF will perform “additional tasks as may be necessary in support of the Gaza agreement,” and that it will be established and operate “in close consultation and cooperation with Egypt and Israel.”

Additionally, the resolution calls for granting US President Donald Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace” the powers of “a transitional governance administration with international legal personality that will set the framework and coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza pursuant to the Comprehensive Plan, until such time as the Palestinian Authority has satisfactorily completed its reform program.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly proclaimed that the Palestinian Authority cannot play any role in governing postwar Gaza, although the idea has remained popular among Israel’s Western allies.

A US official told Axios that the goal is to deploy the first ISF troops to Gaza by January. Washington is reportedly aiming to negotiate the terms of the resolution within days and hold a vote on it within weeks.

The debate about disarming Hamas will indeed be contentious, but somebody has to disarm Hamas, as the terrorist group shows no signs of wanting to disarm or surrender. If Israel does it, that will break the cease-fire, but the article is right: which country wants to take on the task of disarming (i.e., fighting) Hamas? It can’t be in their interest to have their soldiers killed by Hamas, regardless of their desire to help Gaza become peaceful.

*The other day a friend who is also a sports maven told me that the best job in the world is that of a football coach at a big-time sports college like Alabama. You make a ton of money (more than the college President by far), and then, even if you’re fired because you had a losing season, you get millions of dollars in the buyout. Sure enough, the WSJ echoes that in an article called “America’s hottest job: fired college football coach.” Once you’re fired, you can retire in luxury:

College football cannot stop being college football.

Like the other day, when the Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, went on a surreal press conference tirade in which he howled about the $53 million buyout for the recently fired LSU football coach Brian Kelly, cracking that he wanted President Trump to select Kelly’s replacement, and wait, did the Governor more or less just fire the school’s athletic director on TV?

Pretty much!

Landry’s Howard Beale moment is merely the latest example of college football’s unusual grip on this country, its culture and its frequent entanglement in politics. While some of the Governor’s assertions were challenged—Louisiana taxpayers will not be writing a check for Kelly’s buyout, officials confirmed—his baffled irritation isn’t out of place.

These buyouts are absurd, an outgrowth of a crazed marketplace and undeniably screwy optics at a state university.

At the same time, it was telling that a common reaction to Landry’s tangent was:

What are you doing, man? You’re making LSU look nuts! This crazy rant about Kelly’s ridiculous deal is going to impact our ability to give a ridiculous deal to the next guy.

And that was it, in sharp relief, the hypocrisy and riddle of college football: how to pull the brake when everyone’s on the same speeding train.

Meanwhile, the impatient sackings continue. Auburn University parted ways with its head coach, Hugh Freeze, after less than three seasons. Counting three interim appointments, the Tigers are on their sixth head coach since 2020.

Sixth!

Cycling through head coaches like Hollywood assistants who can’t perfect a Starbucks order is another symptom of college football’s sicko economy. Of course there will be no shortage of candidates, including some of the recently dismissed, like Penn State’s ex, James Franklin, who appears to be again in demand.

It’s great work, if you can get it. Even if you can’t get it, it’s great work. Franklin’s buyout with Penn State is about $50 million, which would be offset if he gets a deal elsewhere. Freeze’s buyout is a relative bargain at $15.8. The accumulating buyout-palooza for the recently fired is crossing $200 million, according to USA Today.

Who wouldn’t want to come back in their next life as a fired head football coach, flirting with rival ADs and ESPN while they chill by the pool and circle chalets in the Journal’s Mansion section?

Sounds fab to me.

Fifty-three million bucks as a consolation prize for being fired! The President of LSU makes $750,000 per year, but he could make another $650,000 if he meets a bunch of incentives. Even so, he has to work for that money, while Kelly can just sit back and eat caviar.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a man and his cat have a funny exchange:

Hili: I’m hunting a postmodernist mouse.
Andrzej: Leave that mindless creature alone.

In Polish:

Hili: Poluję na postmodernistyczną mysz.
Ja: Zostaw w spokoju to bezmyślne stworzenie.

*******************

From Give Me a Sign:

From CinEmma:

From The Language Nerds:

Masih is still celebrating, JKR is quiet, and so Emma Hilton gets the honor of the Lead Tweet:

From Luana, a mini-conversation between Helen Pluckrose and Steve Stewart-Williams:

From Bryan, an illusion:

From Simon, who gives us a man who apparently doesn’t know mathm but also sets our tariffs:

One from my feed, and I hope it’s not AI. You have to be very careful these days, and we all make mistakes:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was three years old. Had he lived, he'd be 85 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-11-05T12:49:32.070Z

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb. He saved the first meme and I retweeted it to post here. It is, as far as I know, correct:

. . . and this is what happens when AI gets hold of one of the great classic suggestions in modern science:

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submittingI uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

— Tomer Ullman (@tomerullman.bsky.social) 2025-11-03T13:55:08.703Z