Wednesday: Hili dialogue

November 26, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Wednesday, November 26, 2025, and a Hump Day (“ཧམ་པ་ཉིན་མོ།” in Tibetan). Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I may take a well-deserved break from writing here, though I will have no Thanksgiving dinner since nobody loves me. It’s also National Cake Day, though pies are better.  But a cake is better than no cake, and here from Wikipedia is a German chocolate cake (the name comes from the “German” brand of cooking chocolate, not the nation):

Tracy Hunter from Kabul, AfghanistanTracy Hunter from Kabul, Afghanistan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Jukebox Day and Blackout Wednesday, referring to the fact that it’s a big drinking day (college students returning home for the holiday get soused in bars).

I’m not sure if there will be much posting tomorrow as even Professor Ceiling Cat (emeritus) deserves a day off. That would mean that the Hili dialogue, most of which I prepare the afternoon before, would be truncated. Bear with me: I do my best.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Zelensky is clearly not happy with the pro-Russian peace deal proposed by Trump, and Trump has indicated that the 28 provisions he suggested aren’t final, nor was his one-week deadline for Ukraine to sign on. (Remember when Trump said he’d settle that war on Day 1 of his presidency?).  Now Zelensky and Trump are trying to leaven the agreement and make it easier on Ukraine, but the WaPo thinks that may be problematic.

Momentum is picking up for the new U.S.-led peace deal for Ukraine, with progress made over the weekend in Geneva and new meetings involving the United States, Russian and Ukrainian delegations in the United Arab Emirates. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is even expected to travel to the United States in the coming days to meet with President Donald Trump on the deal.

All these negotiations may be for nothing, however, as the work to make the 28-point U.S. plan more acceptable to Ukraine is precisely what will doom it with Russia, analysts say.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the U.S. had made “tremendous progress” toward a peace deal by bringing Russia and Ukraine to the table.

“There are a few delicate, but not insurmountable, details that must be sorted out and will require further talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States,” she said in a post on X. The Ukrainians have said the crucial matter of territory will be resolved directly between Trump and Zelensky.

. . .Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he expected the Americans to soon present to Russia their interim version of the deal following input from the Ukrainians and Europeans, but warned that if it strayed from what Putin demanded at the Alaska summit in August, there would be a problem.

“Because if the spirit and letter of the Anchorage agreement are erased, based on the key understandings contained therein, then, of course, we’ll be in a fundamentally different situation,” he said.

The work to come up with a peace plan that would somehow be acceptable to all sides and end nearly four years of war came as dozens of Russian missiles slammed into Kyiv overnight, hitting apartment buildings and power infrastructure.

Lt. Col. Jeff Tolbert, a spokesman for Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, said the talks continuing through Tuesday with the Russian delegation in Abu Dhabi “are going well and we remain optimistic.” He added they were synchronized with the White House.

I am not optimistic. Putin wants nearly all of the Donbas region of eastern and southern Ukraine—a lot of territory—and some thinks he wants all of Ukraine, but that would have to involve further fighting if a peace deal isn’t struck.  Trump’s solution is, at present, unacceptable to Zelensky, and that puts him in a tough spot: either “fight his little heart out”, as Trump rudely said, or give up a lot of his country. As for what I think of Putin, it’s not suitable for a family-friendly website.

*The NYT has two articles about how Mamdani’s election has changed the city’s political landscape towards Israel. First, Mamdani criticized a synagogue for hosting a group that encouraged Jews to move ot just to Israel, buit also to the West Bank:

It was the first high-profile incident since Zohran Mamdani’s election involving one of New York City’s most sensitive flash points: the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

A rowdy protest descended last Wednesday on Park East Synagogue, one of New York’s most prominent Modern Orthodox congregations, which had rented space to an organization that helps Jews move to Israel as well as to settlements in the occupied West Bank. Chants of “death to the I.D.F.” and “globalize the intifada” rang through the air.

Mr. Mamdani, the mayor-elect, responded the next day, saying through a spokeswoman that he “discouraged the language” used at the protest and that New Yorkers must be “free to enter a house of worship without intimidation.”

But it was what he said next that alarmed some Jewish leaders: He chastised the synagogue, saying through his spokeswoman that “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

Mr. Mamdani, who will become mayor on Jan. 1, has struggled to build bonds with segments of the Jewish population, many of whom opposed his candidacy in part because of his sustained criticism of Israel and his pro-Palestinian activism.

And though Mr. Mamdani has said he will protect Jewish institutions amid heightened levels of antisemitism and hate crimes, his initial response to the protest did little to quell that unease and was criticized by some Jewish leaders.

It remains debatable whether Israelis moving to the West Bank, or even living in the “restricted” areas of the West Bank itself, violates international law.  You can find arguments for and against that on YouTube. For now I find that moving Jews to the West Bank is at best unwise, especially before a final pace deal is negotiated. But regardless, Mamdani should have kept his mouth shut. His ambit is New York, not the Middle East.

Second, and more serious, Democrats are set to “primary” other Democrats running for Congressional seats because the incumbents are too “soft on Israel.”

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York’s mayoral election this month may have scrambled what had been a clear political imperative for candidates in the city: the need to support Israel.

In a number of congressional races across New York City, challengers are betting that the success of Mr. Mamdani — a vigorous critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians — portends a potential vulnerability for pro-Israel incumbents.

Representative Adriano Espaillat, a Democrat whose district includes Upper Manhattan and portions of the Bronx, is facing a primary challenge from Darializa Avila Chevalier, who helped lead protests against the Israel-Hamas war at Columbia University and has criticized Mr. Espaillat for supporting the sale of weapons to Israel and receiving donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Representative Daniel Goldman, a Jewish Democrat representing parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan, seems headed to a primary battle, too. Councilwoman Alexa Avilés, a harsh critic of Israel, and the city comptroller, Brad Lander, who has attacked the Netanyahu government, have both signaled interest in running for his seat.

“There is no denying that U.S. taxpayer dollars are undergirding what is happening: the utter destruction of Gaza,” Ms. Avilés said in an interview. “You can now run for even higher office, as mayor of New York City, and say these things head-on.”

And in the Bronx, Representative Ritchie Torres, another firm ally of Israel, is being challenged by Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who is trying to court voters opposed to Israel’s actions in its war against Hamas.

“I will invest in the community,” Mr. Blake said on social media when he announced his run. “Ritchie invests in bombs.”

Ritchie invests in bombz? What are these opponents saying? Was Israel not supposed to go after Hamas? Crucially, what would someone like Blake say was the proper action Israel was supposed to take? Remember, Gaza is largely destroyed, and you can blame Hamas for that, as the terrorists hid behind civilians, but the war isn’t over and Hamas is still in charge. It’s as if the “primary-ists” are saying, “Our opponents were too hard on Hamas.”

*A glitch on the “X” (Twitter) site on Nov. 22 revealed that a number of propaganda feeds are actually false, not coming from where they purport to (here and here)

A temporary glitch on X led to a credibility bloodbath for a variety of foreign propaganda accounts that were either posing as Americans or lying about their locations in other ways.

Days prior, Head of Product Nikita Brier had announced a new feature revealing the origin and current location of users. When it rolled out, though, only account owners could view it. That all changed on Friday night, though. In what is assumed to have been a mistake, everyone’s origins and current locations were made public for about an hour before disappearing.

In one instance, it was revealed that one of Hamas’ biggest simps [sympathizers] has been lying about being in Gaza.

The above was posted when it was 65 degrees at night (and 80 during the day), just to give you an idea of the kind of propaganda being spewed. For years, the above account has claimed to be reporting from the ground in Gaza. He’s made hundreds of posts pushing fake claims about genocide, famine, and his own supposed hardships. In reality, his account was created in the United Kingdom, and he’s currently residing in Poland.

This is only one of several examples:

I guess when he said he and his “children” were freezing, he forgot he was still in Eastern Europe. He’s not the only one who got exposed, though. A large number of other accounts that obsess over Israel and Jews, many claiming to be Americans, were also revealed to be foreign ops.

There are a lot more examples, but what needs to be understood is that this is all coordinated. Foreigners, possibly funded by other governments, are creating accounts and using bots to game the algorithms to gain notoriety. They then use those platforms to push vile content under the banner of “America First.” Every bit of it is meant to demoralize and divide Americans, and specifically, the Republican Party.

Another:

One final one. Click on links to go to them:

Last night [Nov. 22], for around an hour, X enabled the feature that shows the actual location from which a tweet originates. Surprise! All those Gazans, tweeting about starving and dodging enemy fire? Actually located in Russia and Pakistan. Those “America First” advocates, who are hostile to Israel? Not exactly American: they are in Ireland, Pakistan, etc.

This I’m not down with since X is now deceiving readers on X by posting lies about their location.  I suppose you could defend this as free speech, but it comes from a source that’s not what you think.

*The French now say they’ve caught all four people (two men and two women) accused of strealing over $100 million in historic jewelry from the Louvre. But that don’t have the jewels.

French authorities said they’ve detained four more people in connection to the Louvre heist, including a man suspected of being the only thief to remain at large after purloining the nation’s crown jewels.

Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said two men, ages 38 and 39, and two women, 31 and 40, have been taken into custody for questioning. Beccuau said all four detainees came from the Paris region, without disclosing further details.

Police said they suspected one of the men of being part of the team of thieves who used a truck-mounted lift last month to break into an upper gallery of the world’s most-visited museum in broad daylight.

He was detained in the town of Laval, in western France, though he is from Aubervilliers, the Paris suburb that was home to the other suspected thieves.

Tuesday’s arrests mean investigators believe they have tracked down the entire crew of thieves, having already detained three suspected thieves in the aftermath of the robbery. Prosecutors brought preliminary charges against the three for criminal conspiracy and organized theft. A woman was also arrested on charges of complicity in organized theft and criminal conspiracy.

There has been no word on whether investigators are any closer to tracking down the jewels themselves. Authorities fear the jewels risk being broken down and sold off. The longer the jewels are missing, experts say, the less likely they are to be recovered.

. . . The thieves made off with eight pieces of jewelry from France’s royal and Napoleonic-era collections valued at 88 million euros, equivalent to around $101 million, though French officials say that sum doesn’t begin to capture the jewels’ historical value to France. Thousands of diamonds studded the jewels, as well as sapphires and emeralds the size of lozenges.

Besides sniffing out where the accused thieves may have hidden the jewels, there’s no way to find them (and that presumes they haven’t been removed from their settings) except to to convict them, give them strict prison sentences, and/or make a deal with one or more of them to trade the information for a lighter sentence.  They might sing if they’re threatened with stiff punishment:  AI tells me they could each get up to 25 years—a long sentence.

*Presumably based on its phylogenetic distribution, or so so the NYT tells us, kissing on the lips has existed for at least 16 million years (h/t Peggy, article archived here).

British scientists say they’ve traced the age of the kiss, to anywhere from 16 million to 21 million years ago, and have found that it was far more common among other species than previously understood.

Ants? They smooch. Fish? Kissers. Neanderthals? Yep, they puckered up, too — sometimes even with us.

But kissing, the researchers said, has always been something of a so-called evolutionary mystery. It doesn’t present much benefit for survival, it has minimal reproductive benefits, and it’s mostly symbolic.

“Kissing is a really interesting behavior,” said Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University who led the study. Dozens of societies and cultures use it, it’s common, and it has weighted symbolism. But, she said, “we’ve not really tested it from an evolutionary perspective.”

In prehistoric kissing, it seems, could be the primitive origins of our search for intimate connection. The act inherently requires vulnerability, and trust. It’s not always sexual and is often used among and between genders simply to show affection, and often between parents and offspring.

Though researchers found evidence of kissing in several species, they narrowed the focus of the study mostly to the behavior of large apes, like gorillas, orangutans and baboons.

But the vast use of the practice surprised Dr. Brindle. She said she had expected examples of kissing among apes and humans, but was surprised to see the gentle behavior shared between bugs, albatrosses and polar bears.

“For some reason, I didn’t expect this many of them to kiss,” Dr. Brindle said.

Among their research groups were Neanderthals, which, despite their differences, shared microbes with modern humans. It leaves open the chance, the study said, that the two swapped spit in not-so-distant history.

Dr. Brindle said she hopes the study can be a foundation for further studies on kissing, and determine — as the study itself notes — whether it is more than Ingrid Bergman’s preferred pastime. Other scientists, she hopes, might start recording their observations of these behaviors while in the field.

“If we had more data on this,” she said, “then we could really start to kind of unpack the potential kind of adaptive advantages of kissing.”

And that’s the whole article.

Well, an ant kiss is not homologous to a human kiss: ants touch mandibles to pass food to each other, an act called trophalaxxis. I don’t know about fish and the article gives give no references.  I suppose the age of the kiss is estimated by seeing which primate (and all primates in between) is our most distant relative that still kisses. For 15-20 myr that would be gibbons and orangutans. Still, they may touch lips, but is it a romantic gesture, the way it’s used in humans? (I presume they’re not referring to cheek-kissing.) If the researchers are really making claims that the evolutionary/genetic basis of kissing was present in our relatives with other primates 15-20 myr ago, they’d have to show that all the primates in that group of lineages kiss as some sort of bonding gesture.  Sadly, the NYT doesn’t give that information.  This is an example of bad science reporting. And it doesn’t even mention the tongue!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has become super cuddly:

Hili: I’m not here to convert you.
Andrzej: But…
Hili: I only came to sit beside you.

In Polish:

Hili: Nie przyszłam cię nawracać.
Ja: Ale…
Hili: Chciałam tylko posiedzieć koło ciebie.

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

From Stacy:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Things With Faces, some unhappy plantains:

From Masih: a burqa-wearing Aussie MP (Pauline Hanson) wears a burqa into Parliament after she was denied permission to introduce a bill banning the garment.

And a video, with other MPs objecting vigorously to the wearing of the garment as “disrespectful of faith”. It is a stunt, especially since they won’t debate such a bill:

From Emma. A biological male wins the “strongest woman” contest. The NY Post  now tells us that his medal has now been taken away because, competing as a trans-identified male, he violated the competition’s rules.

From Malcolm; how fiber-optic cables are splices. It’s complicated!

From Lee Jussim via Luana; how the American Association of University Professors has gone downhill fast (you can find Jussim’s piece here):

One from my feed;  turkeys FTW!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Fench Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was four years old. Had he lived he would be 88 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-11-26T11:46:03.900Z

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, I knew right off that the medals are reversed. Hegseth is an idiot. NOTE: Hegseth deleted his post but I found a copy online; several people pointed out that Kelly’s medals were reversed because the photo was a mirror image!

 

. . .and the decline of Scientific American (a screenshot):

Pinker and Tupy vs. Kingsnorth: do we need a god in these troubled times?

November 25, 2025 • 9:45 am

For reasons I don’t really understand, Steve Pinker gets piled on when he claims, correctly, that humanity has made both material and moral progress in the last eight centuries or so.  But there seems to be a group of miscreants who think that they’d be better off in the 13th century and were devout Christians, obeying religious dicta. This is not only wrong but stupid. If they returned to the times they tout, they’d most likely be living in filth, ridden with maladies, not be able to read or write, and, finally, would die at about 30 from a tooth abscess.

But they were religious! The absence of faith is the latest argument for the failure of modernity.  Material progress and improvements in health, so it’s said, have left humanity only with that damn “god-shaped hole”. Despite our higher well being, it’s said, we are still bereft, yearning for a god.  Although you can have your modernity and gods too, somehow these advocates of material regression think that the benefits of modernity have in fact produced that god-shaped hole by distorting our values, and we need to get back to Christianity (they never mention the other religions).

One of the biggest advocates of the god-shaped-hole (henceforth GSH) hypothesis is Paul Kingsnorth, an English writer who penned a dreadful article in the Free Press along the lines above, called “How the West lost its soul“. Kingsnorth argued that only religion (preferably Christianity, though he mentions others) can save us from the malaise caused by the lack of religion. The Enlightenment, he says, has failed, and so, lacking a morality that cannot exist without religion, we tack our way through life without spiritual mooring.

This is nonsense, as I argued here on October 13 (see also here).  And now Steve Pinker and Marian L. Tupy (the latter described as “the founder and editor of Human​Progress​.org, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity“) have taken Kingsnorth’s thesis apart, showing both the benefits of progress that came from the Enlightenment as well as the failure of religion to forge a workable morality. The resurgence of “Christian nationalism” in America, they argue, has only brought back the old morality that impeded progress.

You can read their piece by clicking below (if you subscribe, for it isn’t archived):

First, though, look how the Free Press‘s author Freya Sanders introduces the piece by Pinker and Tupy (henceforth P&T). The bolding is mine:

We write about this a lot here at The Free Press—about how phones have robbed kids of their childhoods and how young people think corporate jobs are pointless. Paul Kingsnorth argued earlier this year that when people in the West stopped going to church, “the vacuum was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism.” TikTok is warping our moral codes, and porn has ruined our sex lives. People are depressed, nihilistic, and increasingly illiterate.

What’s the answer? God, according to a lot of people. There has been a boom in religiosity across the West. We’ve published a lot about that, too—about how Americans are flocking to podcasts and apps that teach them about scripture; how young people are getting baptized in record numbers, or traveling to France to go on a pilgrimage; and how female Catholics are bringing back chapel veils because they want to connect to a “lost type of Catholicism.”

But in certain corners of the intellectual right, the idea that life was better in the good old days has intensified into a longing for—of all social orders—medieval Christendom. There are calls to replace American democracy with a monarchy. To make our laws and lawmakers more Christian. When Tucker Carlson says feudalism sounds good, you know things have gone too far!

So we’re glad to present the opposing view today, in the form of an essay by Steven Pinker and Marian L. Tupy—who believe that we are alive at the best possible time to be human: right now. And we don’t need the Bible to have a moral code, because we have a secular one that is the reason for all human flourishing: the set of ideas we refer to as Enlightenment ideals. They are the ideas America is built on. And they are written into the Constitution, right next to God.

America has always been a negotiation between reason and faith. Right now, the negotiation is fierce. We’re proud to publish arguments on both sides of it—including this thought-provoking essay. Don’t miss it.

This is disingenuous. Note that Sander says, “we’ve published a lot” about the “boom in religiosity” and the need for God.  Indeed they have, but the P&T piece is really the only humanistic attack on religion that I’ve seen on the site. The fact is that the Free Press is always banging on about religion and its virtues (Bari Weiss is, a Jew who, I think, believes in a higher power), and I think they published this just to show that the venue does indeed publish a variety of opinions, thus being “objective”.  (It also has some well known and eloquent authors) But so far it’s been about ten pro-religion articles to this single dissent, so I call that ratio slanted journalism.

But onward and upward, for this piece is a good palliative for all the Free Press‘s god-touting. P&T begin by describing how conservatism has brought us back longing for the good old days when Christianity ruled the West. They explicitly single out Kingsnorth’s article, for these two men have written a long rebuttal. In the introduction, they obliquely criticize the Free Press, too:

Of course, humanity has already tried monarchy and theocracy—during the Middle Ages—and sure enough, some of the new reactionaries are saying that those times were not so bad after all. Dreher writes admiringly: “In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. . . . Men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”

Other influential conservatives go further in justifying medieval hierarchies. On his eponymous show, Tucker Carlson recently declared: “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.”

And The Free Press recently showcased a full-strength expression of pre-Enlightenment nostalgia in an essay by Paul Kingsnorth called “How the West Lost Its Soul” (an excerpt of his book Against the Machine).

According to Kingsnorth, Western civilization has lost the sacred story that sustained it for 1,500 years: Christianity. The story begins with the Garden of Eden, where humanity chose knowledge over communion with God, which led to exile and suffering, though with a path to salvation through belief in a grisly human sacrifice and a miraculous resurrection. For centuries, “the mythic vision of medieval Christendom” offered people meaning and morality, writes Kingsnorth. But starting with the Enlightenment, and accelerating in the 1960s, it gave way to a “partial, empty, and over-rational humanism,” leaving societies spiritually adrift. With sustaining myths gone and no shared higher purpose, Westerners now live amid “ruins.”

The Free Press introduction captures the contrast starkly: “Conventional wisdom insists that technology has made life better,” whereas the abandonment of the religious story has left us with “a complete lack of meaning.”

I don’t want to reproduce huge portions of the article here, and since it’s not archived, you won’t be able to read it if you don’t subscribe (I suggest you do, if only for Nellie Bowle’s weekly “TGIF” column. Or perhaps judicious inquiry will yield a copy. But I am excerpting more than normal for those who can’t access the piece.

Here are the areas that P&T consider, with excerpts (indented) and perhaps a few words (mine flush left) on each.

Well being and morality. In a section called “knowledge is more meaningful than ignorance and superstition,” P&T argue that religion did not improve people’s well being in the old days, but simply justified bad stuff. They argue that humanism provides a better grounding for morality than does religion, and who would argue otherwise? After all, even religious people pick and choose their Biblical morality, implicitly assuming that things are good because God approves only of what is good, implying that the “good” pre-dates the pronouncements of God. Quotes (all indented):

It’s said that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory, and the historical amnesia of the romanticizers of medieval Christendom is near-complete. Among the blessings of modernity is an Everest of data about life in the past, painstakingly collected by economic historians from original sources over many decades. This quantitative scholarship circumvents fruitless back-and-forth about whether the Dark Ages were really all that dark: We can go to the numbers.

In this essay we will show how the reaction against modernity has it backward. Before the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting “Great Enrichment,” life in the West was characterized for most people not by meaning and morality but by ignorance, cruelty, and squalor. Today we are blessed not just with prosperity and its underappreciated gifts, but with a robust moral mission—one that is grounded in our best understanding of reality, and the indisputable goal of reducing suffering and improving flourishing. Meaning comes from reason and well-being, not scripture and salvation; from governance with the consent of the governed, not rule by kings and clergymen.

, , ,the popular canard among theoconservatives is that religion is the only conceivable source of morality, and so a secular society must be mired in selfishness, relativism, and nihilism. Kingsnorth, for example, favorably cites the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s diagnosis that the Enlightenment left us with a morality that, “loosed from theology,” consists of “nothing more than [an] individual’s personal judgment.”

The dismissal is breathtaking.

The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason and well-being left us with a coherent fabric of arguments against the brutality and injustice that had been ubiquitous in human history. These arguments became the foundation of civilized society

Barbarism and immorality.  P&T show that “premodern Christianism was not moral, but barbaric.” Again, what rational person could doubt that?

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of universal well-being, the morality of holy scriptures was dubious at best. The God of the Old Testament prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, disobedience, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. Indeed, he commanded the Israelites to commit all of these against their enemies.

Whatever humane advances we might attribute to Jesus, his followers did not adopt them for an awfully long time. For some 1,400 years that separated Constantine’s embrace of Christianity in the early 4th century to the rise of the Enlightenment in the 18th, most Christians remained untroubled by slavery, the persecution of heretics, and brutal colonial conquest.

The point about the delay in adopting “Christian humane advances” is a good one. If Christianity causes moral improvement, why did it take millennia for this to get going?

“Health and prosperity are more meaningful than starvation and squalor”.  Steve has argued this clearly in two books (Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), and surely Tupy—whose work I don’t know—has made similar claims.  I’d love to ask people like Kingsnorth if they’d rather live in medieval Europe or in modern Scandinavia. If they accepted Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and had to be embodied in a random person, they’d surely choose the latter.

Westerners have been complaining about how wealth causes moral decline for millennia. Few of the complainants have reflected on how it was wealth that gave them the luxury to complain about that wealth. Their contemporaries who died in childbirth, or whose lives were wracked with hunger, pain, and disease, were not as lucky. The vanquishing of early death, propelled not by prayer but knowledge, may be humanity’s greatest moral triumph.

Some numbers can shake us out of this spoiled complacency. (For sources, see our respective books Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Enlightenment Now.) In 1800, the European life expectancy was 33 years; today, it is 79 years—which means that we have been granted not just extra life, but an extra life. Much of that gift came from leaps in prosperity that spared the lives of children. Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday. Today that fate befalls three-tenths of one percent. Even the poorest countries today lose a fraction of the children that Europe did until recently. If being spared the agony of losing a child is not “meaningful,” what is?

Children who survived often faced orphanhood, hunger, parasites, workhouses, and beatings. Famines, which could kill a quarter of the population, recurred around once a decade. Today, starvation in much of the world has given way to obesity. It is easy to condemn gluttony, but searching for life’s meaning is surely easier on a full stomach.

Christianity comes with antisemitism.  P&T argue that the hegemony of Christianity both in older times and now is inevitably accompanied by a rise in antisemitism, for if you embrace “Christian values”, you perforce see Jews, who supposedly killed Christ and cannot get to heaven by accepting Jesus, as being “anti-moral.” This, too, appears to be the sentiments of modern Christian nationalists, but is dispelled by secular humanism:

[Yoram] Hazony said: “All the classical questions of: Why is the Old Testament in the Christian Bible? What are we supposed to get out of it? Do the Jews have any role in history at all, or was it just supposed to have ended?—all of those questions are on the table.” It’s notable that Kingsnorth, in his essay railing against modernity, consistently cites the Christian, never the “Judeo-Christian,” tradition.

America was founded on the secular Enlightenment principles of equality, rights, flourishing, and democratic governance. It’s no coincidence that Jews thrived here. Nor can it be a coincidence that a movement founded on parochial Christian theocracy would be accompanied by a recrudescence of the world’s oldest hatred.

In the end, I am both amazed and amused at people like Kingsnorth who long for the good old days when people embraced Christianity and thus were both moral and fulfilled. There were no god-shaped holes then.  But, given a choice of living then and now, I’m sure that all the Christian luddites would choose to live now. As for the god-shaped hole, all I can say is that many people, including me, don’t have one.  Our lives get meaning not from embracing Jesus, but from whatever we find fulfilling: friends, loved ones, and family, work, hobbies, and so on. True, some people will always glom onto faith because it’s so easy: all you have to do is go to a church and you get a preexisting set of beliefs, friends and supporters.  But people like me simply can’t believe in god if there’s no evidence for god.

In their last section, called “Modernity is not a ruin”, P&T reprise their argument, and I’ll give a longer bit:

the 21st century, with all its woes, is a better time to live than any time before. Extreme poverty, child and maternal mortality, illiteracy, tyranny, violent crime, and war deaths are lower than in any previous century. The wealth that theoconservatives find so corrosive funds the education and leisure that allow individuals to contemplate meaning, whether it be in work, family, community, nature, science, sport, art, or yes, religion. Another gift of modernity is that people are not burned alive for their beliefs but allowed to hold whichever ones they find meaningful.

It’s sometimes claimed that for all these opportunities, people today are suffering from a new “crisis of meaning.” Here again we shouldn’t confuse nostalgia with fact. Illiterate medieval peasants left us with no records of how meaningful they thought their lives were. As the historian Eleanor Janega points out, they themselves thought they were living in a time of decline, and “they were rebelling constantly.”

When we ask people about their lives today, their own judgments belie any narrative of decadence and decay. Global surveys find that it’s the richest and freest countries, not the backward theocracies, in which people express the greatest satisfaction with their lives. Pathologies like homicide, incarceration, child mortality, educational mediocrity, and premature death are more common in the more religious countries and American states than the more secular ones.

People also express their conception of a better life by voting with their feet. In 2020, of the 281 million who moved to another country, 232 million of them sought a better life in high-income, increasingly secular countries, particularly in Europe and North America. Today’s reactionaries can’t have it both ways, asserting that the affluent secular West is a decadent ruin while fending off the millions of people from poorer and more religious countries who risk their lives to get in.

And if people voted with their hands and had a time machine, they’d surely set it for now instead of 1350.

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 25, 2025 • 8:15 am

This is the last batch I have, so we’ll have a photo hiatus over Thanksgiving unless somebody sends in some pics.

Today’s photos come from reader Uwe Mueller, who sends us bird photos from Germany. Uwe’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The first five pictures were taken in the Bergisches Land, Germany.

A Great tit (Parus major) taking a steep turn directly in front of the camera. It took a lot of attempts to get this kind of shot from this little bird in flight:

This bird was really a hard one to identify. It could either be a Marsh tit (Poecile palustris) or a Willow tit (Poecile montanus). Both birds are very similar and only distinguishable by some minor differences in a few features. After a lot of investigation I tend to think that this is a Marsh tit. But I could still be wrong:

Grey wagtails (Motacilla cinerea) are to be found mostly at small creeks or shallow ponds where they meticulously search the water and the banks for food like worms and insects. They are quite skittish birds and don’t like the human presence. To get a close shot like this you have to stay low-key in nature and have a long lens:

A Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), one of the most widespread warblers in Germany. I had some difficulty with its identification because the blackcap of the bird in the picture is more like a mid-brown cap:

A European green woodpecker (Picus viridis), another bird that you often hear but rarely see:

A Great crested grebe (Podiceps cristatus) is feeding one of its chicks with fresh fish. This picture was taken at the river Ruhr:

A flock of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) flying over the Ruhr. In the upper right corner of the picture you can see a Greylag goose (Anser anser) and two hybrids also flying in this flock. My guess is that the hybrids are the offspring of the Greylag goose. Canada geese and Greylag geese are known to mate with each other and produce offspring:

A European herring gull (Larus argentatus) flying very low over the Baltic Sea near the town of Kiel, Germany:

A male Red-breasted merganser (Mergus serrator) with its distinct red eyes, also near Kiel:

Another picture from Kiel, a Great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) sitting in a surge of waves:

This funny little fella is a Sanderling (Calidris alba). They are constantly rushing over the beach with little mincing steps that are so quick that you hardly see their feet while running. Due to this behaviour they are called “Keen Tid“ in Northern German dialect which translates to “Don’t have time“. Every now and then they stop and stick their beak into the sand, searching for worms and small crabs, like in this picture that I took on the East Frisian island of Juist:

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

November 25, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 25, 2025. It’s two days until Thanksgiving in America as well as National Parfait Day, which is meaningless as nobody will think about them nor eat them today. Still, here’s the American version with fruit and layers of custard and other stuff.

663highland, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Blasé Day, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and National “Eat with a Friend” Day. (Why the scare quotes? )Are you suppose to eat with someone whom you only pretend is a friend, or pretend to eat?)

Here’s a sign I pass every day on my way to work. Note the big error. Should I go in and get my hair desinged? It’s not singed in the first place! (Red box is mine.)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: Jimmy Cliff died at 81. From the NYT:

Jimmy Cliff, a onetime choirboy who emerged from the rough quarters of Kingston, Jamaica, riding a rebel spirit and a fierce sense of social justice to help make the supple, bobbing sounds of reggae a global phenomenon with songs like “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “The Harder They Come,” has died. He was 81.

Mr. Cliff’s wife, Latifa Chambers, announced his death in an online post early Monday. She said the cause was a seizure followed by pneumonia. Fueled by his searing performance as a musician-turned-outlaw in the 1972 film “The Harder They Come,” Mr. Cliff became the first worldwide reggae star.

But he set his sights even higher. Over the years, his musical journey encompassed ska, rocksteady, pop, soul and other genres. “I didn’t really want to be known just as the King of Reggae,” he said in a 2004 interview with The Washington Post. “I actually wanted to be known as the King of Music!”

Among his signature songs are the gospel-inflected “Many Rivers to Cross,” the anthemic “Wonderful World, Beautiful People,” the feel-good tune “Reggae Night,” and “Vietnam,” which Bob Dylan deemed one of the greatest protest songs.

Here is Cliff singing “I Can See Clearly Now” on the Late Show.  For many years I thought the first two lines were these:

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone;
I can see all the Popsicles in my way.

*The NYT “Morning Report” on Trump’s stupid peace deal for Russia and Ukraine:

The peace proposal released last week read like a wish list for Russia. It would require Kyiv to relinquish captured terrain and shrink its army. It would bar Ukraine from joining NATO and also prohibit foreign troops from coming to its rescue in a future conflict.

“Right now the American plan is devastating for Ukraine, weakening its ability to defend itself and providing few guarantees of its future,” Julian Barnes, a Times reporter who covers international security, told me yesterday.

The Ukrainians have been outraged, and Volodymyr Zelensky said the proposal was a choice between “losing our dignity and freedom” and losing U.S. support.

That could be changing. American and Ukrainian officials met in Geneva this weekend and began reviewing the plan point by point. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said they were “narrowing the differences and getting closer to something” that both Kyiv and Washington would be “comfortable with.” The head of Ukraine’s delegation said the officials had made “very good progress.”

They’re trying to reach a deal by Thursday, which is the deadline Trump has set for Ukraine to accept the proposal.

Trump’s Stance:

While the diplomats in Geneva have been seeking compromise, Trump has been lashing out. He posted that Ukraine’s leadership had “EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE” for American military aid and support. (Zelensky posted his own message hours later, expressing thanks “for everything that America and President Trump are doing for security.”)

The exchange took us back to the start of Trump’s second administration, when he and Vice President JD Vance seemed more sympathetic to Russia and publicly berated Zelensky in the Oval Office.

Zelensky later adopted a more accommodating tone and signed a deal to give the U.S. some of Ukraine’s minerals. At the same time, Russia continued bombing Ukrainian civilians, which exasperated Trump. Soon, Trump pivoted and spent much of this year lamenting the obstinacy of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. He ripped Putin and praised Zelensky.

As the Washington Post reports, “. . . President Donald Trump faced mounting criticism from lawmakers and his own base over the proposal.”

A take on this deal posted by reader Pyers.  Ukraine is getting screwed, or was in the last peace deal: losing land, not allowed to join NATO, having its military limited, and so on. More of Trump’s bluster, and I hope it doesn’t become reality. Still Ukraine is losing the war.

*Of course I’m going to read and report on a new essay by James Carville in the NYT: “Out with woke. In with rage.” I love that feisty old curmudgeon, even though he predicted that Kamala Harris would win last year. For he’s always argued that wokeness would hurt the Democrats, and on that he was right. Here’s his no-nonsense message:

We are not even two weeks from the government shutdown, and the public conversation on the matter has fled the building. This shows, no matter what you believe, there’s a simple truth. The shutdown will have zero lasting consequence for next year’s midterms. The only thing that will persevere is economic pain. And that’s exactly why Democrats won on Nov. 4.

Zohran Mamdani, Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill — even down-ballot Georgia Democrats — all won with soaring margins because the people are pissed. And the people always point their anger at the party in charge. Rent is out of control. Young people can’t afford homes or pay student debt. We’re living through the greatest economic inequality since the Roaring Twenties.

President Trump has done nothing to curb the cost of what it requires to take even a breath in America today, the centerpiece promise of his 2024 campaign. The people are revolting, and they have been for some time.

This offers Democrats the greatest gift you can have in American politics: a second chance. I am now an 81-year-old man and I know that in the minds of many, I carry the torch from a so-called centrist political era. Yet it is abundantly clear even to me that the Democratic Party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression.

It is time for Democrats to embrace a sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and altogether unmistakable platform of pure economic rage. This is our only way out of the abyss.

You know what he’s going to say next: “Don’t blow it Democrats: deep-six the wokeness.” And he says it:

Just as it was for the Mamdani campaign, raging against the rigged, screwed-up, morally bankrupt system that gave us the cost of living crisis must be the centerpiece of every Democratic campaign in America. Unless you’re the top 1 percent, this touches everybody. Even lifelong Republicans know this economy isn’t working.

We have to present ourselves as adamantly, even angrily, opposing the system that is preventing younger rural voters from buying homes, jacking up utility bills and keeping grocery prices at astronomical levels. It is vital that Democrats, with some big ol’ cojones, rail against the unjust economic system that has created these conditions. Otherwise, we will continue to be viewed as part of it.

For this to work, we can’t get sidetracked on our message. The Republican Party’s greatest weapon has always been its uncanny ability to turn us against one another. It cannot be said enough: The era of performative woke politics from 2020 to 2024 has left a lasting stain on our brand, particularly with rural voters and male voters. The term Latinx was despised even by many Latino people. Calling folks “BIPOC” should have never been a thing. “Defund the police” was a terrible idea. Polling shows that nearly 70 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is “out of touch” and that it is more interested in social issues than economic ones.

. . .We can no longer be a party with a whiff of moral absolutism. We can correct this only by looking toward the future, always, in every situation possible, and pivoting to a form of economic rage as our response.

With all this rage, we must also have a bold, simple policy plan — one that every American can understand. In the richest country in the history of our planet, we should not fear raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour, which had a 74 percent approval rating in 2023. We should not fear an America with free public college tuition, which 63 percent of U.S. adults favored in a 2021 poll. When 62 percent of Americans say their electricity or gas bills have increased in the past year and 80 percent feel powerless to control their utility costs, we should not fear the idea of expanding rural broadband as a public utility. Or when 70 percent of Americans say raising children is too expensive, we should not fear making universal child care a public good. And darn it, we should not fear that running on a platform of seismic economic scale will cost us a general election. We’ve already lost enough of them by being afraid to try. The era of half-baked political policy is over.

Sounds good, right? Yes, so long as the Democrats can keep away from the wokeness and stick to the concerns of ordinary people, which are not pronouns.  I’m somewhat optimistic about this, because even the Squad might keep itself under control if they realize that, by concentrating on economics and inequality, their party can win. Remember Carville’s slogan for the Clinton campaingn in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid“. Well, 33 years later, Carville’s back with the same message. Ceiling Cat bless him (image below, with Ceiling Cat blessing an AI-created Carville, made by Luana):

*A court in Northern Ireland has banned the religious curriculum in that province because it is taught as if Christianity were an absolute truth.

A court case that began with two parents concerned about the Christian teaching their daughter was receiving at school ended Wednesday with a landmark judgment that could transform the place of religion in schools in Northern Ireland.

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that the religious curriculum in Northern Ireland’s public schools was unlawful because it promoted Christianity as an absolute truth and did not teach religion in an “objective, critical and pluralistic manner.”

The court said in its judgment that the curriculum breached the rights of the child, who is now 11, and of her parents, who had challenged the legality of religious education and collective worship at her Belfast elementary school.

The family, which was granted anonymity by the court, has no religion and is, “broadly speaking,” humanist in its outlook, the court ruling said.

The ruling will force the government in Northern Ireland to rethink the way that religious education is taught in public schools and ensure that the study of other faiths is included in elementary education.

The court said that its ruling was “not about whether Christianity should be the main or primary faith that pupils learn about in schools in Northern Ireland.” It acknowledged that, “historically and today, Christianity is the most important religion in Northern Ireland,” and that therefore it was within the Department of Education’s mandate to make knowledge of Christianity the focus of its curriculum.

It said, however, that the failure of the syllabus to teach children about other faiths, and to think objectively about religion, meant that it was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to freedom of religion.

Northern Ireland Humanists, a charity working on behalf of nonreligious people, called the judgment a “historic win.”

And get this:

For decades, all schools under the control of Northern Ireland’s Department of Education have provided religious education and a daily act of worship. According to the official curriculum, schools do not have to teach children about the existence of other religions alongside Christianity until they are between 11 and 14 years old.

If you want to see the syllabus up to now, go here. The first page starts with this:

I never learned religion in school, though I can see a weak case for teaching kids about the different faiths. But religion has historically been taught, as it was in N.I., as a form of proselytizing.  It’s a good thing they just taught Christianity instead of either Protestantism or Catholicism, but I can’t imagine a kid in Belfast not knowing what Judaism is. At any rate, this is a good decision so long as they teach atheism alongside religion (I believe Dan Dennett made that point, alongside the claim that it would be very hard to teach religions like Islam because they are conflicting interpretations of what the religion says). I guess it’s best to leave it out given the varying interpretations of the faiths.

*I’ve noticed this as well as the WSJ: people in movies and videos are starting to smoke cigarettes again.

The stars are lighting up again.

“Need a cigarette to make me feel better,” crooned pop star Addison Rae on her 2025 single “Headphones On,” while Lorde sang “this is the best cigarette of my life” in her own 2025 release, “What Was That.” Sabrina Carpenter was recently photographed wearing a corset made of Marlboro Gold packages, and sells shirts with song names emblazoned on mock-ups of cigarette boxes and lighters.

On the silver screen, about half of all movies that made their debut last year included appearances of cigarettes, cigars and other tobacco products, up 10% from the previous year, according to a new report from public health nonprofit Truth Initiative and research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

With more actors, pop stars and other celebrities spotted unapologetically smoking, the cultural taboo against it shows signs of ebbing. That worries antismoking advocates, who fear a reversal of the yearslong decline in U.S. smoking rates.

“I find that concerning, glamorous, attractive people smoking cigarettes,” said Ollie Ganz, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, whose research focuses on tobacco.

While U.S. smoking rates are hovering at their lowest level in decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has previously said that smoking in movies contributes to increased smoking rates among young people. “Youths heavily exposed to onscreen smoking imagery are more likely to begin smoking than are those with minimal exposure,” a 2019 CDC report found.

Roughly one in three cancer deaths in the U.S. are linked to cigarette smoking, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Federal health officials have linked smoking to more than 30 diseases and health conditions, including heart disease, stroke and asthma.

Again, I can see the point of leaving smoking out of movies, but on the other hand people do smoke (about 12% of all Americans) and are we supposed to pretend they don’t? Should we also ban alcohol from movies? Or if they want to stop people smoking, why don’t they just ban cigarettes, or tax them at $50 per pack?  I am not really keen on this kind of “leisure fascism,” and up to a few years ago I would smoke a few cigarettes per year (I have excellent self control).  If I were at a bar with a beer and a shot right now, and someone offered me a (non-menthol) cigarette, I’d probably take it, except that you can’t smoke cigarettes in bars any more.

*From the AP’s reliable oddities section we hear about everyone’s worst nightmare: a Thai woman was found alive in a coffin, and knocking on its sides, when she was about to be cremated.

A woman in Thailand shocked temple staff when she started moving in her coffin after being brought in for cremation.

Wat Rat Prakhong Tham, a Buddhist temple in the province of Nonthaburi on the outskirts of Bangkok, posted a video on its Facebook page, showing a woman lying in a white coffin in the back of a pick-up truck, slightly moving her arms and head, leaving temple staff bewildered.

Pairat Soodthoop, the temple’s general and financial affairs manager, told The Associated Press on Monday that the 65-year-old woman’s brother drove her from the province of Phitsanulok to be cremated.

He said they heard a faint knock coming from the coffin.

“I was a bit surprised, so I asked them to open the coffin, and everyone was startled,” he said. “I saw her opening her eyes slightly and knocking on the side of the coffin. She must have been knocking for quite some time.”

According to Pairat, the brother said his sister had been bedridden for about two years, when her health deteriorated and she became unresponsive, appearing to stop breathing two days ago. The brother then placed her in a coffin and made the 500-kilometer (300-mile) journey to a hospital in Bangkok, to which the woman had previously expressed a wish to donate her organs.

The hospital refused to accept the brother’s offer as he didn’t have an official death certificate, Pairat said. His temple offers a free cremation service, which is why the brother approached them on Sunday, but was also refused due to the missing document.

The temple manager said that while he was explaining how to get a death certificate when they heard the knocking. They then assessed her and sent her to a nearby hospital.

The abbot said the temple would cover her medical expenses, according to Pairat.

I wonder if she’s going to be okay, as she sounded pretty sick before they put her in the coffin. Also, who verified that she was “dead” when they did that?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is taking care of Andrzej—or maybe she just wants a nosh (she’s making a blep).

Hili: Don’t you think it’s time for a break from work?
Andrzej: Maybe that’s a good idea.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy nie sądzisz, że to jest pora na przerwę w pracy?
Ja: Może to jest dobry pomysł.

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

From The Language Nerds:

From Stacy; an excellent meme, but it’s probably real given that it’s from Whole Paycheck:

From Cats, Coffee, and Chaos:

 

Masih is back with an excellent tweet:

From Emma, who reports on a schism:

From Simon: a fake ad for Ricky Gervais’s vodka brand, which is real:

We had an official complaint from a lovely gentleman about this billboard. He claimed he'd seen it in a station and was absolutely disgusted and demanded it be taken down. We explained it was never up. Sometimes the complaints will be false.

— Ricky Gervais (@mrrickygervais.bsky.social) 2025-11-22T08:58:33.847Z

From Luana; how did the guy get that name?

One from my feed; the marvels of static electricity:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, scallops escape a predatory starfish. Look at ’em go! I’ve put the YouTube video below:

About 2.5 minutes of SCALLOPS using jet propulsion to escape the predatory Coscinasterias muricata in Port Philip Australia! #molluscmonday youtu.be/qurS99FI210?…

— Chris Mah (@echinoblog.bsky.social) 2025-11-17T16:59:29.293Z

The video:

. . . and a Good Morning Duck:

Morning all, what’s occurring?#Duck #FarmLife #LittleFarm

— Annie Parker (@annieparker.bsky.social) 2025-11-21T21:30:49.210Z

It was a hungry squirrel. . .

November 24, 2025 • 10:50 am

Trigger warning: blood!

Yesterday I posted this photo of an injury I sustained, and asked readers to guess what caused it:

Given what readers know of me, the most common answers were “bit by a duck” and “bit by a squiirrel.”  It turns out that the latter answer (first suggested by Robert Wooley) is correct.  Ducks can’t really bite, at least not hard enough to break the skin, and when I’ve fed them out of my hand, they simply hoover up duck pellets from my open palm. No duck has ever caused me pain (I’m ignoring swimmer’s itch from parasites in the pond as well as the injury I sustained as I ran to rescue a baby duck being attacked by a mallard hen, slicing open my ear as it was caught on a thorny tree).

The most accurate answer came from Johan Kleynhaus:

Our host posted photos some time ago of him feeding the squirrels. My best guess is an over-excited squirrel, at the prospect of scoring a fat nut, who jumped up and the boss’s thumb got in the way.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades, that’s the answer.

I have been feeding squirrels in two places: around Botany Pond and in the Regenstein Library courtyard across the street, for winter is coming on and the fluffy rodents need to lay in their food.

Now the squirrels around Botany Pond know me, and run to me when I whistle. Several of them will even crawl up my leg to retrieve a nut from my hand, and, since they know me, they are not aggressive.  But the squirrels at Regenstein are not yet used to me. I’m training them by throwing them nuts and making my characteristic whistle, just as I did at Botany Pond.  They now know to come to my whistle, but they’re still wary of me.

One of the great pleasures of feeding squirrels is seeing them encounter big nuts for the first time, and not knowing what to do with them. (They learn quickly.) I’ve been giving them hazelnuts in the shell, as well as pecans in the shell. They particularly love pecans, and can handle them well as one end is pointed, making it easy to grab with their mouths, after which they run off and bury the nuts. (They store most of what I give them for the winter, which raises the question of whether they remember where their nuts are buried.)

The local store ran out of pecans, but I found that good walnuts in the shell are available at a reasonable price ($4/pound) on Amazon, and I bought several pounds. I put about five nuts in my pocket as I walk home each day, dispensing them to whoever comes to my whistle. Yesterday, though, the rodents were ravenous, and I ran out of walnuts before I got to the library.  But I was still approached by a hungry squirrel who ran up to me.  I had a few hazelnuts left: small ones. It’s not wise to give a small hazelnut to a squirrel who doesn’t trust you, as they’re inclined to simply go for your hand to get the nut, and that means the possibility of being bitten. Which I was.  The little fellow didn’t intend to hurt me, but simply wanted that nut come hell or high water. And, grabbing it, it bit me by accident.

Squirrel bites are nasty, for their sharp incisors go through flesh like butter, leaving a deep slice like a knife. And that’s what happened yesterday. I will no longer feed hazelnuts to unfamiliar squirrels. But the wound isn’t dangerous, for squirrels almost never carry rabies, and this one acted normally. I went home, cleaned off the cut, soaked it in very hot water for a while, and then doused it with isopropyl alcohol. Here’s what it looks like today. There is no pain. (Sorry for the blurry photo; I don’t know how to take closeups with my iPhone). Note that the slice is small, but produced a lot of blood because it was deep. (I also have superglue on my thumb, as I got it on my hands while trying to glue together a plastic key fob. I am a schlemiel.)

This wasn’t the first time I got chomped by a squirrel. I was badly bitten during my first job at the University of Maryland. As I walked home one day, I saw a student playing with a baby squirrel in a tree outside my building. It was small and adorable, and the student held it and petted it. I couldn’t resist. “Can I hold it, too?”, I asked foolishly.  “Yes, of course,” she said.  “Will it bite me?” I asked. “No, she said,” “it doesn’t bite.”  I picked up the squirrel, whereupon it put its front legs around my thumb (the same one!) and chomped deeply into the pad of flesh and fat at the base of my thumb. It wouldn’t let go, and I shook my hand to dislodge the attacking rodent. “Don’t hurt it!” she cried, oblivious to my own pain. It was one of the most painful injuries I ever sustained.

And the cut was deep. It immediately began spewing blood—a lot more than in the first photo above.  And within a few minutes the base of my thumb swelled up to the size of a ping-pong ball.  I thought I’d better go to the doctor, but it was hard to locate one, as it was Sunday. I finally managed to find one after a few hours, and the doctor took a look and pronounced it “a nasty bite.” He told me that I wouldn’t get rabies, but since the bite occurred a few hours before, he thought they may have to open up my hand and do something to prevent infection (an operation?). At any rate, the doctor didn’t do that, but used some device to open up the cut, and then made me sit in his office for half an hour soaking my hand in the disinfectant betadyne.

Yes, I am foolish, but I’m not going to stop feeding squirrels. I will just be more careful, and will feed unfamiliar squirrel just by dropping the nut in front of them.

That is my story. I have another tale about being bitten through my nostril by an albino baby skunk, but that’s for another day. . .

Surprise! Agustín Fuentes and Nathan Lents criticize the sex binary

November 24, 2025 • 9:30 am

I don’t know how many times Agustín Fuentes, an anthropology professor at Princeton, will keep repeating the same arguments about why biological sex isn’t binary (see these posts on my site). It never seems to end. You’d think he’d stop banging the drum now that he’s written a whole book on the issue called Sex is a Spectrum, but he keeps on making the same old arguments that have been refuted many times (see this review by Tomas Bogardus, for example).  Why does someone make such weak arguments, and continue to do so without ever addressing the many criticisms he’s encountered?

I strongly suspect it’s because Fuentes is an ideologue: he believes that if people see biological sex as spectrum rather than a binary, opprobrium against trans people will lessen or vanish. But trans people should be treated with respect no matter whether or not sex is binary, for “is” does not equal “ought”—a lesson Fuentes should have learned. Further, nearly all trans people implicitly accept a sex binary: after all, they transition from having a male role or appearance to having a female role and appearance, or vice versa. But I’ve written about that before.  Nor does the binary nature of sex have anything to say about how we should regard people of nonstandard gender.Making that argument is another violation of Hume’s Law.

Now Fuentes has been joined by Nathan Lents, a professor at John Jay College. Lents has done good work refuting Intelligent Design, and I’m sad that this essay, published in ProSocial World, an endeavor of biologist David Sloan Wilson and colleagues, is not of Lent’s usual quality. In fact, it’s a terrible article, replete with mistaken arguments and bad logic.

Now it’s possible that these authors really believe that biological sex is a spectrum and are not just trying to buttress a “progressive” gender ideology, but I would find that behavior obtuse. Read Dawkins (link below) or Bogardus to see why.

I am so tired of this misrepresentation and confusion that it deeply nauseates me to have to discuss them again, but I’ll try to do so briefly, using quotes from the article by Fuentes and Lents. Click on the headline below to read (it’s also archived here).

Fuentes and Lents (henceforth F&L) first admit the binary of gametes, a binary used to define the sexes by most biologists who aren’t ideologues:

The major clades of eukaryotes – plants, animals, fungi, and the many kingdoms of protists – have evolved both unique and shared aspects in their sexual reproductive mechanisms, but one such aspect – the differentiation of gametes into two major forms – is a common theme. Anisogamy, the property of having two types of gametes – one very large and relatively immotile and one very small and highly mobile – is a key feature of sexual reproduction in all animals, all land plants, and many protist kingdoms.

F&L’s beef is not that there is a gametic binary (see Richard Dawkin’s great Substack essay for why defining—actually, recognizing—the sexes this way is essential and useful), but rather that organisms recognized as “male” (small mobile gametes) and “female” (large immobile gametes) show variation in other traits related to sex.  On average, human males differ in body size from females, but there is variation within each sex. And so it goes for body hair, gene expression, behavior, penis size, and so on.  But of course these traits, while correlated and connected with sex, are not part of the definition of sex, which involves the gamete binary.

Some quotes from F&L:

In our view, this binary classification of sex in animals is insufficient for capturing the full breadth of biological sexual diversity.

Some of the inadequacies of the binary sex classification for individuals are uncontroversial, as it has long been known that a large number of species – around 20% of non-arthropod invertebrates – include individuals that are simultaneously hermaphroditic. Many others, including around 2% of vertebrates, are sequential hermaphrodites. Animal bodies exist in a variety of sexed forms, with some even reconfiguring their biology relating to sex, including for the production of gametes, within their individual life history, sometimes multiple times. The presence of simultaneous and sequential hermaphrodites vexes the binary classification for sexed bodies and demonstrates that sex is neither immutable nor neatly reducible to gamete production.

Furthermore, sexual dimorphisms, sexual bimodalities, and a spectrum of sex-influenced gene expression are observed throughout animal bodies and across animal species. Some of this variation is patterned in close association with gamete production, but much is not so simply described. Across bodies, behaviors, and physiologies, there is substantive inherent variety and diversity, creating a sexual continuum of genetic, developmental, and behavioral biology within and across species. Individual animals can vary widely in the development, patterning, and expression of sexual biology in a variety of ways, from body sizes and compositions, to color patterns and genital anatomy, to courtship behaviors and parental investment, to name some of the most commonly diverse components of sex. These biological variations rarely collapse into two discrete sex-based categories defined by gamete production. Moreover, much of the biological variations in bodies, even those closely associated with reproduction, are also engaged in a diversity of other bodily functions and processes with myriad phylogenetic, ecological, and behavioral constraints and affordances, which are also not ubiquitously or consistently associated with the type of gametes a body produces.

But nobody contests this form of variation; but to pretend that hermaphrodites refute the sex binary is disingenuous. Yes, some individuals can make both types of gametes, and some, like the infamous clownfish, can actually change their sex, but the gametic binary remains. (I don’t much care if you call hermaphrodites a “third sex”, but they still bear only two types of gametes—the only types that exist.) Human hermaphrodites, like other individuals called “intersex,” are vanishingly rare, and none have been able to produce viable gametes of both types. But F&L’s arguments are not about hermaphrodites or “intersex” individuals with differences in sex development. Instead, their arguments are about variation among individuals, most of them of regular sex.

They also extend their argument among species. In various species of animals, for instance, biological sex can be determined by genes, chromosomes, rearing temperature, social milieu, haploidy versus diploidy, and so on, but there are only two types of gametes and reproductive systems, no matter how sex is determined.  That in itself should tell you something important about the binary.  Nevertheless, F&L persist with their “variation means there’s no binary” argument:

Dramatic sexual diversity and variation is not limited to adulthood. There is also substantive diversity in mechanisms of sex development across various animal taxa. There are chromosomal systems, other genetic systems, as well as systems based on season, temperature, age, social status, and population density, most of which have convergently evolved in multiple disparate lineages, emphasizing the relative genetic, cellular, and developmental flexibility and adaptability of these sex systems.

But, to paraphrase Ronald Fisher, the sexes are always two. Why is that?  F&L are using a familiar but misguided tactic trying to refute the sex binary. I call this “The Argument from Complexity” and it can be stated this way:

There is variation among individuals in traits related to and correlated with gamete type, and that variation is often not binary but bimodal or even forming a spectrum. Further, the determination of these traits, like body size or behavior, depends on a complex interaction between genes, development, and the environment.  Therefore biological sex itself is not a simple binary, but a spectrum.

You can recognize the fallacy in this; I believe Emma Hilton calls it a “bait and switch”. Yes, determination of ovaries and testes itself is complex, with many genes (as well as the internal environment) involved. And individuals vary in gene expression, body size, ornamentation, and other traits connected with sex. But there are still only two types of gametes and two sexes. Male and female peacocks look very different, but nobody says that refutes the sex binary. (In fact, the sex binary explains this difference.) And individuals of the two sexes must mate with each other to produce offspring—save for parthenogenetic or self-fertilizing species, which still participate in the gamete binary. Regardless of the complexity of development in humans, you get an offspring only when a male having sperm mates with a female having eggs.  If the male is very short, or has a tiny penis, that makes no difference!

Here’s F&L’s version of The Argument from Complexity:

Importantly, the recognition that sex can be a complex mixture of anatomy, physiology, and behavior does not serve to deny or minimize the existence and impacts of sex differences. In fact, it affirms them and emphasizes their importance. While the matter of which gamete an animal body makes – its gametic sex – is clearly important, it is not the only variable by which animal morphologies or behaviors can be, or are, sexed. If these other variables were neatly binary, immutable, and non-overlapping, it would not be necessary to distinguish between gametic sex and biological sex. But, since nearly all other sex traits are either continuous or bimodal, are not always immutable nor perfectly correlated, a simple and categorical definition of sex that is based purely on gamete production is both unwarranted and potentially misleading.

. . . Animal morphology and physiology are the product of complex interactions of biological, developmental, and environmental systems, and the human environment is a particularly complex assemblage of biotic and abiotic factors: what we refer to as human culture.  Human phenotypic expression is always mutually shaped by cultural milieu.  It is well-established that adult height and weight, childhood development trajectories, taste bud reactivity, muscle development and coordination, patterns of sexual arousal, resistance (or lack thereof) to disease-causing bacteria, and nearly every other aspect of human bodies emerge from mutual and interactive development of physiology, morphology, cultural context, and lived experiences.

All that is sand thrown into the eyes of the public; it has nothing to do with the binary nature of biological sex.

Finally, N&L even make the bonkers argument that the athletic advantage of males or females may not be a result of their evolved differences (based on gene expression), but could be a result of social conditioning. This is an argument made by those “progressive” individuals who think that we should not be dividing sports into male versus female leagues. (The Olympic Committee has just decided otherwise.):

Furthermore, it is not currently known which, or how much, of all of this patterned variation is shaped by differences in how boys and girls, and men and women, use their bodies on a daily basis. While human anatomical development is a fairly canalized pathway producing a relatively consistent phenotypic range, the developmental process itself both affects and is substantively affected by how that anatomy is physically and socially engaged, especially during childhood and adolescence. Indeed, there is emerging evidence that persistent culturally mandated gender differences in play behaviors and sports participation, which are quite substantial in many cultures, have clear and strong effects on the developmental dynamics of skeletal and muscle formation.

Similarly, gendered differences in the social environment likely contribute to differences in sexed bodies in ways that are probably impossible to untangle. For example, it is well established that hormone levels and ratios are affected by the social environment, and these same hormones directly impact both the development of many tissues and sex-related and non-sex-related behaviors (muscle hypertrophy, hair distribution, metabolism, mental alertness, and libido, to name a few). Such complexities are not limited to humans by any stretch, as Patricia Brennan explains in another essay in this series, in Ruddy Ducks, social interactions directly impact the seasonal growth and development of the penis, emphasizing the dynamically responsive nature of sexual anatomy, even in adult animals.

It’s not clear to me what the penis of ruddy ducks has to do with human behavior and sports participation. Sadly, F&L don’t discuss the evidence that even injecting biological males with hormones and giving them puberty blockers, an important change of internal environment, nevertheless still gives these trans-identified males an athletic advantage over biological women.

I hope that I don’t have to make these points again, but I suspect I will.  The ideological termites have dined well, and have even managed to convince biologists and science popularizers like Steve Novella and Bill Nye that sex is a spectrum.  Have a look below at Bill Nye using the Argument from Variation to claim that sex is a spectrum. (I have never liked his arguments, and this bit shows he’s drunk the Kool-Aid.)  Nye also notes that sex is “assigned at birth”.  What is extra confusing is that he conflates sex with both “sexuality” and gender.

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 24, 2025 • 8:15 am

This is the last collection of photos I have, so the feature won’t be available until I get new pictures. Just sayin’. . . .

But today we have a photo-and-text essay from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior.  His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The unfairly despised

The renowned entomologist, evolutionary biologist, naturalist, conservationist and target of woke troopers Edward O. Wilson popularised the concept of biophilia (love of life), the intuitive affiliation humans have with nature that is expressed by our attraction to animals, plants, landscapes and other natural things. For Wilson, biophilia is an evolutionary trait ingrained in the human personality. While his hypothesis has been supported by anecdotal and quantitative evidence, not all forms of life are equally cherished. Snakes and spiders, for example, evoke fear and revulsion in many people, responses that are also embedded in our brains and shaped by ancestral fears of animals that could harm us.

Little Miss Muffet being scared by a spider, by William Wallace Denslow © Wikimedia Commons:

Among the many types of animal phobias (the irrational, exaggerated and uncontrollable aversion to certain creatures), entomophobia is one of the most common across countries and cultures. Many theories have been proposed to explain the negative emotions triggered by insects (Lockwood, 2013), but anthropologist Hugh Raffles was spot on in describing entomological scenarios that can trigger primordial horrors: “there is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude; there is the nightmare of unguarded orifices and the nightmare of vulnerable places; there is the nightmare of swarming and the nightmare of crawling; there is the nightmare of awkward flight and the nightmare of clattering wings; there is the nightmare of entangled hair and the nightmare of the open mouth.” (Raffles, 2010).

The fear of being stung, bitten, or swarmed by flying living things help explain why, in a 2021 survey, Britons placed spiders and wasps at the top of the list of unpopular invertebrates. The survey also revealed an interesting aspect of human perceptions and attitudes: largely harmless animals are more disliked than mosquitoes, the world’s most lethal to humans.

Results of a YouGov 2021 survey © Statista:

Cockroaches came third on the British dislike scorecard, surely only because they are not that common in the country. In warmer places, where people are likely to have had close encounters with cockroaches, these insects shoot up to the top of the list, and by a considerable margin. A shiny, greasy appearance, probing antennae, erratic skittering and a sewage aroma are off-putting enough, but their flying and occasional accidental entanglement in one’s hair can send the toughest character shrieking away. On top of that, domestic cockroaches are associated with filth, which triggers an uncontrollable feeling of disgust. For psychologist Mark Schaller, this reaction reflects our Behavioural Immune System, a set of innate responses shaped by evolution to identify signs of contamination by pathogens and avoid disease. If something looks like it could make us sick, we flee from it.

A sight to make many people cringe: an Oriental cockroach (Blatta orientalis) sharing our table © H. Zell, Wikimedia Commons:

The upshot of all this bad PR is that many people loathe cockroaches. Fervently. And yet, there’s more to cockroaches than abjectness and pestilence.

There are some 4,500 described species of cockroaches, of which 25 are synanthropes (organisms adapted to live near humans) and considered pests. The remainder are found in a variety of natural ecosystems, predominantly in tropical and sub-tropical regions. They live among leaf litter, rotting wood, underneath tree bark and among vegetation, feeding on almost anything of nutritional value. Together with termites, which belong to the same order Blattodea, cockroaches are highly beneficial by accelerating the breakdown of organic matter and the release of nutrients into the environment.

Florida woods cockroaches (Eurycotis floridana) munching away on rotten wood © Happy1892, Wikimedia Commons:

And another ecological role of cockroaches is slowly becoming better known: pollination.

Some plants and cockroaches share the same type of habitat: shaded, humid spots under the cover of thick vegetation. These places are not the best for recruiting the usual pollinators such as bees, hover flies and moths. But a cockroach may be the ticket for efficient transport of pollen from one plant to another. And that’s an opportunity not missed by Balanophora tobiracola, a parasitic flowering plant from Yakushima Island, Japan. Margattea satsumana cockroaches are seen scurrying all over B. tobiracola plants, suggesting they may do more than feed on pollen and nectar. Indeed, exclusion experiments – where plants accessible to visitors are compared to those with no access – revealed that cockroach visitation enhanced pollination, while the contribution of moths, flies and beetles was negligible (Suetsugu, 2025).

A M. satsumana cockroach visiting a B. tobiracola plant © Suetsugu & Yamashita, 2022:

Cockroach pollination on a Japanese island is not an isolated case. In French Guiana, the cockroach Amazonina platystylata is the main pollinator of Clusia aff. sellowiana (a potentially new species related to Clusia sellowiana). The cockroaches have no specialised pollen-collecting structures, but their bodies are coarse enough to retain pollen grains and transport them from flower to flower (Vlasáková et al., 2008).

An A. platystylata cockroach and a Clusia flower © Cockroach Species File and Scott Zona (Wikimedia Commons), respectively:

Cockroaches are known to pollinate some ten other plant species, so they are not exactly major players in plant reproduction. But part of the reason for these meagre figures is lack of information. Shy, nocturnal insects living deep down in thick forests are not observed very often, much less researched. Cockroach pollination also illustrates plants’ capability to adjust and make the best of challenging settings; when run-of-the-mill pollinators are not around, a busy, inquisitive cockroach would do just fine.

Not all cockroaches are unappealing to us, like the Mardi Gras cockroach, aka Mitchell’s diurnal cockroach (Polyzosteria mitchelli), from Australia © Evelyn Virens, iNaturalist: