Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Although the view that sex is a spectrum, and that there are more than two biological sexes in humans and other species, is still prevalent among the woke, others are realizing that sex in humans (and nearly every other species of plant and animal) is indeed a binary, with a tiny fraction of exceptions in humans. These include individuals with “differences in sex determination” (DSD) and almost nonexistent hermaphrodites. Estimates of exceptions in our species range from 0.02% to 0.005%.
The rise of the “sex is a spectrum” notion is due solely to the rise of gender activism and to people who identify as nonbinary or transgender. But gender is not the same thing as biological sex: the former is a subjective way of feeling, while the latter is an objective fact of biology based on a binary of gamete types.
I personally don’t care if someone identifies as a member of a nonstandard gender, but I do care when people like Steve Novella, who should know better, argue that biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum. In fact, there are far more people born with more or fewer than 20 fingers and toes than are born as true intersexes, yet we do not say that “digit number in humans is a spectrum.”
It’s a shame that many of those who claim that sex is a spectrum are biologists who recognize the sex binary and its many consequences, like sexual selection. The misguided folks include the three main scientific societies studying evolution, who issued a statement that biological sex was a spectrum, and further that this was a consensus view. (Their original statement is archived here.) The societies then took down their claim when other biologists pointed out its inanity (see here, here, and here). And it’s not only biologists who recognize the ideology behind the claim that sex is a spectrum; the public does, too. NBC News reported this in 2023 (note the conflation of sex and gender):
A new national poll from PRRI finds Americans’ views on gender identity, pronoun use and teaching about same-sex relationships in school deeply divided by party affiliation, age and religion.
Overall, 65% of all Americans believe there are only two gender identities, while 34% disagree and say there are many gender identities.
But inside those numbers are sharp differences. Fully 90% of Republicans say there are just two genders, versus 66% of independents and 44% of Democrats who believe the same
Sadly, if you’re on the side of truth in this debate, at least as far as the number of sexes go, you’re on the side of Republicans. So it goes. Further, Americans and sports organizations themselves are increasingly adopting the views that trans-identified men (“transwomen,” as they’re sometimes called) should not compete in sports against biological women. This is from a 2025 Gallup poll.
Sixty-nine percent of U.S. adults continue to believe that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth sex, and 66% of Americans say a person’s birth sex rather than gender identity should be listed on government documents such as passports or driver’s licenses.
Thus, although wokeness is like a barbed porcupine quill: easy to go inside you but hard to remove, I’m pretty confident that the claim of a biological sex spectrum will eventually decline even more. But there are still some ideologues who twist and misrepresent the facts to argue that there are more than two sexes. (The argument centers on humans, of course.) One of these is Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, who has written several papers and a recent book arguing for the human sex spectrum. I’ve pushed back on his arguments many times (see here), and wrote a short review of his book Sex is a Spectrum, a book that should be read with a beaker of Pepto-Bismol by your side. There’s another and better critical review of Fuentes’s book by Tomas Bogardus, here, which Bogardus has turned into his own new book, The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters.
This post is just to highlight another critical review of Fuentes’s book and his views on sex, one written by Alexander Riley and appearing at Compact. You can get to a paywalled version by clicking on the title below, but a reader sent me a transcript, and I’ll quote briefly from that below.
A few quotes (indented). I don’t know how readers can access the whole review without subscribing:
Fuentes, an anthropologist who has extensively studied macaques, begins with a primer on the evolution of sexual reproduction in life on the planet. To show how “interesting” sex is, he offers the example of the bluehead wrasse, a fish species in which females can turn into males in given ecologies. The example, he says, is “not that weird” in biology.
But the reality is that species like this one most definitely are weird, not only in the animal kingdom, but even among fish, who are among the most sexually fluid animals. Among fish, the number of species that are sexually fluid in this way is perhaps around 500 … unless you know that there are approximately 34,000 known fish species. In other words, even in the most sexually fluid animals, transition between male and female by one individual can happen in only 1.5 percent of the total species. What Fuentes describes as “not that weird” is certainly highly unusual. [JAC: note that switching from male to female or vice versa does not negate the sex binary.]
This sleight of hand is typical of Fuentes’s handling of evidence. He attacks a classic argument in evolutionary biology that differences in male and female gametes (sperm an eggs, respectively) explain many other differences between the two sexes. In short, because eggs are much costlier to make than sperm, females have evolved to invest more energy in the reproductive chances of each gamete compared to males. This bare fact of the gamete difference means, according to the Bateman-Trivers principle, males and females typically develop different mating strategies and have different physical and behavioral profiles.
The distortion below is typical of ideologues who promote Fausto-Sterling’s data even when they know it’s incorrect:
Fuentes notes that what he calls “3G human males and females,” that is, those individuals who are unambiguously male or female in their genitalia, their gonads (the gland/organ that produces either male or female gametes), and genes, do not make up 100 percent of human individuals. He goes on to suggest that at least 1 percent of humans, and perhaps more, do not fit the 3G categories. This is a claim unsupported by the facts. The citation he links to this claim is an article by biology and gender studies professor Anne Fausto-Sterling. The claim made by Fausto-Sterling about the percentage of those who are intersex has been thoroughlydebunked. She includes a number of conditions in her category of intersex (or non-3G) that are widely recognized as not legitimately so classified. One such condition (Late Onset Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, or LOCAH, a hormonal disorder) makes up fully 90 percent of Fausto-Sterling’s “intersex” category. Individuals with LOCAH are easily classed as either male or female according to Fuentes’ 3Gs, and nearly all of them are able to participate in reproduction as normal for their sex. The percentage of those who are actually outside 3G male or female classes is likely around 0.02% percent, which means that 9,998 out of every 10,000 humans are in those two groups.
What’s below shows that trans-identified men do not become equivalent to biological women when they undergo medical transition:
Transwomen are much more likely to exhibit behaviors of sexual violence and aggression than women. A 2011 study showed clearly that even male-to-female transsexuals who had undergone full surgical transition, and who therefore had undergone hormone therapy to try to approximate female hormonal biology, still showed rates of violent crime and sexual aggression comparable to biological males. They were almost twenty times more likely to be convicted of a violent offense than the typical female subject. This is reason enough to keep individuals who have male hormonal biology out of spaces in which they interact closely with semi-clad girls and women.
And Riley’s conclusion:
The fact that Fuentes can make such ill-founded claims without fearing serious pushback is an indication of how captured academic culture is by the ideology behind this book. A healthy academic culture would not so easily acquiesce to political rhetoric masquerading as science.
Yes, anthropology has been captured—especially cultural anthropology—and, as I said, even some biologists have gone to the Dark Side. I have nothing but contempt and pity for those who know that there are two sexes but twist and mangle the facts to conform to the woke contention that the sexes can be made interchangeable. But I should add the usual caveat that, except for a few exceptions like sports and prisons, transgender people whould be given the same rights as everyone else.
Another sign of people rejecting the “sex is a spectrum” claim is that Fuentes’s book didn’t sell well. Despite coming out less than a year ago. it’s now #301,447 on Amazon’s sales list, and has only 25 customer ratings, totaling 3.8 out of 5 stars. It didn’t exactly fly off the shelves.
Here are two Amazon reviews by savvy readers (note: none of the reviews on Amazon are by me):
I never would have selected this book on my own, but fortunately a reader suggested it, and I’m very glad. The book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S. C. Gwynne III, is a history of the Native Americans of the Great Plains extending from about 1830 to the beginning of the 20th century. This is the period when all the tribes (the book calls them “Indians”, not “Native Americans”)—and there were many tribes and sub-tribes—came into conflict with Mexicans and with Americans moving West, and we know how that ends.
The history centers on the Comanches, the dominant tribe on the plains, though there was never one hierarchical tribe but a series of sub-tribes that were loosely affiliated as a “nation” and would sometimes join forces or fragment. Gwynne did a great deal of historical research using primary documents, and the result is a informative but mesmerizing tale, one that is hard to put down.
The Comanches were nomads, ranging widely over the Great Plains from Colorado to Texas. Their “villages” were only temporary, and would be moved (by women, who did the heavy lifting) from place to place during wars or buffalo hunts. And those were really their two primary activities: killing members of other tribes and killing buffalo, which were then so numerous then that their herds could extend to the horizon. An important part of Comanche culture was the horse; Comanches were nearly always mounted in war or on the hunt, with horses descended from those brought to the Americas by the Spanish. As you can see from the photo of a Comanche warrior below, the horses were small, descended from wild mustangs caught and “broken” with great skill. Comanches also specialized in stealing horses from other tribes and from settlers and the American military. Horses were their riches.
Comanche horsemanship was superb, largely accounting for their success against other tribes and against settlers. They were able, for instance, to ride sideways on the horse’s flank, not visible to enemies on the other side, and shoot arrows (with tremendous accuracy) from below the horse’s neck. Until they managed to get firearms from the settlers and soldiers, they used arrows and lances, and that is how they brought down buffalo. (The butchering, of course, was done by the women.)
I won’t go into detail about the lives and wars of the Comanche, except to say that the book imparts three lessons about Native Americans on the plains:
First, they did not “own” land or even occupy it. As I said, they were nomadic, and many other Native American tribes, including Apaches, Cherokees, Kickapoos, and Arapaho, roamed the same territory. This bears on the present-day conflict about repatriating artifacts and human remains to tribes that claim them. For artifacts or bones found on the Great Plains (and elsewhere, of course) cannot be ascribed to a given tribe without DNA analysis, which is almost never done, or if there are distinctive signs from the artifacts identifying them as belonging to a given group. Since this is rarely possible, it becomes a crapshoot about what to do about repatriating Native American artifacts, most of which now have to be returned to a tribe that claims them before scientists or anthropologists get to study them. Read the books and writings of Elizabeth Weiss to learn more about this conflict.
Second, war was a way of life for the Comanche; they were always at war with one tribe or another—even well before white settlers moved West. The view that all was peaceful among Native Americans until white settlers invaded “Indian” land and displaced the residents is grossly mistaken. Young men were trained for war beginning at five or six, and the youths were skillful with the horse and the bow. Comanche life without war was unthinkable, and the men prided themselves, and rose in rank in their groups, largely through skill in warfare. In the end, the Comanches were diminished not because of lack of skill in fighting, but because they were outnumbered by settlers and the Army, because the Army had superior weapons, especially cannons, and because the settlers killed off their main means of subsistence: the buffalo. The number of Comanche is estimated to have fallen from about 40,000 in 1832 to only 1,171 in 1910. The book describes many treaties between the Comanche and the U.S. government or its agents, but these treaties were almost always broken by one side or another—or both.
Third, their life was very hard. They subsisted almost entirely on buffalo, had to weather the brutal cold of the Plains in tipis or on horseback, often went without food or water, and of course almost never bathed. (This was tough on the women, who became covered with blood and guts when skinning buffalo.) But they prided themselves on their toughness and bravery. (women often fought alongside the men). These features were mixed with an almost unimaginable degree of cruelty towards their enemies. Enemies who were not killed outright were tortured, and in horrible ways: scalping, cutting, and roasting to death slowly. These acts were considered normal and not immoral, though the white settlers (who were often tortured as captives) saw them as brutal and primitive. But the Comanche were capable of great kindness as well, especially towards other members of their tribe and occasionally towards white women and children who survived battle with the tribes and were “kidnapped’ by them, many becoming, in effect, Comanches themselves.
This brings us to the centerpiece of the story: the abduction of an American woman, Cynthia Ann Parker, in a battle in 1836. She was eight years old. Parker became integrated into the tribe, learned their language (eventually forgetting much of her English) and married a Comanche chief, Peta Nocona. Among their three children was Quanah Parker, who showed tremendous skill, wisdom, and courage as a warrior, and rose through the ranks (despite being half white) to become a chief himself. The story of Quanah is the story of the decline and fall of the Comanches, limned with many battles and culminating in their surrender to American soldiers and sedentary occupation of land on a reservation, where of course they were unhappy. Quanah demonstrated his leadership skills even on the reservation and, through judicious rental of reservation land to settlers for grazing cattle, became wealthy and renowned among both whites and Native Americans. Here’s a photo of Quanah in his native clothing:
Daniel P. Sink of Vernon Texas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Gwynne skillfully weaves together the story of Quanah and greater historical events, so in the end you understand not just the history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but the life of Comanches and the personalities of Quanah and his mother, Cynthia Parker. Parker herself was captured by the Texas Rangers when she was 33 and lived the rest of her life with settlers, including members of her extended family. She was never happy, and tried to escape back to the Comanches several times, but never succeeded. She had several children, including Quanah, but was separated from her sons and left with only one daughter, Topsannah (“Prairie Flower”). Cynthia died at 40, heartbroken. Here’s a photo of her with Topsannah. Despite arduous efforts of settlers to assimilate Cynthia back as an American, she was always a Comanche at heart. The expression on her face tells the tale.
Here’s Quanah in 1889. As you see, he adopted many of the settlers’ ways, including their clothing, But he never cut his braids:
Charles Milton Bell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve run on too long, but I give this book an enthusiastic recommendation and thank the reader who recommended it. Although it may strike you as something you might not like, do give it a try. (Click on the picture below to go to the publisher.) You may know about the sad history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but this book tells you, more than anything I’ve read, how at least some of them lived their lives as free men and women.
Today we have part 2 of Paul Handford’s hummingbird photos (part 1 is here). Paul’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
The Rufous hummer, Selasphorus rufus, was a common frequenter of our yard, boldly visiting the feeders. It has the distinction of being the northernmost breeding species of any member of the family (61°N, in southern Alaska). Given that they winter on the Gulf Coast and the southern Pacific slopes of Mexico, this means that, in terms of body-length, at least some Rufous hummers make the longest of all avian migrations!
The females closely resemble those of the congeneric Calliope hummer, differing in having longer tails and rufous, rather than buff flanks:
The males are mainly strongly rufous, and with a brilliant ‘metallic’ scarlet throat. Again, this is a colour produced by interference produced by the structural characteristics of the feathers rather than by pigment. As such, the brilliance shows when it is viewed directly; from the side, it appears dark, even black:
Welcome to Sunday, February 1, 2026, and we’re into a new month, one likely filled with more snow, slush and freezing temperatures. You can see what’s in store from this illumination of February from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, produced between 1412 and 1416. This page is attributed to Paul Limbourg, or the “Rustic painter”, and the Wikipedia caption is this:
An enclosure surrounds a farm comprising a sheep pen and, on the right, four beehives and a dovecote. Inside the house, a woman and a couple of young man and young woman warm themselves in front of the fire. Outside, a man chops down a tree with an axe, bundles of sticks at his feet, while another gets ready to go inside while blowing on his hands to warm them. Further away, a third drives a donkey, loaded with wood, towards the neighbouring village.
Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Jesus and Mo artist put up this 2007 flashback struo in honor of No Hijab Day. I love the last panel, which tells you why the covering is worn:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 1 Wikipedia page.
And there’s a Google Doodle today celebrating The Art of Beat Making in Hip Hop. You can see an animated video about it by clicking on the screenshot below, and the occasion is given at the site:
In celebration of Black History Month, today’s #GoogleDoodle music video celebrates the art of hip-hop beat making, highlighting how hip-hop producers have innovated techniques for mixing and looping sound. The Doodle is set to a track composed by guest artist, Illa J.
Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.
The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.
The memo, addressed to all ICE personnel and signed on Wednesday by Mr. Lyons, centers on a federal law that empowers agents to make warrantless arrests of people they believe are undocumented immigrants, if they are “likely to escape” before an arrest warrant can be obtained.
ICE has long interpreted that standard to mean situations in which agents believe someone is a “flight risk,” and unlikely to comply with future immigration obligations like appearing for hearings, according to the memo. But Mr. Lyons criticized that construction as “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” changing the agency’s interpretation of it to instead mean situations in which agents believe someone is unlikely to remain at the scene.
“An alien is ‘likely to escape’ if an immigration officer determines he or she is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained,” Mr. Lyons wrote.
The Times shared a description of the memo’s contents with several former senior ICE officials from the Biden administration. Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior adviser at ICE, called the new definition “an extremely broad interpretation of the term ‘escape.’”
Well, all you need to do now as an ICE agent is have a suspicion that someone should be apprehended and a feeling that the person won’t hang around. The first bit gives you license to detain almost anyone; the second, of course, can apply to nearly everyone save people working at a job (it takes a while to get a warrant). This will only increase the public rancor against ICE, and seems a bad decision.
The United Nations said on Friday that it was facing imminent financial collapse and would run out of money by July if countries, namely the United States, did not pay their annual dues that amount to billions of dollars.
Senior U.N. officials said that if the cash ran out, the agency would be forced to shut down its landmark headquarters in New York by August. The U.N. Security Council, a 15-member body responsible for maintaining international peace and stability, convenes its meetings at U.N. headquarters.
It would also have to cancel the annual General Assembly gathering of world leaders held in September and shut the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which responds to global emergencies like conflicts and natural disasters, it said.
The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, sent a letter to the ambassadors of all 196 member states on Thursday warning them of “imminent financial collapse,” saying the organization’s financial straits this time were different from those in any previous periods, according to a copy of the letter seen by The New York Times.
“The crisis is deepening, threatening program delivery and risking financial collapse,” Mr. Guterres wrote. “And the situation will further deteriorate in the near future. I cannot overstate the urgency of the situation we now face.”
. . . The United States is responsible for about 95 percent of the money owed to the United Nations, about $2.2 billion, according to a senior U.N. official who briefed reporters on the agency’s budget crisis. That amount is a combination of the U.S. annual dues for 2025, which has not been paid, and for 2026, the U.N. official said.
I am not a huge fan of the UN since it sided with Hamas and against Israel during the war on Gaza, and has, over the years, issued condemnation after condemnation of Israel. From AI:
Since October 7, 2023, the UN Security Council has adopted multiple resolutions focusing on humanitarian pauses, hostage release, and civilian protection in Gaza. While numerous UN bodies have heavily criticized and passed resolutions condemning Israeli actions, the UN General Assembly has not formally condemned Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack, with efforts to do so failing to meet required thresholds.
And in 2024 the UN condemned Israel 17 times, and the rest of the world only 6 times! The UN runs UNRWA, infested with Hamas terrorists and teaching Palestinian kids to hate Jews. Its secretary general as well as Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, are palpable antisemites. UN Women was very slow to condemn Hamas’s attack on women and its sexual violence on women, waiting until December to do so. The UN force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, is supposed to prevent Hezbollah from engaging in terrorist activities and keep it from running the country, and has failed miserably. UNIFIL doesn’t do squat except run away when there’s fighting. As a whole, the major bodies of the organization, the Security Council and General Assembly, are not only biased but ineffectual. While the UN does engage in humanitarian activities, I think the whole megillah needs to be restructured, and that the U.S. should not contribute to an organization that itself lauds or fails to stop terrorism. Indeed, members of UNRWA engage in terrorism. This is why we aren’t funding it, and I see no way to make the UN into the world peacekeeping organization it was meant to be.
*Last week the feds raided an elections center in Georgia, and for apparently no reason other than Trump is still peeved at losing the 2020 election there (Georgia is a swing state) and called the state’s Secretary of State to beg for enough votes to win (remember?). They wouldn’t oblige him so now, more than five years later, Trump is still exacting revenge.
On Wednesday, that obsession translated into action, when a team of F.B.I. agents, armed with a search warrant, descended on the Fulton County, Ga., elections hub outside Atlanta to seize ballots, voter rolls and scanner images — even though previous investigations have found no evidence to support his false claims of widespread fraud.
Curiously, the raid was accompanied by some Administration bigwigs, including erstwhile Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, who doesn’t work for the FBI. The Dispatch comments:
That should have been the least interesting thing about it, especially in context. The operation stank of irregularities that would have been extremely interesting under any other administration but are day-ending-in-Y normal for this one.
For instance, the federal prosecutor listed on the search warrant isn’t the local U.S. attorney in Atlanta, it’s a U.S. attorney from Missouri. We can only guess why, but the New York Times notes that Missouri prosecutors are tangled up with “Eagle Ed” Martin, a staunch “2020 was rigged” true believer and one of the most sinister henchmen in Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
The search was also curiously star-studded. Andrew Bailey, the highest-ranking official in the FBI apart from Director Kash Patel, was on scene to assist. Strangely, so was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, having reportedly “spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials.” So that’s what she’s been doing instead of her job.
Three sources inside the Trump administration, two of them at the Justice Department, told Politico they don’t understand why an official tasked with sniffing out foreign threats to the United States is participating in domestic law enforcement. Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, observed that there are only two possibilities:
Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus—in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” of relevant national security concerns—or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.
The 2020 election in Georgia was examined by Trump’s own campaign, members of his first administration, and state officials led by a Republican governor and Republican secretary of state. The closest anyone has come to identifying meaningful wrongdoing in Fulton County was human error that led to some absentee ballots being double-counted but didn’t affect the outcome.
One consultant to the president’s 2020 operation who looked into the possibility of fraud sounded flabbergasted when the Journal asked him about the FBI’s Fulton County raid. “That election is six years in the past,” he said. “There’s no undoing it. I can’t imagine there aren’t more important things to look at.”
Like an elephant, Trump never forgets—and he doesn’t forgive, either. And to think that I was once a supporter of Gabbard when she was a Democrat, and I’ll admit that I was even a bit sweet on her. She seemed savvy, was in the Army, surfed, was a Hindu, and had that cool skunk stripe in her hair. Now she’s proven herself just another flack for the Trump administration. What a letdown.
The U.S. military has assembled a formidable force in the Middle East within striking range of Iran. Now, President Trump must decide how to use it.
As warships and planes reach the region in growing numbers, administration officials said they are debating whether the main aim is to go after Iran’s nuclear program, hit its ballistic missile arsenal, bring about the collapse of the government—or some combination of the three.
Trump has asked aides for quick and decisive attack options that don’t risk a long-term war in the Middle East, officials said. The ideal option would be one that hits the regime hard enough that it has no choice but to accede to U.S. nuclear demands and lay off dissidents, they said.
There have been discussions about a punishing bombing campaign that could topple Iran’s government, the officials said. Trump and his team have also weighed leveraging the threat of military force to extract diplomatic concessions from Iran.
What Trump decides will determine the shape of any military action. “The kind of things you’d want to do and the force packages you would need are very different,” said retired Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, a former Navy intelligence officer.
A senior administration official said that while Trump has consistently said Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, he is being purposefully ambiguous to keep his strategic objectives and military thinking secret.
Speaking about the ships converging on the Middle East, Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office that “they have to float someplace. They might as well float near Iran.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday that Tehran was open to nuclear discussions but that the U.S. needed to stop issuing military threats.
The last sentence is bullpucky. Iran never has and never will stop trying to make nuclear weapons. The regime knows that all it would take is one or two such missiles to entirely destroy Israel, while Iran is big and could stand some retaliation. The lesson that no administration has learned is this: DO NOT NEGOTIATE WITH IRAN ABOUT STOPPING THE PRODUCTION OF NUKES. I’m still a bit ambivalent about us interfering in another country’s internal affairs, but given the huge carnage of civilians there and especially the fact that Iran is ground zero for empowering terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, I wouldn’t be sad if we attacked. The question is what kind of attack would topple the regime, and that’s coupled with worries about what would the Revolutionary Guard do.
*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s latest column has a provocative title, “Can the iPhone save our democracy?” It has to do with recording events, and of course he means the events in Minneapolis.
A video leaked this week of Greg Bovino, the former Minneapolis ICE honcho, that did the media rounds in the last 24 hours. He’s giving directions to his troops when he was in Los Angeles. It contained what you might expect:
This is our fucking city! … Arrest as many people who touch you as you want. Those are the general orders, all the way to the very top! It’s all about us now. It ain’t about them.
Then this:
“Professional, legal, ethical, moral.” We’re on camera. But other than that, it’s what we do.
What checks might there be on an ICE empowered “from the very top.” Bovino tells us: “You’re on camera. But other than that…” My italics.
The iPhone seems to be the only serious threat to ICE’s violence. We know they feel emboldened to do virtually anything to anybody and have been granted a rhetorical “absolute immunity.” We also know that the federal government will tell big, beautiful, massive lies to justify any and all ICE abuses — before any investigations.
So Renee Good was a “deranged lunatic,” Karoline Leavitt declared. Good didn’t just try to run over an ICE officer; she did run him over, and it was unclear if he would survive his injuries, said the president. She was engaged in “domestic terrorism,” according to Stephen Miller. Equally, Alex Pretti was another “would-be assassin” who walked up to ICE officers “brandishing” a gun, trying “to murder federal agents” who, fearing a “massacre,” fired solely in self-defense. He was an “insurrectionist” rightly “put down,” in the words of one MAGA congressman. Last night, Trump repeated his description of Pretti as an “insurrectionist” and “agitator.”
But we’re left with a small but real reassurance: the propagandists don’t get away with it. And the only reason — I repeat — the only reason is because citizens’ iPhones recorded the split-second incidents, with footage before and after the killings, and everyone on earth could watch them. In both the Good and the Pretti cases, the iPhone footage simply, methodically refuted the Big Lies.
. . . We’ve become worried — with very good reason — about the damage phones have done to our brains, our attention span, and our democracy. But without them, the Trump lies about Minneapolis might well have prevailed. Yes, the phone brings illiteracy, antisemitism, white supremacism, and woke moral panics. Without the iPhone, after all, we would not have had the summer of Floyd. But it also provides a dose of granular visual reality that can be hard to wish or propagandize away, as the Floyd video did.
. . . .what happened this past week in America was that, even with all those caveats, a big majority of sane Americans emerged out of the woodwork, looked at the videos, rejected tribalism, and said: Nah, ICE is lying. And ICE had to retreat.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” is how Orwell describes the ultimate totalitarian triumph. Well, this past week, the Party failed. And reality won. More to the point, deeply divided Americans, thanks to the iPhone, can still see it. Which is, to be honest, something of
All I can do is make a comment that I don’t like to see in a comment thread after my posts: “+1”. Sometimes that’s all you can say here.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the editor is taking a snooze:
Andrzej: Siesta’s over, back to work.
Hili: Were you talking to me?
In Polish:
Ja: Koniec sjesty, wracamy do roboty.
Hili: Do mnie mówiłeś?
This post by Masih is non-embeddable, but click on the screenshot to see the video, and heed the warning: it’s grim and a bit gory. But as she says, “Do not stop talking about Iran.”
From Luana, who says “Sarah Lawrence is a disgrace.” And most of all its President! Here Ezra Klein gets disrupted at the college because he’s a Jew.
I recently watched a video of Ezra Klein trying to speak at your school, with you sitting on stage and doing nothing to stop the attempted deplatforming of him. After the ruckus was over, you simply told him, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”
If such disruptions are allowed to interrupt speakers at your school, it’s nothing to joke about—or be proud of. At the University of Chicago, protestors are summarily removed from the audience and our President would be ashamed of what happened. It is against University policy to interrupt a speaker, as it’s an abrogation of free speech. I presume that your school doesn’t have such a policy, but if it doesn’t, it should.
Cordially,
Jerry Coyne
Professor Emeritus, Ecology & Evolution
The University of Chicago
From Simon, who says, “The only good dog is a sheep dog, but even some sheep dogs are overrated.”
It’s time to see this video again, as the children saved by Nicholas Winton have grown up and surprised him at a BBC taping. And I always tear up when I see it.
I remember the first time I ever saw this footage. It’s stuck with me ever since as an incredible example of human goodness. https://t.co/56EEJH1YDS
BRIAN MAY QUIETLY WALKED INTO A SMALL RESCUE SHELTER ON THE BRINK OF CLOSING — WITH JUST 48 HOURS LEFT BEFORE EVERY CAT INSIDE WOULD BE PUT DOWN
The bills were overdue. Donations had dried up. The owner had run out of options. In less than 48 hours, 39 cats were scheduled to be… pic.twitter.com/g9v06QJlsV
It's hard to grasp how large this grouper is until you see it in comparison to the ship's toilet on the left.This appears to be an Atlantic goliath grouper or 'itajara' (Epinephelus itajara). They can reach 800 lbs (350 kg) & 8 feet long (2.5 m)Let's talk about these gentle giants.
Bill Maher is back, and this week he has a particularly good comedy bit: “New Rule: Eyeroll Activism.” His topic is similar to Ricky Gervais’s scathing remarks at the 2020 Golden Globes in that both men excoriate Hollywood for its virtue signaling, with Maher beginning with the wearing of anti-ICE pins at the Golden Globes. And since Hollywood is identified with the Democratic Party, Maher claims that this virtue-signaling, in which celebrities weigh in on political issues they know little or nothing about—but thinking that their “star power” gives them extra credibility—is said to turn off the average viewer. Maher argues that such “Golden Globe activism” actually works against liberals.
Here are the two money quotes. First, referring to ideological lapel pins:
“Get out of here with your virtue-signaling body ornaments. They are just crucifixes for liberals, because every time I see one I think, ‘Jesus Christ!'”
and to the signalers:
“I know it’s very important to you that you feel you’re making a difference, so let me assure you that are. You’re making independents vote Republican.”
The longer (23-minute) overtime segment with guests Marjorie Taylor Greene and MS Now host and former congressman Joe Scarborough, is not as funny, but Maher gets into it with Scarborough about attitudes towards America, and also shows a bit of the attitude that gets Maher labeled as an anti-vaxer. He seems to be pretty ignorant of the science attesting to the safety and efficacy of vaccinations.
We’re back with Caturday felids again, but I ask readers to help me out by sending me good cat-related news items when you see them. I may not use some, but I will look at all of them. Thanks.
Today we have three short items. The first, from History.com, describes a 1960 attempt by the CIA to turn cats into spies. In principle it was a good idea, but not so much in practice. Click the screenshot to read:
Here’s a description of “Operation Acoustic Kitty”:
The Acoustic Kitty was a sort of feline-android hybrid—a cyborg cat. A surgeon implanted a microphone in its ear and a radio transmitter at the base of its skull. The surgeon also wove an antenna into the cat’s fur, writes science journalist Emily Anthes in Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts.
CIA operatives hoped they could train the cat to sit near foreign officials. That way, the cat could secretly transmit their private conversations to CIA operatives.
“For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench,” Anthes writes. “Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi”—not the outcome they were expecting.
Oy! I bet the microphone contributed to its death.
“The problem was that cats are not especially trainable,” she writes. In a heavily redacted memo, the CIA concluded: “Our final examination of trained cats…convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.”
Here’s the conclusion, with credit given to the CIA:
There’s more: they tried to create spy insects:
With DARPA’s support, researchers at the University of California Berkeley successfully created a cyborg beetle whose movements they could remotely control. They reported their results in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience in October 2009.
“Berkeley scientists appear to have demonstrated an impressive degree of control over their insect’s flight; they report being able to use an implant for neural stimulation of the beetle’s brain to start, stop, and control the insect in flight,” reported Wired the month these findings came out. “They could even command turns by stimulating the basalar muscles.”
Well, to use the radio-controlled bugs as spies, they’d also have to equip them with microphones, which they didn’t, but they could be used for another purpose. The Wired article quotes the Berkeley researchers:
Eventually, the mind-controlled insects could be used to “serve as couriers to locations not easily accessible to humans or terrestrial robots,”
What about pigeons, for crying out loud? They were used in WW1? Anyway, this is your tax dollars at work.
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Here’s a post from Facebook (see also here) that I tried to check. It seems accurate in that it’s replicated elsewhere, including a newspaper (below), but information is scant. In this case, however, the cats detected spying, probably because cats have a broader hearing range than humans, especially at high frequencies, and their hearing is more sensitive than ours.
The article, titled “Cats Finger ‘Bugs'”, reports on the discovery of 30 hidden microphones in the Dutch Embassy in Moscow. The listening devices were reportedly found after two Siamese cats reacted to the imperceptible sound of a microphone being switched on.
The article:
And an AI response to my question about the incident:
Discovery: Two Siamese cats alerted the ambassador to the hidden microphones by scratching a wall.
Technology: The microphones were wireless, activated by electronic beams, and produced a sound inaudible to humans.
Diplomatic Response: Instead of protesting, embassy staff used the bugs to their advantage, staging dialogues that resulted in the Soviet authorities unknowingly fixing an embassy sewer issue.
Current Status: The newspaper reported that the microphones remained in place, and the diplomats had grown accustomed to their presence.
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Finally, in a 5-minute video, actor Jeremy Irons describes artistic depiction of lions, from ancient Egypt through ancient China, Greece, and Rome up to Rembrandt and beyond. Six drawings of lions by Rembrandt survive, and below you can see that one of them is up for auction.
On February 4, one of the most significant drawings by Rembrandt ever to reach auction will be sold at Sotheby’s, with 100% of proceeds protecting wild cats worldwide — art giving back to the animals that inspired it. While lions dominate culture, their real-world populations have declined by nearly 90%, and this historic auction directly supports Panthera’s work to reverse that trend.
Here’s Rembrandt’s drawing, of “Young Lion Resting” created between 1638 and 1642, and I hope it brings a lot of money for Panthera:
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Lagniappe: A short video of three bobcats having fun in someone’s swimming pool:
And riceball cats from Facebook: cats made out of rice:
Praise Ceiling Cat: reader Tara Tanaka, photographer and videographer extrodinaire, has returned with an awesome video featuring both cats and d*gs (well, a bobcat and coyotes). Tara filmed it from her living room in Florida (Tara and her husband own a large tract of wetland). Tara’s Flickr page is here and her Vimeo page is here.
Tara’s Vimeo notes, which assure us that this is genuine:
We had seen one or two coyotes around 9:30 the last two mornings. Hoping they would return for a third day I got my camera ready in the living room to try to record them. About 9:00 my husband said he saw one, so I made some final adjustments for the lighting and began to search for something moving in the distance. When I finally centered the subject in the viewfinder, I said “I think I’m looking at a bobcat.” Almost immediately the cat stood up and as I panned with it I was shocked when two coyotes ran into the frame, one on each side of the cat. Enjoy the interactions between the two species and between the very bonded pair of coyotes. I believe the female is pregnant.
After I finished filming I just sat in disbelief that I had had the opportunity to record something so unique – and from my living room! I feel like I could have gone to Yellowstone and spent a month in the field and not witnessed an encounter like this. Because of the dramatic temperature difference between the thawing ground and the sun heating the brown grass, the waves of heat shimmer intensified as the sun got higher and you can see them rippling across the screen. Despite the extreme conditions, I was thrilled that I was able to record the interaction so clearly from 1000′ away, and through a double-paned window.
We should have a pond full of water with waders arriving to nest right now, however due to a severe drought that started over a year ago, the entire swamp is dry. Without water to allow our large alligators to patrol under the nests and protect them from predators, I’m afraid that our hundreds of waders that nest here every year will not feel safe and will likely nest elsewhere.
Filmed with a Panasonic GH6 + Nikon 500mm f2.8 lens. Since I filmed it from inside the house, I used the audio from a video I shot from the yard last year.
The bobcat and coyotes don’t seem to mind each other, though the bobcat eventually climbs partway up a tree. Be sure to enlarge the video and put the sound up to hear the birds singing.
