al-Baghdadi finally meets his end

My view is that al-Baghdadi was a combatant and thus a legitimate military target. No trial was necessary.

Why Evolution Is True

As many sites have reported (the NYT is one), ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, 48, was hunted down by U.S. special forces and killed (or rather, committed suicide). He detonated a suicide belt, taking three of his children with him. As the NYT reports,

“Last night, the United States brought the world’s No. 1 terrorist leader to justice,” Mr. Trump said in an unusual nationally televised address from the White House. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead.”

Mr. Trump said Mr. al-Baghdadi was chased to the end of a tunnel, “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way” as he was pursued by American military dogs. Accompanied by three children, Mr. al-Baghdadi then detonated a suicide vest, blowing up himself and the children, Mr. Trump said.

Mr. al-Baghdadi’s body was mutilated by the blast, but Mr. Trump said tests had confirmed his identity. The president made a point of repeatedly…

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Oxford student union mandates that its authorities promote “jazz hands” as a substitute for applause

So it’s true – the world really is going mad.

Why Evolution Is True

I don’t know why, but stuff like this depresses me and makes me wonder what the world will be like in 20 years, when students who passed this resolution are running the UK—and maybe the US. But I’ll most likely be dead then.

This event not nearly as bad as the Right supporting Trump, of course, but everybody writes about Trump while the mainstream and liberal media are reluctant to documenting the Authoritarian Left. (If you’re a reader, by the way, please don’t tell me to write more about the perfidy of Republicans. You can see that kind of discourse, whose sentiments I share, on every other site.)

So the latest occurrence is that Oxford University’s student council voted three days ago not to mandate the use of jazz hands in place of applause, but to “mandate Sabbatical Officers to encourage the use” of “jazz hands”, the British Sign Language…

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Is @jeremycorbyn antisemitic? With historian Deborah Lipstadt.

Utopia, you are standing in it!

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Cultural appropriation: can minorities appropriate the culture of other minorities?

Why Evolution Is True

This is the kind of question that arises when you adopt full-blown intersectionalism. It’s apparently been decided that it’s okay to culturally “appropriate up“, i.e., Chinese people can wear jeans, and Africans suits, but it’s not okay to “appropriate down“, so that white people can’t wear cornrows or play jazz—at least not without explicitly acknowledging the borrowing and, as this article by Bianca Lambert, a freelance beauty writer, maintains, studying all the nuances of that borrowing.

The article at hand is, of course, at PuffHo, and the answer to the question in the title is a clear “yes: it’s appropriation for minorities to adopt black culture.” But it’s apparently not wrong for blacks to adopt Hispanic or Hindu culture. Click on the screenshot to read:

Most of the article is the usual culture-protection and calling-out of appropriators, and not worth commenting on again; but the thesis…

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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to two Americans and a Brit for work on adaptation of cells to varying levels of oxygen

Why Evolution Is True

This just in: the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the three people below (click on screenshot to go to the Nobel site):

I don’t know these researchers, nor much about their work, but I’ve put an informative video below (which shows you how the Prizes are announced, and what garnered one this year), and this is from the CNN report:

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine has been jointly awarded to William Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza for their pioneering research into how human cells respond to changing oxygen levels.

Announcing the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday, the Nobel committee said that the trio’s discoveries have paved the way for “promising new strategies to fight anaemia, cancer and many other diseases.”

The importance of oxygen has long been established, the committee explained, but how cells adapt to changes…

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Vestigial limb muscles in human embryos show common ancestry—for the gazillionth time

Why Evolution Is True

There are three kinds of vestiges that constitute evidence for evolution (the sub-claim of that theory that modern species share common ancestors), and I mention all three in Why Evolution is True:

1.) Vestigial traits that persist in modern species but either have no adaptive function or a function different from that served in their ancestors. The vestigial ear muscles of humans are one, the flippers of penguins (functional, but not for flying in the air) is another, the coccyx in humans (sometimes with attached “tail muscles” that can’t move it) is a third.

2.) Vestigial genes that are functional in our relatives (and presumably in our ancestors) that have been inactivated in some modern species. There is no explanation for these “dead genes” save that they were useful in ancestors but aren’t useful any longer. Examples are “dead” genes that code for egg yolk proteins in humans (but don’t…

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1/3rd of Auckland measles patients are hospitalised

Utopia, you are standing in it!

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A NYT interview with Bill Maher

Why Evolution Is True

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has a long interview with Bill Maher (click on screenshot below)—complete with footnotes, something I haven’t seen in the NYT.

I’ve always been a big fan of Maher: there are in fact few things he’s said on his show that I don’t agree with. I suppose it’s because both he and I criticize both the Right and the Left, and Maher, one among many, has suffered for doing that. The Left wants to be immune from criticism by others who profess to be Left, but Maher is not only a Leftist, but an incisive social critic.  And now I learn that he’s a huge Beatles fan as well. What’s not to like? And so, to celebrate International Blasphemy Day, treat yourself to a read. I’ll put a few excerpts below.

By the way, in the interview Maher defines political correctness as “the elevation of…

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