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There’s a good article in Quillette showing how one person, the notorious but (to me) highly admirable J. K. Rowling singlehandedly undercut Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act that came into effect on April 1. I explained this law on March 27, also showing how the Scottish Police published as an example a woman named “Jo” (Rowling’s nickname) who said that people who didn’t identify as one of the two genders “should be put in the gas chambers.”  That is, of course, an oblique swipe at Rowling by the government, and I suspect she could have sued for defamation. But she got her revenge in another way.

Rowling has been attacked by gender activists for two of her stands: that trans women remain (biological) men (and vice versa), and that certain positions should be reserved for natal women, including participation in women’s sports, incarceration in women’s prisons, and rape and sexual-violence counseling.  I agree with both of these positions, and also with Rowling’s insistence that with these exceptions trans people should be treated with respect and dignity, and afforded all other rights.

That, of course, is not enough for gender activists, who have demonized Rowling as a transphobe. But she refuses to be demonized, and has fought back against her detractors as well as against the new law, which basically equates trans women with biological women in all respects, and also penalizes those who oppose this view.

Click below to read, and I’ll show how Rowling took down the law. She did it with tweets.

You can see the new law, which I’ll call the HCPOA, at the first link above. It’s basically a blasphemy law that wouldn’t stand in America since it violates the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech. Here’s how I described it before:

Note that it is a crime to make statements about age, disability, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or “variation in sex characteristics”, stuff that a “reasonable person” would find “threatening”, “abusive”, and even “insulting”.  You don’t even have to have the intent of stirring up hatred.

Further, look at (2)aii above. You are committing a crime even if you “communicate to another person material that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”.  So, for example, if you email a friend that a guy you don’t like “must have a small dick” (a common insult for males, but also abusive because it makes fun of “variation in a sex characteristic”), or say to someone “Jack is a dotty old codger”, which insults someone on the grounds of age, then those might be offenses.

Also, as one reader said, “Part of the reason why people are so worried is that the guidance that Police Scotland have issued seems to be somewhat different from what the law itself says. It’s a download document 29 pages long.”  Looking at it briefly, I find two things extra worrying.

First, even if what you do doesn’t amount to a “crime,” it’s supposed to be reported and the coppers will investigate it, probably putting your name on the record,

Indeed, they DO put your name on the record, even if you haven’t violated the law. And employers and others can get access to your record. Note too that women are not included in the protected class, so you can spew all the misogyny you want. Here’s one example from the article:

Most of us wouldn’t regard mocking someone’s “non-binary” identity as deserving of a “hate incident” marker, but that’s what happened to a Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser, after he shared a post on X ridiculing the Scottish government’s “non-binary action plan.” Every “community” has to have its own action plan these days, leading to a proliferation of oppressed groups with confusingly similar titles. “Choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat,” Fraser wrote. “I’m not sure Governments should be spending time on action plans for either.”

He was aghast when he discovered that Police Scotland had logged an NCHI on his record for this joke, but hadn’t done the same in relation to the complaints against Rowling and Yousaf. He accused the force of “double standards” while SNP MP Joanna Cherry, a rare sensible voice within the party, suggested that senior officers were revising policy “on the hoof” to avoid the embarrassment of recording an NCHI against an internationally famous author. (This sequence of events became even more absurd when the force suddenly changed its tune, telling Fraser his personal details hadn’t been logged in relation to an NCHI after all.)

Further, application of this law is subjective, particularly because the determination of “hate” depends not at all on the violator’s intention, but on the subject’s interpretation of the violator’s motivation. It is, in other words, an “I’m offended” law.

That’s insane. As you might expect, the Scottish coppers are being flooded with complaints, many of them probably designed to undercut the law. They’re coming in at the rate of one per minute, and the cops are complaining that investigating every report (which they must do) distracts them from investigating more serious crimes. Finally, if you don’t want to deal directly with the cops when reporting an offense, the government has designated some weird “third party reporting centres” where you can register your offense. These include a sex shop (!) and a salmon and trout farm, presumably where you can buy some lox without being doxed.

Enter Rowling, my hero. She simply issued a series of tweets, the last one of which completely undermined the law by demanding that if anybody is arrested for misgendering (e.g., “going after a woman for calling a man a man”) she would simply repeat what got the person arrested so Rowling could be charged, too. And of course the Scottish police are not going to charge J. K. Rowling!

To show her devastating attack, delivered with with and humor, I’ll show all of Rowling’s tweets, as some will make sane people laugh.

First, her pinned tweet laying out her views. It’s long and you can click on it to read the whole thing, but note that she starts with the biological definition of the (two) sexes:

I believe a woman is a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes. It’s irrelevant whether or not her gametes have ever been fertilised, whether or not she’s carried a baby to term, irrelevant if she was born with a rare difference of sexual development that makes neither of the above possible, or if she’s aged beyond being able to produce viable eggs. She is a woman and just as much a woman as the others.

You’ve asked me several questions on this thread and accused me of avoiding answering, so here goes.

I believe a woman is a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes. It’s irrelevant whether or not her gametes have ever been fertilised, whether or not… pic.twitter.com/X6mbdJ0YVm

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 6, 2024

And then the devastating series of ten tweets followed by her admission that she was “just kidding”, and then her big challenge to the legal system..

Lovely Scottish lass and convicted double rapist Isla Bryson found her true authentic female self shortly before she was due to be sentenced. Misgendering is hate, so respect Isla’s pronouns, please. Love the leggings! 2/11 pic.twitter.com/aKgOWRdb4K

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024

“Love the leggings!” LOL.

Samantha Norris was cleared of exposing her penis to two 11-year-old girls. Hooray! Unfortunately she was then convicted for possession of 16,000 images of children being raped and sexually assaulted. Be that as it may, Sam’s still a lady to me! 4/11 pic.twitter.com/GG2kLql3Ea

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024

But most women aren’t axe-toters or sex offenders, so let’s talk role models! Guilia Valentino (in red) wanted to play on the women's team 'because of sisterhood, validation and political visibility'. Naturally, she was given some boring cis girl’s place. Yay for inclusion! 6/11 pic.twitter.com/zl5i41RqBG

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024

Munroe Bergdorf isn’t just a pretty face! Public campaigner for a children’s charity until safeguarding concerns were raised, she was appointed UN Women’s first ever UK champion. ‘What makes a woman “a woman” has no definitive answer,’ says Munroe. Great choice, UN Women! 8/11 pic.twitter.com/za6GG5q2Oo

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024

Last, but least, TV’s India Willoughby proves we women can call a black broadcaster a ‘nasty bitch’ who ‘wouldn’t be anywhere without woke’, dub lesbians men, insult the looks of a female Olympic swimmer, ‘joke’ about kidnapping feminists, and STILL get airtime! What a gal! 10/11 pic.twitter.com/gShqbEvO5s

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024

The last tweet is her admission that she’s violated the HCPOA. Click screenshot to read the whole thing.

And, at the end:

It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women’s and girls’ rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man. Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal. I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment. If you agree with the views set out in this tweet, please retweet it.

Yes, ma’am:

Retweeted per JKR's request: "if what I've written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment. If you agree with the views set out in this tweet, please retweet it." https://t.co/kY4dmB8XXT

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 12, 2024

The ten tweets above, with the eleventh as a finale, is one of the great takedowns of virtue-signaling activism of our era, featuring transwomen who, says Rowling, are “men, every last one of them.” Clearly an offense!

But the cherry atop this Cake of Snark is this:

If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I'll repeat that woman's words and they can charge us both at once. pic.twitter.com/s9OcsgHr5j

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 2, 2024

As Quillette noted, “Feminists hailed the novelist as a heroine, understanding that she had thrown the protection provided by her wealth and status over thousands of other women.”  And don’t you doubt that if anybody is charged for a hate crime by calling a transgender woman a “man”, Rowling will simply repeat it. The cops would have to charge Rowling, too, and what are they chances they’d do that?

The new law, as an “I’m offended” blasphemy law, is unnecessary, unworkable, and impossible to apply.  It is not needed and should be repealed.  I have no idea what brought this dumb law onto the books, but Quillette hazards a guess, involving the Scottish drive for independence from Britain:

The ruling Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) lost a crucial referendum in 2014, failing to persuade enough Scots to vote in favour of independence, and it has seemed rudderless ever since. Much of what has happened in Scotland in the last decade can be traced back to that crushing disappointment, as the SNP struggled to establish its purpose and identity. In an irony that’s hard to miss, a party built on the supposedly indelible differences between the English and Scottish has sought to solve its problem by embracing a faddish ideology, transgenderism, which proposes that anyone can be whatever they like. And that includes an apparently unshakable conviction that men can become women and vice versa.

Indeed identity politics has become as central to the SNP’s creed, if not more so, than taking Scotland out of the UK. In a reversal of Whisky Galore-type stereotypes, in fact, the Scots have now taken on the role of witch-finders, sniffing out heretical thoughts under the cover of a supposedly liberal ideology. A vast amount of parliamentary time has been wasted on bad and unnecessary legislation advocated by trans activists, including a bill to remove all safeguards from the process that allows people to change their legal gender. The UK government salvaged the day by blocking the reckless Gender Recognition Reform Act last year, but the SNP had another trick up its sleeve.

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into effect on April 1—April Fools’ day, as critics were quick to point out. It’s been on the statute books since 2021, but implementation was delayed because no one could say with any certainty what it actually criminalised.

Well, who knows? But I do know that J. K. Rowling, despite her fame and wealth, has risked something more valuable—her reputation—by standing up for her principles.

Although the elimination of SATs or other standardized tests during the Pandemic Era (or giving students the option of submitting them) was justified by various excuses about viruses and so on, in most cases the real reason was to create equity.  Especially when it became clear that the Supreme Court would declare race-based admission illegal, colleges eliminated standardized tests as a way to achieve racial equity, assuming that the lower average scores of minorities would translate into lower admissions.  And yet several studies have shown that standardized tests are the best predictor of college grades (“success”).

But it didn’t quite work that way. At least under the “test optional” criterion, a study by Dartmouth College showed that the “optional” criterion used by many schools had the effect of harming admissions prospects of lower-income students, since they often thought, mistakenly, that their test scores would hurt them. Here’s a bit from a NYT article by David Leonhardt that I wrote about in February:

Last summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth. After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. [JAC: Four-part ACTs are alternatives to SATs.] With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement. Beilock wanted to know what the evidence showed.

“Our business is looking at data and research and understanding the implications it has,” she told me.

Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing, as I explained in a recent Times article.

A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, Dartmouth switched to a test-optional policy, in which applicants could choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores. And this policy was harming lower-income applicants in a specific way.

The researchers were able to analyze the test scores even of students who had not submitted them to Dartmouth. (Colleges can see the scores after the admissions process is finished.) Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake.

They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.

After this study, Dartmouth reinstated the SAT test as a mandatory requirement for applicants,

Now Harvard University (which as students we called “Schmarvard”), has also reinstated mandatory standardized tests as part of the admissions process.  Click to read:

This is from the April 11 Harvard Magazine:

Harvard announced today that the College will reinstitute mandatory submission of standardized test scores for applicants, beginning with students applying for fall 2025 admission (the class of 2029). Until today’s decision, the College had a test-optional policy in place for applicants through the class of 2030. The announcement follows similar decisions by Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown to require standardized testing beginning with the class of 2029.

Test-optional policies were widely adopted during the pandemic, when it was difficult to sit for standardized tests, and many remained in place even as the threat of illness faded. The tests were thought to disadvantage lower-income students and those from under-resourced high schools. But a working paper coauthored in 2023 by Ackman professor of public economics Raj Chetty, Black professor of political economy and professor of education and economics David Deming, and John Friedman, a professor of economics at Brown, found standardized tests are a useful means of identifying promising students at less well-resourced high schools. In a statement, Chetty said “Critics correctly note that standardized tests are not an unbiased measure of students’ qualifications, as students from higher-income families often have greater access to test prep and other resources. But the data reveal that other measures—recommendation letters, extracurriculars, essays—are even more prone to such biases. Considering standardized test scores is likely to make the admissions process at Harvard more meritocratic while increasing socioeconomic diversity.”

As previously reported, MIT, which reinstituted a testing requirement last year—citing SAT math scores as measures of an applicant’s ability to handle a highly quantitative curriculum—recently reported enrolling its most diverse class. (In late March, Emi Nietfeld’15 hadargued in favor of mandatory standardized testing from the perspective of a disadvantaged applicant in this New York Times essay, “How the SAT Changed My Life.”)

In today’s announcement, Harvard said it will require submission of SAT or ACT scores, but that other eligible tests, such as AP exams and International Baccalaureate scores, will be accepted in exceptional cases.

The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science parroted the Dartmouth finding:

“Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond” said Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi Hoekstra in an email to students and colleagues. “Indeed, when students have the option of not submitting their test scores, they may choose to withhold information that, when interpreted by the admissions committee in the context of the local norms of their school, could have potentially helped their application. In short,” she continued, “more information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range.”

It’s about time. And notice that what’s mentioned is “across the socioeconomic range” rather than “across the ethnic range.”  I don’t know if “socioeconomic” is the new code word for “race,” but the mandatory submission of test scores can only be a good thing. How can it hurt? It’s a way of identifying talent that isn’t revealed by high-school grades or where someone went to high school, and if a college wants to admit students on the basis of either merit or likelihood of success (they’re correlated), the make the tests obligatory.

Well, I have about three batches of photos left, so by Monday we’ll be kaput. I’m very sad that readers aren’t stepping up, but this seems to be part of the senescence of this website.

Here’s a third batch (of three) by reader Ephraim Heller taken in the Galápagos (#1 is here and #2 is here).  More birds today, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Captions and IDs by Ephraim. and I request readers’ help with those species that aren’t identified.

One of the 18 species of Galápagos finches studied by Darwin [JAC: readers’ IDs welcome]

Galápagos flycatcher (Myiarchus magnirostris) . Another common endemic species.

American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber):

Unidentified bird collecting nesting material:

Great blue heron (Ardea herodias) consenting to a close up shot.

Self-explanatory photos of swallow-tailed gulls (Creagrus furcatus):

Nazca booby (Sula granti). Per Wikipedia: Siblicide has been well studied in this species; the first chick is born around five days before the second and is larger and stronger by the time the second is born. It drags its younger sibling out of the nest. Field experiments in the Galapagos demonstrated that the boobies can manage to feed two chicks without too much difficulty. This raises questions as to the origin of the phenomenon. Nazca booby regurgitating food for its chick (who has presumably murdered its sibling):

NBC 10 in Philly reports a disturbing case of censorship, and of course it’s Jewish stuff that’s censored. Fortunately, a court stepped in and undid the censorship with a restraining order. Click the headline to read, and you can also find a shorter account on ABC 6 in Philly.

What happened is summarized by the bullet points in the report above:

 

• The Philly Palestine Coalition – which has organized several pro-Palestinian protests since the start of the Israel-Hamas War in October of last year – called for the Israeli Film Festival in Philly and the Main Line to be canceled, claiming the event is sponsored by Israel Bonds, also known as the Development Corporation for Israel.
• The Bryn Mawr Film Institute (BMFI) — a theater and institute based in Bryn Mawr — announced they were pulling their screening of one of the movies involved in the festival, “The Child Within Me,” a documentary focused on Israeli musician Yehuda Poliker.
• The decision sparked outrage and a protest from local Jewish groups as well as a court order requested by the Israeli Film Festival, according to a lawyer representing the festival. The lawyer accused BMFI of breaching its contract by pulling the film. BMFI later confirmed they would screen the film following the court order.

What’s bizarre about all this is that while the pro-Palestinian groups wanted to cancel the entire showing, the BMFI decided to pull just one of the movies, and one that had absolutely nothing to do with the war, or anything related to it.

Guy Brodetzki, an Israeli man who currently resides in Lower Merion, also organized a grassroots group of concerned citizens called the Hope for Israel Alliance – Philadelphia. Brodetzki told NBC10 “The Child Within Me” has nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas War.

“Very famous singer. The movie is about him. And he’s very special,” Brodetzki said. “He was gay when it wasn’t that easy to be gay. He’s the son of Holocaust survivors. Many of his songs are about being a child of Holocaust survivors. This is the movie. There’s no mentioning of the Arab-Israeli conflict at all. There’s no mentioning of the war. There’s no mentioning of Palestinians. Nothing. It’s all about him. It’s about Jewish-Israeli culture. So why on earth would you want to cancel the showing of this kind of movie?”

Before lawyers got involved, BMFI issued a pathetic excuse for canceling the movie. Get a load of this dissimulation!:

“Bryn Mawr Film Institute is not a political organization. We don’t endorse or oppose any causes. In past years, we have not regarded hosting a screening from the Israeli Film Festival as a political partnership or taking a stance on any issues,” a BMFI spokesperson wrote. “This was our feeling when we arranged the 2024 screening many months ago. However, as the situation in Israel and Gaza has developed, it has become clear that our showing this movie is being widely taken among individuals and institutions in our community as an endorsement of Israel’s recent and ongoing actions. This is not a statement we intended or wish to make. For this reason, BMFI is canceling the sole screening of the music documentary, The Child Within Me.”

That’s pathetic, showing a complete lack of backbone and principle. It’s like a library pulling a book from the shelves because it offends some of the public. If they’re not political, then they shouldn’t worry about looking as if they endorsed a film. Does a library endorse Mein Kampf, for crying out loud?  As ABC 6 reported, “Film Institute Executive Director Samuel Scott said the issue was not the film itself but concerns over heated political protests regarding the film’s screening.

 

And then the law stepped in:

Brodetzki’s group planned a protest outside the Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Tuesday. After the protest was planned, Lori Lowenthal Marcus, an attorney representing the Israeli Film Festival, told NBC10 the movie would still be screened at BMFI Tuesday evening following a court order. Marcus accused BMFI of breaching its contract when they attempted to pull the film from the festival.

Here’s the restraining order forcing the BMFI to show the movies. It’s short and sweet:

 

That’s all it took, and the film festival caved, saying that they were “flawed human being” making “bad calls” (see below).  Their intention was surely not to hurt and offend Jews, but it was certainly to avoid Palestinian ire.  It is due to fear of Palestinian action against the film that the BMFI took action. I wonder if they would bow to pressure from any other group about non-Israeli films.

So here’s the apology, which, as Shania Twain said, “don’t impress me much.”

h/t: Alex

CSICon, run by the Center for Inquiry, looks to me like the modern-day version of James Randi’s Amazing Meeting, which was also held yearly in Las Vegas, and emphasized science and reason. I loved those meetings, and I’m going to the CSICon meeting this October as a speaker.

You can see the lineup of stars below, including Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson, as well as the Novella Brothers and Cara Santa Maria.

I won’t speak much about of the Steve Novella’s “progressive” views on sex (i.e., it’s really a continuum) and on his helping deplatform the late Harriet Hall’s positive review of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, but I will go to his talk.

I’m speaking, too—for half an hour on Saturday morning, October 26, and will probably say something about science and ideology. I recommend you go, not to see me, but to mingle with all the good people who will attend this conference, and to hear the many speakers.  I don’t usually go to meetings, but wouldn’t miss this one.

You can read more about the meeting here, which is where the green button took you when you clicked the email announcement.

The last time I posted something about an article by Georgetown University Law Professor Jonathan Turley, I believe someone beefed because Turley was a conservative, implying that his articles couldn’t be trusted. Well, I deplore the attitude that you can judge the veracity of claims using the ideology, race, or gender of someone who reports them: all you have to do is check the facts!  And it turns out that the startling and disturbing facts adduced in this new piece by Turley on his website check out (remember, most articles give links).

And yes, it’s true that UCLA has an “Activist-in-Residence” program, blending ideology with scholarship, and that first year medical students at UCLA were forced to listen to a lecture given by an apparently bonkers pro-Palestinian woman described as a “formerly incarcerated and unhoused poverty scholar” who made the students chant for Palestine as well as to pray to “mama Earth.”

Read and weep by clicking the headline:

This is unbelievable, except, as far as I can determine, it checks out. Excerpts from Turley are indented:

There has been much discussion about the controversial mandatory lecture for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles from a pro-Palestinian speaker accused of anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric. However, there is less attention to the fact that Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia was appearing because she is one of UCLA’s paid Activists-in-Residence.

Gray-Garica is described by UCLA as “a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public.”

. . . In her two-hour lecture, Gray-Garcia dismissed modern medicine as “white science” and told the medical students to engage in a prayer to “mama Earth.” Students were expected to pray and affirm that “Mama Earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped or played.”

It was part of what was billed as a talk on “Housing (In)justice in LA: Addressing Unhousing and Practicing Solidarity.”

A complaint filed after the lecture [JAC: see below] alleges that students were expected to chant “Free, free Palestine” and when one student refused to stand during one prayer, an unidentified UCLA faculty member asked for the pupil’s name. The complaint alleges that students were concerned that they would face repercussions if they did not chant and pray on command.

In the lecture, posted online, Gray-Garcia keeps her face covered with a keffiyeh while veering off into a diatribe over the Gaza Strip.  She also attacked the concept and defense of private property as “crapitalist lies” that kill “black, brown and houseless people.”

First, let’s check out Tiny Gray-Garcia. You can see her views on her public Facebook page, with this header:

A few pictures, with and without keffiyeh or face covering.  If you browse, you’ll find that it’s all-Palestine all the time

And Mama Earth, too! This looks like the garb she lectured in, as you can see in the short clip below:

But she isn’t always covered; she appears to be the woman in the middle (from her Facebook page):

Here she is on the latest Activist-in-Residence page, face not visible.  I wonder if there were ever any conservative or even centrist “activists” included in this program.

Here’s the page showing UCLA’s Activist-in-Residence program,  As they say, the purpose of that program is to disrupt the university and effect Social Justice:

It is our objective to “turn the university inside out” and invite artists, community organizers, and movement leaders to undertake power-shifting scholarship and pedagogy focused on social change. This program provides opportunities for activists to engage with the UCLA community to develop and strengthen their capabilities, work, and commitment towards social, racial, spatial, and gender justice.

This is explicitly ideological and would certainly not be permitted at the University of Chicago. Yet UCLA is a public university, and I wonder if the program is being funded by the taxpayers of California.

Now some of the projects sound like really good ones, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that social-justice change, all in a “progressive” direction, is part of the mission of a university, especially a public one. Below is UCLA’s official profile of Tiny as a “Poverty Skola” on the page (click to enlarge), further described as a “formerly unhoused, incarcerated poverty scholar”. (“Formerly unhoused” is progressive Newspeak for “was once homeless”, and of course you know what “incarcerated” means. Her crime is not given, though, in the ten-minute video below; she says it was a “poverty crime”.)

Gray-Garcia’s UCLA lecture online at the link is an excerpt only only 100 seconds long, not the two full hours that Turley implies, but in this Tik Tok clip you can see a weirdly garbed Gray-Garcia walking around haranguing the students with wacko ideology:

@povertyskola

Excerpt of “The myth of Clean and the unhoused body on stolen land -presented by povertyskolaz at #Poormagazine #AetnaStreet #KripHopNation at #uclamedschool #Povertyscholarship #Homefulness #Prop1 #4118 @The Black Kripple @Poor People’s Army @Delphine Brody

♬ original sound – PovertySkola

Here’s Tiny giving a ten-minute talk online, coming off as an activist but also unhinged. What I wonder is what this person has to contribute to the education of medical students.   It’s hard to see why on earth an anti-Semitic Marxist should be selected to give a lecture that must be heard by first-year medical students. Is this the best that UCLA can do? But of course her presentation simply reflects the indoctrination that UCLA’s activists, and at the medical school, want to give their students.  There is, of course, no counterspeech, only that one student who refused to pray to “mama Earth”.

More from Turley:

Gray-Garcia was undeterred by the complaint or the criticism, posting on X the next day: “As we hold our relatives in Occupied Palestine, and all of Mama Earth in prayer and love, we need to make connections.”

Here’s the tweet. Gray-Garcia repeatedly analogizes, throughout her discourse, gentrified American areas with Israeli “colonialism”. She also accuses Israel of “apartheid.”

As we hold our relatives in Occupied Palestine &all of MamaEarth in prayer & love we need to make the connections -for us Houseless, indigenous, swept/evicted people -we r not separate from this struggle – we suffer from the same settler colonial terror https://t.co/G2jFflsud1

— Lisa "Tiny" Gray Garcia (@PovertySkola) October 8, 2023

More from Turley:

There have been ample objections to this indoctrination session at UCLA, but the school has been criticized for years for its viewpoint intolerance and orthodoxy.

However, what is most disturbing is the decision of the university that higher education should have paid “activists-in-residence.”  At a school notorious for excluding conservative and libertarian voices, it is doubtful that it would embrace a pro-life or anti-transgender activist in residence. Instead, the faculty can enlist the support of activists to push an ideological agenda in mandatory sessions like this one.

UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy has gushed with praise for Gray-Garcia’s “rousing remarks presented in the form of spoken word poetry.”

UCLA Luskin Professor Ananya Roy, who created the residency program, heralded how the activists-in-residence is part of “our effort to turn the university inside out.” Roy added that “at the Institute, we organize knowledge within, against and beyond the university. The Activist-in-Residence program brings to the university the movement scholars and public intellectuals who are teachers and guides for this praxis.”

The faculty, including Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris who is the Interim Dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, obviously support this view of higher education.

The question is why taxpayers and donors should support such school-sponsored activism. I previously wrote about the “radical chic” of academia as well as the new focus on “activism” as a field of study.

In fact, Turley says he encourages his students to be activists. But we shouldn’t tell them HOW to be activists, which is exactly what UCLA Medical School is doing by giving Tiny, with known views, a platform. Will they give someone like Turley, or even a centrist, a plaform for a mandatory med-school lecture? Given the way med schools are going, I wouldn’t count on it!

Many of us encourage political activism and engagement of our students. They need to bring their passion and voices to the debates today over issues ranging from abortion to the environment to wars.

We have long benefited from intellectual activists in our country, but they were intellectuals first and activists second. They were thought-leaders who used classic education to advance societal change.

Gray-Garcia embodies how academics are destroying the very intellectual foundation for higher education. Incorporating such “activists-in-residence” are extremely popular moves for faculty at schools like UCLA. However, they are hijacking higher education for their own political and professional purposes. The problem is that few have the courage to oppose such programs out of fear that they will be the next to be targeted in a cancel campaign or university investigation. Most remain in cringing silence as bizarre scenes like the one at UCLA play out on campus.

The one UCLA student who refused to pray on command was a courageous exception. However, we should all pray for the future of American higher education if Gray-Garcia is the measure of American intellectual thought.

You can find the complaint about Tiny’s lecture by UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group here. The closing statement from that letter:

I am weary of begging readers to send in wildlife photos, as I have about three days left.  If nobody sends any in, we’ll go to sporadic presentations and then. . . . nothing.  Then the Caturday felids will go and then. . . the void.

But today we have a presentation by UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison, who visited a wildflower farm.  Here captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. There are two bird pictures at the end.

Visit to a Wildflower Farm

To restore degraded land and improve it for wildlife, there have to be farms that provide native plant seeds in large amounts. Native seed farming is a highly skilled enterprise in which source material is often gathered from the wild, cultivation must be done with care to maintain adaptive genetic traits, and all techniques from germinating through harvesting and storage must be tailored for numerous finicky plant species.  It’s a tough business to succeed in, and there’s a great need for more of it.

Hedgerow Farms in Winters, California is a much-admired member of Northern California’s native seed industry. Their chief scientist, a recent graduate of our Ecology program at UC Davis, invited me to attend their annual Field Day in April 2024.  It was a fun and enlightening experience.

Touring the fields on a hay bale ride:

Goldfields, Lasthenia californica:

Desert Poppies, Eschscholzia californica mexicana (orange field):

Cream Cups, Platystemon californica, with a smattering of Succulent Lupine, Lupinus succulentus, that was grown in the same field last year:

Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium bellum, not a grass but a member of the iris family:

The wildflowers (or “forbs”) are beautiful, but grasses are grown and used in much larger quantities.

Meadow Barley (Hordeum brachyantherum):

Purple Needlegrass, Stipa pulchra, the most popular species in Californian grassland restoration, intermixed with leftover California Phacelia, Phacelia californica:

Sedges, Carex species, essential for restoring streambanks:

Growing native seeds requires a great deal of both manual labor and creatively MacGyvered farm machinery.

Hoeing a field of Woolly Sunflower (Eriophyllum lanatum):

Seed cleaning apparatus, in which field-harvested material enters from the bins on the right of this photo, passes through a series of threshing and sifting machines adjusted differently for each plant species, and emerges as bags of nearly-pure seed:

Seed samples on display:

Native plants are also used for the conservation practices with which enlightened farmers retain their soils and support wildlife.  Tailwater ponds and hedgerows are two such practices that we saw on the tour.

Tailwater ponds are small wetlands that trap irrigation runoff and allow sediments to be recycled onto the fields:

Hedgerows are roadside plantings that provide food and cover for wildlife, and may stabilize canals and ditches:

A hedgerow of native shrubs (yellow: Flannelbush, Fremontodendron californcum; pink: Western Redbud, Cercis occidentalis; blue: California-lilac, Ceanothus); note the more typical, barren roadside in the foreground:

 

Okay, now for the animals!   Among this farm’s many community partners is the falconry club, who brought their beautiful birds to the field day. From left to right are a Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus), female Harris’s Hawk (Parabuteo unicinctus), two Merlins (Falco columbarius), and male Harris’s Hawk:

Several birds and people in this photo are falconry-based pest abatement professionals. The most famous pest-abating bird is Rufus the Hawk, a Harris’s Hawk who keeps pigeons off the courts at Wimbledon.

Harris’s Hawk closeup:

From Allaboutbirds on Harris’s Hawk: “The most social of North American raptors, these birds cooperate at nests and hunt together as a team. When hunting, a group of hawks surround their prey, flush it for another to catch, or take turns chasing it. This hawk’s social nature and relative ease with humans has made it popular among falconers and in education programs.”

If you’ve listened to National Public Radio (NPR) in the past few years, what you’ve heard is basically a progressive, left-wing radio station, not a station that represents American diveristy of opinions and viewpoints.  Several of my friends have canceled their subscriptions, even though they’re Democrats and consider themselves on the Left.

But NPR is also publicly funded to some extent. Although it claims that it gets less than 1% of its funding from the government (i.e., from taxpayers like you and me), The Hill notes that “NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law.”

Regardless, NPR is suppose to be a radio station that all Americans can listen to with profit, not a megaphone for progressive Leftism. Yet, according to this new article in the Free Press by Uri Berliner, the senior editor of NPR’s business desk (and still with the station!), NPR has not only tilted increasingly leftward, with a changing demographic, but has become more “white” as elitist listeners tune in while blacks (and conservatives) don’t listen much. Further, it has bought into stories that were later found dubious or even debunked, yet has never corrected itself. Right now subscriptions are falling, the local branches are laying off workers, and NPR’s future seems uncertain.

Click to read: I’ll summarize it briefly and give a few quotes. Note at the bottom that NPR has officially responded, and I’m unsure whether Berliner has a future at the institution.

First, the changing demographic of listeners:

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

Berliner then goes into three stories in which NPR took positions that ultimately seemed dubious or even indefensible; but in no case did it ever correct itself (three points below are my take):

1.) NPR glommed onto the idea that Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election. No evidence supporting that came out, and NPR quietly dropped the story without any corrections.

2.) NPR poo-pooed the “Hunter Biden laptop story,” barely covering it at all because it didn’t believe the notion that Hunter Biden would use his dad’s name to advance himself. It turned out that, of course, he did. NPR never corrected itself.

3.) NPR bought big-time into the “wild virus wet-market” theory for the origin of COVID, dismissing the idea that the virus came from a leak in a lab in Wuhan, China. As time progressed, the lab-leak theory became more credible, and now, though we still don’t know for sure, the lab-leak seems more credible than the wet market. NPR, however, utterly rejected the lab-leak theory and hasn’t corrected its earlier insistence.

According to Berliner, after the death of George Floyd the station adopted a form of Critical Race Theory, even accusing itself of complicity in racism. Of course if any station is lily-white, it would be this station with its elitist and progressive listeners carrying NPR tote bags and driving Volvos.  But it’s startling how quickly the issue of race came to dominate every aspect of NPR:

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

And I read this next bit with utter dismay.  Along with the absence of viewpoint diversity in its programs, something that the station simply ignores when it comes up, they’ve bought into gender activism to the point where they can’t use the term “biological sex”!  Oy!  And of course in the Hamas/Israel war, the station is tilting towards Palestine, because that’s what progressives want to hear: Israel is the white colonialist oppressor. I myself have noticed this even on my short drives around Chicago. Bolding below is mine:

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.

The inevitable result is that people are tuning out and listening instead to the many podcasts on tap:

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.

Berliner offers a solution, which is to return to “traditional” journalism, but in the engaging way it used to. They need to broadcast more diverse viewpoints, perhaps even debates. Since NPR has a new CEO,  businesswoman Katherine Maher, only 40, it might change course. I can’t tell enough about her to guess if she’ll change the direction of NPR’s broadcasting.

You may well ask yourself, as I did, “Why on earth does Berliner stay at such a dysfunctional station?”  Well, maybe he’s hoping that Maher will effect a big change. But judging from his own narrative, buttressed with emails, names, and evidence, his tenure at NPR now seems to be one big tsuris.  And he doesn’t explain why, given this large kvetch, he’s still with the organization.

Sadly, some liberals are dismissing this piece; after all, it’s in the “conservative” Free Press.  As one reader wrote me:

A response to it from a friend, a fellow academic: “This guy sounds like a disgruntled MAGA Republican boohoo.” Liberalism is doomed!

*********

Now NPR has pushed back, and it’s not much of a response:

NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner’s assessment.

“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.”

She added, “None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole.”

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network’s chief content officer, would have no further comment.

But there are also heated denials from NPR employees rejecting Berliner’s claims. Read the piece to see them. Still, the best way to judge whether NPR is doing what it should do is simply to listen. And, thank Ceiling Cat, you no longer have to listen to the uber-woke and deeply spiritual Krista Tippett, who was let go. As I always said about her, she was so moved by her own profundity that she often came close to tears. Just sayin’.

My partner in crime, biologist Luana Maroja at prestigious Williams College, is once again making heterodox statements that will peeve a number of students—and perhaps faculty. But she is brave.

In this case, some Williams students got the bright idea last winter that the College should do away with all grades for first-semester students because those students want to play and socialize without any “pressure”. Further, the stress of getting grades could supposedly damage their mental health.

But of course one of the motivations (see below) also seems to be achieving “equity”—a motivation designed to cast opponents of the suggestion as bigots or racists. The “equity excuse” has been made by a number of colleges to not only eliminate grades for incoming students, but also to omit standardized tests like the SAT as requirements for applying to college. In its place some schools have installed “holistic admissions”, a way to get around the Supreme Court ruling that colleges cannot use race-based admissions.  In fact, required standardized tests seem have the effect of boosting minority achievement, by highlighting those students who do particularly well in comparison with others.

It appears, and this is not rocket science, that most student groups at Williams are in favor of the proposal. They don’t really want to bust their hump first semester; they want to play and hang out. Luana, of course, thinks this is slacking off, as you can see from her letter, which was published this morning in The Williams Record (the student newspaper). I agree because I’m an old-school professor, but Luana is young. It appeared today because the faculty will be discussing the propsal this afternoon.

Click below to read it:

I’ll quote the first four paragraphs of the letter, but the whole letter is about three times longer:

This winter, the student members of the Committee on Educational Affairs (CEA) brought an argument that the College should adopt a mandatory Credit/No Credit (C/NC) grading policy for students in their first semester at the College. On April 3, faculty were informed about this argument, which will be a topic of discussion at the faculty meeting this afternoon.

This suggestion was based on similar policies at peer institutions, like Swarthmore, MIT, and Wellesley, where first-year students still receive letter grades on all course components, but receive “credit” or “no credit” designations on their official transcripts (i.e. shadow grading). The argument claims that grade-induced academic expectations are stressful and that students’ mental health and social relationships will improve under a C/NC system while keeping students’ long-term academic performance intact. 

What proponents of the argument fail to realize is that adopting the policy could, in fact, result in significant academic harm, especially for students who do not come from elite academic backgrounds. Although there will not be a motion to adopt the policy at this afternoon’s meeting — the CEA brought this topic to the general faculty for discussion to build consensus on the “underlying value of the goals” — I think it is important to share my opinion here, because many students are not familiar with this argument and many professors who share my feelings are afraid to voice opposition due to the framing’s focus on mental health, grades, and minorities.

The argument claims that grades given in the first semester harm various marginalized groups. It asserts that “isolation, stress and a myopic focus on academics … are differentially demanding for marginalized students, whether based on their racial identity, class, sexual orientation or any otherness.” While I appreciate the empathy for marginalized groups, this framing stifles debate. Because the argument is framed as “reducing harm towards minorities,” professors and students opposed to the argument will be afraid of voicing concerns or offering arguments against it lest they be perceived as callous or bigoted. 

As Luana points out later, she herself, as a Brazilian student entering an American graduate school (Cornell), and coming from a dysfunctional educational system, well knows motivating value of assessing merit. You can’t do that with a pass/no pass system.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “rogues”,  came with an email note:

It must be true. It’s in a hadith!

Yep, it’s the old “turtles all the way down” answer to the question “But who made “Allah,”, except this time delivered with pebbles!

And here’s that hadith:

The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said to me: they (the people) will constantly ask you, Abu Huraira, (about different things pertaining to religion) then they would say: Well, there is Allah, but after all who created Allah? He (Abu Huraira) narrated: Once we were in the mosque that some of the Bedouins came there and said: Well, there is Allah, but who created Allah? He (the narrator) said: I took hold of the pebbles in my fist and flung at them and remarked: Stand up, stand up (go away) my friend (the Holy Prophet) told the truth.

Reader Don McCrady sent some lovely photos of the eclipse (I thought readers would send ’em in en masse, but it didn’t happen). Don’t captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I thought you might like to show your readers some photos from this past Total Eclipse.

I flew down to a spot near Lampasas, Texas. Unfortunately, we had some issues with the clouds, but we did have sporadic clearing that allowed me to get some fairly good shots.

Here’s a shot from the partial phase as the moon encroaches the sun, here about to cover up the huge sunspot numbered 3628. This sunspot was easily visible to the naked eye through our eclipse glasses. (Even the Trumpanzees I was with were smart enough to wear them when looking at the eclipse.)

In this shot, the totality is just beginning and we can see Bailey’s Beads. These are the last vestiges of the sun as they become eclipsed behind the mountains and valleys of the moon’s surface, and are one of the most beautiful phenomenon to photograph during the eclipse.

Finally we have a shot near the end of totality showing the huge solar prominences, again visible to the naked eye.

These images were shot using a Canon EOS R5, a Canon RF100-500mm extended all the way to 500mm at f/8. Partial phases were shot through a mylar solar filter, and the totality was shot with no filter.

And from Susan Harrison:

The eclipse as seen from New York City:

 

What a pair! The renowned biologist and the hoax-exposer/mathematician, teamed up to attack the medical profession’s new and woke tendency to deny the existence of biological sex as a reality. (Yes, all animals have exactly two sexes, which are not made up by society.) This eloquent op-ed is in the Boston Globe, and you can click below to read it for free, or find it archived here (h/t Mark, Barry).

It’s the “sex assigned at birth” meme, which any fool knows was made up to pretend that biological sex doesn’t really exist in nature, but is merely a “social construct”. This is the same risible meme taken apart by Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven in a recent NYT op-ed. As Alan and Richard note below, the distortion of reality was made for ideological reasons—by gender activists who want to see biological sex as a spectrum, and that is based on the the insupportable view that if you distort biology, transgender or transsexual people will not be “erased”. But, as I’ve said ad infinitum, you don’t need to distort biology to justify treating such people with civility and respect, and to confer on them the same moral value as everyone else has.

The excerpt from the above speaks for itself, but has a lot of useful links to show how well the termites have dined.

The American Medical Association says that the word “sex” — as in male or female — is problematic and outdated; we should all now use the “more precise” phrase “sex assigned at birth.” The American Psychological Association concurs: Terms like “birth sex” and “natal sex” are “disparaging” and misleadingly “imply that sex is an immutable characteristic.” The American Academy of Pediatrics is on board too: “sex,” it declares, is “an assignment that is made at birth.” And now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urge us to say “assigned male/female at birth” or “designated male/female at birth” instead of “biologically male/female” or “genetically male/female.”

After discussing the biological definition of sex, which, as you know well by now involves differences in developmental systems that produce gametes of different size and mobility, Sokal and Dawkins give a sharp rap on the knuckles of the medical establishment. I’ve put the last two paragraphs in bold; the penultimate one shows the trend and motivation, while the last one shows the damage.

Much is speciously made of the fact that a very few humans are born with chromosomal patterns other than XX and XY. The most common, Klinefelter syndrome with XXY chromosomes, occurs in about 0.1 percent of live births; these individuals are anatomically male, though often infertile. Some extremely rare conditions, such as de la Chapelle syndrome (0.003 percent) and Swyer syndrome (0.0005 percent), arguably fall outside the standard male/female classification. Even so, the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology.

So where does this leave the medical associations’ claims about “sex assigned at birth”?

A baby’s name is assigned at birth; no one doubts that. But a baby’s sex is not “assigned”; it is determined at conception and is then observed at birth, first by examination of the external genital organs and then, in cases of doubt, by chromosomal analysis. Of course, any observation can be erroneous, and in rare cases the sex reported on the birth certificate is inaccurate and needs to be subsequently corrected. But the fallibility of observation does not change the fact that what is being observed — a person’s sex — is an objective biological reality, just like their blood group or fingerprint pattern, not something that is “assigned.” The medical associations’ pronouncements are social constructionism gone amok.

. . .For decades, feminists have protested against the neglect of sex as a variable in medical diagnosis and treatment, and the tacit assumption that women’s bodies react similarly to men’s bodies. Two years ago, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet finally acknowledged this criticism, but the editors apparently could not bring themselves to use the word “women.” Instead the journal’s cover proclaimed: “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.” But now even this double-edged concession may be lost, as the denial of biological sex threatens to undermine the training of future doctors.

The medical establishment’s newfound reluctance to speak honestly about biological reality most likely stems from a laudable desire to defend the human rights of transgender people. But while the goal is praiseworthy, the chosen method is misguided. Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned.”

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It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just. If the cause is truly just, then it can be defended in full acceptance of the facts about the real world.

And when an organization that proclaims itself scientific distorts the scientific facts in the service of a social cause, it undermines not only its own credibility but that of science generally. How can the public be expected to trust the medical establishment’s declarations on other controversial issues, such as vaccines — issues on which the medical consensus is indeed correct — when it has so visibly and blatantly misstated the facts about something so simple as sex?

 

Read also Byrne and Hooven; click below (or read it archived here):

Finally, the infamous Lancet cover:

Here’s a rare example of animal behavior being fossilized. In this case it’s in termites, whose modern representatives engage, as pairs, in a behavior called “tandem running”. This occurs after a group of reproductive termites  who have left their natal nest fly away, a behavior certainly evolved as a way of staring new colonies.  Unlike other social insects like bees, a termite colony contains both reproductive males and females, both of which have wings, eyes, and the capacity to mate and start new colonies (other workers lack wings and eyes). At mating time, a swarm of reproductive individuals fly away at random (they’re not good fliers), and then alight on the ground or, in the case at hand, on a tree trunk.  After dropping their wings, they form mating pairs, each of which can start a new colony. To find that colony, a male and a female engage in “tandem running,” with (in the species below) the female running around with the male close behind, his head contacting her abdomen. Apparently some species can have either a male or a female as the leader in the tandem run. I can’t find out whether mating occurs before the tandem run or after the pair burrow into the ground to found their new colony.

When the female finds a site she likes, the pair digs in (most termites nest underground), and, after mating, the female becomes the “queen”, and the male the “king”.  They remain monogamous, with the male continuing to fertilize the female throughout the life of the colony. This implies that all the termites in a colony are brothers and sisters. Since “kings” and “queens” can live for decades (25-50 years, according to one site, the colony can last a long time sending out reproductives to found new colonies.

At any rate, below you can see two examples of tandem running in reproductive alates (winged termites that have lost their wings). This is the behavior that appears to have been “fossilized”.

The YouTube notes:

When male and female termite alates (flying termites) pair up, they break off their wings and the male starts following the female around until she finds a suitable spot to start a new nest. This activity is called termite tandem running.

And so to the new paper in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, which you can read by clicking on the title below or reading the pdf here.

The authors had a piece of 38-million-year-old Baltic amber, which is fossilized plant resin. (Baltic amber containing animal or plant inclusions like this can sell for a lot of money.) When resin or sap falls to the ground, it can, over long periods, be converted to amber by pressure and temperature of the sediments above. Eventually it becomes quite hard and can be mined.

In one pice of amber, the authors found two termites that looked as if they might have been tandem running when they got stuck in the sap and then preserved. Here’s a photo of their specimen, which is of the extinct species Electrotermis affinis.  The caption to the partial figure below is “E. affinis pair in Baltic amber. (A and B) The dorsal and ventral sides of the tandem, respectively, with (B) an arrow pointing to the 15-articles antenna of the tandem leader.”  The scale bars represent 0.5 mm.

This certainly looks like a tandem pair, but the problem is that they are not straight head-to-abdomen, but twisted a bit, so they are more side to side.  Because it’s hard to get a good look at specimens in amber, and you can’t cut the amber open (that destroys the specimen), the authors used  X-ray microtomography (a 3-D reconstruction using X rays) to show that the male is the one on the right in (A) and left in the ventral view (B); he’s smaller and the sexes can be told apart by the shape of the seventh “sternite”, or abdominal plate. They also saw that the female’s mouthparts were in contact with the tip of the male’s abdomen, which is what happens in tandem running.  So we have a male and female in the right contact position, buttressing the idea that this is a tandem pair.

The authors then hypothesized that this was indeed a pair that was doing tandem running (probably on a tree) when they got stuck in sap, and the side-by-side position resulted from the pair trying to get unstuck.  They failed, and eventually became part of a piece of amber.

To test this “position change” hypothesis, they put tandem-running termites of a living species, Coptotermes formosanus, in a sticky trap, a flat piece of cardboard covered with a sticky substance (I used them in the lab to catch cockroaches). This mimics a pair getting stuck in resin, and, as in resin, the pair could move around a bit after they got stuck.  Would the tandem runners move more side by side?

Indeed they did. The stickiness led to the tandem pair shifting their positions as they tried to free themselves. In fact, they assumed a more side by side position once stuck. (I have to say that I find this experiment disturbing, as it involves killing insects for the sake of science. However, I killed cockroaches to keep my lab free of organisms other than fruit flies.)

Here’s what they found in 17 termites that didn’t escape the trap:

The spatial orientation of the leader and the follower after entrapment was significantly different than in natural tandem runs. The distance between the body centroids of the leader and the follower was smaller in trapped pairs than in natural tandems (Fig. 2 D–G and SI Appendix, Fig. S2, Exact Wilcoxon rank sum test, W = 599, P < 0.001). This is because partners of trapped pairs were often positioned side-by-side, differing from the linear positioning of natural tandems (Fig. 2 D–G). The shorter inter-individual distance could result from the two individuals entering the sticky surface together and becoming stuck near each other without the ability to move away, rather than their active behavioral interactions to maintain proximity.

And a picture of a living tandem pair (female in front) that wound up stuck more side by side, like the fossilized ones above:

(From paper): The relative position of females and males forming mating pairs. (A–C) Mating pairs of the termite C. formosanus in (A) a natural tandem run and (B and C) on a sticky surface. Females are marked in red and males in blue. The convoluted lines indicate the trajectories of a female and a male during 30 min after the pair entered the sticky trap.

They also concluded, from a complicated logistic regression, that the probability was 74% that the following individual was a female.

Finally, here’s a reconstruction in the paper of the original event that led to the fossil. Note that the “fossilized behavior” term is a bit incorrect, as what gets fossilized is not their normal behavior, but what seems to be the behavior of a tandemly running pair that’s gotten stuck.  But given that there are individuals of both sexes in this pair, and that the antennae contact the abdomen, combined with what’s seen in the “resin mimicking” experiment, it’s seems likely that the authors are correct.

(from paper) Artistic reconstruction of E. affinis tandem pairs running freely on a tree bark and one tandem trapped by tree-resin.

What about other examples of fossilized behavior? I want to put in a paragraph about this from the paper, just for your delectation:

Some fossils preserve the “frozen” behavior of animals in actions at the moment of death (9, 10). However, our results demonstrate that animals on the sticky trap are not instantaneously immobilized and change their postures on the surface. These experiments imply that the spatial orientation of animals preserved in sticky matrices, such as in tree resin prior to fossilization into amber, is influenced by the process of entrapment. Therefore, the interpretation of fossilized behavior can be dramatically refined or even corrected by observing the behavior of living organisms under entrapment conditions. Some behaviors fossilized in amber may remain unaltered by the entrapment process. For example, the preservation of mating moths in copula (14) or hell ants grasping prey items (12) suggests that the inter-individual interactions of these behaviors are strong enough not to be disturbed by the movement on the sticky surface. However, entrapment in amber likely affects many other behaviors. For example, insects dispersing through phoresy [attachment to other insects as a way of moving around] can be preserved detached from the host insect, perhaps because the host struggled on the sticky surface before complete encasement (37). The consequence of different behavioral responses can be studied using extant relatives. Furthermore, animals have evolved behavioral responses to sticky objects. For example, recent studies have revealed that ants are not passively affected by sticky objects but actively modify them. Red imported fire ants cover sticky surfaces with soil particles to access food resources (38), and granivorous desert ants remove sticky spider webs from nestmates to rescue them (39). Scavenging insects can be attracted by large animals trapped on a sticky surface (11, 35), and the spatial distribution of these insects may have reflected their foraging behavior. Thus, future studies on behavioral responses to sticky objects by animals will increase our understanding of fossil records in amber, as well as shed light on the behavioral capacity of extant insects.

I found it really interesting that ants can get around the danger of sticky substrates by covering them with soil, and can even remove spider web stuck to other ants. Ants have brains about the size of a grain of sand, but this behavior is somehow coded in there (or else they learn to do this, which seems less likely).

********

Reference: K. Mizumoto et al, 2024.  Extinct and extant termites reveal the fidelity of behavior fossilization in amber.  Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2308922121

 

We’re almost at the bottom of the tank again, so please send in your good photos. Thanks.

Today we have some fall photos from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous. But he/she added this:

 I’ve attached some pics of fall foliage, from right here at my home in NY’s Hudson Valley.

There’s a new 38-minute movie out, “Man of Steele”, made by filmmaker Eli Steele about diversity, the attempted removal of AP classes, and antisemitism in a ritzy California school district.  The movie, however, was was apparently removed from both YouTube and Vimeo—just for two seconds of video that someone claimed constituted “copyright infringement”. It appears to be fair usage, which isn’t really infringement, but fortunately you can still watch the movie. As Steele notes in the second headline below (click on each one to read):

The complainant was Menlo-Atherton High School’s newspaper, M-A Chronicle, and they objected to the inclusion of a two-second clip in the Killing America trailer. I checked the trailer’s YouTube page and, indeed, it had been removed.

Here’s are three Substack sites that explain the situation (the links to the movie are below, or you can click on the first headline).

I’ve watched the movie, and you won’t lose much more than half an hour if you do, but I have to say that it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, as it mixes together diverse subjects (removal of AP classes from a high school, equity, diversity, a school board’s musing over the advanced-placement classes, and the reaction of one parent whose son goes to the Bay Area school at issue).  Perhaps I was tired, but I didn’t find it particularly coherent. That said, it’s still worth watching to see the parents battle over whether “tracking” students creates inequities and is unfair, or whether it allows students to reach their full potential. It’s worth it to see the school board dissimulate, and it’s worth it to see the odious, antisemitic and pro-Palestinian lies that some teachers tell to their students. But the film fails explain clearly how equity is connected with anti-Semitism, although one can intuit that the connection is via a DEI mentality, which promotes equity and denigrates Jews at the same time (Jews are seen as white, oppressive colonialists). And the occasional insertion of Russian stuff, like their national anthem, baffles me. Is Steele saying that Marxism is behind some of this? Who knows?

In the end, one doesn’t know what happens in the school district, but perhaps because the school board hasn’t decided what to do.

Here, from one of the posts, is the creator’s explanation of why he wanted to get the movie out (I know him only by the name “Man of Steele”):

That is why I’m releasing the film now — to force the following issues to the forefront:

• Free Speech — what are we teaching students at high school newspapers when we tell them to embrace censorship, not free speech, as their weapon of choice?
• Artistic Expression — are we going to let documentaries and other art forms be censored by activists, especially those in wealthy, elite neighborhoods?
• Hate/Antisemitism — Why has this school and district largely ignored the rising antisemitism on campus? We know if it was blacks who were on the receiving end, the response would be different. This double-standard must end.
• Ideological Capture/Lowering of Education Standards — For too long these education activists, many from Stanford University and beyond, have been given free reign to impose their ideologies onto students. As a result, the quality of education has declined significantly.

People often ask why I made Killing America and Diana Blum, the film’s main subject, once said something that summed up my thoughts perfectly: “With this film, I wanted to give parents a voice because they’ve been silenced and ridiculed for so long by the school board, activist teachers, and the school authorities. This film is our way to get around that ideological resistance and be heard for once and for all.”

I don’t have to say it but the irony here is that it is these education ideologues that are trying to take our voice away once again.

To watch the movie, click on the headline below, go here (same place), or watch it on Steele’s tweet below.

Again, I emphasize that you should watch this movie, but realize that it’s not a fully-formed documentary. The fact that the school is trying to censor it on trivial grounds tells you all you need to know.

After enduring a week of unwarranted takedowns of the Killing America trailer on @Youtube and @Vimeo as well as receiving a baseless cease and desist letter that seeks to prevent my documentary from being shown in its original form, I’ve decided to release the full (38 min)… pic.twitter.com/KL6RxeJ3KE

— Eli Steele (@Hebro_Steele) April 5, 2024

If you want to donate to Steele to support the movie, go here. I also found this on the donation page, which clarifies the film a bit.

THE STORY: In August of 2023, I was contacted by Bay Area parents who recently learned that Sequoia Union High School District had been removing honors classes for the past 8 years. Not only that, they were infusing other classes with liberated ethnic studies curricula. At first, I thought that this was an old story. We saw how Virginia and Manhattan parents fought over the schools for the past three years.

Then October 7 happened.

It quickly became apparent to us how the immediate and unapologetic rise in antisemitism in the Bay Area schools was related to the elimination of honors classes as well as the oppressor-oppressed model that ethnic studies brought into the classroom. We knew then that we had a film here and “Killing America” is the result.

h/t: Luana

 

I’ve posted fairly often on the videos of German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder , who posted YouTube videos dealing not only with her heterodox approach to modern physics, but also with subjects like consciousness, free will, and transsexuality. According to Wikipedia, her most recent academic positions were at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (until 2023) and since then at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich’s Center for Mathematical Philosophy. (Her personal website is here.)

No longer. In this 14-minute video called “I failed,” Hossenfelder explains why she now has no formal academic job but is doing only YouTube videos.

The story is familiar to many Americans. Unable to secure a permanent, tenured position, Hossenfelder was told that because she was a woman, she should apply for female-limited scholarships that weren’t tenured and depended on getting grants to get a salary.  So, as for many academics in America, that academic job depended on getting grants. And those grants come with substantial “overhead” given to the institution: money that can be used to support other endeavors of the institution. (In America, federal grants can come with 50% or higher overhead, so if you get a million bucks for your own research, the institution gets $500,000+ on top of that. It’s supposed to be used to support the infrastructure of your lab, like water, electricity, maintenance, and the like, but the university simply puts it in a big pot and uses it for nearly anything.)

This system is a way to turn untenured faculty into money earners to support the institution, and explains why so many faculty, tenured or otherwise, are under constant pressure to get grants. Even if you have tenure, in many places your promotion and salary increases depend getting grants, though the University of Chicago is one of the few places I know of in which discussion of grants is forbidden when the tenure and promotion committee decides your fate. Research accomplishment, service to the university, and teaching are all that matters.

As an untenured academic, Sabine had no security, and on top of that she became part of the system (also prevalent in America), in which a senior professor heading a lab simply tells his minions what to do and then slaps his or her name on whatever papers come out of the lab. This “paper production machine,” as Sabine calls it, is a way for the Boss to get a c.v. bloated with many papers on which he or she didn’t do any work, but procured the money to support. In other words, the Boss writes the grants and the minions do the work that helps the Boss advance and get further grants.

I have to say that I find this system repugnant, but it’s what both Americans and Sabine have to deal with. I avoided it by doing my own research with my own hands—after all, that, and not writing grants, was the fun part—and by not putting my name on papers in which I didn’t actively participate (correcting a student’s paper or just funding the work doesn’t count!). But I also discovered that the NIH, which funded my research throughout my career, didn’t care whether or not my name was on the papers I listed as “accomplishments” in my grant proposals; they wanted only to see what you had done with the money (i.e., how many decent papers came out of my lab, whether or not I was an author). Thank goodness for that! But see below for its effects on my psyche.

But I digress. Sabine went through a series of jobs and grants, constrained by the German system to do research that was a bit “edgy,” but not the kind of research she wanted to do. Caught up on this grant-and-paper recursion, unable to do the research she loved, and married (with twins) to a man who worked in Sweden (e.g., commuting), she became unhappy and depressed.  Eventually, as she says, she applied for grants in areas where she did want to work, but she didn’t get grant funding. Without that money, she didn’t have a job.  And so she had to leave academia.

As she says matter-of-factly (but clearly distressed), her academic career finished as “the story of a young scientist whose dreams died” and “the story of an old scientist who thinks they a who could have made a difference if it hadn’t been necessary to get past five reviewers who didn’t share [her] interests.” She tries to put a good face on her tale by saying that she found on YouTube “a community of people” who share her interests. In the end, she says she’s found an honest trade by swapping knowledge for viewers’ attention.

The video ends with a bump as she says, “I’m not sure if I’m going to post this video. It’s a bit too much, isn’t it?”  She did post it. No, it’s not too much, though it’s sad and it tells you how the system works for both tenured and untenured academics.

Watch below, and then I’ll say a bit more afterwards.

I want to tell a personal story that buttresses Sabine’s tale of the importance of grants. From the beginning of my career, it was necessary to get federal grants, and for two reasons. Most important, I was an experimental evolutionary geneticist, and needed money to support my lab and my students.  Your “setup” money that they give you when you begin a job (my first position was at the University of Maryland) runs out after a year or two, and you have to start writing grants as soon as your butt hits your first office chair.

Second, at Maryland grants were important to do the research that would get you promoted to tenure. Even at Chicago, I couldn’t do lab work or support my Ph.D. students unless I had a grant. And without research and publications, one couldn’t do the work you wanted, and your career would tank.

Fortunately, I was funded by the NIH from the outset, and was lucky enough to keep the same grant for 33 years without an interruption of funding. (There was pressure to get more than one grant, but I resisted it; I was happy with a single grant that could fund the work I wanted to do, and didn’t want to spend my life writing grants so I could be part of “the paper production machine.”) Grants are hard to write, and I usually began writing one six months before it was due.

The way the NIH informs you of your fate is first via a letter—a letter in which there is a pink piece of paper that gives you your rating: at that time ratings went from 100 (best) to 500 (worst).  That number give you an idea if your grant fared well, but whether or not you get funded came via a subsequent phone call.  I remember how my hands shook when I opened the NIH letters, and how pleased I was to see a good score (my last one was 103, nearly perfect).  From the score, you had a good idea if you’d get funded, and, after the phone call confirming that came, I was very happy that I had another 3 years of funding (I had 11 straight funding bouts).

But, as a lugubrious Jew (is that redundant?), my happiness was ephemeral. For I almost immediately began worrying about the NEXT grant. Would I be able to do the research I was just funded for so that I could get the grant renewed again?

The day I decided to retire, I felt a great weight lift off my shoulders, but I didn’t understand why. Then I realized: I never had to apply for another grant again! It turns out that during my whole career, the fear of losing my grant had gnawed silently at my insides, like a tapeworm. Now there was no more fear, and for several years I simply enjoyed my research and stopped worrying about grant deadlines and renewals.

The upshot is that I fully understand Sabine’s malaise.  The academic grant-and-paper system isn’t great, but I don’t see an alternative right now. But I do know that grants should be given for research accomplished rather than research proposed (the latter, occupying about 15 single-spaced pages, is what took me so long to write a grant). If this alternative were the case, I wouldn’t have had to spend six months planning what I would do in advance—a nearly impossible task anyway.  I understand, although I may be wrong, that this is how the Canadian granting system works: everyone gets some money for their first grant, and then for subsequent grants you write a very short proposal whose kernel is describing what you did (and published) with the last grant. If you keep your record of accomplishment going, you keep getting your grant. That system saves an enormous amount of time.

h/t Norm

We’re back because a few readers have sent in some photos, but I can always use more.  Today we have Doug Hayes of Richmond, Virginia, of “Breakfast Crew” fame, giving us a view of the latest crew. Doug’s notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The Breakfast Crew is becoming more active now that warmer weather has arrived. My neighbor and I also took trips out to the Chamberlane Swamp and to the Richmond Flood Wall to check on some of our favorite birds.

The dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) are still hanging around the yard. We only got a dusting of snow a few months ago, but the snowbirds are still here:

Lots of male Northern Cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) are zipping around the neighborhood, squabbling with each other and staking out territory as mating season draws near. This guy was hanging out in our front yard, keeping watch for rivals:

This American Robin (Turdus migratorius) decided to check out the suet:

A male House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) enjoying a hearty breakfast:

I’m seeing more Eastern bluebirds (Sialia sialis) this year than previously. They have also turned up earlier than usual:

A juvenile European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) waiting his turn at the suet feeder:

Carolina wrens (Thryothorus ludovicianus) are the most numerous birds in the yard after sparrows. They seem to have an endless curiosity about everything, going inside boxes, under tarps and poking around objects left on the patio table:

There has been a population explosion among Chipping Sparrows (Spizella passerina). Huge flocks of these little birds have shown up in the past few weeks:

A few Brown Thrashers (Toxostoma rufum) have been living on the edges of the yard for some time, usually keeping close to the bushes and trees. This one finally figured out how to get to the suet feeder:

Northern Mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos) usually keep to the yards across the street and it is unusual to see them in my back yard. This one decided to go for the suet:

Downy woodpeckers (Picoides pubescens) are quite common throughout the neighborhood. Several are regulars at the feeders:

This striking-looking Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura) showed up a couple of weeks ago. A change from the usual gray:

My neighbor and I took a quick trip to the Chamberlane Swamp a few days ago, but it was something of a disappointment. Only a handful of great egrets (Ardea alba) were around, but I got a nice shot of this one taking flight:

The James River was very high thanks to recent heavy rains. The swift current didn’t stop the Double-crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) from diving and fishing:

Large numbers of Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) were out along the James River, but fishing was poor due to the high, fast-moving water. This bird perched on the flood wall, keeping a watch for fish and rival ospreys:

Camera info:  Sony A7RV mirrorless body, Sony FE 200-600 zoom lens and 1.4X teleconverter, all shots hand-held. Photos processed with Adobe Photoshop 2024 and Topaz Photo AI for noise reduction in high ISO shots.

It’s very strange that there are some people who claim that there is no real difference in the harmfulness of different religions as practiced during our day. As nearly all the Four Horsemen maintained (and Sam Harris continues to do so eloquently), Islam is the faith that, as practiced now, causes more harm than any other faith, and certainly more harm than does Christianity. And yes, I freely admit that between the 12th to the 18th centuries—the period of the Inquisition—Christianity was the world’s most harmful faith. But we mustn’t forget the Aztecs, who routinely engaged in mass and gruesome murders of both their own people and prisoners.

But now the most pernicious faith seems to be Islam. Certainly many Muslims (and I know some) practice their faith benignly and even charitably. But many others don’t, and they enable harms throughout the world—harms that were never produced by Christianity or that have been largely abandoned by them. Here are some practices promoted or exacerbated by Islamic doctrine:

• Islamism: the desire to dominate the world with Islamic doctrine, including sharia law
• The codified oppression of women. In many places women must be veiled, put into cloth sacks, can’t go out without a male guardian, can’t go to school or get many jobs, must walk behind their husbands, can be beaten (or divorced) by their husbands without sanction, can be stoned to death for adultery (a practice just resumed by the Taliban in Afghanistan), and so on.
• Honor culture: killing of family members who supposedly sully a family’s “honor”
• Female genital mutilation, which is encouraged in many places by Islam
• Sharia law, which is also oppressive. For example, the testimony of women under sharia law counts only half as much as a man’s
• The oppression of gays, including outright murder in places like Gaza and legal execution in places like Iran.
• Blasphemy laws, under which you can be killed for insulting Islam or burning the Qur’an
• The demonization and sometimes the killing of apostates or atheists
• The issuing of fatwas when Westerners insult Islam, sometimes calling for killing those perceived to insult the religion (Charlie Hebdo, Salman Rushdie, etc.). This is connected with the blasphemy laws mentioned above
• Divisiveness within the religion that leads to war and death: Sunnis kill Shiites and vice versa, so there are internecine killings as well as cross-cultural killing
• The propagation of hatred of Jews and propagandizing of the young
• Favoring religious teaching in madrassas above secular teaching
• The suppression of freedom of speech in general, particularly that which criticizes the government, often an explicitly Islamic government.  Masih Alinejad, for instance, fears for her life in America because she criticizes Iran, which has tried to both kill and kidnap her in separate incidents. Why? Because she’s against mandatory wearing of the headscarf (hijab) for women.

I could go on, but I’ll stop here so I can finish this post.

While I suppose you can find instances of some of these practices among Christians (e.g. honor killings, Orthodox Jews inhibiting secular learning, the demonization of gays), you would be a fool to say that the harm caused by Islam, as instantiated by the acts above, is as serious as that caused by Christianity in our era. There’s simply no argument to be made for it.

Except, of course, by P. Z. Myers, because Richard Dawkins has just defended Christianity against Islam in the way I have above, and we all know that P. Z. Myers is obsessed with criticizing Dawkins. And so Myers does, in a deeply misguided and logically confused piece on Pharyngula called “Banality and bigotry“.  The point Myers wants to make is that Dawkins, as a “cultural Christian” who also sees modern Christianity as morally superior to modern Islam, is thus bigot against Islam—an “Islamophobe”, if you will. (I prefer to think of “Islamophobia” as “fear of the consequences of Islam, which isn’t bigotry.) I won’t psychologize Myers, as I just want to rebut his argument, but I’d suggest that he reflect on his obsessive animus against Dawkins.  In this case, the animus has forced Myers to twist the facts to imply that Christianity is precisely as bad for the world as is Islam.

Myers’s jihad comes from the video below, in which Dawkins conveys an “Easter message” of the moral superiority of Christian behavior over Muslim behavior—comparing behaviors based on religious dictates. The interlocutor is journalist Rachel Johnson, and the venue is LBC, originally the London Broadcasting Company. It’s an interesting discussion, for Richard also queries Johnson about her own beliefs, sometimes making her squirm.

But the main error of both her queries as well as Myers’s article is to claim that because there are bad behaviors inspired by both Christianity and Islam, they must be equally bad. And if you say that, you’re a bigot. The error, of course, is the neglect of the real issue: how often do bad behavior promoted by the two faiths occur?  Further, says Myers, both the Bible and Qur’an promote some bad behaviors, so the two faiths again must be pretty much equally bad. Here I’d disagree, maintaining that the Qu’ran is full of more hatred, animus, and oppressive dictates than is the Bible. (Yes, I’ve read both.) But that’s really irrelevant to the question at hand, as most modern Christians don’t follow the bad parts of the Bible, while the Qur’an hasn’t been equally defanged.

Click to listen:

Dawkins mentions some of the bad behaviors inspired by Islam that I’ve listed above, including hostility to women and gays. He adds that “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time. It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in the way Islam is not.”  It seems clear that he’s referring to behaviors emanating from the religions today, which is further clarified when Dawkins says that, if given a choice, he’d prefer to to live in a culturally Christian than in a Muslim country—though he “doesn’t believe a word of Christian faith”.

I’d agree, and I’m betting that, given a choice of living in the U.S. or U.K. on the one hand or Iran or Afghanistan on the other, Myers would choose the Christian countries. You don’t have to believe the tenets of Christianity to make that no-brainer choice, nor do you have to believe that liberal democracies are the inevitable result of Christianity. It’s simply a matter of the average well-being in a country taken across all of its inhabitants.

Here, however, is how Myers deals with Dawkins’s claim that he’s a “cultural Christian” because he likes church music and cathedrals, even though he entirely rejects Christian doctrine:

 It’s meaningless and trivial to say that we have all been shaped by our environment…although, of course, many Christian believers think that this is a huge deal and are acting as if Dawkins has renounced his unbelief.

He has not. What he then goes on to do, though, is to declare his bigotry, and that is what I find disturbing.

He likes hymns and cathedrals and parish churches — fine, uncontroversial, kind of boring, actually. But then he resents the idea that people would celebrate Ramadan instead of Christmas. Why? They both seem like nice holidays, that some people follow a different set of customs shouldn’t be a problem. Then he goes on to say that Christianity is “a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that Islam is not.”

How so? Because Islam is hostile to women and gays. He goes on to talk about how the Koran has a low regard for women.

Jesus. It’s true, but has this “cultural Christian” read the Bible? I don’t see any difference. The interviewer tries to bring up the record of actual practicing Christians, and he dismisses that as only those weird American protestants, as if jolly old England has no gay baiting, no murders of young women, and as if JK Rowling were just an open-minded, beneficent patron of the arts. Many American Christians are virulent homophobes who treat women as chattel, but his equally nasty culturally English Christianity has people and organizations that are just as awful.

70% of women teachers in the UK face misogyny. The British empire left a legacy of homophobia. The UK is so transphobic that some people are fleeing. Cultural Christianity does not seem to have made Great Britain a kinder, gentler place, but Dawkins must have some particularly rosy glasses that he wears at home, and takes off when he looks at any other country.

Dawkins has come out as sympathetic to Christianity, but only because it justifies his bigotry. At least he’s being open and honest about both biases.

Here Myers makes the two mistakes I mentioned above. First, he sees no difference between the proportion of bad stuff in the Bible and the bad stuff in the Qur’an. I do see a difference (I presume Myers has read both, as I have), but, as I said this is really irrelevant.

The main question is where one wants to live: in a Christian or a Muslim country, and whether Islam has more pernicious effects on the modern world than does Christianity. Which religion promotes behaviors that lead to a better, more desirable society?  To me the answer is clear, but apparently isn’t to either Myers or his faithful acolytes.  For crying out loud, America doesn’t systematically execute gays (yes, very rarely one gets killed). And yes, some Christians are “virulent homophobes”, but it’s insane to argue that, across all Americans (or American Christians), homophobia or oppression of women are just as bad as they are in Muslim societies. Perhaps 70% of women teachers in the UK have faced sexual harassment, a figure that is 70% too high, but in Muslim countries women can’t even become teachers, nor can women and girls become students. If you followed John Rawls and, behind the curtain of ignorance, had to choose whether you’d grow up as a women in a Muslim or Christian country, knowing nothing else about your circumstances, I think the choice would be clear.

The British empire left a legacy of homophobia? Well, I don’t know much whether that was a ubiquitous result of colonialism, but for the sake of argument I’ll agree. The point, however, is that homosexuality is a capital crime in many Muslim countries.  That’s why the notion of “gays for Palestine”, seen on some banners and placards, is so ridiculous. Below is a map showing where homosexuality is legal versus illegal.  Notice anything?

From Statista and Equaldex

Myers ends by accusing Richard of bigotry, presumably because Dawkins thinks that Christianity breeds better societies than does Islam. One can look up the data on various indices of social well being, happiness, and so on (the situation for gays is in the map above), and I’ll let the readers investigate, but the bullet points I’ve given already show that there are very great harms in some Muslim countries that one doesn’t find in majority Christian countries.

To conclude that Dawkins is a bigot, then, you have to not only cherry-pick the data and add confirmation bias, but also decide that making a rational argument supported by data is an instance of “bigotry”. This is the same error as concluding that it’s “Islamophobia”, a form of bigotry, to argue that Muslim societies are more dysfunctional than Christian (or atheist) ones.  In reality, you can hold the argument I’ve made above without being bigoted towards individual Muslims. “Islamophobia” should be a term for “fear of what Islam does”, rather than a form of bigotry.

It’s Sunday, and that means a dollop of photos from John Avise. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Here we have part 5 of John’s birding trip to Australia.

Australian Birds, Part 5 

This week’s post concludes a five-part mini-series on birds that I photographed on a business trip to Queensland, Australia in 2006.Then next week, PCC(E) willing, we can begin a tour of birds from several other countries. 

 Silver Gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae):

Spangled Drongo (Dicrurus bracteatus):

Spotted Catbird (Ailuroedus maculosus):

Straw-necked Ibis (Threskiornis spinicollis):

Wompoo Fruit Dove (Ptilinopus magnificus):

Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita):

White-bellied Cuckoo-shrike (Coracina papuensis):

White-breasted Woodswallows (Artamus leucorynchus) (they typically huddle like this when perched):

White-cheeked Honeyeater (Phylidonyris niger):

Garden Sunbird (Nectarinia jugularis), male:

Well, the headline is a bit hyperbolic, at least as far as losing the war is concerned, but it may not be far off. This hasn’t seemed to be announced in the MSM I read, but it’s all over the Israeli papers, like the Jersalem Post (click to read):

An excerpt:

The IDF on Sunday announced that it had concluded the active invasion stage of the war for now while leaving open the possibility of a future new invasion of Rafah in deep southern Gaza.

In terms of IDF soldiers, this means that the IDF has withdrawn all of Division 98 from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza while maintaining one plus brigades – the Nahal brigade and portions of Brigade 401 – in northern and central Gaza.

Although a top IDF official said that this change had nothing to do with US pressure, the timing was unmistakable in coming right after the IDF’s disastrous mistaken killing of seven humanitarian aid workers last week.

The decision also came less than two days after Israel opened the Erez Crossing and Ashdod port to transfer humanitarian aid, decisions made under threat by the US of potentially losing weapons support after Jerusalem had refused these requests from Washington for months.

Critically, this means that Palestinians can, on one hand, move freely within southern Gaza and Khan Yunis and that there is a complete vacuum for preventing a return of Hamas governance, but the IDF is keeping northern and central Gaza cut off from the south.

What this means, of course is that will be no invasion of Rafah, regardless of “the possibility of a future new invasion of Rafah in deep southern Gaza”.  This decision—which must have been made by Netanyahu, who has consistently and adamantly maintained that the goal of Israel was to destroy Hamas, and that couldn’t be done without taking Rafah—is baffling, and, I hear, has also baffled the Israeli people.  It means that Hamas, which has four brigades (and most hostages) sequestered in southern Gaza, has “a complete vacuum” for returning to power, at least in the south. It means that the most powerful leaders of Hamas, either in southern Gaza or Egypt (or some other country) remain alive to revitalize their terrorist organization.

And if Hamas returns to power in southern Gaza (can northern Gaza be far behind?), then Israel has lost the war. As one Israeli leader said (I can’t remember who), “there is no use in putting out three-quarters of a fire.” But that’s exactly what Israel has done.

Why did this happen? I have pondered the possibility that it may be a trick, but I don’t believe it. It almost surely results from pressure coming from the U.S., and if that’s the case, then America has achieved what I always said Biden wanted: for Israel to lose its ability to defend itself, and to remain surrounded by terrorists. He’d prefer to win an election than to lose Israel.

Any pressure from the U.S. surely intensified after the killing of seven humanitarian aid workers (though the U.S. killed far more innocents via “friendly fire”), and after the world, predictably, took the side of Palestine. I suspect Biden threatened Netanyahu with a complete cessation of future aid, and a severance of Israeli/US relations would be an absolute disaster for Israel.

What about the hostages? Who knows? They are undoubtedly with the Hamas leadership, and an attack to rescue them would be disastrous. But if Israel is this timorous, it will likely exchange thousands of jailed Palestinian terrorists, many of whom are in prison for killing Israelis, for a fraction of the remaining hostages, many of whom are now dead.  Hamas will keep others (the soldiers, young people, and younger men) to use as future bargaining chips.

In other words, in the War Cabinet’s own assessment of what it means to “win” this war, Israel has lost.  I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think Israel would lie about what it’s doing.