Why Evolution is True Feed

From yahoo!life, apparently originating at Fox News, we hear of a stray cat that interrupted a wedding.  The outcome was inevitable; click on screenshot below to read:

An excerpt:

A stray kitten was adopted by an adoring couple after she interrupted their wedding last year.

Cat owner Cara racked up over 3 million likes after posting video of her meow-filled wedding ceremony on TikTok. The wedding was held at Curry Estate in Hopewell Junction, New York in September 2023.

Video shows the groom reading his vows to the bride when audience members suddenly hear a cat – now named Daisy – loudly meowing.

Cara told Fox News Digital that she originally didn’t hear the chatty cat.

Here’s what I think is that the Tik Tok video:

@gatsby.and.daisy

The cat distrubtion system was working overtime for this one! #cat #weddingtok #catdistributionsystem

♬ Here Comes the Sun – Relaxing Instrumental Music

Besides the wedding, there is of course another happy ending: the stray kitten got adopted:

Cara’s sister, who served as the maid of honor, then called the couple’s attention to the matter.

“[She] kindly let us know that there was a cat right there meowing,” the wife explained. “She was so perfectly perched on a tree stump behind us demanding to be heard.”

According to Cara, she and her husband were already “huge cat people” before the ceremony – and the feline’s unexpected appearance was a highlight.

“We have a cat that we adopted together, Gatsby, [and] our friends have celebrity nicknamed us Catt (Cara + Matt), and we even had cat cake toppers,” she explained.

“It felt like this was all meant to be when she showed up.”

After the bride and groom fell in love with the kitten, the couple’s families and friends worked hard to look for her – but had no luck.

“All anyone could talk about was the cat. It was the highlight of the night… I knew we had to have her.”

All’s well that ends well:

Two weeks later, Cara and Matt were contacted by their wedding venue. After trying for days, staff were finally able to lure the stray with leftover shrimp from past weddings.

“We were on our honeymoon [when they said] they had gotten her and that she was headed to a shelter if we wanted to adopt her,” Cara explained.

Cara said Daisy perfectly integrated into her household. She was named after Daisy Buchanan from “The Great Gatsby” to match with her sibling, Gatsby.

“She is the most affectionate cat and loves nothing more than spending the day curled up inside our sweaters,” Cara said. “It got even better when our resident cat, Gatsby, befriended her so quickly.”

And a wonderful three-minute news video of the whole affair. Be sure to watch the whole thing showing Daisy finally adopted by the ailurophilic newlyweds.  I love that the cats are named after characters from The Great Gatsby.

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Ginger, who sent this video of a New Age full-body cat massage, said, “You don’t have to watch/listen to the whole thing, but that is one HAPPY cat!  Every cat should have such treatment a least a few times in their nine lives.”

The maker, itzblitzz, adds this note:

(Update: We adopted her). Hi everyone  In today’s video, I will be giving our current foster kitten a relaxing massage . This has been one of my most HIGHLY requested videos of all time! I hope you find it relaxing and enjoyable. We have fostered 4 cats so far this year and it has been a very rewarding experience. Start the video at 2:30 when the ad ends and the massage begins. It’s pretty New-Agey, so you can just look in on this 41-minute video. However, there’s no doubt that this is one happy cat!

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Here are three cat films, each of which purports to be the first video ever of a cat. But only the third one seems to have precedence.

First, an old silent film from 1906, colorized, fixed up and, most important, showing a CAT. Reader Jon says the short film is “a good way to modernize history (and show cats haven’t changed much over the years).”  This isn’t the earliest cat video, though; the two below it were made earlier.

The YouTube information (I didn’t alter caps or anhything):

We have learned so far that this film is “Le déjeuner des Minet” made in 1905, and released in 1906. This is a french movie, and many viewer lipread french words.

What we don’t know yet : The name of the director. The name of the young girl, and her grandmother,

Old film restoration with the following workflow : – Cleaning dust and scratches, degraining, stabilizing, sharpening, auto-levels and auto-white balance with AVISynth – Upscaled and Colorized using neural network to 4k – Frame interpolation up to 60 fps

And one from 1899 by Louis Lumière. It also claims to be the first cat video, but apparently it’s not.

This early silent film is the first cat video to be made in 1899 featuring a young girl feeding a rather energetic cat. The film was directed by Louis Lumière.

In fact, the REAL earliest video of a cat is this one released in 1894 by Thomas Edison Studios of two boxing cats.  I don’t like it because of the pugnacious, fighting moggies.  But the YouTube notes say this:

This film is the product of Thomas Edison’s (yes, that Thomas Edison!) Manufacturing Company. Why did the brilliant men – namely producer, W.K.L. Dickson – who worked for Thomas Edison feel that they needed to use this new technology to show the world “boxing cats” is a question that has boggled the minds of film historians for over 100 years.

 

h/t: Ginger K., Jon

Yes, I know that Harvard University has one big graduation for all undergraduates and grad students (I went to it when I got my Ph.D. in 1978; Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave the commencement address in a famous speech that called out the West for its “spiritual degeneration”).  At that time, there was but one “identity” ceremony that included everyone. E pluribus unum!  (One small exception: people who got their Ph.D.’s in different fields had separate degree-granting ceremonies.)

I’m not sure when this changed, but now Harvard has many different graduation ceremonies for different identity groups. And, of course, they are organized by the DEI office. Here’s this year’s panoply of “identity ceremonies” listed by the conservative National Review:

Harvard University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging will once again host “affinity celebrations” at its 2024 commencement, according to documents obtained by National Review.

Harvard plans to hold a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration” — which refers to LGBT students — a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” The university will also hold a central commencement ceremony for students of all backgrounds.

. . . . The only publicly available mention of affinity celebrations on any Harvard website is published on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ page. The note does not mention the specific events or groups recognized, simply describing them as “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from marginalized and underrepresented communities.”

“Desi-American” means people whose ancestry is Pacific Islander, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani or other Asians, identity groups that may not be so fond of each other! Is there any oppressed group missing here? The “First Generation-Low Income Celebration” puzzles me, as the two features don’t necessarily go together, and of course immediately upon leaving the ceremony the graduates have abandoned that identity.

There was one notable group missing at Harvard last year, and you can guess which one it was. That’s right—the Jews!  But now, facing a federal Title VI civil rights investigation for a campus climate of antisemitism, and the fracas around the “Jewish genocide” hearing in Congress that in the end brought down Harvard and Penn’s Presidents, the school decided it had better do something to effect some climate change, though not in the way that the antisemitic Greta Thunberg would favor.

Frankly, I think these separate graduations are ludicrous and, in the end, purely performative. Do they move society forward? No.  Are they divisive? Probably, in that they continue the obsessive academic focus on identity.  “Identity politics” isn’t inherently bad—after all, it was the impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. But these days, fostered and promoted by DEI offices, it has gone way too far, making someone’s identity, based on features they can’t control, the most important aspect of their persona. This is why Steve Pinker, who’s at Harvard and laid out in the Boston Globe a five-point plan for fixing Harvard that includes this recommendation:

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

It is, as I said, Harvard’s DEI office that creates these identity-based graduations, reinforcing the malign atmosphere Steve describes in his first paragraph. Am I happy that Harvard, under the gun for antisemitism, now includes a Jewish ceremony? No, of course not: it’s disgusting—pandering to both Jews and DEI in general. It is, after all, DEI that, by fostering a climate that sees Jews as white oppressor colonialists, fosters antisemitism.

This conclusion isn’t rocket science. One Jewish student is quoted in the National Review about the issue:

For some, like Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum — who spoke about the situation on the ground at his school during a House Education and Workforce Committee roundtable in late February — the addition of a separate celebration for Jewish students simply perpetuates the underlying dynamics driving antisemitism at Harvard.

“Rather than acknowledge the harmful ways in which Harvard DEI has contributed to campus antisemitism, the university further marginalizes individuals into groups of race, ethnicity, and religion,” Kestenbaum told National Review. “Harvard DEI is simply out of control.”

One way to stop this, as Steve suggests, is simply to disempower DEI.  Perhaps colleges can keep on staff a few individuals to whom one can bring complaints of bigotry, but there should be none of the training, propaganda, and divisivenesss that DEI sows on campus.  Even at the “free speech” University of Chicago, our climate is permeated by DEI, which sends me announcements of events on a nearly daily basis.

I have about three or four days’ worth of readers’ wildlife photos, but am going to dole them out every other day or so in the hopes that readers will step up and contribute. We shall, of course, have John Avise’s Sunday bird photos tomorrow, but I implore readers with good photos to sent them in.  We have never been so low before, and it’s worrisome. On the other hand, perhaps people don’t care if this feature remains, and in that case, I’ll let it taper off to the occasional post.

Truth be told, the world is quite depressing these days, with at least two wars in which one side is moral and the other immoral, the threat of Trump’s re-election looming, and, to top it all off, the Sun is going away on Monday. As le chien noir is here, posting may be light for a while

Please discuss what you want today: the wars, predictions about November’s election, or whatever.

Quillette has a published a “case study” showing how one transgender female athlete can wreak substantial damage not just on one woman, or on one sport, but on a ton of women and in five sports (basketball, rowing, volleyball, tae kwon do, and track).

I won’t belabor this, for I’ve already written a lot about the inherent athletic advantage of being male, most of which remain in place (sometimes to a lesser degree if there’s medical intervention) when a male identifies and lives as a woman. And the advantages don’t appear to abate with time, either. A related problem, besides unfair athletic advantage of transwomen in women’s sports, is injury to women by the stronger natal males (transwomen), also documented in the Quillette article whose headline is below.

It’s worth looking at this, and also at the Daily Mail article on the same athlete, if only to see the photos and videos, which tell the tale alone.

Click to read:

The venue is the KIPP Academy in Lynn, Massachusetts, and the school’s trans athlete is bearded, 6-foot-tall Lazuli Clark.  There’s no mention of whether he’s had hormone therapy or surgery, but I believe this is based solely on Clark’s self-identification since doctors aren’t mentioned.

Some quotes involving the different sports:

Basketball:

Thanks in large part to The Independent Council on Women’s Sport, an American-based advocacy group, almost 9-million people have seen the infamous video clip of Clark injuring a female opponent during a February 8 high-school basketball game. Clark, a student at KIPP Academy in Lynn, MA, also reportedly hurt two other girls during that same game. Following the third injury, the coach of the opposing team, Collegiate Charter of Lowell, MA, chose to forfeit the game rather than risk losing more players.

Here’s the video; note how Clark towers over the other girls and drags one to the ground as he shoots. Enlarge the video to see it:

Trans-identified male player for Kipp Academy in MA injured 3 girls before half time causing Lowell Collegiate Charter School to forfeit.

A man hitting a woman used to be called domestic abuse. Now it's called brave.

Who watches this & actually thinks this is "compassionate,… pic.twitter.com/ZLlqYH6iAs

— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) February 19, 2024

Three girls hurt in one game by this muscular beanpole! But, after negative publicity, KIPP Academy forfeited its last game and pulled itself out of the playoff bracket.

Volleyball:

Basketball isn’t Clark’s only sporting pursuit. By my count, Clark has opted into female categories in at least four separate sports. . .

These include volleyball, a sport in which the high-school senior was named a Commonwealth Atlantic Conference “all-star.” According to KIPP Academy Lynn statistics, Clark scored more kills during the 2023-24 volleyball season (171) than the rest of the team (131) combined. (A kill is defined as “an attack by a player that is not returnable by the receiving player on the opposing team and leads directly to a point or loss of rally.”) Clark also led the team in aces and blocked shots, and was tied for the team lead in total sets played, at 68. That makes 68 sets during which one of Clark’s female teammates was warming the bench while this biologically male athlete was racking up kills during KIPP’s 22-game schedule.

Track:

On May 30, 2023, Clark competed—as a female—in Lynn, MA’s All-City Track Championship, setting the all-time meet record (for females) in the 400-meter hurdles and shot put. Clark’s average shot-put distance of 41 feet, 2 inches was more than six feet longer than any female participant achieved at the 2023 state championship in the corresponding division. In both track categories, Clark’s female competitors were bumped down in the rankings as a result. That would include the female athletes who deserved to take first place in hurdles and shot put, but who instead had to console themselves with second.

A six-foot addition to a 35-foot shotput record clearly shows that something mre than female athletic ability is involved!

Rowing:

USRowing, which allows self-identified women, born as males, to compete as women, allowed Clark to join a private female rowing club (schools can’t afford their own rowing teams). As per USRowing’s policy transgender women, with all their male plumbing, are allowed to use the women’s locker room.

Recently, Quillette received a leaked copy of an October 12, 2022 letter sent to the United States Rowing Association (commonly known as USRowing), the sport’s national governing body, in which 15 parents of elite female Massachusetts-resident rowers detailed their concerns about Clark.

In an interview with Quillette, one of the signatories reported that Clark joined the female rowing club in 2021, after placing poorly (“near the bottom,” by this parent’s account) with the club’s corresponding male team. Clark reportedly didn’t bother to shave or otherwise maintain the outward aesthetic pretenses of female gender identification, and even continued to wear the male club’s uniform.

In one documented 2022 incident, it is alleged, Clark walked into the girls’ changing room, spotted a female rower who was topless, and made a lewd comment about her breasts (“Oooh, titties”). As a result, documents reviewed by Quillette indicate, Clark was reported by team officials to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a congressionally mandated body dedicated to “ending sexual, physical, and emotional abuse on behalf of athletes everywhere.” After SafeSport took action in late 2022, Clark never rowed for the club again—in either gender category. (Efforts to contact Clark or adult members of Clark’s family about these allegations, as well as other events described in this article, were unsuccessful.)

It’s no surprise, then, that Clark’s prowess in rowing against natal women hasn’t been documented.  The Daily Fail reports that Clark is also competing in tae kwon do.

Why is this allowed to continue—at the expense of women’s safety, women’s self-esteem, and women’s enthusiasm for sport?  We already know why: it’s gender activism, which has, largely by guilt tripping and employing the mantra “trans women are women”, allowed natal men, sometimes without medical treatment, to simply say they’re women (yes, they may identify as women, but that’s irrelevant to the issue). This policy has largely been supported by the Biden administration.

Quillette gives at least two reasons more: fear on the part of the female athletes and “activist talking points”.

From the letter from the parents of female rowers:

 The October 12, 2022 letter to USRowing reads, in part, as follows:

Our daughters have stayed quiet because they are afraid. We tried to speak up for them, and we were shut down. We tried to speak to leadership at all levels. [But] name-calling and the threat of mental health is being used as emotional blackmail to keep us all quiet while women are harmed and devalued…Our daughters also faced a locker room situation where they were uncomfortable…They stopped changing in the locker room and began to hide away. These young girls should never have been put through being told they had to face a male body everyday as they undressed…It was a constant thought, a constant threat to submit and a constant awareness. Yet they dared not say anything (except privately to their parents). The rowing team also required the male athlete to room with them on trips. The girls spoke to us about quitting rowing because of the intimidation of being forced to be in a hotel room alone with a male.

There’s also a pervasive fear on the part of women athletes of being called a “transphobe.”

Finally, activist talking points:

A second reason such farces are tolerated is that male athletes who invade female athletic spaces have become experts at reciting the same activist talking points that USRowing and other sports organizations have used to gaslight concerned parents. A common rhetorical strategy here is to suggest that any expression of concern for the integrity of female sports categories (or the emotional well-being of girls) serves to channel a form of conservative political extremism, which in turn nullifies the very “existence” of trans-identified individuals.

A 2023 media profile of Clark, for instance, has the high school senior lamenting (in the words of a The74 reporter) “how difficult it can be to focus on school when some policymakers are passing laws against her identity.” According to Clark,

going to school is the least of people’s concerns at this point for a lot of people. There are days where I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I have to worry about my [Advanced Placement] U.S. history project, and yesterday another state basically made it so that I can never exist in that state.’ And it’s like, how’s anyone supposed to think about anything at all when there’s all of that going on?

I hardly need add, since I’ve said this many times before, that I don’t think transmales or transfemales should be the subject of bigotry, incivility, or unequal treatment—except when the unequal treatment involves things like rape counseling, sports, or incarceration. In all other respects, equality.  I am not a transphobe, nor do I think trans people should be “erased”.  But it seems to me that when the familiar mantra comes into conflict with fundamental fairness of separate women’s sports (or jails), it has to give way.

The whole issue is summed up in this cover of the British Journal of Sports Medicine from last May, which is reproduced the Quillette article.  I couldn’t believe it was real, but then found it in a tweet by an author of one of that issue’s articles (there’s also an article on transgender participation in sport), and then checked the cover of the issue in our library. Yes, it’s real. If I’m not mistaken, this shows the dangers of transwomen participating in rugby. (If that huge player is really a natal women, I retract what I said!):

h/t: Mike

Well, here we are ninety years after the Nazis began persecuting Jews in Germany, and I guess the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is feeling guilty for having completely ignored that persecution until the war was nearly over (1944). No matter that none of the editors of the journal back then are still active, much less alive: they still feel that a long apology is in order.

I guess I don’t mind their late mea culpa (it’s five pages long), and I’m not even sure a medical journal should take political stands, but in this case the Nazis affected the practice of medicine in Germany. For one thing, they fired more than 3,000 Jewish doctors, and, of course, later sent them to the camps. And the Nazi doctors were, of course, often complicit in medical outrages, like the euthanasia of the mentally ill and the gruesome and torturous experiments on inmates in concentration camps.  One could, I suppose, make a Kalven-like case that the Nazis were indeed hurting the practice of medicine (though in a different country), and so their crimes fall under the ambit of NEJM.

And so the NEJM editors, recognizing that other journals, like the Journal of the American Medical Association and Science, did call out Nazi atrocities, are trying to catch up. Unfortunately, they coopt the language of DEI to explain the journal’s ignoring of Nazi atrocities.

Here’s how the journal begins its admission of ignorance, willful or otherwise. I’ve put links to key articles they reference that are on the Internet rather than their footnotes:

Hitler was first specifically mentioned in the Journal in 1935, in an article by Michael M. Davis, a noted American health expert and reformer, and his collaborator Gertrud Kroeger, a leading German nurse. Yet between this article and 1944, when Nazi war crimes were first explicitly acknowledged in an editorial, the Journal remained all but silent regarding the deeply antisemitic and racist motives of Nazi science and medicine and the threat to the “ideals” of civilization. . . .

Articles on Germany or Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s are overwhelmingly about the compulsory and oversubscribed sickness insurance system, “socialized medicine,” and “quackery,” not the persecution and mass extermination of Jews. In fact, when it did address Nazi “medical” practices, the Journal enthusiastically praised German forced sterilization and the restrictive alcohol policies of the Hitler Youth.

Finally, the Nazi Reckoning after 14 years:

But when the Allied powers liberated the concentration camps, it became clear, as the so-called Doctors’ Trial (1946–1947) categorically demonstrated, that the medical profession in Germany embraced Nazism’s antisemitic and eugenic ideology8 and was deeply complicit in the implementation of mass extermination. The crimes of the Nazi state could no longer be ignored. The first Journal article explicitly damning Nazi medical atrocities is a 1949 article by Leo Alexander, a Viennese-born American neuropsychiatrist, who gathered evidence for the trial of the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg.More articles would be published from the 1960s onward, as scholars started documenting the atrocities committed by medical doctors, and especially after the Declaration of Helsinki of 1964, which established a number of ethical principles regarding human experimentation.12

The journal admits that it was an “outlier” in this respect, but then goes into excruciating and tedious detail into the one article it wrote in 1935 by Davis and Kroeger—an analysis of German “socialized medicine”. Click on screenshot below to get the pdf. Be warned, it’s a snoozer, even though it approves of socialized medicine.  I’m not sure why NEJM even mention this article save that it was attacked two weeks after publication in a letter to the editor, whose author, Joseph Muller, claimed that the Davis and Kroeger piece was propagandistic and “unworthy to appear in our periodical”.

The criticism:

Davis and Kroeger’s article did not go unchallenged. In a letter to the editor published 2 weeks later, Joseph Muller, a dermatologist and an active member of the Massachusetts Medical Society (which owned and still owns the Journal), complained about the Journal using Davis and Kroeger’s article “as a propaganda organ for half cooked world improvers.”21 The article, he claimed, was “neither medical nor scientific, but contains plenty of propaganda and is therefore unworthy to appear in our periodical. It is remarkable by omission of facts rather than by its statements.” Moreover, he wrote, the omission “that more than three thousand medical men were deprived of their means of supporting themselves should open the eyes of the American medical profession to one great danger of State Medicine.” Though Muller showed sympathy for the Jewish doctors, however, the real crux of his critique was not Nazi genocidal atrocities but — remarkably — the danger that socialized medicine could hold sway over the profession, a long-held concern among American physicians about “state medicine.”

As we see below, first author Davis answered Mueller’s criticism in a very brief response that basically swept away Nazi atrocities (Kroeger didn’t answer; the journal said she was a Nazi sympathizer). Its heart is this:

The deplorable repressive policy of the Hitler government in respect to Jewish physicians had no bearing on the main point which the article was intended to bring out, namely, that the organized medical profession of Germany has, by the actions described in the article, been placed in a more responsible position than ever before with respect to the medical services under German health insurance.

In other words, “who cares about the Jews, we were talking about medical insurance”.

Well, what we have is medical history, and of course it wasn’t just doctors who ignored what the Nazi regime is doing. Many people had no idea about the camps, though ignorance of the persecution of the Jews should have been evident to any thinking person.  But the apologia could have occupied but a single page, saying just what I said above.  Sadly, the piece goes on and on, and finally drags in DEI-like elements in trying to explain the exchange of letters above as well as the journal’s failure to cover the medical atrocities of the Nazi regime (bolding is mine):

Davis’s brief response to Muller’s attack is important in that it reveals what have come to be understood as critical elements of structural racism: unconscious bias, denial, and compartmentalization. In his rejoinder, Davis tried to bring some clarification to his omission by denying the relevance to his argument of discrimination against and persecution of Jews.  , , For Davis, the expansion of medical power was thus more important than the fact that this gain in power came at the expense of thousands of Jewish physicians. Moreover, it did not matter to Davis that the doctor whom he described as the “guardian of the health interest” of the German people had to be “Aryan” to be able to practice.1 As we now know, however, this reliance on the benevolent and altruistic physician to act in accordance with the Hippocratic Oath was insufficient to prevent the atrocities committed by physicians in the Nazi death camps.

And later, there’s this, called “moral blindness”:

And beyond Davis, how do we account for the virtual silence of the Journal about these issues over the ensuing decade? Part of the answer lies in denial, compartmentalization, and rationalization, all of which depend on structural and institutional racism — deep historical, often unrecognized, bias and discrimination that serve the status quo.

Well, we don’t know whether Davis’s (or the NEJM’s biases) were unconscious, and is it really news that many Americans didn’t like Jews in the 1930s and 1940s? Those were the years of the popular antisemitic radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, and of the equally popular antisemitism of Charles Lindbergh, American Hero. And yes, there was structural and institutional racism, most familiar to academics as the “Jewish quotas” in many universities instituted in the 1920s, and lasting for at least three decades.

This history is well known and well documented, save for the possibility of “unconscious” bias, a dubious concept that remains controversial. Regardless, I find it somewhat bizarre that the NEJM feels the need to apologize so many years afterwards, when during WWII it was simply following the American Zeitgeist that preferred to ignore the plight of European Jews. And equally bizarre is that it coopts the language of DEI to implicate structural and institutional racism, which of course was simply the racism put in place by Hitler and many Germans after they whipped up sentiments against the Jews. Is anything accomplished by using modern concepts that are arguable (“structural racism” and “unconscious bias” as a cause of inequities) rather than what’s really at issue here: the fact that not many people cared about the Jews during WWII?  I’m just glad they didn’t mention “the inequities affecting Jewish doctors due to structural racism and unconscious bias.”

I have about two days’ worth of photos left before this feature goes kaput, so please send in your photos! Thanks.

Today we have the second installment of photos from the Galápagos from reader Ephraim Heller (the first part, the “non-birds,” is here). There will be one more installment of bird photos. Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Following up on my non-bird Galapagos photos, below are the Galapagos bird photos.

A flightless cormorant (Nannopterum harrisi) playing with a tiger snake eel (Myrichthys maculosus) before eating it. The Galapagos cormorants have lost their ability to fly but use their small wings for agile swimming. Per Wikipedia:

The flightless cormorant is the largest extant member of its family, 89–100 cm (35–39.5 in) in length and weighing 2.5–5.0 kg (5.5

This unique cormorant is endemic to the Galapagos Islands, where it has a very restricted range. It is found on just two islands; Fernandina, and the northern and western coasts of Isabela. Distribution associates with the seasonal upwelling of the eastward flowing Equatorial Undercurrent (or Cromwell Current) which provides cold nutrient rich water to these western islands of the archipelago. The population has undergone severe fluctuations; in 1983 an El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event resulted in a 50% reduction of the population to just 400 individuals. The population recovered quickly, however, and was estimated to number 900 individuals by 1999:

American oystercatcher (Haematopus palliatus). I have often seen these in California:

Galapagos mockingbird (Mimus parvulus). The Galápagos mockingbird is one of four mockingbird species endemic to the Galápagos Islands. These four are all closely related, and DNA evidence shows they likely all descended from an ancestor species which reached the islands in a single colonization event. There are six subspecies, each endemic to a particular island or islands:

Galapagos dove (Zenaida galapagoensis). A common endemic bird:

Blue-footed booby (Sula nebouxii). It turns out that blue feet are sexy (per Wikipedia):

The blue color of the blue-footed booby’s webbed feet comes from structures of aligned collagens in the skin modified by carotenoid pigments obtained from its diet of fresh fish. The collagens are arranged in a manner that makes the skin appear blue. The underlying color is a “flat, purplish blue”. That color is modified by carotenoids to aquamarine in healthy birds. Carotenoids also act as antioxidants and stimulants for the blue-footed booby’s immune function, suggesting that carotenoid pigmentation is an indicator of an individual’s immunological state. Blue feet also indicate the current health condition of a booby. Boobies that were experimentally food-deprived for 48 hours experienced a decrease in foot brightness due to a reduction in the amount of lipids and lipoproteins that are used to absorb and transport carotenoids. Thus, the feet are rapid and honest indicators of a booby’s current level of nourishment. As blue feet are signals that reliably indicate the immunological and health condition of a booby, coloration is favored through sexual selection.

The brightness of the feet decreases with age, so females tend to mate with younger males with brighter feet, which have higher fertility and greater ability to provide paternal care than older males. In a cross-fostering experiment, foot color reflects paternal contribution to raising chicks; chicks raised by foster fathers with brighter feet grew faster than chicks raised by foster males with duller feet. Females continuously evaluate their partners’ condition based on foot color. In one experiment, males whose partners had laid a first egg in the nest had their feet dulled by makeup. The female partners laid smaller second eggs a few days later. As duller feet usually indicate a decrease in health and possibly genetic quality, it is adaptive for these females to decrease their investment in the second egg. The smaller second eggs contained less yolk concentration, which could influence embryo development, hatching success, and subsequent chick growth and survival. In addition, they contained less yolk androgens. As androgen plays an important role in chick survival, the experiment suggested female blue-footed boobies use the attractiveness and perceived genetic quality of their mates to determine how much resources they should allocate to their eggs. This supports the differential allocation theory, which predicts that parents care more for their offspring when paired with attractive mates.

Frigatebird (Fregatidae). These birds are fascinating and first introduced me to the wonderfully descriptive term kleptoparasite (which I now use in political discussions). Per Wikipedia: Able to soar for weeks on wind currents, frigatebirds spend most of the day in flight hunting for food, and roost on trees or cliffs at night. Their main prey are fish and squid, caught when chased to the water surface by large predators such as tuna. Frigatebirds are referred to as kleptoparasites as they occasionally rob other seabirds for food, and are known to snatch seabird chicks from the nest. Seasonally monogamous, frigatebirds nest colonially. A rough nest is constructed in low trees or on the ground on remote islands. A single egg is laid each breeding season. The duration of parental care is among the longest of any bird species; frigatebirds are only able to breed every other year.

Galapgagos hawk (Buteo galapagoensis). Sadly, there are believed to be only around 150 mating pairs in existence today:

Swallow-tailed gull (Creagrus furcatus) harrassing a galapagos hawk who dared enter its territory:

Red-billed tropicbird (Phaethon aethereus). The males’ tails are about twice its body length. I think these are beautifully elegant birds in flight. They cannot stand and is not proficient at walking, and require an unobstructed takeoff to fly from land:

You’re not going to get away from Jewish stuff for a while because, as someone posted on Facebook, “The more you hate us, the Jewisher we get.”  Well, reader Debra Coplan sent me the first video below of “The Shvesters” (Yiddish for “The Sisters”), who aren’t real sisters but sing acapella in a jazz-infused Yiddish.  There’s a short collection of their songs on Instagram. Debra said this:

I just love the Yiddish singing of the Shvester Sisters. The song below is sad but so beautiful.  They sing old Yiddish songs my grandmother sang so it brings lovely memories.  But even without my memories, these songs have so much feeling.

When I added that most of my Jewish relatives live around Pittsburgh, Debra added, “Mention that my grandmother Rose sang Yiddish on WAMO Radio Station in Pittsburgh. She  also was the singer on WAMO for the Manischewitz Chicken Soup ad.”

And again, this is music new to me that I actually like. But of course I’m genetically predisposed to like it! Here are two of the 38 songs on their site, and I haven’t heard them all.

This first one is sad and not jazzed up; the description is above:

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The Jewish Journal has an article about the Sisters, whose real names are Polina Fradkin and Chava Levi. An excerpt:

“We want to create, and to bring back Yiddish Jazz” says Chava, as we are wrapping up our conversation. “It has definitely been lacking. When I listen to contemporary Yiddish music, I can’t help but think ‘oh what I wish I could change to make it feel more like you want to dance to it.’” The Shvesters do not just make us want to move our feet to Yiddish; their music makes us long for Yiddish. In an age when social media and fast-moving content flushes out connection to culture and to our ancestors, we all crave an opportunity to be back, at nine years old, in the kitchen at Pesach. It warms our hearts, it links us to our loved ones, and it inspires us to keep being Jewish. “We’re taking something that is dying to be back into the mainstream,” says Polina, “and bringing it into the light in a new, sophisticated, and exciting way.” 

Something jazzier, with some scatting:

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One more:

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h/t: Debra

Years ago I read this statement by George Orwell in his collected essays, and from time to time, especially when I suffer a reversal, I think about the second sentence.

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.  A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

It’s the opening two sentences of Orwell’s 1944 essay “Benefits of Clergy: Some notes on Salvador Dali“.

Now Orwell wasn’t in the habit of making enigmatic statements, and I can see how he would view his own life as a “series of defeats”. His early work was rejected repeatedly, he was often attacked, often cheated on his wife, admitted that he treated her badly, and finally was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that killed him. On the other hand, he found success after publishing Animal Farm and then Nineteen Eighty-Four, and made a decent living as a writer and editor until he died at age 46.

So while I agree with Orwell that autobiographies can’t really be trusted, I’m not sure why he thinks that every life feels like “a series of defeats”. It doesn’t feel like that to me, though it may do so on my deathbed.  So, after all these years, I’ll ask readers to tell me what they think Orwell meant by that. Interpretations below, please!

**********

Oh, and don’t forget that Hitchens wrote a superb book on the man, Why Orwell Matters, and you can hear a precis of the book in this hourlong podcast in which Hitchens is interviewed by Russ Boberts about the book.  You can hear Hitchens’s repeated throat clearing; this podcast was made 10 months before Hitchens was diagnosed with stage 4 laryngeal cancer.

Orwell (his real name, of course, was Eric Blair) is one of my favorite writers, and you could do worse than read his Collected Essays (there are four volumes). Here’s the photo used for his press card:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Orwell_press_photo.jpg#/media

Jonathan Turley is a prominent attorney and professor of law at George Washington University Law School. He also writes a popular legal blog that often deals with free speech. His latest piece, with the headline below, deals with a question that’s occupied us quite a bit: what limitations, if any, should colleges put on freedom of speech?

I’ve been a hard-liner on this issue, insisting that colleges and universities should hew strictly to the First Amendment as interpreted by the courts, which of course means that you can pretty much say what you want unless it constitutes defamation, instigates immediate and predictable violent harm, creates harassment in the workplace, and so on.

But I have found another exception to the First Amendment for speech emitted on campus. And that is an exception widely adopted by universities, including the University of Chicago: the “time, place, and manner” exception, which, in fact, seems to be a legally recognized restriction of the First Amendment. Wikipedia characterizes it like this:

. . . . “The crucial question is whether the manner of expression is basically incompatible with the normal activity of a particular place at a particular time. . . “The [F]irst [A]mendment does not guarantee the right to communicate one’s views at all times and places or in any manner that may be desired. A state may therefore impose reasonable restrictions on the time, place or manner of constitutionally protected speech occurring in a public forum.”

At the University of Chicago we have time and place restrictions (students can’t protest in an academic building or if it disturbs classes), and there are supposed to be restrictions on manner, too. The most notable of those is the prohibition against hecklers shouting down or deplatforming speakers. This in fact is the violation we talked about Tuesday, when I reported that members of Students for Justice in Palestine had been tapped (not even slapped) on the wrist by a disciplinary committee for deplatorming (shouting down with megaphones) a demonstration by Jewish students last October. While such behavior may be legal in public parks and other such places, universities are allowed to prohibit this kind of “heckler’s veto.” After all, the purpose of a university is to teach and learn, and you don’t learn anything from a speaker if their speech cannot be heard because of hecklers. (I believe Mill mentions this in “On Liberty”.)

This brings us to Turley’s column (click headline below to read it), which recounts an incident of heckling at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

It so happens that a speaker was lecturing at Tulane in “an event to foster diversity of ideas and entrepreneurship for New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week.”  It also happens that that speaker was interrupted by—you guessed it—a speaker shouting pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli slogans (wrong time, wrong place, irrelevant speech).  And it so happens that, sitting in the audience, was a Tulane professor of national repute, Walter Isaacson, former President of CNN, and then of the Aspen Institute, and of course author of several best-sellers, including biographies of Steve Jobs and Leonardo (the latter my favorite of his works). Isaacson (a secular Jew, I think, though that doesn’t matter) decided to remove the heckler from the room by pushing them (it’s a transgender student using that pronoun) out the door. You can see it the video by clicking on the picture below, which takes you to an Instagram post. The second link in that Instagram post shows the video.

Turley gives the rest of the tale:

Isaacson, who is the Leonard Lauder Professor of American History and Values in the history department, can be shown gently moving MacDonald out of the seats. However, at the door, there appeared more of a brief scuffle at the last moment before the two went out of the frame for a split second. Isaacson is then shown returning immediately. There does not appear to be more than shoving on the video to move MacDonald out of the event.

In its Instagram post, SDS claimed that MacDonald (who identifies as a “them” as a transgender student) was injured: “Isaacson, an audience member, grabbed Rory and cursed at them, battering them and leaving them with bruises on their arms and scratches on their back.”

On local media, MacDonald is shown displaying slight scratch marks.

SDS and other groups have condemned Isaacson.

They have in fact called for Isaacson to resign.

The student shows the damage, which is light but still actionable, I think:

More from Turley:

Technically, shoving can be assault under both criminal and tort law. Certainly leaving scratch marks can qualify as evidence of assault. However, the situation is more complex than some faculty member spontaneously assaulting a student. Any removal of a disruptive protester will involve some firm handling or shoving. Indeed, when a subject resists, this can become a matter of self-defense for security as force is increased. As a subject resists, security is allowed to protect itself with a commensurate level of force.

If security can physically remove a protester (including shoving an individual from a room), the question is whether an audience member can do so. A professor has no special legal status to conduct security or exclude individuals from a public event. What is clear is that this is a function best left to university security. The problem is that security often does not enforce rules against disruptive behavior.

MacDonald was disrupting the event and Isaacson was seeking to remove him. In moving to the door, there does not appear to be anything more than firmly shoving MacDonald. In the final second, there appears to be a more forceful push in the hallway as Isaacson goes back inside. Isaacson can claim that he was protecting himself by shoving away MacDonald at that last minute. He is seen speaking to the student before firmly leading him to the door. Again, the university is investigating. There is no report of a criminal complaint.

If the university is investigating this matter, it should also address why a faculty member felt compelled to perform security at the event. We have seen universities routinely fail to expel protesters interrupting classes and events.

Universities can turn these protests into a type of “heckler’s veto” where speeches are cancelled in advance or terminated suddenly due to the disruption of protesters. The issue is not engaging in protest against such speakers, but to enter events for the purpose of preventing others from hearing such speakers. Universities create forums for the discussion of a diversity of opinions. Entering a classroom or event to prevent others from speaking is barring free speech.

There are two questions here:  did Isaacson commit assault, causing actual physical harm beyond just a threat? And, of course, where was security? Turley raises both questions, the first above and the second here:

Tulane clearly failed to protect this event and that led to this “self help” action by Isaacson. If he went too far off camera, there is also a question of why he had to act at all rather than campus security removing such disruptive protesters. This will continue until university administrators have the courage to suspend or expel students denying others the right to listen and speak at events.

But for my own school, this fracas raises a third question: what are schools going to do about this heckling, which clearly violates any free-speech regulations on campus?

Absent enforcement of school rules on such disruptions, there is little hope for the open exchange of ideas and a diversity of opinions on campus. It can unleash a type of tit-for-tat pattern of retaliation as speakers are prevented from speaking on controversial subjects. Our campuses then become little more than screaming matches. The rules of most schools properly draw the line between protests and disruptions. Everyone is allowed to be heard. However, if you enter to disrupt it, you are disrupting free speech.

In such cases, security must be either on the spot or be readily available to remove hecklers, allowing the speaker to be heard. This is exactly NOT what the University of Chicago did when SJP disrupted the Jewish speakers, who had permission to give speeches on the quad. The deans on call simply stood by and did nothing, and when asked to do something, they said they were powerless. The University cops also stood by, and said they could do nothing without the permission of the deans. (This is the same answer the cops gave me when I watched SJP and UCUP illegally blockade the administration building last fall. “We need permission from the administration to take action.” Of course no action was taken, and when I tried to call the administration, nobody answered.)  This is an embarrassment to the University, and I trust they’ll inform security and the deans on call to stop deplatforming and heckling. And I hope the administrators in charge of the deans on call don’t sit on their hands when a violation occurs..

As for Isaacson, who looked royally ticked off, I think they could file battery charges against him that would stick.  Even if he acted as “mock security,” it seems to me that what he did was illegal.  Whether he actually gets charged is another matter.  But morally he was in the right, and I applaud him.

Today ecologist Susan Harrison returns with an attempt to find Spring. Her comments are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Looking for early spring in southern Oregon

In late March, signs of spring were evident at the Denman Wildlife Area and adjacent Table Rocks near Medford, Oregon.  This wildlife area is a floodplain on the south side of the Rogue River; the Upper and Lower Table Rocks are basalt mesas just across the river, each with a hiking trail to the top.

Denman Wildlife Area (foreground) and Upper Table Rock (background):

Wildflowers were strikingly abundant for so early in the season, hinting at the prospect of a splendid spring.    In amongst the flowers and the Oregon Oaks (Quercus garryana), you can also see a profusion of red-leaved Poison Oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) in most of these pictures.

Shooting star (Primula hendersonii), a classic harbinger of spring:

Henderson’s fawn lily (Erythronium hendersonii), an endemic of this area:

Grand hound’s tongue (Adelinia grandis):

Grass widows (Olsynium douglasii):

Scarlet fritillary (Fritillaria recurva):

Nuttall’s larkspur (Delphinium nuttallianum):

Migratory songbirds had yet to arrive and some overwintering waterfowl were still hanging around.   However, a few of the resident songbirds had begun to sing and set up territories, including the kinglet and towhee below.

Ring-necked Ducks (Aythya collaris):

Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Corthylio calendula):

Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus):

Acorn Woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus), always a reliable resident:

California Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma californica), an even more reliable resident:

View to Mt. McLoughlin from the top of Upper Table Rock:

I presume you want the good news first. Sadly, it comes not from the University of Chicago but from Vanderbilt, now headed (as Chancellor) by our ex-provost Daniel Diermeier. As reported by the Nashville Tenneseean, last week more than two dozen students decided to hold a sit-in in Vandy’s administration building protesting—what else?—the University’s so-called complicity with Israel in its war with Hamas.

The students began protesting Tuesday morning after an amendment to the Vanderbilt Student Government Constitution, which would prevent student government funds from going to certain businesses that support Israel, was removed by administration officials from a student ballot in late March.

. . . .More than two dozen students entered Kirkland Hall, an administration building which houses Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier’s office, to hold a sit-in around 9 a.m. Tuesday, along with over 30 more students who sat on the steps outside.

Students at the protest — both inside and out — shouted chants asking for Diermeier to allow students to vote on the amendment that was removed from the ballot by administration.

Students entered the administration building around 9 a.m., and a second, larger group gathered in front of the building.

Those inside the building stayed for around 22 hours before being escorted out by Vanderbilt University Police.

The students outside protested for hours, with numbers fluctuating as students rotated in and out of class. A number of students stayed outside protesting until the students inside the building emerged.

After letting the students stay in the building for all of 22 hours (a generous dispensation!), Vanderbilt began removing them, taking names and arresting some while giving others suspensions.

Three students who sat in the chancellor’s office were arrested for assault and bodily injury to another, according to a statement from Vanderbilt University, though online jail records do not currently list any charges.

A fourth student was charged with vandalism after breaking a window on Kirkland Hall Tuesday night.

All four students have been released.

In addition to arrests, students confirmed that interim suspensions were issued to all demonstrators who entered the building.

Below is a video of the three students who were arrested for assault and causing bodily injury, pushing and shoving the poor guy who was opening the door and then trying to close it before The Entitled rushed in en masse.  From the campus to the administration office, Vandy will be free!

Seriously, this kind of assault is unconscionable.  Of course verbal protest that doesn’t violate university rules or block buildings, much less injure an employee, is fine. That’s freedom of speech, and as you’ll see below, Chancellor Diermeier took the Chicago Principles of Free Expression (and also the Kalven Principles of Institutional Neutrality) south with him when he migrated.

This was not a kneejerk reaction by the administration, which tried to persuade the demonstrators to leave for nearly an entire day. But, unlike the timorous administration of my school, there will be serious consequences for the students, including suspension (which will go on their records), and the arrested students will likely not have their charges dropped.

Below, after the first tweet in which the Entitled Students lecture a black Vanderbilt cop on why he should be on their side, you’ll see a tweet showing the letters Diermeier wrote to the parents of Vandy students as well as to the University community itself (there are three pages total). They are tempered letters but also strong and principled ones, asserting that free speech does not allow disruption of speech. That’s something that many colleges don’t seem to have learned.

I think Chancellor Deimeier, who frequently has stated a university’s role is to “foster debate, not end it,” handled this well. Far better than other universities have done in similar circumstances.

Letter to the community just sent, below. (I have a son there, who fwiw was… pic.twitter.com/e3yksOswMa

— stevemur (@stevemur) March 27, 2024

An excerpt from Diermeier’s letter to the Vandy community:

Now the best news: Chancellor Diermeier wrote an eloquent defense of Vandy’s principles, and an explanation of the University’s actions, for the Wall Street Journal. It hasn’t been archived as far as I can see, so try clicking on the screenshot below.

Because it’s not archived, I’ll give a longish excerpt:

Vanderbilt has worked hard to nurture a culture of free expression built on three pillars. The first is a determination to provide an open forum: opportunities for dialogue and debate. The second is the practice of institutional neutrality, by which university leaders refrain from publicly taking political positions to avoid indirectly stifling free thought and expression among students and faculty. Last and most distinctive is a commitment to civil discourse, the practice of respectful argument rooted in facts, which our undergraduates agree to uphold when they sign a student-authored community creed before taking their first classes.

These commitments were tested for about 24 hours starting March 26. Vanderbilt, like many universities, is home to a group of students who support the international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. The BDS effort encourages economic and political pressure aimed at ending Israel’s current policies toward Palestinians, which organizers say are oppressive, immoral and in some cases illegal. The movement calls for economic and cultural boycotts, financial divestment and government sanctions.

. . .Some students supporting BDS declared their opposition to Vanderbilt’s institutional neutrality, calling it a cop-out, or worse. They advocated for a reversal of course on a campus referendum that would have required student government funds to follow BDS restrictions, which the university had disallowed because following those restrictions would put Vanderbilt in violation of Tennessee law. The student government isn’t legally separate from the university, and student-government funds are university funds. The law requires the university to certify each year that it isn’t involved in any boycotts of Israel, which the state defines broadly. Failing to make the certification, or acting contrary to it, would put large state contracts for the university at risk. Implementing the BDS restrictions with university funds also potentially conflicts with federal laws governing boycotts of countries friendly to the U.S.

Like all Vanderbilt students, those supporting BDS are free to speak out and demonstrate on our campus—subject, like all student groups and as at all universities, to reasonable limits on the time, place and manner of their protests.

On Tuesday, 27 students transgressed those limits when they forced their way into a closed administrative building, injuring a community-service officer in the process. Students pushed staff members and screamed profanities. Our staff took a graduated approach to de-escalating the situation, including several attempts to discuss the issues with the student group and encourage them to take a different course of action. Over 20 hours, the students were consistently informed that they were violating university policies and warned that they were subject to suspension for doing so.

Early the next morning, the Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County Magistrate’s Office charged three students with assault. One student protesting outside the building was charged with vandalism after cracking a window. The remaining 25 students left the building voluntarily. The administration suspended all of those students on an interim basis and will all go through a rigorous accountability process to determine further disciplinary action.

Critics have claimed that Vanderbilt has abandoned its long-held commitment to free expression. They are wrong. Vanderbilt supports, teaches and defends free expression—but to do so, we must safeguard the environment for it. Students can advocate BDS. That is freedom of expression. But they can’t disrupt university operations during classes, in libraries or on construction sites. The university won’t adopt BDS principles. That’s institutional neutrality. As a community, we should always remember to treat each other with respect and rely on the force of the better argument. That’s civil discourse.

Teaching students the importance of upholding rules for free expression doesn’t squelch their right to voice their opinion—it protects it.

In these difficult times, each university will be tested. And each university will follow its own path. Our approach is clear: We clearly state the principles and rules that support our mission as a university. Then we enforce them.

That last paragraph is magnificent. And yes, the University of Chicago was tested, too, and also had—or so I thought—a clear approach, one identical to Vanderbilt’s. The difference is in the last sentence. Vanderbilt enforces their principles; we don’t. (See my post from yesterday.)

I’m not sure whether Diermeier is Jewish, but he certainly fits the criteria for being a mensch.

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

Now the bad news: In the meantime, the administration of the elite Smith College are acting very un-Deiermeierish, allowing the students to occupy College Hall, the administration building, for over a week. The administration, according to this Inside Higher Ed piece by Johanna Alonso, is sitting with its thumb up its fundament trying to figure out what to do with the Occupiers.

The protestors, are, of course, asking Smith to divest from Israel. (Sitter-inners are always big fans of Palestine.) They appear to be largely (surprise!) members of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The administration has already said that divestment will “not likely be considered unless ‘materially different information is brought forward’,”, so they’ve evinced some moxie, but they need to boot those protestors back onto campus.

Click to read.

An excerpt:

In the latest face-off between students and administrators over the war in Gaza, students at Smith College have been occupying the main administrative building on campus for almost a week, demanding the institution divest from weapons manufacturers that supply military machinery to Israel. The protesters say they will not leave College Hall until the institution commits to divestment, according to statements on the social media pages of the college’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, which is spearheading the demonstration.

Approximately 50 students are participating in the protest, SJP members said on social media; photos show that students have brought pillows, air mattresses, large amounts of food and other items into the building. A photo showed a Palestinian flag bearing the words “Smith divest now” flying above College Hall, where the American flag is typically displayed.

No arrests or student conduct charges have been made, although students “are allegedly in violation of several elements of the Student Code of Conduct including unauthorized entry or use of a building, abuse of property, and disruption of college activities,” Carolyn McDaniel, Smith’s director of media relations, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

This is how sit-ins disrupt the functioning of a college:

According to McDaniel, the protest has had an impact on students’ abilities to access certain offices located inside College Hall, including Student Financial Services, the Office of Disability Services and the Title IX office.

The occupation, she wrote, has made it difficult for “those with pressing needs to get the help they deserve. We are aware, for example, of a family who drove a considerable distance to discuss FAFSA assistance from financial services and they weren’t sure how to proceed upon learning that the office was inaccessible. We were able to help them in other ways, but it caused this family needless concern.”

Now there’s a dilemma for progressives: Title IX and disability services versus SJP. (SJP is winning.)

The articles notes that there are a lot of Smithereens who agree with the protest, but not everyone:

However, others have expressed dismay over the occupation. According to one anonymous email purportedly from a Smith student to Inside Higher Ed, the institution “has become a terrifying place with absolutely no consequence for breaking the law.”

“The college refuses to do anything to hold them accountable, and now the front doorstep of what’s supposed to be a brilliant college for smart women looks like a tent city of anti-Semitic drum circlers,” the author wrote.

Well, someone has a sense of humor! But it appears that a climate of antisemitism is infecting Smith, as it is some other schools.

The sit-in also comes after several antisemitic incidents occurred at Smith earlier in March. Swastikas were found on crosswalks and in two cases mezuzahs, religious symbols that some Jewish people affix to their doorframes, were ripped down near campus, the Boston Globe reported last month.

I would advise Smith’s president, Sarah Willie-Le Breton, to follow Diermeier’s lead—if she has the moxie.

h/t: Ginger K.

In today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “clearly,” each member of the Divine Duo calls the other one out for untrue beliefs. It’s a miracle that they’re able to share a Guinness, much less live together (and sleep together):

Today’s photos come from reader and UK resident Stephen Warren, and includes, arguagly, what is the world’s tallest waterfall.  Stephen’s photos are indented, and you can enlarge them by clicking on them.

Tugela Falls via the chainladders

Tugela Falls is a stream that plunges over the Amphitheatre escarpment in the Drakensberg mountains, located in South Africa just to the East of the border with Lesotho. It is usually listed as the second tallest waterfall in the world in terms of total drop, after Angel Falls in Venezuela, which also holds the record for the greatest single drop. However as noted here, recent measurements indicate that Tulgela Falls may actually be taller than Angel Falls for total drop.

The Amphitheatre is an escarpment 5km long with a cliff some 4000 ft high over much of its length followed by a more gentle descent into the valley. As you can see, and some may remember, it was used as the backdrop to the film “Zulu”, which depicted the battle of Rorke’s Drift. That’s not unreasonable because Rorke’s Drift (and Isandlwana) is only 60 miles away. The big knob on the right hand side is the Sentinel and the walk cuts across the bottom and reaches the plateau at the top, at 9700 ft elevation. from the RH side.

We stayed at the Witsieshoek Mountain Lodge, which on a good day has a spectacular view of the Amphitheatre, but the weather was cloudy for much of our visit, and I have had to string together the best pics taken at different times They are a bit mediocre, but I think convey the thrill of the walk. Here is the view from the Lodge. The lodge is near the town of Phuthaditjhaba, formerly named Witsieshoek:

The lodge was built to facilitate the hike to the top of Tugela Falls, although there are many alternative attractive hikes to try. The route starts at the Sentinel car park, at 8200 ft elevation, and involves a fairly easy climb of some 1500 ft, until you get to the exhilarating chainladders. These involve two vertical pitches of some 80ft and 50ft. You need a cool head for these, particularly the first one, although everyone I spoke to who had done the walk insisted they found it terribly easy!

The Lodge provide a lift to the Sentinel car park in a 4WD. The road is in terrible shape and it was a very uncomfortable ride. Here is the start of the walk, looking up to the Sentinel. I did the walk with my son George, who you will see in some of the pictures:

I was surprised to see native flowers on the route that I have in my garden. This is a Nerine:

This, I think, is an Osteospermum:

. . . and this is a Lobelia:

On the drive from Bloemfontein to the lodge (4.5h) we frequently saw Cosmos in the fields. So I checked, and Cosmos is in fact native to the Americas, and it came to South Africa in contaminated horsefeed in the 2nd Boer War.The first part of the walk was paved, but once we got into the rocky parts it was still never hard going, and we didn’t suffer from the elevation either. We eventually reached the chainladders, by which time we were in the clouds. Here is a view from the bottom of the first pitch (this was actually taken on the way down),

. . . and then a picture take from the top of the first pitch.

The top is a plateau, and it is a gentle 25min walk over to the top of Tugela Falls. The stream is only small:

Finally, my son George at the top of (probably) the tallest waterfall in the world, but we couldn’t see much of it:

Here is a great picture from the Tugela Falls wiki page to get a better idea:

Juniper339, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We did the whole walk in 4.5h, up and down.

Today’s wildlife photos are by Rodney Graetz from Australia. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Mornings by a Wetland

An adult Purple Swamp Hen (Porphyrio porphyrio) using its foot to hold back the long grass and let its two chicks begin the day.  Their grassy cave was not a nest, just an overnight camp.  Likely about 2+ weeks old, the chicks will now be supervised to forage along the water’s edge, but not out on it.  Adult Swamp Hens can swim, but pin-feathered chicks cannot.

Cattle in peak condition are described by cattlemen as ‘fat and shiny’.  We would describe this adult Dusky Moorhen (Gallinula tenebrosa) as ‘fat and shiny’.  Bright-eyed, bright coloured, with chest plumage freshly groomed, standing on a small raft of Cumbungi (Typha sp.), surrounded by wetland and grassland full of insects.  Its world is looking good.

A wren in non-breeding plumage: most likely a female Superb Fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus).  Unusual to have stayed perched long enough to be photographed.  Their typical foraging and socialising activities are best described as feverish: one of continuous, high speed, flitting movement.

An adult Black Swan (Cygnus atratus) sublimely cruising offshore.  It is a female, judging by the neck length and the mass of curled ‘bustle’ feathers on its rump.  So far, this year, no (creamy white) cygnets have been sighted.

A Straw-necked Ibis (Threskiornis spinicollis) with a cape of iridescent feathers captured with bunched toes doing a wing stretch.  The ‘straw’ chest display involves specialised coloured and shaped feathers.  If you look closely, the deep ‘Saturday Night Fever’ vee-shaped gap in them indicates it is a male bird.  Spectacular formation fliers, they are great nomads.

Aware that the bird photo encyclopedist, John Avise, recently posted his photos of Australasian Darters (Anhinga novaehollandiae), we add a complementary one of a adult female stretching its surprisingly large gape, given its needle-like beak.  One can imagine the size of the fish that could be swallowed.

This Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) is also ‘fat and shiny’ and in the breeding plumage of the bright yellow beak surrounds, and a barely visible crest low on the head and neck.  It is Australia’s largest cormorant species with a wingspan of 80+ cm (30+ inches).  It has a small feather stuck on its beak from an interrupted grooming.

We have posted this photo of an Australian Wood Duck (Chenonetta jubata) family before.  We repeat it here to contrast the next two puzzling photos.  The takeaway impression here is the close supervision of the 10 ducklings by both parents, especially the ever alert male: behaviour that makes this species a very successful breeder.  With this in mind, go to the next photo.

A cluster of 11 (Wood Duck) ducklings, aged 4+ weeks, instinctively huddled together for warmth and security.  Missing are any adult parents: a critical absence that we have never seen before.  These ducklings look ragged and stressed, so our conclusion is they have been orphaned.  But how?  All possible predators of just the adult birds – people, fox, native water rat – are implausible, plus there were no signs of struggle, feathers, etc.  We can’t accept that they were just deserted.

The cluster spontaneously but listlessly moved out onto the water to sit there, seemingly bewildered, and obviously lethargic.  Where now is safety at night: on land or on water?  On land would be most comfortable but unsafe, and ducks are reputed to never sleep on water.  Their future?  We’ve unsuccessfully searched for them since.  A mystery, still.

From Jerry: The abandoned ducklings broke my heart.

Comedian Andrew Doyle was of course the creator of Titania McGrath, the entitled Wokestress whom many people took seriously. Yet she was amazingly prescient, with many of her spoofs of the woke eventually becoming true, with life imitating art. Click on the video below, and enlarge it, to see eight minutes of Titania’s prescience.

I won’t be able to post much (except for a huge post tomorrow a.m.) until Thursday, but this should fill some of that lacuna. Enjoy.

Titania McGrath predicted much of today’s woke madness.

Was she giving them ideas? pic.twitter.com/4gLHDWGEDp

— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) March 23, 2024

Well, I certainly encountered Coleman Hughes on his way up when he interviewed me for a YouTube video. Now he’s he’s hit the big time with a gig as a staff writer for The Free Press and an analyst for CNN, a new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, which is doing very well on Amazon, a podcast called “Conversations with Coleman,” a YouTube channel, and the ultimate achievement, a stint on The View, in which Whoopi Goldberg asks him to explain his thesis. The ten-minute piece is below.

His thesis, which you’ll see, is that we should use class-based categories rather than racial ones to reduce poverty. Another one of The View women (I don’t recognize her) pushes back hard on Coleman, using quotes from Dr. King that seem to have walked back King’s own famous “colorblind” quote from his “I have a dream” speech.  Coleman keeps his cool in the face of some hostility, and remains as eloquent as ever.  He might be thought of as a younger version of John McWhorter.

He’ll go a lot further, even though what he says doesn’t conform to What Black People Should Be Saying.

It would seem superfluous now to argue that women and men are equally competitive in athletics and thus there should be no sex-spcific categories.  We know that, with puberty, comes differences in may traits involved in athletic success, including muscles mass, bone density, grip strength, throwing speed, and so on. (Equestrian sports may be one in which women have either no disadvantage or even an advantage, but I haven’t looked for the data.)  This intersexual difference in athletic ability is in fact why we have separate men’s versus women’s leagues. I was surprised to find, in the Lundberg et al. paper below, that even before puberty boys have significant athletic advantages over girls, which one has to consider when deciding whether to separate the sexes in secondary-school competitions.

But the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which a few years ago punted in a general policy for its athletes, deciding that each sport has to set its own rules, has led to the publication of the Lundberg et al. paper, reiterating again that there seems to be no physical sport in which men don’t have an inherent, sex-related advantage (largely coming from testosterone), so the Bayesian presumption is that there will be a difference. The paper’s publication was apparently prompted by the IOC’s abandoning standards. As the authors note, “The IOC framework does not provide suitable guidance to sports authorities to protect the female category in sports.”

But of course the burning question now is whether or not transgender women (natal men), even under testosterone suppression, retain athletic advantages over natal women, and, if so, whether those advantages disappear over time. And Lundberg et al. paper says that advantages remain and do not go away with time. (We’ve had evidence for this for a long time.)

In classifying individuals for athletics, then, “transgender women don’t count as women”, a fact that goes against all the mantras of gender activism. Nevertheless, truth is stronger than mantras, and the data show that, in those sports that have been examined, transgender women have a similar (but smaller) advantage over natal women as do natal men do over natal women.  The authors (and I) see the inclusion of natal men in women’s sports, then, as unfair. But others disagree, thinking that inclusivity trumps fairness. Since all of us think that those who want to compete athletically should have a way to do so, some hard thinking is involved. Should we have “open” categories, in which only a few will compete? Or should trans women compete only in men’s sports? I have no solution, but surely we need to know the facts before we make a decision like this.

I found the Lundberg paper because a reader sent me an article from the conservative Federalist that linked to it. And yes, the Federalist does accurately characterize the paper. You can read the Federalist by clicking below, but if you want a deeper dive in to the data, one with lots of references, click on the second headline too (get the pdf here). All access is free

Excerpts from the link above:

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) developed its 2021 framework on sex and “gender” around the concepts of fairness, inclusion, and non-discrimination. This framework leaves it to each sport’s governing body “to determine how an athlete may be at a disproportionate advantage against their peers.” However, they admonish sports organizations against “targeted testing … aimed at determining [athletes’] sex, gender identity and/or sex variations.” Instead, it’s up to each sport to “[provide] confidence that no athlete within a category has an unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage.”

The IOC’s sophistic gymnastics to deny sex-based categories in sport prompted 26 researchers from around the world to rebut the IOC’s framework. Their paper, published last week in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, is the latest peer-reviewed study providing evidence of the obvious about sex in sports.

The researchers reviewed studies from “evolutionary and developmental biology, zoology, physiology, endocrinology, medicine, sport and exercise science, [and] athletic performance results within male and female sport” to refute the IOC’s position that male athletes warrant “no presumption of advantage” over female athletes based on “biological or physiological characteristics.”

That statement “is ridiculous on its face,” says Kim Jones, co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS). “This is the basic knowledge we all understand and see play out in front of our eyes every day. [This new] paper is brilliant at laying out how clear the differences are between men and women. There are thousands of differences between male and female development in humans across the entire maturity path that result in these huge performance gaps.”

John Armstrong, a mathematician at King’s College London who was not affiliated with this research, highlights this “central flaw” of the IOC’s framework. “To say we should not presume male advantage in a sport unless we have specific data for that sport is like saying that just because most of the apples in a tree have fallen to the ground, one shouldn’t presume the remaining apples are also subject to gravity,” he said.

“There is overwhelming evidence of male advantage from across different sports and there is little to be gained from demonstrating this again and again, sport by sport,” Armstrong noted.

So much for untreated natal men versus untreated natal women. What about when testosterone is suppressed?

But even sports that have copious research into sex differences in performance have permitted males to compete in the female category at all levels of competition and age. One path has been through misguided policies based on testosterone levels.

Over the last decade, various sports governing bodies — including the IOC and USA Boxing — have attempted to define females through testosterone levels. Those organizations relied heavily on a publication by Joanna Harper, a trans-identifying male medical physicist. The paper consisted of eight self-reports by trans-identifying male recreational runners who had suppressed their testosterone pharmacologically and recalled that they ran slower after doing so. Harper excluded the one respondent who said he ran faster and then concluded that males who were suppressing their testosterone could compete fairly in the female category.

Read the paper if you want to see how weak Harper’s evidence was, yet was used to buttress allowing transgender women to run against natal women. The subjects, whose times were self-reported, weren’t even athletes.  But I digress:

Last week’s paper builds on research by lead authors Tommy Lundberg, Emma Hilton, and others who demonstrate the persistence of male advantage after testosterone suppression.

While testosterone suppression decreases various measures of anatomy, physiology, and physical performance, those changes are a small fraction of the differences between men and women on these metrics. A testosterone-suppressed male will have less muscle mass than his former self, but as a category, testosterone-suppressed men remain larger and stronger than women. Further, testosterone suppression does not change attributes like height, bone length, or hip and shoulder width.

And the part below surprised me, as I always thought athletic differences became significant almost entirely after puberty, which could justify having only a single league for younger kids. I’m not so sure now, but remember that winning may not be as important for younger kids than for high-school, college, or professional athletes, so combined leagues may still be considered “fair” in, say, elementary or some secondary schools.

Even before puberty, though, males outperform females in athletic competitions. Greg Brown is an exercise physiologist at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and was a co-author on the Lundberg paper. Brown recently published research based on national youth track and field championships. He found that by age 8, the boys ran faster in their final rounds than the girls did in theirs, at race distances from 100 meters to 1,500 meters.

Again, click to read:

 

Here’s the paper’s abstract with the IOC’s unjustified conclusion and the data from transwomen (my bolding). Note that what they consider most fair is disallowing transwomen from competing against natal women.

ABSTRACT

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently published a framework on fairness, inclusion, and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations. Although we appreciate the IOC’s recognition of the role of sports science and medicine in policy development, we disagree with the assertion that the IOC framework is consistent with existing scientific and medical evidence and question its recommendations for implementation. Testosterone exposure during male development results in physical differences between male and female bodies; this process underpins male athletic advantage in muscle mass, strength and power, and endurance and aerobic capacity. The IOC’s “no presumption of advantage” principle disregards this reality. Studies show that transgender women (male-born individuals who identify as women) with suppressed testosterone retain muscle mass, strength, and other physical advantages compared to females; male performance advantage cannot be eliminated with testosterone suppression. The IOC’s concept of “meaningful competition” is flawed because fairness of category does not hinge on closely matched performances. The female category ensures fair competition for female athletes by excluding male advantages. Case-by-case testing for transgender women may lead to stigmatization and cannot be robustly managed in practice. We argue that eligibility criteria for female competition must consider male development rather than relying on current testosterone levels. Female athletes should be recognized as the key stakeholders in the consultation and decision-making processes. We urge the IOC to reevaluate the recommendations of their Framework to include a comprehensive understanding of the biological advantages of male development to ensure fairness and safety in female sports.

Finally, the data on transwomen athletes.  I’ve left the references in showing the plethora of studies concluding that testosterone suppression doesn’t eliminate male advantage. Bolding in the text is mine

4. TESTOSTERONE SUPPRESSION POST-PUBERTY DOES NOT NEGATE MALE PERFORMANCE ADVANTAGE:

The IOC framework suggests that testosterone concentrations could be investigated as a means to mitigate performance in transgender women. However, no study has demonstrated that transgender women with suppressed testosterone levels after puberty reach biological or physical parity with females. Conversely, numerous studies have shown that biological differences persist after testosterone is suppressed,25, 44, 46 with physical performance implications. There is no plausible biological mechanism by which testosterone suppression could reduce height and associated skeletal measurements (e.g., bone length and hip or shoulder width) that may confer a discipline-dependent performance advantage. Consequently, no study has reported reductions in skeletal advantages in transgender women who suppress testosterone after puberty.25

Twelve controlled longitudinal studies44, 47–57 collectively following more than 800 untrained or moderately trained transgender women have shown that testosterone suppression for 1 year induces only a 5% loss of pre-transition muscle mass/strength. This loss accounts for only a fraction (one-fifth or less) of typically observed male versus female muscle mass and strength differences.25, 26, 58 For example, in the study by Wiik et al.,44 thigh muscle volume differences of 39% between transgender men and women were reduced only marginally with 1 year of testosterone suppression, and 83% percent of the initial male advantage was retained. The result is higher levels of muscle mass and strength in transgender women compared to females for at least 3 years after testosterone suppression (i.e., the longest sampling duration of current longitudinal studies), with male advantage still evident in cross-sectional studies of transgender women who suppressed testosterone for up to 14 years.59–61

Note, however, that factors affecting endurance performance, like supermarathon running, have not been tested sufficiently to come to any conclusion. It may turn out that in these endurance sports transwomen are on par with men. But certainly this isn’t the case for marathon running.

The effects of testosterone suppression on biological factors underlying endurance performance are less well explored than those of strength and power. Nonetheless, untrained or moderately trained transgender women who have successfully suppressed testosterone after puberty achieved female-typical hemoglobin concentrations within 3–6 months.44, 46 In contrast, the effect on hemoglobin mass, which, unlike hemoglobin concentration, is strongly related to VO2max,39, 62 is unknown, and other factors related to endurance performance, such as work economy and fractional utilization, have not been studied.

We argue that the existing literature on physical changes induced by testosterone suppression constitutes the most robust dataset currently available, and is relevant for elite athletes, because it confirms the principle of persistence of biological characteristics even in the absence of training. These longitudinal studies are then complemented by studies in which testosterone suppression in males has been accompanied by exercise training, which demonstrate that training can partly, or even completely, attenuate reductions in muscle mass and strength.63, 64 Therefore, a rational hypothesis based on current evidence would be that retained male advantage would be larger, not smaller, in highly trained transgender women if they continued to train during testosterone suppression, compared with untrained or moderately trained individuals. This hypothesis is also supported by the observation that sex-specific differences in athletic performance are at least equally pronounced in elite athletes compared to untrained or moderately trained individuals.26

The findings documented in the scientific literature, and the hypothesis that retained male advantage would be larger in athletes, predict that the relative ranking of transgender women in competitive sports would improve significantly after they switch from the male to the female category. This is illustrated by a case study of an American transgender swimmer, who achieved significant National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ranking improvements (from middle to top) across a range of events after switching from the male to the female category.65 This occurred as a result of performance decreases that were significantly smaller than male versus female performance differences, supporting the retention of male biological advantage and illustrating the resultant unfairness.

The swimmer referred to above is certainly Lia Thomas. At any rate, 12 women athletes are suing the NCAA for forcing them to compete against trans women. You can read about the suit at the Free Press, by clicking the link below. Again, Lia Thomas seems to have been the spur for this suit (article archived here). The unarchived piece has a YouTube discussion of the lawsuit by two of the plaintiffs, Riley Gaines and Réka György:

 

Ibram X. Kendi (née Ibram Henry Rogers) has a short article in The Atlantic whose thesis is summed up in the subtitle below. And I think his thesis is both self-pitying and, worse, wrong.  I am not a Kendi expert, though I have read his book How to Be An Antiracist (not that impressive: a strange gemisch of autobiography and strong antiracism that brands everyone not actively working against racism as a racist). I’m told, though, that his earlier book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, is good.

But this essay is not good. It’s full of false claims about how nobody but straight white Christian men ever counted as “intellectuals”.   No blacks, no gays, no Jews, and no women.  Frankly, I’m surprised that The Atlantic published it, but it’s Kendi, Jake! (I suspect the magazine needs a fact checker for stuff like this.)

Click below to read it, or find it archived here:Kendi’s claim is that the term “intellectual” explicitly includes (and historically included) only white males who assume the mantle of objectivity, denigrate “lived experience”, and engage in work that deliberately avoids discussing or trying to solve what Kendi sees as the most pressing problems of society. Kendi came to this notion, he says, when he was writing How to Be An Antiracist, and worried that his style might not place him among “intellectuals.”

 

Some quotes to demonstrate what he sees as who counts as an “intellectual” (indented):

The intellectual has been traditionally framed as measured, objective, ideologically neutral, and apolitical, superior to ordinary people who allow emotion, subjectivity, ideology, and their own lived experiences to cloud their reason. Group inequality has traditionally been reasoned to stem from group hierarchy. Those who advance anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, and anti-homophobic ideas have historically been framed as anti-intellectual.

The traditional construct of the intellectual has produced and reinforced bigoted ideas of group hierarchy—the most anti-intellectual constructs existing. But this framing is crumbling, leading to the crisis of the intellectual.

The crisis isn’t really mentioned further: it appears to be a crisis in Kendi’s own head, about whether he or people like him count as an intellectual/

Forty-six years later, when intellectuals of all races produce work on matters primarily affecting white people, the assumed subject of intellectual pursuits, these thinkers are seldom accused of engaging in identity politics. Their work isn’t considered dangerous. These thinkers are not framed as divisive and political. Instead, they are praised for example, for exposing the opioid crisis in white America, praised for pushing back against blaming the addicted for their addictions, praised for enriching their work with lived experiences, praised for uncovering the corporations behind the crisis, praised for advocating research-based policy solutions, praised for seeking truth based on evidence, praised for being intellectuals. As they all should be. But when anti-racist intellectuals expose the crisis of racism, push back against efforts to problematize people of color in the face of racial inequities, enrich our essays with lived experiences, point to racist power and policies as the problem, and advocate for research-based anti-racist policy solutions, the reactions couldn’t be more different. We are told that “truth seeking” and “activism” don’t mix.

I’m wondering who said that “truth seeking” and “activism” don’t mix? There is a whole tradition of people who seek the truth but also had the explicit aim of achieving social justice (in the proper sense). They are most notable in feminism, including Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, and so on. These women were intellectuals and activists at the same time. The same goes for gay and black thinkers, including James Baldwin (black and gay), Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Langston Hughes, and, on the working people’s side, Eric Hoffer.  And yet Kendi says this, which is so palpably false that I’ve put it in bold:

Intellectuals who are people of color, women, non-Christian, LGBTQ, or working class—indeed intellectuals of all identities who have challenged the status quo, especially traditional and bigoted conventions—have historically been cast aside as nonintellectuals.

To support this claim, Kendi cites a few people who have dismissed the work of people like W. E. B. Du Boois or Carter Woodson. But citing a few detractors (of the work, not of the identity) does not show that these people have been “cast aside”.  If they have been, how come they’re still read—and taught on college campuses—today?

As for “non-Christian” intellectuals, well, I’ll omit a list of Jewish or atheist thinkers, starting from Spinoza, because you should be able to think of them (Spinoza, Marx, etc.)   And when you read a paragraph like this, from Kendi, you sense that his definition of a “true intellectual” is “someone like Kendi.” (It’s the “No True Kendi” hypothesis):

American traditions do not breed intellectuals; they breed propagandists and careerists focusing their gaze on the prominent and privileged and powerful and on whatever challenges are afflicting them. Intellectuals today, when focused on the oppression of our own groups—as embodied in the emergence of Queer Studies, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Disability Studies, Latino Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Asian American Studies—are ridiculed for pursuing fields that lack “educational value,” and our books, courses, programs, and departments are shut down and banned by the action of Republicans and the inaction of Democrats. We are told to research, think, and write about people, meaning not our people. We are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

Who, exactly, tells people to die? That’s pure histrionics.

Insofar as the “studies” courses are criticized—and yes, some of these are valid and worthwhile—they are criticized in academia precisely because they do not involve the search for truth. They involve instead the inculcation of propaganda and the denigration of “heterodox” thought.  But seriously, for Kendi to say that these programs, or what he sees as faux intellectuals, argue to let “our people” die, or tell people to die (presumably blacks, LGBTQ people, women, Jews, and so on; see below) is hyperbolic and, in fact, a lie—unless I misconstrue the meaning of the word “die”.

And he says it again:

We are told not to change the inequitable present, and not to expect anything to change in the future. We are told to look away as the past rains down furiously on the present. Or we are told that intellectuals should focus only on how society has progressed, a suicidal and illogical act when a tornado is ravaging your community. Yet again, we are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

He may be referring to Pinker here, who if course has never told anybody or any group to die, but the “die” thing is just unhinged.

In the end, this article feels like a long whine, one in which Kendi, who apparently has faced charges of not being an intellectual (and his antiracism book doesn’t seem very intellectual), wants to change the meaning of “intellectual” to “someone who rationally seeks the truth in their work, but also prizes ‘lived experience”‘and, above all, has the aim of changing society in ways Kendi approves of”. But has he forgotten about Karl Marx, an intellectual by anybody’s account, whose explicit aim was to change society to make it more egalitarian, and is the author of these famous words (inscribed on his tombstone):

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Here’s Kendi wanting to be seen as both an intellectual and an antiracist (he sees the terms as nearly synonymous), while beefing that he hasn’t yet acquired the patina of an intellectual:

Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who looked like me or who had a background like mine, who came from a non-elite academic pedigree, emerged proudly from a historically Black university, earned a doctorate in African American Studies. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who researched like me, thought like me, wrote like me—or who researched, thought, or wrote for people like me. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who are not ranking groups of people in the face of inequity and injustice. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include those of us who are fixated and focused wholly and totally on uncovering and clarifying complex truths that can radically improve the human condition. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include our conception of the intellectual.

Well, the Oxford English Dictionary disagrees, but really, who cares? (I’ve chosen a few of many definitions that seem to be what Kendi’s talking about.)

(“Intellectual” an adjective) Possessing a high degree of understanding or intelligence; given to pursuits that exercise the intellect; spec. devoted to academic or cultural interests.

(“Intellectual” as a noun): An intellectual being; a person of superior or supposedly superior intellect; spec. (a) a highly intelligent person who pursues academic interests; (b) a person who cultivates the mind or mental powers and pursues learning and cultural interests.

Note the word “cultural” in both definitions. At any rate, here’s some beefing by Kendi about how he thought his antiracism book would be received:

When the traditionalists today disagree with the evidence-based findings of intellectuals—or envy the prominence of our work—too often they do not contest our findings with their own evidence. They do not usually engage in intellectual activity. They misrepresent our work. They play up minor typos or small miscues to take down major theses. They call us names they never define, like “leftist” or “Marxist” or “woke” or “socialist” or “prophet” or “grifter” or “political” or “racist.” All to attack our credibility as intellectuals—to reassert their own credibility. In politics, they say, when you can’t win on policy, you smear the candidate. In intellectualism, when you can’t win on evidence, you smear the intellectual.

 

I knew the smears were coming, because I knew history. What blocked my writing bound my intellectualism. What finally set me free to be an intellectual was the face of death, a face I still stare at to amass the courage to be an intellectual.

Although Kendi is not explicit about what the “crisis” of the intellectual is, it seems to be that people like Kendi, who aspire to be both a rational thinker but also someone with an explicit social agenda, don’t count as intellectuals. It may also sting him that Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University (he founded it and runs it) is in trouble. It has produced virtually no intellectual work, has laid off staff, and Kendi himself has been repeatedly accused of mismanagement. Kendi and the Center remain under investigation.

But I find it bizarre that Kendi even worries about whether he’s seen as an intellectual. Certainly his first two books have had a profound effect on society, whether for good or ill. They are part of the modern canon of Social Justice literature. So yes, he’s changed the thinking of many Americans, even though I see Kendi’s views as misguided and his effect on society neutral at best, malign at worst.  With the fame this young man (he’s only 41) has accrued, why this beef about intellectuals? After all, he’s accomplished what he says intellectuals are supposed to do.

At any rate, I find the ending of the piece ineffably sad, for when I read in his antiracism book that he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2018, I thought, “Uh oh—this guy is a goner.” Fortunately, he’s still with us, as I wouldn’t want anybody, including an intellectual opponent, to go through that and die. Here’s his ending:

It took me all of 2017 to write six chapters of How to Be an Antiracist. A slog. But when doctors diagnosed me with Stage 4 colon cancer in January 2018, when I figured I probably wouldn’t survive a disease that kills 86 percent of people in five years, when I decided that this book would be my last major will and testament to the world, everything that blocked my writing wilted away, along with my prospects for living. I no longer cared about those traditional conceptions of the intellectual—just like I no longer cared about the orthodoxy of racial thinking. I no longer cared about the backlash that was likely to come. All I cared about was telling the truth through the lens of research and evidence, reaction be damned. And just like that, between chemotherapy treatments, the words started flowing, furiously: 13 chapters in a few months.

Since I wasn’t going to live, I wanted to write a book that could help prevent our people from dying at the hands of racism. Yes, I was told I would die, but I wanted to tell my people to live. Like an intellectual.

It looks like he survived, even if he isn’t seen as an “intellectual” in the way he wants.  Were I to chararacterize him, I’d call him an “activist.”

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

Karl Marx’s tomb at Highgate Cemetery, London. I’ve put a rectangle above the famous quote (note: Marx was a “non-Christian”, born of Jewish origin and later a diehard atheist.

From Wikimedia Commons

Bill Maher’s latest monologue, “Stuck on stupid,” takes out after what he sees as overreactions to the covid pandemic (including closing schools and denying flatly that the virus came from a Wuhan lab),  I remember disinfecting groceries with alcohol and staying a long distance away from people, and, seriously I don’t think that Maher is correct to say that those behaviors were simply stupid. After all, remember that people were dying of a virus that we didn’t understand, and a lot of people hadn’t yet been vaccinated.

So I think here Maher is being snarky with the wisdom of hindsight. He even seems to diss vaccinations!

And yes, we have learned some stuff: how to make RNA vaccines, that those vaccines work, and that, right now, we don’t really need to have our sixth booster unless we’re immunocompromised.

This ain’t one of Maher’s better efforts. I didn’t follow his opinions at the beginning of the pandemic, but I know some reader did, so please weigh in below.

Many of you may have seen the 1988 movie “My Neighbor Totoro“, directed and written by written and directed by the immensely creative Hayao Miyazaki and made into an animation by the fantastic Studio Ghibli (see it!). In one scene sisters Satsuki and Mei stand by as their friend, a large catlike spirit animal named Totoro, boards the Cat Bus. Shaped like a cat and able to fly, it’s amazing, and a great imaginative creation. Here’s the scene where the Cat Bus first appears. (It also appears later in the film.)

Now, by clicking on the two-page article from Toyota Times below, you can learn how Toyota created a drive-able Cat Bus. (All photos from Studio Ghibli.)

Indented text from the Toyota site:

Toyota’s APM Cat Bus was unveiled to the press in a ceremony on February 27, 2024.

It was modeled on the iconic bus in which Satsuki and Mei hurtle through the night sky in the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro.

The design is based on Toyota’s Accessible People Mover (APM), a low-speed, short-distance BEV used at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. But let’s jump right into the details.

You can’t help but smile. This whimsical design is the work of Naoki Nagatsu, Professional Partner at Toyota’s Vision Design Division, and his team, in close communication with Studio Ghibli director Goro Miyazaki.

The tail end and insidewith furry seats:

 

The concept for the APM Cat Bus was “fantastical feline shapeshifts into APM.” Bringing out the details required the unique carmaking skills of veteran designers.

Director Goro Miyazaki placed particular importance on those otherworldly eyes. [Miyazaki is shown below, and his words are doubly indented.]

The two eyes don’t actually face forward but slightly out to the sides. This was Miyazaki’s advice for achieving that supernatural look, but positioning the left and right pupils nicely on the spherical eyeballs was difficult.

To begin with, we had to get the car sitting perfectly level.

Incidentally, the APM Cat Bus’s steering wheel is centered in the vehicle—not placed on one side, as is usual—because the weight difference would cause a slight lean if the tire pressure were not adjusted. Now that’s fine-tuned craftsmanship.

The caption: “Four mice adorn the roof, peeking out so that they are visible from the eye line of a 100cm-tall child.”

One of the Cat Bus’s standout features is eyes that shine in the dark. How were they brought to life?

The team crafted eyes in many color and shape variations, repeatedly testing how they lit up indoors, under natural light, and in the dark. When the APM Cat Bus is actually operating, most people will see it during the day. That makes the nighttime cat eyes all the more special.

The APM Cat Bus is based on the Accessible People Mover, which was designed to accommodate seniors, mobility-impaired passengers, pregnant women, and parents with young children.

As such, it is configured to provide easy access for all types of people, with a ramp that can be deployed in just 10 seconds.

It allows a wheelchair user and their companion to board from opposite sides. Another basic APM feature is the raised driver’s seat, which makes it easy to turn around and check that the passengers are safe when setting off.

Where can you see it?

Ghibli Park visitors can catch the Cat Bus for themselves at Expo 2005 Aichi Commemorative Park (Nagakute, Aichi) from March 16, with tickets featuring illustrations by director Hayao Miyazaki.

There’s also a Ghibli Museum in suburban Tokyo.

I’ve loved all the Ghibli animations, and now there’s a new one I haven’t seen, “The Boy and the Heron,” which is highly acclaimed, and nabbed a 97% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I can’t wait to see it. “Spirited Away,” from 2001 and another of Miyazaki’s films, was a fantastic animated story.

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From the Washington Post, we have the story of a cat purloined as it was inside a stolen truck.  Citizens went up in arms to recover the moggy. Click to read:

Susie Heffernan dashed into a store to purchase some pet food, and left her cat, Dundee, in her truck. A winter storm was coming, and Heffernan wanted to stock up on food for her animals before an expected blizzard hit the area.

When she came out a few minutes later, her truck — and cat — had vanished.

“I don’t ever usually leave an animal in the car, but I thought he was perfectly safe,” said Heffernan, explaining that she had just taken Dundee to the veterinarian and she left him in her truck because it was too cold to bring him out, and she knew she could run her errand fast. She locked the doors.

“This can’t really be happening,” Heffernan thought to herself, as she stood in a Tractor Supply store parking lot in Paradise, Calif., on Feb. 28.

While she was concerned about losing her 2000 Ford F-250, she was far more worried about Dundee — an 8-year-old Siamese whom Heffernan rescued off the streets in 2018. He was in a carrier in the passenger seat.

Heffernan immediately ran back into the store and called the police. Although Tractor Supply did not have video footage of the theft, the store next door did. It showed a gray vehicle dropping off a person nearher truck. A figure then entered her truck, Heffernan said, and both vehicles drove off around 12:25 p.m.

Strangers came out, searched, and even donated money for a reward. The truck was found the next day, but Dundee was missing (his medication, which he requires, was still in the car):

They picked up Heffernan at the store, and a group of about a half-dozen neighbors spent from 1 p.m. to around 3 a.m. searching the streets for Dundee, who has a thyroid condition and needs daily medication. They also contacted Pamela Bezley, another neighbor who runs a cat rescue group, and she began searching, too.

News of the stolen cat spread rapidly on social media, with people posting in several Facebook groups to be on the lookout for Dundee. Many strangers joined the search.

“People just came out in droves,” Curtis said.

Heffernan said she received hundreds of messages with words of support and potential leads, and people pushed to get the story covered by local news outlets.

“The offers that were coming in from strangers were just incredible,” said Heffernan, noting that people pitched in reward money for Dundee’s safe return. One man pledged $1,000, but Heffernan capped the total at $500 to prevent the thief from holding out for more money.

The day after the truck disappeared, police found it in Chico, about 15 miles from where it was stolen. Dundee was nowhere in sight.

The truck was stripped and was missing the ignition and catalytic converter. The locks were damaged, and the dashboard was pulled out. The thieves placed Dundee’s medication, which was on the floorboard in front of the crate, in the glove box.

Finally, someone said he had the cat and nabbed the $600 reward:

Finally, someone called and said they had Dundee. Heffernan promised to keep their identity secret and vowed to take a no-questions-asked approach. Heffernan — along with Curtis and Bezley, who runs Concow Feline Rescue — met the person at an apartment complex in Chico. They gave the person the $500 reward, plus an extra $100, and took Dundee home. Heffernan said she does not know whether the person was responsible for stealing the truck and believes they saw the torrent of posts on social media about the reward.

It’s a bit weird that the person who probably stole the cat got all the dosh for a reward. But of course what cat lover would mind that? The important thing is to get your moggy back!   But now the cops should investigate the person who had the cat to see if he stole car + cat!

Here’s a 2½-minute news piece about Dundee’s rescue, and showing the cat.

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If you’re around Pasadena in early August, they’re having a big two-day Cat Convention, which you can read about by clicking on the poster below. Tickets run from $35 to the VIP special tickets at $175 with apparently lots of cat perks.  Unfortunately, the schedule, which is here, says that things won’t be finalized until the summer, but stay tuned.

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Lagniappe: I took a photo of this sign in mid-March. They’re fixing up the south facade of Rockefeller Chapel, barely visible to the left. and the whole facade is covered in Black Cat scaffolding. The company is apparently in Chicago, and they have hats and tee shirts for sale, but sadly, the wonderful tee shirts are sold out.

h/t: Debra