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Today’s contribution is, of course, a Sunday selection of birds from John Avise. John’s IDs and notes are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Australian Birds, Part 3 

This week’s post continues a 5-part mini-series on birds that I photographed on a short business trip to Queensland, Australia in 2006.  It shows just a few of the many avian species that inhabit the Land Down Under.

Great Bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis):

Grey Fantail (Rhipidura albiscapa):

Grey-headed Robin (Heteromyias cinereifrons):

Helmeted Friarbird (Philemon buceroides):

Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae):

Lewin’s Honeyeater (Meliphaga lewinii):

Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos)

Arafura Shrike-thrush (Colluricincla megarhyncha):

Macleay’s Honeyeater (Xanthotis macleayanus):

Magpie Goose (Anseranas semipalmata):

Magpie Goose flying:

Comedian Andrew Doyle is of course the creator of Titania McGrath, an über-woke and privileged cis white female who expounds Social Justice on Twitter. She’s spoofing it, of course, but has fooled many people into thinking she’s serious. And, as a full time faux wokester, Titania has made many satirical posts that later came true. Here Doyle gives some of them.

It goes to show that in Woke World, the line between satire and reality is paper-thin:

I’ve described in these pages what I consider to be the finest prose written in English; it includes the beginning of The Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott; the ending of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (but there’s also great stuff in Tender is the Night); much of Thomas Wolfe (especially “The Child by Tiger“, an excerpt from one of his novels); and James Joyce’s long story The Dead, which, especially in its ending, stands above them all.

But there’s one more, and I’ll put down a specimen here. I know I’ve put up a video of this scene from Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937) before, but I just reread much of the book and marveled at how wonderful it is—and sad, too.  It is of course an autobiography of Blixen’s stint in Kenya, where she owned a coffee farm, and includes a hedged description of her life with her lover Denys Finch Hatton, a guide and big-game hunter who died in a plane crash while she still lived in Kenya.

She and Denys had picked out their graves, up in the Ngong Hills with a fantastic view of the plains as well as Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilamanjaro.  But she had to leave Africa when she lost her farm, and so buried Finch Hatton up in the hills before she left.  This description of what happened to his grave always brings me to tears, no matter how often I read it. I just realized I put this up in a longer extract seven years ago, and you might want to read that part, too.

After I had left Africa, Gustav Mohr wrote to me of a strange thing that had happened by Denys’ grave, the like of which I have never heard. “The Masai,” he wrote, “have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave in the Hills. A lion and a lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time. Some of the Indians who have passed the place in their lorries on the way to Kajado have also seen them. After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace, I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there they can have a view over the plain, and the cattle and game on it.”

It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. “And renowned be thy grave.” Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has his lions made only out of stone.

The last paragraph is one of the best I know in English, and the whole scenario is ineffably moving. It’s even more amazing when you realize that Blixen’s native language wasn’t English but Danish, and she wrote the book in English. (In this way she’s like Joseph Conrad.)

I know I’ve forgotten some of my favorite prose, but I’ll note more here if I remember. In the meantime, weigh in with your favorites below. Remember, this is not a selection of “best books” or “best stories” but simply “the best prose written in English”.

The lion clip is no longer on the Internet, but below a clip from the movie showing Blixen (played by Meryl Streep) giving a few words at Finch Hatton’s burial (he was played by Robert Redford).  Just these few moments show what a great actor Meryl Streep is.

The film was shot on location in Kenya, and I do recommend it, even if the critics give it only a 63% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It did win the Best Picture Oscar.

The NYT’s “Trilobites” column analyzes what a cat’s meow really means. Click on the headline below, or read the article archived here.

The article describes a study in which people tried to interpret the meaning of a cat’s meow by watching videos of said moggy. Some excerpts:

It turns out these misunderstood moments with your cat may be more common than not. A new study by French researchers, published last month in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, found that people were significantly worse at reading the cues of an unhappy cat (nearly one third got it wrong) than those of a contented cat (closer to 10 percent).

The study also suggested that a cat’s meows and other vocalizations are greatly misinterpreted and that people should consider both vocal and visual cues to try to determine what’s going on with their pets.

The researchers drew these findings from the answers of 630 online participants; respondents were volunteers recruited through advertisements on social media. Each watched 24 videos of differing cat behaviors. One third depicted only vocal communication, another third just visual cues, and the remainder involved both.

. . .Their vocals can range from seductive to threatening: meowing, purring, growling, hissing and caterwauling. At last count, kittens were known to use nine different forms of vocalization, while adult cats uttered 16.

That we could better understand what a cat wants by using visual and vocal cues may seem obvious. But we know far less than we think we do.

. . . And the fact that we’re not very good at picking up on signs of animal discontentment should not come as a surprise, Dr. Udell suggested. “We’re more likely to perceive our animals as experiencing positive emotions because we want them to,” she said. “When we see the animals, it makes us feel good, and our positive emotional state in response to the animals gives us these rose-colored glasses.”

Even some of the most common cues may be misunderstood.

Purring, for example, is not always a sign of comfort. “Purring can be exhibited in uncomfortable or stressful conditions,” Dr. de Mouzon said. “When a cat is stressed, or even hurt, they will sometimes purr.”

Such instances are a form of “self-soothing,” said Kristyn Vitale, an assistant professor of animal health and behavior at Unity Environmental University in Maine, who was not involved in the new study.

. . .As an example, Dr. de Mouzon pointed to a cat’s habit of suddenly biting. “Over time, with cats communicating and humans not understanding, the cat will just bite,” she said, “because they have learned over time that this is the only way to make something stop.”

Animal rescue shelters use such findings to educate prospective owners. Dr. Udell and Dr. Vitale are assessing whether cats can be suitable as therapy animals, or in aiding children with developmental differences.

I wonder if humans could develop a form of “purr therapy” in which we could do something similar to purring as “self-soothing”.  As you know, self care is a big deal these days, often involving expensive items like hot-rocks-on-the-back therapy and expensive oils.  If we could do something like purring it would be a lot cheaper!

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From Country Life we have a big list of great quotations about cats. I’ll give just a few; click on the headline to see ’em all:

Ernest Hemingway:

“One cat just leads to another.”
Source: Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”

Mark Twain

“If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.”

Leonardo da Vinci

“The smallest feline is a masterpiece.”

Jane Pauley

“Never trust a man who hate cats.”

Albert Schweitzer

“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.”

Lilian Jackson Brown

“Dogs have their day but cats have 365.”
Source: Three Complete Novels by Lilian Jackson Braun: The Cat Who Saw Red / The Cat Who Played Brahms / The Cat Who Played Post Office

P. C. Cast

“I’ve found that the way a person feels about cats—and the way they feel about him or her in return—is usually an excellent gauge by which to measure a person’s character.”
Source:Marked

Charles Dickens

“What greater gift than the love of a cat.”

Eckhart Tolle

“I have lived with several Zen masters—all of them cats.”
Source: The Power of Now

Beverley Nichols

“Let us be honest: most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness. I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked around the house with a saintly expression.”
Source: Beverley Nichols’ Cats’ X. Y. Z.

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

This NYT piece (click on headline or find it archived here) made big news, and is still doing so: I saw it on the NBC Evening News two nights ago. It’s one of the cleverest ideas I’ve heard of!

An excerpt (warning: lots of puns):

Finally, there is something cats can do for humans.

The Worcester Public Library in Worcester, Mass., announced that through the end of March, people who have lost or damaged a book or other borrowed items can bring a photograph, drawing, or magazine clipping of a cat, and get their library cards reactivated.

The library calls the program March Meowness, a way for the system of seven branches to forgive (or is that fur-give?) members of the community who misplaced a book or damaged a borrowed item, and then never went back to avoid paying for it.

In just a few days, the program has already generated hundreds of returns, multiple postings of random cat photographs on the library’s Facebook page, and photographs and drawings pinned on a growing “cat wall” in the main building.

The local NPR affiliate, WBUR, described it as a “never be-fur tried initiative,” and urged patrons to hurry and “act meow.” So far the response, WBUR said, has Jason Homer, the executive director of the library, “feline good.”

. . . If you don’t have a cat? No problem. One cat-less 7-year-old boy, who never returned a “Captain Underpants” book, had his library card reactivated after the staff gave him paper and crayons to sketch one.

. . .The library had previously tried to boost attendance and fee-forgiveness programs with canned food drives. But the cats found their way into the spotlight, as they do. The Meowness program took shape after several months of brainstorming by a library task force that met to come up with a creative way to get people back through the doors.

“It spiraled in a good way from there,” Mr. Homer said. “We were just trying to figure out the lowest barrier possible.”

. . .Mr. Homer said that using cats as the vehicle to forgive patrons for losing or damaging books or other borrowed items could help to soften the stereotype of the stern librarian.

“We don’t really have the high buns and ‘shush’ people anymore,” he said. “We are still book lovers, cardigan lovers and cat lovers.”

This would not, of course, have worked nearly as well as d*gs, for cats rule the Internet.

On the news report I heard that the library had received over 10,000 cat photos, many sent in by distant folks who wanted to help a local waive their fees or get back their library card.  In response, the library has now waived fees for everyone! That’s what a cat lover would do.

And here’s a video:

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Lagniappe: A version of the well known song “The Cat Came Back“, sung by Garrison Keillor and Frederica Von Stade. This song was written in 1893 by Harry S. Miller, and has been recorded many times.

The original sheet music:

In public domain.

h/t: Merilee

Again I importune readers to keep those wildlife photos coming in. And many thanks to those who have contributed.

Today we have some black-and-white photos by reader Christopher Moss. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. This was sent on March 15:

Inspired by today’s B&W film, I thought I’d throw some more your way.

Rain on trumpet lilies (Lilium spp). Leica MP, Summilux 75mm, Delta 3200 in Diafine.

Nuttby Dream Home. Supposedly the second most photographed site in Nova Scotia (how does one ascertain that?), and now demolished. Leica M7, Summicron 50mm, Tri-X in TMax developer.

It’s nice having a brewery at the end of the driveway! Hasselblad 500c, Planar 80mm, XP2, Rodinal developer:

Their product. Pentax 645n, 80mm lens, Tri-X, Diafine:

Lap Cat. Pentax 645n, 120mm lens, Ilford HP5+, Diafine:

Russet apples. Nikon F6, 85mm lens, Tri-X, TMax developer:

Bridge over the Waugh River, now part of the Great Trail. Rolleiflex 2.8GX, XP2, Rodinal:

Fog at Barrachois. Leica MP, Summilux 35, XP2, Kodak HC-110:

I took this photo of a tranquil lake in 2016. Six years later we bought this house and now live there! Leica M2, Summilux 35, Acros 100, Kodak HC-110:

Icicles over the front door, Leica M2, Summilux 35, Ilford PanF, Kodak HC-110:

Wallace. Nikon F6, 28mm lens, XP2, Kodak HC-110:

And finally, the culprit:

If you’re an American who supports Israel in its war against Hamas, you’re subject not only to a barrage of bizarre and untenable claims, but also must ride an emotional roller coaster controlled by Biden and Blinken. These B brothers seem determined to control Israel’s behavior in the war, going back and forth in what they dictate to the Jewish country.  We are told that the war must stop because too many Gazan civilians have been killed in proportion to dead terrorists, yet the ratio is by all rational accounts roughly 1.5:1—one of the lowest ratios of civilians/combatants killed in modern warfare.  (And of course the media always use the dubious figures presented by Hamas as if they were accurate!)

We see Blinken telling Israel that they must hold an election now to get rid of Netanyahu—a reprehensible interference in democratic politics, and during wartime!   (I’m not a big fan of Netanyahu, and am sure he’ll be deposed in the next election, but now he’s part of a three-person war cabinet that, with help from the Israeli military is directing the fighting. And two of those members are, unlike Netanyahu, from the Israeli Left).

We see the world, including America, issuing dire warnings that Israel must not invade Rafah, despite the fact that that is where the Hamas leadership and a large proportion of its fighters have holed up, and despite Israel having plans to evacuate civilians. Without going into Rafah, Hamas will not be destroyed, and of course will not voluntarily give up power. Keeping Israel out of Rafah is, as all pro-Palestinians realize, a recipe for keeping Hamas in power.

We see the American administration broaching the idea that the Palestinian Authority should rule postwar Gaza, despite the fact that Gazans despise the PA. And the PA is a corrupt, terror-promoting organization that pays Palestinians who kill Jews in its odious “pay for slay” program (or, as Wikipedia calls it, the “Martyrs’ Fund“). What kind of moron would suggest that the PA take over running Gaza? And if any remnants of Hamas remain, they won’t be allowed to.

And now the ultimate insult: the U.S. will propose today a UN Security Council resolution that will call for a ceasefire and release of hostages.  The details are hazy, but the resolution is aimed not at Hamas but at Israel, for, given the details, it could lead to the resurrection of Hamas and its attendant terror attacks.  Realize that since October 7 there has been not one UN resolution, be it in the General Assembly or the more important Security Council, that has condemned what Hamas has done and told it to lay down its arms, release the hostages, and surrender.

One gets the impression that for a very brief time after October 7 the West was on the side of Israel, but that didn’t last long.  Now, it seems, the West, including the U.S., wants Hamas to win—or at least Israel to vanish. Why? Well, of course Biden is sweating bullets over winning a close election in November, and he needs the votes of Muslims and young people who don’t favor Israel.  Further, the casualty ratio is too high for most people, who don’t seem to realize that it’s an extraordinarily low ratio of civilians killed to terrorists killed, especially for urban warfare in close quarters.

Will the Security Council resolution pass? Yes, of course, since the U.S., which has been the only veto in the Council’s resolutions against Israel so far, is actually proposing this resolution. And that bodes very ill for Israel.

We also see bizarre claims (viz., from Thomas “I am Dumb” Friedman) that creating a two-state situation will somehow miraculously bring about lasting peace, even when we know that neither Palestinians nor Israelis favor that situation, that it can’t work, and that polls show that most Palestinians, whether they be in Gaza or the West Bank, still favor Hamas.  Here are results from a poll taken between March 5 and 10 from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research:

Forced to the "brink of starvation" in a bombed-out hellscape, what do Gazans think of Hamas now?

New poll:

71% of Palestinians approve of the 10/7 Hamas attacks

91% say Hamas committed no war crimes

59% want Hamas to rule Gaza after the warhttps://t.co/GmkDrwDsaT

— i/o (@eyeslasho) March 21, 2024

Finally, there’s the world’s accusation that Israel is preventing humanitarian aid to Gazans, despite all evidence that Israel is allowing and facilitating that aid, while Hamas takes the lion’s share of it while also ensuring that more civilians are killed—its strategy from the beginning. In fact, Israel has even proposed using IDF soldiers to guard the aid-bearing trucks to prevent them from being hijacked buy Hamas.

Yes, it looks to a pro-Israeli American that the Western world has lost its collective mind, taking steps that will ensure a victory of Hamas, a barbaric, Jew-hating organization that not only oppresses its own people, but is sworn to kill all Jews and eliminate Israel. This is the organization that, apparently, the West is loath to dismantle.

This is my view, but it appears to be one shared by the former Guardian writer Melanie Phillips in a recent column. Phillips, once a liberal, left the Guardian and moved towards the center-right, for which of course she’s been damned. It’s even worse for “progressives” because she’s Jewish favors Israel in the war. But her latest Substack column (also in the Jewish News Service), which you can read by clicking the headline below, rings true.  In fact, she speaks of a “war” between the U.S. and Israel, though of course it’s a war of wills, not of weapons.

Her thesis:

As some of us have long feared and has now become undeniable, Israel is fighting not one but two wars of defence against a malevolent foe.

The first is against the axis of Iran and its proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen. The second is against America.

The Biden administration is to construct a pier off the Gaza shore to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. This week, Israeli TV’s Channel 14 reported that, astoundingly, the Americans have handed over the financing and management of this pier to Qatar, the founder, funder and protector of Hamas and therefore the godfather of the October 7 pogrom.

Channel 14 said the Qataris demanded that the new pier be built by a Gaza company named Al Hissi, which is controlled by Hamas.

Giving Qatar control of this pier would ensure Hamas continues to exist, enrich itself and attack Israel with an open route into Gaza. As Yigal Carmon, the founder of MEMRI, has written in horror: “The US has flipped sides, from Israel to Qatar.”

America could end this war tomorrow by telling the Qataris that unless they instruct Hamas to surrender and release the hostages, Qatar will forfeit its preferential treatment by the United States and will henceforth be treated instead as an international pariah.

Instead, America is feeding Israel into the Qatari jaws. The outcome, writes Carmon, will be escalation into a total regional war by Iran not only against Israel but America.

America’s action is so preposterous it’s hard to believe. Yet in any event, the Biden administration has already pivoted from supporting the destruction of Hamas to working for its ultimate victory.

The administration has been relentlessly pressuring Israel to admit more and more aid into Gaza, accusing it falsely of stopping the trucks and ignoring the fact that most of this aid is being stolen by Hamas to enable it to survive at the expense of the needy civilian population.

The United States is determined to impose rule in post-war Gaza by the Palestinian Authority, despite the fact that the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party, Fatah, has exulted at the October 7 pogrom and declared that it will continue such attacks.

The administration is determined to impose upon Israel a Palestine state, even though this would become another “Hamastan” and place central Israel in grave danger of October 7-style attacks on steroids.

And with Israel now poised to attack the last redoubt of Hamas in Rafah, which is key to the defeat of this genocidal enemy, America is subjecting Israel to intense pressure to abandon this final front of the war.

While many, including me, have imputed America’s waning support for Israel to Biden’s drive to get re-elected, Phillips thinks that the desire to depose Netanyahu is a stronger motivation.  She may be right, but that motivation is misguided. Right now Israel is in an existential battle, and the war is being prosecuted by not only military experts, but by a war cabinet that includes right-wing Netanyahu but also two left-wing Israelis (Ganz and Gallant), who were generals in the IDF. Netanyahu fought too, and acquitted himself well in battle, taking part in many actions and being wounded many times, though he never made general. At any rate, now is not the time to call for regime change in Israel, even if you think that the U.S. has the right to tell the Israeli people when and how to hold elections.

Chuck Schumer, who pretends to be a Jew who has Israel’s best interests at heart, also comes in for his share of Phillipsian opprobrium. Beside calling for Israel to depose Netanyahu, Phillips adds this:

Far worse, Schumer parroted the blood libels being used to demonise Israel by its enemies. Claiming to be one of the Jews who “love Israel in our bones,” he stated in the next breath: “I’m anguished that the Israeli war campaign has killed so many innocent Palestinians. I know that my fellow Jewish Americans feel the same anguish when they see the images of dead and starving children — and destroyed homes.”

Every civilian death in wartime is tragic. But “so many innocents” is based on Hamas casualty figures that inflate the numbers and totally omit the Hamas forces they include.

Even more nauseatingly, Schumer smeared Israel still further by intoning: “We must be better than our enemies, lest we become them.”

The suggestion that Israel is no better than Hamas is a pernicious lie spread by those who want Israel gone. In fact, Israel’s ratio of civilians to combatants killed is fewer than 1.5 civilians for every one combatant, far better than any other country’s army has ever achieved.

That ratio, the focus of the world’s ire, should actually dampen its ire. The ratio is astoundingly low, but of course although using it to indict Israel makes no sense, it supports The Narrative, which in the end sees Israeli Jews as white colonialist oppressors and Gazans and Hamas as oppressed people of color who are simply battling colonialism, occupation, and oppression. Phillips:

Israel is not just fighting to defend itself against genocide. It is on the front line of the west’s defence against its enemies and the defence of civilisation against barbarism.

Western liberals can’t acknowledge this because they can’t allow their unchallengeable orthodoxies of Palestinian powerlessness, “peace processes” and western iniquity to be destroyed. So they have turned on the Jews. Jewish suffering has to be erased because it gets in the way of the narrative.

That’s why the eruption of Palestinianism throughout the west is so shattering. People wonder why the forests of Palestinian flags at the incendiary anti-Israel demonstrations are in themselves so intimidating.

It’s because the Palestine cause is not two states side by side. Palestinian identity consists entirely of the intention to eradicate Israel by the hijack and appropriation of Jewish history. Palestinianism stands for the erasure of Jewish national identity and wiping the Jewish people out of their own historic homeland.

Perhaps the last paragraph is a bit hyperbolic, but not overly so given the Jew hatred taught to Palestinian children and the repeated rejection by Palestinians of a “two state solution.” However, I’m sure that there are decent Palestinians who merely want to live in peace with Israeli neighbors, and live in a prosperous country with a decent government. Unfortunately, Hamas won’t permit that.

And, apparently, neither will the United States.

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

UPDATE: I’ve just learned that, against all expectations, the U.S.’s Security Council resolution at the UN did NOT pass—it was vetoed by Russia and China but of course the U.S. voted “yea”.

France will work with Jordan and the United Arab Emirates to convince Russia and China to back a resolution at the United Nations for a ceasefire in Gaza after the two big powers blocked a text by the United States, French President Emmanuel Macron says.

“Following the Russian and Chinese veto a few minutes ago, we are going to resume work on the basis of the French draft resolution in the Security Council and work with our American, European and Arab partners to reach an agreement,” Macron says at the end of a European Union leaders’ summit in Brussels.

France’s foreign ministry said on Thursday it had started drafting a resolution with diplomats, saying they would put a draft forward if the US resolution did not pass.

Earlier, the UN Security Council failed to pass a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza as part of a hostage deal, the first time the US has backed such language.

The resolution called for an “immediate and sustained ceasefire” lasting roughly six weeks that would protect civilians and allow for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

I’m not sure why Russia and China voted “no”, unless it’s simply because they don’t like the U.S. and wanted to oppose its resolution.

John K. Wilson is identified in the new article below in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHI) as “the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies and the forthcoming The Attack on Academia.”  In the piece below (access by clicking the headline), Wilson says that the concept of “official” academic neutrality, as embodied in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, has been misconstrued and misapplied.

Here are Wilson’s two beefs about Kalven (his words are indented):

1.)  The Kalven Report was a 1967 product of the University of Chicago faculty, yet is adjudicated not by the faculty but by the university administration (Wilson’s words are indented):

The Kalven Report is a monument to faculty power. It was the product of a faculty committee, decreeing restraints on the administration purely in order to protect faculty freedoms. And faculty members were given the sole power to interpret these limits. The Kalven Report noted that “the application of principle to an individual case will not be easy”; it called for “faculty or students or administration to question, through existing channels such as the committee of the council or the council, whether in light of these principles the university in particular circumstances is playing its proper role.” In other words, the administration (like everyone else) is required to go to a faculty committee for any question about how to interpret the Kalven Report. (Unfortunately, the University of Chicago administration has been violating the Kalven Report for decades by imposing its own interpretations of neutrality without faculty consultation.)

2.)  Wilson argues that the Kalven Report was meant to apply only to pronouncements by the University administration, not by University moieties like departments or Institutes:

The Kalven Report should also be followed for its approach to what institutional neutrality means, by limiting the term to actions and speech by top administrators on behalf of the entire college. The most dangerous betrayal of the Kalven Report’s principles is the extension of neutrality beyond the central administration to include all sub-units and faculty departments of a college.

Wilson is wrong—dead wrong—on both of these points, and was corrected by my Chicago colleague Brian Leiter (a law professor) in a letter to the CHE that came out just a few hours ago. Click below to read it:

From the letter:

Although John K. Wilson links to the actual text of the Kalven Report, he mischaracterizes it throughout his piece while alleging, ironically, that others “misunderstand” it (“More Colleges Are Swearing Off Political Positions. They’re Getting It Wrong”, The Chronicle Review, March 18). He declares that “shared-governance…is an essential part of the Kalven Report,” although it is not mentioned and has nothing to do with the principles articulated in that document. He says falsely that “the University of Chicago administration has been violating the Kalven Report for decades by imposing its own interpretations of neutrality without faculty consultation,” even though the Report requires no such consultation and even though, in the most recent cases, it was precisely faculty (including myself) who raised Kalven violations with the university, prompting it to act.

and

President Zimmer’s clarification made explicit longstanding understandings of Kalven’s principles; after all, as the report emphasizes, “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student,” not the university or department or school. Kalven cautions that we “cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues,” which is exactly what many departments started doing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Department orthodoxy is, arguably, far more dangerous than university orthodoxy: An untenured faculty member might perhaps ignore the provost’s pronouncements about “systemic racism” but be more wary when her own department issues a statement of an official position.

Brian doesn’t pull any punches, and implicitly accuses Wilson of “lying” (yes, the word is used) about Kalven.

Leiter has also put a note about this on his own website, the Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog. Click to read:

Two bits from the blog (I’ve omitted Brian’s excerpt from the CHI letter):

Years ago, I was impressed that Mr. Wilson (a freelance “academic freedom” expert [sic] as it were) was one of the few who spoke up on behalf of the attack on the free speech rights of Ward Churchill.  Alas, it’s now clear that his interest in free speech and academic freeodm is partisan through and through, as his astonishingly dishonest attack on the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report makes clear.

. . . Mr. Wilson is not as egregious an enemy of academic freedom as Jennifer Ruth or Michael Berube, but he is not an honest broker.  (I have corresponded with Mr. Wilson about other academic freedom issues, after being e-introduced to him by Nadine Strossen, and my impression from that is that he was not very smart and not really interested in a principled conception of academic freedom.  This latest incident confirms my impression then.)

As you see, no punches are pulled here, either. I’ve worked with Brian on Kalven, and although he can be brusque, he’s also efficient, eloquent, and, by Ceiling Cat, gets things done!  Kalven has and is being enforced, and, by and large, it’s worked quite well here. While schools like Harvard, MIT, and Penn get in big trouble by lacking any academic neutrality and unevenly enforcing what speech policy they do have, the University of Chicago hasn’t been hauled before Congress, excoriated in the press, or lost any donors.

Agustín Fuentes is surely bucking for Social Justice Scientist of the Year, as I’ve documented in numerous posts. Whenever there’s an article about how scientists are bigoted, racist, and sexist, including Darwin, or there’s an article to be written that extols social justice in science but will have little or no effect on society, you’re likely to find Fuentes’s name on it. (He’s a professor of anthropology at Princeton.)

In his latest attempt to introduce politics into science, he’s written an “eLetter” to Science that you can read by clicking on the headline below. I didn’t know of eLetters before, but they’re constitute “a forum for ongoing peer review. eLetters are not edited, proofread, or indexed, but they are screened.”  Perhaps I should have submitted this as an eLetter instead of posting it here, but I’ve already started writing it, so let’s proceed.

In this eLetter Fuentes argues at great length that scientific journals and organizations should use their expertise to pronounce on political, social, and moral issues of the day. In other words, these organizations should not be institutionally neutral, as the University of Chicago is (see our Kalven Report).  But I think he’s dead wrong and that these institutions should strive to be neutral except when pronouncing on political issues that directly affect the science or branch of science that an organization represents. The reasons, of course, are the same ones that created our Kalven Report: official pronouncements on debatable issues tend to chill speech, they require someone to be the arbiter of what is the “right” view, and are often likely to be deeply conditioned by an ideology that’s transitory. This is the problem with many pronouncements on racial and gender disparities in the past; our views have become more moral and egalitarian, as well as more informed by data; and this will continue.

Well, read Fuentes’s view on how organizations should be making the “right” statements about society, and of course Fuentes is the arbiter of what is “right”:

Here are three statements that, says Fuentes, are ones that scientific organizations have made and should have made because they are scientifically true. (His words are indented except when noted otherwise). Only the first lacks obvious social import.

The following are three incontrovertible statements of scientific fact:

“Biological evolution is the central organizing principle of modern biology.”

“Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories.”

“While ‘race’ is not biology, racism does affect our biology, especially our health and well-being.”

While the first statement seems true, it is still debatable, and I have in fact seen scientists take issue with it. I would simply say that “evolution” is the explanation for how things got the way they are, and that the alternative of creationism is false. The sentence “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, a famous pronouncement by my scientific grandfather Theodosius Dobzhansky, is ambiguous unless you carefully explain what “making sense” and “in the light of evolution” means. But I am less concerned with this than with the other statements.

The second statement is true in one sense, in that we cannot divide humanity into a finite and agreed-upon number of populations with big genetic differences, but in fact “race” is not a social construct, either. There’s biology behind it, even in the “crude” races that most of us can name.  If it were a purely social construct, companies like 23andMe wouldn’t work, and you couldn’t tell someone’s ancestry with a high degree of accuracy using multiple loci or even morphology.  Here’s a bit that Luana Maroja and I wrote on race in our Skeptical Inquirer paper dealing with the erosion of biology by ideology.

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

Of what use are such ethnicity clusters? Let’s begin with something many people are familiar with: the ability to deduce one’s personal ancestry from their genes. If there were no differences between populations, this task would be impossible, and “ancestry companies” such as 23andMe wouldn’t exist. But you don’t even need DNA sequences to predict ethnicities quite accurately. Physical traits can sometimes do the job: AI programs can, for instance, predict self-reported race quite accurately from just X-ray scans of the chest.

As for the third statement, it’s totally debatable. Yes, the idea that “racism affects some people’s biology” is trivially true. But statements like “racism is responsible for the higher mortality of  black than of white both mothers and babies in America” (something widely touted in the press) assigns a debatable cause to an undisputed fact. Yes, that difference exists, but there are other explanations as well, including cultural and dietary differences, physiological conditions like liver disease and blood pressure, drug use, and so on, and nobody has bothered to even mention these alternatives in the literature. Taking the default explanation as “ongoing racism” for a phenomenon with several possible explanations is not good science. Fuentes’s third statement is debatable and can’t be taken as prima facie true. It is potentially resolvable by science, but it has not been resolved.

Because of default explanations involving ongoing and structural racism or sexism have now become pervasive in official pronouncements of scientific journals and societies—and not just about society but about internecine matters like promotions, grants, and acceptance of papers—we should be wary of statements like the following, also coming from Fuentes:

As part of this cultural shift over the past 5 years, a range of scientific organizations that focus on human biology, psychology, and health have released powerful, scientifically grounded statements against the misuse, misperception, and misrepresentation of data and analyses on human variation. These include clarifications on why and how races are not biological divisions of humanity, what human genetic diversity looks like, how racism shapes and affects human health, why IQ and economics are not best understood through aspects of one’s biology, and how disease patterns relate to human biological and social diversity. Many of these organizations have also produced critiques of their own historical and core roles in propagating bias, bad scientific practice, and harms, such as eugenics, discriminatory medical and psychological treatment, and miscegenation laws. Such statements have been released by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; the American Medical Association; the American Psychological Association; and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science).

But, as Luana and I showed, scientific organizations are still propagating bias, misconceptions, and misunderstanding by trying to hew to a “progressive” ideological agenda.  The sword of non-neutrality cuts both ways.

True, many of the statements to which Fuentes refers are “scientifically grounded” in that they invoke science and sound scientific, but they’re often based on assumptions that have not been scientifically tested. In other words, they’re debatable, and that means that promoting them as if they’re “incontrovertibly true” is wrong.

Here’s what Fuentes thinks we’re doing wrong: being politically neutral:

There are, however, individual scientists, politicians, and members of the public who decry public statements by scientific organizations as “political,” asserting that the only reason they weigh in on societal issues is because of partisan pressures. Their core argument is that science should be neutral and forays into the political realm damage scientific integrity. It is true that some organizations’ statements endorsing political candidates or particular human rights stances are intentionally political and not exclusively tied to the organizations’ focal areas. In such cases, the organizations should be extremely careful and fully consider the impact, negative and positive, on their standing and credibility. Simply put, not all organizations should weigh in on all, or even most, societal topics. But it is also true that science as a field of practice, and scientific organizations as entities, have never been neutral.

Of course scientists have never been completely neutral on political, ideological, or moral issues, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to be neutral.  And that means avoiding making political, ideological, or moral pronouncements that don’t affect the progress of science (or of the branch of science promoted by a journal or society).  If there are important social issues whose outcome depend critically on science, then perhaps scientists can weigh in, but the science has to be nearly irrefutable, and people have to be careful. Far better to comment as a “private citizen” scientist (even writing op-eds like Fuentes’s, properly labeled as “personal opinions”) than for scientific organizations and journals to make official statements.

Equally important, although Fuentes pronounces early on that “science, as a human undertaking, cannot be neutral,” he’s wrong. Science is a set of tools to find out truths about the world: observation, experiment, replication, hypothesis-making and -testing, doubt, double-blind tests, and so on.  It is scientists who break neutrality, not science itself. Just because science is a human endeavor doesn’t give us license to go around making official statements about human society. Of course scientists are free, like all Americans, to give their personal views, so long as it doesn’t involve harassment, false advertising, or defamation.

If you want some examples of where this non-neutrality goes wrong, Fuentes supplies them, though inadvertently:

Case in point: As of March 2024 there are there are more than 490 legislative bills in consideration in 41 states seeking to criminalize the use of public restrooms that match one’s identified gender for some individuals, limit or deny access to gender-affirming care, and a range of other legal restrictions targeting transgender and nonbinary youth and adults. These legislative actions fly in the face of contemporary scientific understandings and the recommendations from the major medical professional organizations, including the US National Institutes of Health. At their heart, the bills have little to do with evidence-based research, science, or data, relying on decidedly unscientific contentions to support their agendas. Recently, seven professional scientific organizations that focus on human biology, human evolution, and human genetics released a joint statement in support of trans lives, including transgender, nonbinary, gender and sex diverse, and queer communities. The statement affirms the power of all persons to make the ultimate decisions over what happens to their own bodies, and based on contemporary scientific understandings opposes legislation rooted in biological essentialism affecting reproductive justice and access to health care, especially the discrimination and denial of health care for youth and adults, including care that is gender and life affirming. Although this is a small act, the reaction that it stimulated, and the likelihood of more professional science organizations acting as well, such as the American Psychological Association’s recent statement, illustrate that such organizations can, and should, effectively contribute to critical societal issues. Scientific data and analyses matter, even when their public presentation can be considered “political.”

Seriously? What can science tell us about restroom use? That is a social problem that is at best minimally informed about science, and science journals and organizations best stay well away from it. In fact, the “science” of gender-affirming care also consists largely of subjective evaluations or statements lacking evidence, and, at least in the U.S., scientists appear to have gotten it largely wrong. We don’t know the long term effects of puberty blockers, and perhaps objective rather than “affirming” therapy could kids from surgery, allowing them to become gay instead of snipping of their parts. There is very little good science behind “affirmative care.” And there is no science supporting the gender-activist issue (one supported no doubt by Fuentes) that transwomen should be allowed to compete in athletics against biological women. The science in fact says exactly the opposite: transwomen retain, perhaps for life, substantial athletic advantages over natal women. Has that stopped scientists from arguing that “transwomen are women” in every relevant sense? Nope.

To support the view that “affirmative care” isn’t supported by science, observe that countries in Europe, but not the U.S., are doing away with a lot of gender-affirming care, including deeming puberty blockers as clinical rather than normal treatments.  That’s because the science is unsettled! It is clear what Fuentes’s agenda is here, and it’s pure, unsullied gender activism, which at present rests largely on scientifically unsupported claims. Fuentes is touting ideology here, not the weight of scientific evidence.

Which brings me to my final point. Science not only gets political and ideological pronouncements wrong, but often gets the science itself wrong—and gets it wrong because the “science” touted by activists is distorted to reflect ideology. Luana and I wrote about five such areas in our paper, including “race” differences, gender differences, evolutionary psychology, and indigenous “knowledge.” If journals and societies can get the very science wrong because they are blinkered by ideology, what hope do we have for getting political or ideological issues right?

h/t: Luana

Here’s a song I didn’t know of (well, I did when it was a Beatles song), but look at the lineup: Clapton, John Lennon, and Keith Richards on guitar, and Mitch Mitchell on drums.  I had a hard time telling Clapton from his face (where did that ridiculous sweater come from?), but his playing is unmistakable. More on Clapton in tomorrow’s Nooz.

The YouTube notes:

The Dirty Mac performing “”Yer Blues”” from The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus Recorded before a live audience in London in 1968, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus was originally conceived as a BBC-TV special. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, it centers on the original line up of The Rolling Stones — Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman (with Nicky Hopkins and Rocky Dijon) — who serves as both the show’s hosts and featured attraction. For the first time in front of an audience, “The World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band” performs six Stones classics. The program also includes extraordinary performances by The Who, Jethro Tull, Taj Mahal, Marianne Faithfull, Yoko Ono, and The Dirty Mac. A ‘supergroup’ before the term had even been coined, the band was comprised of Eric Clapton (lead guitar), Keith Richards (bass), Mitch Mitchell of The Jimi Hendrix Experience (drums), and John Lennon on guitar and vocals.

If you asked me a few days ago, before I read this new article, whether I thought that in nearly all species of mammals males were larger than females, I’d have answered something like this:

“No, I’m sure there are many species in which males and females are the same size, and others in which females are the larger sex. However, I’d guess that over all species, the trend would be that there are more species in which males are larger than females than species that go the other way.”

My guess embodies a generalization based on one form of sexual selection theory—the one in which males compete for males (“The Law of Battle,” as Darwin called it in his 1871 book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex; also see here.)  But I would never say that all species of mammals have larger males than females, not only because I know that’s false, but also because there are good ecological and evolutionary reasons for females in some species to be larger (for example, to carry or nurture more young).

The new paper by Tombak et al. in Nature Communications investigated this question. Clock below to read, or see the pdf here.

It’s explicitly set up as a test of Darwin’s ideas in the very first sentence of the paper:

A long-standing narrative postulates that in mammals, males are typically larger than females. Darwin treated it as a matter of common knowledge1, as have many subsequent evolutionary biologists studying sexual selection.

And, lo and behold, they discover—looking at data from 429 species of mammals in all mammalian orders and 66 of the 78 mammalian families—what I suspected: when one sex is significantly larger (and by larger I mean “weight”) than the other, it is usually the males (73% of species in which there was a significant sexual weight dimorphism showed that the males were larger.). But the authors also found that also a big percentage of species (39%) show males and females being the same weight (their sample sizes were large enough to have some statistical power).  What bothers me a bit is the “Darwin was wrong” trope, which we see over and over again.  Of course he was wrong—notably about how inheritance works—but modern evolutionary biology doesn’t consist of simply repeating the words and views of Darwin. It turns out, though, that, as far as one can judge from his book on sexual selection, his words do seem to be wrong!

But back to the data. Here are the results summarized in a single figure: a pie chart of all species studied, and a chart showing significant or insignificant differences in sll mammalian orders having more than ten species. Click to enlarge.

As you see, 45% of species have significantly heavier males, while only 16% have heavier females. My answer would have been right: the generalization that where there is a difference in weight, males are heavier in general turns out to be correct. But we also see that 39% of surveyed species have males and females of equal weights (weights could not be statistically distinguished between the sexes).

You can also see that Chiroptera (bats) and Lagomorphs (rabbits and pikas) are an exception, with generally heavier females, while rodents and artiodactyls have even more species of heavier males than do other orders. In all other groups, where there is a difference between the sexes in weight, the males are heavier.

 

This generalization is probably due to sexual selection. Heavier males have an advantage in competition for access to females, most notably in elephant seals (see below), conforming to Darwin’s “law of battle.” But females could also simply prefer to mate with larger males because they are better able to defend offspring and their mates, or as a sign of health and good nutrition. It’s also possible that this fits into Darwin’s “preference for beauty,” with females finding bigger males more “beautiful”—though today we wouldn’t really use “beauty” but simply “female preference”. Do females find bigger males “more beautiful” and prefer them for that rather than for evolutionary advantages associated with size? I vote for the latter.

As for why bats and lagomorphs tend to have heavier females, well, we don’t know.  One could make up stories, but this difference reflects selection pressures that would be very hard to understand, and may have operated largely in the past.

Here are the outliers among males and females:

The most dimorphic species was the northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris), where males had a mean mass 3.2 times that of females. The most extreme female-biased dimorphism was found in the peninsular tube-nosed bat (Murina peninsularis), in which mean female mass was 1.4 times that of males.

Note as well that when there is a significant difference in weight between the sexes, the authors find that that difference is larger in heavier-male than in heavier-female species (male/female body mass ratios in the “heavy male” species average 1.28 to 1, while the female/male mass ratios in the “heavy female” species average 1.13 to t).  This shows that the tendency for males to be larger is even stronger than indicated above.

This is a good paper with a lot of work involved and, as far as I can see, a proper analysis.  This leaves two questions, though:

1. Did Darwin really say that males are almost universally heavier than females in animals?  Is this another paper being used incorrectly to show that “Darwin was wrong”?
2. Is there a drive in the paper to overturn a “bigger male” paradigm said to be based on sexism or the patriarchy?

The hypothesis that the authors said was Darwin’s view being tested seems to be this (from the new paper):

A long-standing narrative postulates that in mammals, males are typically larger than females. Darwin treated it as a matter of common knowledge, as have many subsequent evolutionary biologists studying sexual selection.

. . . . Our results did not support the ‘larger males’ narrative—the idea that most mammals have larger males than females.

But was that really Darwin’s idea? Or the idea of modern evolutionary biologists? As I said, I never adhered to the view that most mammals have larger males than females; I adhered to the view that if one sex is large, it is likely to be the male sex.  But these views aren’t the same.  Did Darwin adhere to the “larger male narrative”?  I didn’t pore minutely through his 1871 book to find out, but found one statement about mammalian size on p. 312 in Selection in Relation to Sex (he didn’t have much data, and relied largely on dog breeds): Bolding is mine

Summary.—The law of battle for the possession of the female appears to prevail throughout the whole great class of mammals. Most naturalists will admit that the greater size, strength, courage, and pugnacity of the male, his special weapons of offence, as well as his special means of defence, have all been acquired or modified through that form of selection which I have called sexual selection.

This does imply that the difference “prevails through the whole great class of mammals”, so the “Darwin was wrong” trope is pretty much correct. But we know better now, and Darwin had little data, so the “Darwin is wrong” trope is losing its steam. I have to add that as Darwin surveyed the whole animal kingdom in his book, he does remark on many cases in which female birds or female insects are larger than their conspecific males, so perhaps he thought the “law of battle” was more prevalent in mammals.

UPDATE:  See Coel’s comment below: Coel gives another Darwin quote in which the Great Man admits of some exceptions, though not that many. The conclusion: Darwin was partly right and partly wrong–not a satisfying outcome but we’re way past Darwin now.

As far as The Patriarchy goes, the paper has one brief note that this may account for the persistence of the “males are always larger” view:

Why has this narrative persisted so stubbornly? It may be ascribed to the long-time focus of SSD research on species with conspicuous dimorphisms, as suggested by Bondrup-Nielsen and Ims and by Dewsbury et al.. However, given the well-established variation in dimorphism across mammalian taxa, it is surprising that so many would accept generalizations based on a few, relatively species-poor taxa. The narrative may also be traced to a long-standing research focus on male mating strategies in the study of evolution, particularly in mammals. Darwin himself focused almost entirely on how sexual selection operated on males in the form of mate competition when discussing mammals. Competitive males and choosy females are a recurring theme in animal behavior researc, based on the argument that females invest more energy in gametes and are therefore the less reproductively available sex: the controversial ‘Darwin-Bateman-Trivers’ paradigm.  The dominance of this paradigm and the general focus on males in sexual selection research are likely to have influenced which narratives are readily accepted and amplified and which are overlooked or subjected to heavier scrutiny.

That’s not so bad, though, and “the dominant narrative” may well be the one based on the “law of battle” rather than a sexist “bigger is better” narrative.

The Patriarchy does surface, though, in the Scientific American note on the paper (click below) in a statement by the lead author. Click to read:

Here’s a statement by the lead author of the paper:

“There’s been this really strong inertia toward the larger male narrative, but it was just based on Darwin’s hand-wavy statement, and the evidence doesn’t really support it,” says the study’s lead author Kaia Tombak, a postdoctoral evolutionary biologist at Purdue University. That this narrative has endured for so long “may reflect Western societal biases that tend to look at issues through a male lens.”

A “Western societal bias” looking at things “through a male lens” implies some kind of bigotry. But even Scientific American, save that one statement, sticks pretty much to the facts. I’m just wondering whether there’s an undercurrent of ideology here that helps sell the paper. I’m going to be charitable and say that if there is one, it’s not very evident. It’s a good paper, Darwin’s statement on mammals appears to be incorrect, but as a generalization the “bigger male” narrative still holds. It’s just a shame that the paper seems to make a big deal of refuting a notion that may have been Darwin’s, but isn’t, I believe, the mainstream view in modern evolutionary biology. And they could have at least said that the generalization still holds pretty strongly, even if it’s not universal.

____________________

Tombak, K.J., Hex, S.B.S.W. & Rubenstein, D.I. 2024. New estimates indicate that males are not larger than females in most mammal species. Nat Commun 15, 1872. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45739-5

by Greg Mayer

It’s World Frog Day! Give some love to our slimy green friends! World Frog Day celebrates all anurans, so toads are included. Here’s a nice big American Toad (Bufo americanus) from Will County, Illinois.

American Toad (Bufo americanus), front, Will County, IL, July 13, 2023.

 

American Toad (Bufo americanus), back, Will County, IL, July 13, 2023.

 

American Toad (Bufo americanus), habitat, Will County, IL, July 13, 2023.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (aka the Bronx Zoo) is celebrating with fascinating frogs and a fine gallery of frog photos; you can also contribute to frog conservation. And don’t forget to celebrate Coyne’s Harlequin Toad (Atelopus coynei) here and here!

JAC: and HERE!. What a beaut!

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “hard2”, is  “a resurrection today, from way back in 2006.”  Eighteen years old: it’s been going a long time!  The boys are listing the many reasons they hate atheists, but of course Mo just proves the atheists’ claims.

Today we have a batch of cool astronomy photos from reader Chris Taylor. Chris’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  His captions are very good, and I highly recommend enlarging the photos to see things like nascent comet tails and the moons of Jupiter, which are very clear in the enlarged photo but harder to see on this post itself.

Not exactly wildlife, but I hope these might be of interest. All of these photos were taken by me from my own property, apart from the first one.

Starting off with our own galaxy, which we see as the Milky Way. Having lived in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, I have to say that the part visible from the south is much more impressive than the north, so I will show some of the highlights.

The first photo is looking south across the water of the Coorong, a long coastal lagoon on the east of the Great Australian Bight. The Milky Way is visible right down to the horizon. The brightest star in the middle of the photo is Alpha Centauri. This, together with its near neighbour Beta Centauri, form the pointers to the Southern Cross, Crux.  The long axis of the cross points towards the southern celestial pole, which is out of the frame of this picture.

Taken from my own backyard, the next photo is a closer look at the Milky Way in Centaurus and Crux. Alpha and Beta Centauri are at the bottom right of the frame, with the Southern Cross to the right of centre.  Easily visible in this shot is the Coalsack, a dark nebula where dust is obscuring the light from more distant stars. In indigenous culture, the dark areas of the sky formed constellations as well as the bright stars. In some groups, the Coalsack was the head of an Emu in the sky, but in others it was the head of a hunter. Also visible as a bright fuzzy star at the bottom left of centre is the globular cluster Omega Centauri.

Focusing more closely on the constellation Crux, the Southern Cross now, this photo shows the constellation in more detail. The Coalsack is at the bottom, with the brightest star Acrux at the edge of the dark area. There are another four bright stars that make up the kite shape of the cross, and which are represented on the Australian flag.  At the bottom of the photo is what appears to be another bright star. To the naked eye this seems rather dimmer, and it was given the designation kappa Crucis. But it is in fact a cluster of about 100 young hot giant stars.  When its true nature was realised, it was given a new name, the Jewel Box cluster. It is a beautiful sight in a telescope.

Seen from my home latitude, the centre of our galaxy passes straight overhead at times.  This next photo shows the Milky Way in the constellations of Scorpius and part of Sagittarius. Once again, alpha Centauri is visible as the bright star just over the roof of the house. Below and right of centre is the bright red star Antares. The Milky Way is very wide and bright in this direction and is crossed and split by many dark lanes of dust, but there are also many bright clusters of stars.

A closer look into this region of the sky shows some of the clusters and nebulae. On the left side of the frame are the bright stars of the “tail” of Scorpius, and left of centre are two open clusters named Messier 6 and 7 (M6 and M7).  These were catalogued by the french astronomer Charles Messier in 1780s who was searching for comets, but made a catalogue of objects that could be mistaken for a comet. M6 is the brighter spot left of centre. It is a cluster of about 150 hot blue stars, plus one red one.  The colours of the stars can just be made out. M7 is smaller and fainter below centre. On the right are two areas of nebulosity.  The brightest one can be seen as a fuzzy spot surrounding a number of blue stars.  This is the Lagoon Nebula, M8, a giant cloud of interstellar gas and dust shining by reflected light from the stars embedded within the nebula.  It is in the region of 5000 light years from earth. Close by is M20, the Trifid nebula.  These nebulae are areas where stars are forming from the hydrogen gas making up the clouds.

The last picture of the Milky Way is centred on the eta Carina nebula, as it rises over the corner of my house. Eta Carinae is a binary system of two (possibly more) stars. The primary is one of the most massive and most luminous stars known; it has a mass of over 100 times that of the sun, while its luminosity is as much as 4 million times the Sun’s.

Our galaxy is accompanied by a number of smaller, satellite objects.  This includes the two Magellanic Clouds. These are named for the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who referenced them in his writings, although he was not even the first European to describe them. From my home, the clouds are easily visible, looking like spots of the milky way that have become detached. In fact, they are dwarf galaxies in their own right. The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of all the satellites, and it is now classed as a Barred Spiral; the bar and at least one spiral arm can be seen in this photo. It is about 160,000 light years from Earth. The bright spot at the centre is the Tarantula Nebula, an enormous area of active star formation.

Also satellites of our galaxy are the Globular Clusters. Globular clusters are collections of anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of stars that are packed into a dense spherical agglomeration due to their mutual gravity. These clusters are then able to orbit the centre of the galaxy as a single unit. Omega Centauri, which we saw in a previous photo, is the brightest one visible from earth. Messier 15 is another of the clusters catalogued by Charles Messier in the 1740s. This one is in the constellation of Pegasus and being away from the plane of our galaxy has many fewer stars close by. In my photograph the individual stars that make up the cluster – there are well over 100,000 – are not individually, but form a fuzzy halo around the central condensation of the cluster.

Moving closer to home, here are some photographs of objects in our own Solar System. The first ones were taken on 01 May 2022. Before dawn on that day, I got up to record the close conjunction of the two brightest planets in the sky, Jupiter and Venus as they appeared only 0.2 degrees apart – half the diameter of the Moon. The pair made an incredible sight, far outshining anything else in the sky as they rose over the hills to the east of my place.

But also on this day was another event – five of the planets were visible in a line in the eastern sky. At the bottom are Jupiter and Venus, higher up towards the centre is Saturn and the red planet Mars in at the top of the frame. The fifth one was Neptune, halfway between the bright planets and Saturn. But it is just visible on the photo as a couple of blue pixels, you have to look really hard to find it!

The last photo is zoomed in to Jupiter and Venus.  Three of the Jovian moons are visible, at the top is Callisto, closer to the planet is Io, and on the other side is Europa.

I also managed to photograph two of the wandering comets. First is Comet C/2021 A1 aka Comet Leonard. This photograph was taken in January 2022 when the comet had already passed the closest to the Sun in its orbit, and a long though quite dim tail had developed. This comet was found to have had a hyperbolic orbit, which meant that the orbit was open and the comet would never return to the inner solar system. As it happened, it never got that far out from the Sun. As it rushed through past the inner planets, the nucleus of the comet broke up, and with the heat from the Sun evaporating more of the ice and other volatile material, the comet vanished from view in March 2022.

Another reasonably bright was Comet C/2022 E3 or Comet ZTF. On the morning of 11 Feb 2023, it passed between the Earth and Mars, when I was able to record the event.  Mars is the reddish blob at the top of the frame, very overexposed, while the comet is bottom centre. There is a small tail forming around the core of the comet which appears green in this photo. That green colour was the result of Carbon C2 molecules evaporating off the surface of the nucleus. As the sunlight energises the molecules, they emit light at this frequency, which gives the characteristic colour.

I’ve been waiting years for this version of “Without a Song“, by Billy Eckstine, to be put on YouTube. And today I found it!

The song was written by  Vincent Youmans  in 1929, with lyrics added later by Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu. It’s been covered by many people, including my sweetheart Karen Carpenter (and her brother Richard), but to my mind this is by far the best version.

Eckstine led the first big band to be considered “bebop”, and its graduates included, among others, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie. Sarah Vaughan and Miles Davis.  Besides leading the band, arranging, and playing trumpet, Eckstine sang with a full, rich, and warm voice, one that reminds me of another forgotten jazz great: Johnny Hartman. (Listen here to one of my favorite songs, in which Hartman sings with John Coltrane’s sax. Their entire album, which is fantastic, is here.)

This recording is from 1960, and was recorded live in Las Vegas for Eckstine’s album “No Cover No Minimum“. The arrangement and vocals are top notch, not to mention the modulation in the last verse.

As you know, I go back and forth on the question of affirmative action for college and professional-school admissions, and even after I thought I’d settled on a view (i.e., give some preference to minorities among those equally qualified for admission), it still keeps changing. After I read the long New York Times piece below by the notorious Nikole Hannah-Jones, it’s changed a bit more, making me wonder if the Supreme Court, in banning race-based admissions, didn’t go a bit too far.

Although I’m not a huge fan of Ms. Hannah-Jones (I, along with many historians, thought the 1619 Project was based on a dubious thesis and was historically distorted, almost propagandistic), I have to say that I found the piece readable, engaging, and making some thoughtful points.  It’s also a good run-through of the history of black civil rights and attempts to secure equality since the Civil War: Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Bakke v. California, all the way through the recent Harvard case.

I have not gone all the way over to Hannah-Jones’s views, set out below, but it’s clear that the question of affirmative action bears more thinking, at least for me. I’ve always thought that some form of reparations are due those who still suffer historically from oppression. My only question is what those reparations should be. It can’t be money, and in the end true reparations mean giving everyone, especially members of once-oppressed groups, equal opportunities from birth. That will of course take forever, so what do we do in the interim? Affirmative action has been the answer, and is still the answer for Hannah-Jones, but the Supreme Court has pretty much killed it.

At any rate, I’d read Hannah-Jones’s piece if you have time (click headline to read; I haven’t found it archived):

The topic is whether we should have a “colorblind” society, as was supposedly limned by Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream” speech. Hannah-Jones’s answer is no.  To achieve full equality in America, we must explicitly be aware of race, taking it into account when making employment or admissions decisions.  Clearly, she thinks that all the civil rights laws enacted since 1964 have done little to fix the problem of inequality.

Here are the main points I think she makes, as well as a few of my own comments.  Her quotes are in quotation marks.

1.) Descendants of American slaves have suffered a continual disadvantage since slavery was abolished, being segregated, denied equal rights, and in general subject to pervasive discrimination. The historical residuum of this discrimination is still with us, and I don’t think people can deny that.

2.) This problem needs to be made right by some form of reparations.  A color-blind society cannot make things right; we must have some form of affirmative action: preferential treatment of the descendants of slaves.

3.) A problem here: she wants only the descendants of slaves to get these advantages. Other blacks, like recent “immigrants and children of immigrants” from Africa and other places, are not entitled to these reparations.

4.) Other minority groups who have been subject to affirmative action, like Hispanics, aren’t dealt with in her article; in fact, the word “Hispanic” isn’t even given.  It is slavery, and slavery alone, that must be considered in affirmative action, which must apply only to those who can show they are descended from slaves. Yet other blacks and minorities also suffer, perhaps not for historical reasons but from race-based oppression itself. One has to consider the moral weight of this argument.

5.) Reparations cannot be based on socioeconomic status or “condition”; it must be based on ancestry tracing back to those who were enslaved, i.e.,  the “condition” of being a descendant of slaves.

6.) Increasing “diversity” is of little consequence. What Hannah-Jones wants is to increase the representation of descendants of slaves in American life through affirmative action. That must involve some kinds of quotas, not just a subjective method for increasing the proportion of black and brown faces in schools. Her stand thus explicitly opposes the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision, which ruled that there can be affirmative action so long as it increases diversity—seen as an innate good—but not if it involves quotas. Hannah-Smith doesn’t explicitly mention a need for quotas, but I think it’s inherent in her argument.

7.) Despite the “colorblindness” touted in King’s famous speech, he also made statements that could be interpreted as favoriting affirmative action (see below).

I’ll give some of her quotes that, to be sure, make points worth considering. Please comment below on the issue, the quotes, or the points above. I do recommend your reading her article. Even though it’s long, it’s well written.

The ramifications of the recent affirmative-action decision are clear — and they are not something so inconsequential as the complexion of elite colleges and the number of students of color who attend them: We are in the midst of a radical abandonment of a compact that the civil rights movement forged, a shared understanding that racial inequality is harmful to democracy.

. . . Race, we now believe, should not be used to harm or to advantage people, whether they are Black or white. But the belief in colorblindness in a society constructed on the codification of racial difference has always been aspirational. And so achieving it requires what can seem like a paradoxical approach: a demand that our nation pay attention to race in order, at some future point, to attain a just society. As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in a 1987 speech, “The ultimate goal is the creation of a colorblind society,” but “given the position from which America began, we still have a very long way to go.”

After Brown v. Board of Education (1954):

Civil rights activists were finally seeing their decades-long struggle paying off. But the architects and maintenance crew of racial caste understood a fundamental truth about the society they had built: Systems constructed and enforced over centuries to subjugate enslaved people and their descendants based on race no longer needed race-based laws to sustain them. Racial caste was so entrenched, so intertwined with American institutions, that without race-based counteraction, it would inevitably self-replicate.

And the Bakke vs. Board of Regents of the University of California case (1978), which rejected UC Davis’s use of racial quotas in its medical school, but allowed race to be used as one factor in admissions. Note how Hannah-Jones is concerned here exclusively with the descendants of slaves:

Thus, the first time the court took up the issue of affirmative action, it took away the policy’s power. The court determined that affirmative action could not be used to redress the legacy of racial discrimination that Black Americans experienced, or the current systemic inequality that they were still experiencing. Instead, it allowed that some consideration of a student’s racial background could stand for one reason only: to achieve desired “diversity” of the student body. Powell referred to Harvard’s affirmative-action program, which he said had expanded to include students from other disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those from low-income families. He quoted an example from the plan, which said: “The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor, just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

But, of course, a (white) farm boy from Idaho did not descend from people who were enslaved, because they were farmers from Idaho. There were not two centuries of case law arguing over the inherent humanity and rights of farm boys from Idaho. There was no sector of the law, no constitutional provision, that enshrined farm boys from Idaho as property who could be bought and sold. Farm boys from Idaho had no need to engage in a decades-long movement to gain basic rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to vote. Farm boys from Idaho had not, until just a decade earlier, been denied housing, jobs, the ability to sit on juries and access to the ballot. Farm boys from Idaho had not been forced to sue for the right to attend public schools and universities.

In Bakke, the court was legally — and ideologically — severing the link between race and condition. Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition. With a few strokes of his pen, Powell wiped this context away, and just like that, the experience of 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow was relegated to one thing: another box to check.

According to Hannah-Jones, Martin Luther King Jr. floated ideas similar to affirmative action (Reagan campaigned on a covertly racist platform):

Reagan, who had secretly called Black people monkeys and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Yet in the first commemoration of that holiday in 1986, he trotted out King’s words to condemn racial-justice policy. “We’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” he said. “We want a colorblind society, a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This passage from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech has become a go-to for conservatives seeking to discredit efforts to address the pervasive disadvantages that Black Americans face. And it works so effectively because few Americans have read the entire speech, and even fewer have read any of the other speeches or writings in which King explicitly makes clear that colorblindness was a goal that could be reached only through race-conscious policy. Four years after giving his “Dream” speech, King wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” And during a 1968 sermon given less than a week before his assassination, King said that those who opposed programs to specifically help Black Americans overcome their disadvantage “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the Black man’s color a stigma; but beyond this they never stop to realize that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.”

And, to finish, Hannah-Jones’s indication that we’re not where we want to be:

Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.

Now one could argue that equity should not be the goal if different groups have different abilities and preferences; instead he true goal should be equality of opportunity.  And I agree that we should aim for equality of opportunity rather than equality of representation. But the former will be nearly impossible to achieve given the resources needed. Perhaps one might hope that instead of trying to create equality of opportunity to  ensure equity, we should do the opposite: creating a bit more equity as a way of paving the way for equality of opportunity.

Weigh in below!

First, a quote:

“Just consider how absurd it would be to reverse the logic of human shields in this case: Imagine the Israelis using their own women and children as human shields against Hamas. Recognize how unthinkable this would be, not just for the Israelis to treat their own civilians in this way, but for them to expect that their enemies could be deterred by such a tactic, given who their enemies actually are.

Again, it is easy to lose sight of the moral distance here—which is strange. It’s like losing sight of the Grand Canyon when you are standing right on the edge of it. Take a moment to actually do the cognitive work: Imagine the Jews of Israel using their own women and children as human shields. And then imagine how Hamas, or Hezbollah, or al-Qaeda, or ISIS, or any other jihadist group would respond. The image you should now have in your mind is a masterpiece of moral surrealism. It is preposterous. It is a Monty Python sketch where all the Jews die.

Do you see what this asymmetry means? Can you see how deep it runs? Do you see what it tells you about the ethical difference between these two cultures?” —Sam Harris  \(audio is here)

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

Now, here is a simple question—or rather questions—prompted by my reading the readers’ thoughts in the discussion yesterday, “What does the U.S. want with Israel?”

How come no country in the world, save Israel, is calling for Hamas to surrender, lay down its arms, and release the hostages? That is the simplest way to end the war: no more Hamas, no more civilians killed, no more soldiers of the IDF killed, the hostages get to go home, and so on. It’s not complicated! (Of course how to run Gaza afterwards is complex and vexing, but first the war has to come to and end, and with a victory for Israel.)

And why is only Israel asking for this solution given that Hamas is a terrorist organization sworn to extirpate Israel and kill Jews, given that Hamas started this whole mess, and given that Hamas is even promoting the killing of more Palestinians, as well as members of NGOs, as a tactic to raise the world’s ire against Israel? How come the UN, the EU, and other Western governments aren’t pressuring Hamas? It is only Israel who gets pressured—to the extent that America is now telling Israel how to run the war, how to run its elections, and for heaven’t sake do not under any condition go into Rafah.

The answer to these questions is simple: Biden has become spineless and wants to win reelection, which he thinks he can’t do if he wholeheartedly supports Israel. And for the rest of the world, they simply want Israel to disappear, but except for some Muslim states they can’t say that out loud. (I’m not saying they want all the Jews killed, only that they don’t want Israel to exist.)

What a pity that Israel is in this largely on its own, while the rest of the world kowtows and grovels before Hamas! Yahweh knows, Israel is not perfect. But it’s a far sight better than Hamas and, as Sam Harris has emphasized, who you support in this conflict is a clear-cut moral question. Sadly, the world seems to have lost its moral compass.

Today we have the seventh and final installment of Robert Lang‘s recent trip to Antarctica in a small boat, and there are videos as well as photos. Robert’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Antarctica Part 7: Other Wildlife

Birds—penguins and flyers—and mammals—pinnipeds and cetaceans—are the stars of the Antarctic, but there is plenty of other wildlife to be seen if one looks carefully. Underpinning the entire Antarctic ecosystem is the Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), whose total biomass is estimated to be half a billion metric tons. While we often saw animals feeding on them in the open water, we could only infer their presence from the feeding behavior; they’re too small to see (from a shallow angle, that is—overhead imagery has captured vast swarms). But we did find one in a tidepool. They’re tiny: just a few cm long.

Even smaller, and lower-down on the food chain, are copepods (class Copepoda), seen here also in a tidepool along with some red algae (Phyllophora sp.). These are about the size of a grain of rice.

Copepods and krill both eat phytoplankton; krill also eat copepods. Another of their predators is the smooth comb jelly (phylum Ctenphora, order Beroidae). We saw this one swimming just below the surface near our Zodiac; the boat driver successfully maneuvered to let people on both sides of the boat see the comb jelly while avoiding the outboard motor turning it into comb marmalade.

The shoreline of the Peninsula and its islands tends to be pretty barren, as the rocks are regularly pounded by ice and waves, but we saw an Antarctic sea urchin (Sterechinus neumeyeri) tucked into a crevice just at the waterline.

In the bay of Deception Island (the volcanic caldera), we saw quite a few brittle stars (class Ophiuroidea) washed up dead. Since there were warm-water vents all along the shore, we wondered if it just got too hot for them.

On shore, there’s not much permanent life, but there’s plenty of residue of prior life, including quite a few relics of the whaling days—not just human relics, but also whale bones that were left behind. Here’s an old whaling boat with some whale vertebrae in the foreground.

There are only two vascular plants in Antarctica, but there’s quite a range of lichen to be found on the rocks. These are two from King George Island, one with cup-like stalks, and another bringing a splash of bright color to the normally gray landscape.

I’ll close with an image of the not-terribly-elusive Red Penguin; we saw several flocks over the course of two weeks, typically waddling along their age-old trackways after migrating there from their giant floating rookeries. We saw them at some remove several times, but kept our own respectful distance, not wanting to disrupt their natural behaviors.

And this brings our Antarctic journey to an end.

It’s one of those weeks when I don’t really have a lot to say based on what’s happening, nor any juicy articles to analyze or criticize. Instead, I’d like to start a discussion.

Here’s the question, which could be phrased in several ways: “Does America want Israel to lose the war with Hamas?” Or, “Does the U.S. care much if Israel loses the war?” or, perhaps the least debatable question: “Is the U.S. doing things that will help Hamas win the war?”  (I think the answer to the last question is “of course,” though the U.S. may not be doing it with that intention.)

One thing is for sure: if Israel is to win, Hamas must be eliminated and there can be no cease-fire long enough to enable them to resume power.  You don’t win a war with terrorists without destroying their organization,

Yet here’s what we see (or rather, what I see)::

• Chuck Schumer is calling for elections to depose Netanyahu, right in the middle of a war. This is us interfering with a democracy, and is inappropriate. I believe Netanyahu, now that the war has begun, is doing a pretty good job. I’m pretty sure he’ll be deposed when the war is over, and I’m not a big fan of his. But to call for his replacement now?
• Israel is allowing as much humanitarian aid into Gaza as arrives; it’s certainly not stopping humanitarian aid. But of course the world thinks otherwise. I’ve never seen a country act this way; certainly during Vietnam the public didn’t demand that we provide humanitarian aid to the North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese civilians fighting us.  And in that case the U.S. did very little to avoid killing civilians; indeed, they wiped out whole villages of civilians indiscriminately.
• Biden and many others are demanding that the IDF do not take Rafah (remember, Israel does have a plan to evacuate civilians there). But if Israel doesn’t take Rafah, then Hamas will stay in power for sure.
• During last night in Gaza, the IDF attacked Al-Shifa hospital. Hamas had returned there to resume its occupancy, and fired on Israelis approaching the hospital.  During the ensuing fight, many terrorists were killed as well as one IDF soldier, but no civilians were killed. The IDF even brought doctors in case patients needed extra care. Yet the world is baying at what Israel did.  How dare they go back into a hospital. Apparently the IDF should have let Hamas take over the hospital, but of course Hamas, in doing so, was committing a war crime. Nobody worries about Hamas’s war crimes, though; once again Israel is held accountable.
• Blinken has proclaimed that it should be Israel’s highest priority to ensure the safety of Palestinian civilians.  That’s not what you say to an ally prosecuting a war and already trying to kill as few civilians as possible.
• The death tolls provided all come from Hamas, which doesn’t distinguish between terrorists and real civilians. And “children”, to Hamas, are anybody under 18, which can and does include many members of Hamas. Yet these figures are all taken to represent “civilians.”  I suspect, but don’t know, that they include many more terrorists than the media implies.
• The U.S. has blown hot and cold on a ceasefire. If there is a permanent ceasefire now, Israel has lost, for Hamas will regroup, recoup, and take up power in Gaza again, as well as continuing to steal aid sent for humanitarian reasons
• The U.S. has floated the idea that postwar Gaza should be governed by the Palestinian Authority, one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever heard. The P.A. is a corrupt, Jew-hating, and terrorist-promoting organization, still handing out money to terrorists who kill Jews—the “pay for slay” program.
• Americans are touting the two-state idea as a “solution.” It is not a solution—at least not right now. It is a recipe for more enmity and killing. Palestine never wanted it (it wants one state run by Arabs), and now Israel doesn’t want it, either. Only the addle-brained thinks that this will bring peace.

And, of course, we hear little from anybody about the war crimes or perfidies of Hamas.  Americans seem willing to exchange 1,000 Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails for what must be now only about 100 hostages. Does anybody think about whether that’s a fair deal? Further, all the news about casualties we read in the news comes from Hamas, but is presented as “the facts.”

These matters make me wonder what the deuce the U.S. intends by behaving this way. What does it want? You may respond that Israel, on its side, has no plan for how to deal with postwar Gaza, and perhaps that’s true, though I’m pretty sure this is an object of serious discussion in the war cabinet. But Job One is for Israel to win the war, and it can do that only by taking Rafah and, as it does so, kill as few civilians as possible. (Of course we see little in the media about the Hamas strategy of trying to get Palestinians killed to sway world opinion. People who think that Hamas is desperate to prevent the killing of Palestinian civilians are simply wrong. Part of Hamas’s strategy is to gain the world’s sympathy by getting its own civilians killed and then calling attention to that.)

In the end, does the U.S. not want Israel to win this war, or achieve only a partial victory, if that’s even possible?  Sure, Biden, conscious of the votes he needs from young pro-Palestinian Americans as well as Muslim-Americans, is constantly hedging his bets, but all the points above have not only baffled me, but, as someone on Israel’s side, produced a real emotional and political roller-coaster ride.

Discuss!

Here’s the entire Real Time show for last week, but watch before it’s taken down. It starts 30 seconds in, and has a rather salacious introduction with jokes about Lauren Boebert and Fani Willis.

The intro monologue ends at 6:15; the guests are two congresspeople, Nancy Mace and Ro Khanna, as well as Eric Holder.  The main monologue, “New Rules,” starts at 41:15 and ends at 50:45.  The rest is afterglowshow.

UPDATE:  It’s gone now, but here’s the second monologue:

This is one of the big objections to Israel defending itself: if Hamas is taken out, who will run Gaza after the war.  The U.S., of course, wants the Palestinian Authority to run it, which is one of the dumbest ideas advanced by Biden and Blinken. The PA is terminally corrupt and, more, still engages in the “slay for pay” program, in which jailed Palestinians who have killed or attacked Jews get a special stipend, which is larger in proportion to how many Jews you’ve killed.  Do you want such an organization to run Gaza? Do you want such an organization right next door to Israel?

Unless you’re addlepated, I don’t think so.  Other suggestions have been made, like turning Gaza into one of the United Arab Emirates, but that probably couldn’t fly, though it has possibilities. This article in the Free Press makes a suggestion that is at least tenable, as it allows Palestinians to run Palestine. Click to read:

Here’s the proposal (excerpts are indented):

The Gaza war is a chance for Palestinians, with outside help, to make a quantum-leap improvement in their politics and society. And that starts with leadership.

Western countries and perhaps Arab states will inevitably send large sums of reconstruction aid to Gaza after the conflict.

They should use that money to empower a new elite in the territory.

The United States can help arrange to channel the aid through some kind of body whose governors would include Palestinians committed to conditions set by the donors. The main conditions should be radical but hard to argue against:

(1) don’t steal the funds,

(2) fund only civilian projects, and

(3) don’t promote hatred of Israel or the donor countries.

(1) will be tough given the history of both the PA and Hamas, and (3) will be the toughest of all; it will take a generation at least—IF UNRWA, which promotes hatred, is out of the picture.

More:

Palestinians agreeing to administer the reconstruction would need security for themselves and their families, who might have to be removed to safe places abroad, as the current Palestinian leaders would see them as enemies.

Can you run a country if you’re not there?

But I can agree on this:

t would be wasteful (at best) to put reconstruction aid into the hands of the PA or UNRWA, let alone Hamas. The existing political institutions are the problem, not the solution. A random set of Palestinian businesspeople would do a better job than the leaders now in power.

The aid donors can draw on the talents of Palestinian engineers, medical doctors, and lawyers, especially Palestinians who have lived in the West and know firsthand the benefits of living under the rule of law. What is crucial is that the new administrators do not come from the ranks of the PLO (which runs the PA), Hamas, or other terrorist or extremist groups.

There are capable Palestinians who are not ideologically extreme. The aid donors’ challenge is to recruit those who might have the courage, integrity, and ability to spend aid money properly. It bears repeating that this means using the funds to buy not explosives, rockets, and tunnels for terrorist attacks, but apartment buildings, sanitation systems, power plants, and financial support for farms and factories. It should finance schools that teach useful skills rather than indoctrinatin

UNRWA absolutely cannot play a role, and if it doesn’t, then it must be disbanded, for its only mission is to help Palestinian “refugees”. And of course the PA and Hamas must not play a role in governance. Since they both want to, this will be tough.

Finally, some caveats:

Would the newly empowered Palestinians have legitimacy? Not at first, but no Palestinian leader now has a democratic mandate. The issue is not democracy but effective, relatively humane administration. And once in place, new leaders may garner support if they use the aid to improve their people’s lives, without enriching themselves or provoking war with Israel.

Actually, although this sounds good at first glance, the problems seem insurmountable. You have to push UNRWA, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority out of the picture, find some honest and well-intentioned Palestinians who don’t want Israel eliminated put in charge, make sure they and their families don’t live in Palestine, make sure that Jew hatred isn’t taught, and that nobody interferes with the (overseas government). As Rosanne Rosanadanna would say, “Never mind.”

Or do you think this is possible?