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We are in serious trouble, folks. I have about three days’ worth of readers’ wildlife photos left, and that feature (like “Caturday felids”, which has a dearth of readers) is in danger of becoming extinct. Please send in your good wildlife photos.

Today we feature ecologist Susan Harrison with some lovely tropical animals and one landscape photo.  Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Costa Rica Miscellany

Here’s the third and last batch of photos from a February 2024 trip to Southwestern Costa Rica, during which I visited a wildlife-rich field station on the Rio Sorpresa (Surprise River) and saw many colorful birds, both there and in the nearby Corcovado National Park and the towns of Golfito and Puerto Jimenez.  Today’s photos mostly feature smaller and/or more subtly colored creatures from this trip.

Basilisk (Basiliscus basiliscus), also known as the Jesus Christ Lizard for its skill of dashing across water surfaces:

JAC: I’ve added this National Geographic video of a basilisk running on water:

Bright-rumped Attila (Attila spadiceus), whose distinctive song (“quit it, quit it, QUIT IT – aaaaah!”) is heard much more often than the bird is seen:

Panamanian White-faced Capuchin (Cebus imitator) looking angsty:

Charming Hummingbird (Polyerata decora):

Cocoa Woodcreeper (Xiphorhynchus susurrans):

Great Kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus), screaming its loud squeaky calls straight at me:

Green Iguana (Iguana iguana), a yard-long reptilian lawn mower:

Grey-capped Flycatcher (Myiozetetes granadensis) on Purple Mombin tree (Spondias purpurea):

Grey-capped Flycatcher on branch with Snakefern (Microgramma) epiphyte:

Common Pauraque (Nyctidromus albicollis), a member of the nightjar family, making its weird sounds:

Scarlet-rumped Tanager (Ramphocelus passerinii), which looks to me like a Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) turned sideways:

Northern Tamandua (Tamandua mexicana), a large placid anteater seen in Corcovado National Park:

Variegated Squirrel (Sciurus variegatoides):

Yellow-green Vireo (Vireo flavoviridis):

One of the many waterfalls on the Surprise River:

Scarlett Johansson showed up on Saturday Night Live to play Senator Katie Britt, who gave the cringeworthy In-the-Kitchen Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union address. Johansson’s was a great performance (her resemblance to Britt in both appearance and behavior are remarkable), and I’ll show you how great by putting the real Britt video at the bottom. First, Scarlett, whom I could find only on Twitter aka “X”:

From CNN:

Scarlett Johansson – otherwise known as Mrs. Colin Jost – made a cameo appearance during the show’s cold open, playing Alabama Sen. Katie Britt in her much-talked about GOP rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday.

With one hand firmly raised, Johansson dressed as Britt called out Biden’s “performative” qualities (while fervently denying any performance of her own), delivering her remarks from her kitchen.

”You see, I’m not just a mother,” Johansson said. “I’m a wife, a mother, and the craziest b—h in the Target parking lot.”

The end of the skit saw a well-placed spoof of Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning racial satire “Get Out,” when Johansson took out a teacup and stirred it, causing Kenan Thompson to freeze with a tear falling down his face.

From Simon:

Sen. Katie Britt delivers the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union Address pic.twitter.com/x7mDzO1sWP

— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) March 10, 2024

Here’s Britt’s real response, about 20 minutes long, starting at 1:18. Brit later admitted that she had no basis for accusing Biden for fostering sex-trafficking across the border.

This article from Tablet describes “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers“, and while I have a few quibbles with it (or rather, alternative but not-so-plausible interpretations), the author’s take seems pretty much on the mark. Abraham Wyner simply gives the daily and cumulative death-toll accounts of Palestinians taken from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry between October 26 and November 10 of last year, and subjects them to graphical and statistical analyses.

The conclusion is that somebody is making these figures up.  They aren’t necessarily inaccurate, but the article makes a strong case that there’s some serious fiddling going on. And the fiddling seems to be, of course, in the direction that Hamas wants.

I’ve put the figures Wyner uses below the fold of this post so you can see them (or analyze them) for yourself. As the author notes, “The data used in the article can be found here, with thanks to Salo Aizenberg who helped check and correct these numbers.”

Click on the link to read.

The data are the daily totals of “women”, “children”, and “men” (men are “implied”, which probably means that Wyner got “men” by subtracting children and women from the “daily totals”). Also given are the cumulative totals in the third column and the daily totals in the last column.

When you look at the data or the analysis, remember three things:

1. “Children” are defined by Hamas as “people under 18 years old”, which of course could include male terrorists
2. “Men” include terrorists as well as any civilians killed, and there is no separation, so estimates of terrorists death tolls vary between Hamas and the IDF, with the latter estimating that up to half of deaths of men could be terrorists
3. A personal note: I find it ironic that Hamas can count the deaths to a person but also say they don’t have any idea of how many hostages they have, or how many are alive.

On to the statistics. I’ll put Wyner’s main findings in bold (my wording), and his own text is indented, while mine is flush left.

The cumulative totals are too regular. If you look at the cumulate death totals over the period, they seem to go up at a very even and smooth rate, as if the daily totals were confected to create that rate. Here’s the graph:

(From author): The graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the period. Data aggregated by the author and provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based on Gaza MoH figures.

Cumulative totals will always look smoother than the daily totals, so this may be a bit deceptive to the eye. However, Wyner also deals with the daily totals, which are simply too similar to each other to imply any kind of irregular daily death toll, which one would expect in a war like this.  As he says of the above:

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.

The figures for “children” and “women” should be correlated on a daily basis, but aren’t.  Here’s what Wyner says before he shows the lack of correlation:

Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R² ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R² to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R² is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. . .

This seems reasonable to me, although if a large number of “children” are really terrorists fighting the IDF and are not with women, this could weaken the correlation. But given Hamas’s repeated showing of small children in its propaganda, one would indeed expect a pretty strong correlation. In fact, the probability of getting this value of R² (actually, the proportion of the variation in daily women killed explained by the number of men killed) is a high 0.647, which means that if there was no association, you would get an R² this large almost 65% of the time. To be significant the probability should be less than 0.05: less than a 5% probability that the observation association would have happened by chance alone.

(From author): The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated to the number of women reported. The R² is .017 and the relationship is statistically and substantively insignificant.

There is a strong negative correlation between the number of men killed and the number of women killed.  The daily data plotted over time shows that this is a very strong relationship: the more women killed on a given day, the fewer men killed on that day.  Below is the plot and what the author says about it.

The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

The correlation between the daily men and daily women death count is absurdly strong and negative (p-value < .0001).

The figure is indeed strongly negative, and isn’t due to just one or two outliers. The  R value itself (the Pearson correlation coefficient) is a huge -0.914 and what we would call “highly significant”, with a probability that a correlation this large have occurred by chance being less than one in ten thousand. It’s clearly a meaningful relationship.

Is there a genuine explanation for this, one suggesting that the numbers are not made up? I could think of only one: on some days men are being targeted, as in military operations, while on other days both sexes are targeted, as if Israel is bombing both sexes willy-nilly. But that doesn’t make sense, either—not unless the men and women are in separate locations (when a lot of women are killed on a given day, almost no men are killed). Look at the data below the fold, for example: on October 30 no women were reported killed but 171 men were killed.  That could happen only if on that day Israel was targeting only men, which would mean they were going after terrorists. But that’s not Hamas’s interpretation, of course.

Conversely, on the next day 6 men were reported killed and 125 women.  Was the IDF targeting women? None of this makes sense.

There are other anomalies in the data. Here’s one:

. . . . the death count reported on Oct. 29 contradicts the numbers reported on the 28th, insofar as they imply that 26 men came back to life. This can happen because of misattribution or just reporting error.

Indeed, as on October 29 there were 2619 deaths in the cumulative total of men (implied), but on the day before, October 28, there were more: 2645! Take a look at the chart below the fold.

One more anomaly:

There are a few other days where the numbers of men are reported to be near 0. If these were just reporting errors, then on those days where the death count for men appears to be in error, the women’s count should be typical, at least on average. But it turns out that on the three days when the men’s count is near zero, suggesting an error, the women’s count is high. In fact, the three highest daily women casualty count occurs on those three days.

Here’s how the author explains the data:

Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

After deciding that we can’t get any numbers other than these, and adding that we can’t differentiate civilians from soldiers, or accidental deaths caused by misfired Gazan rockets, Wyner leave us with this conclusion:

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.

People tend to forget this ratio, which is stunningly low for fighting a war in close quarters against an enemy that uses human shields. (The link to “historical standards” goes to PBS and an AP report, so it isn’t exactly from Hamas).  Besides showing us that we can’t trust Hamas’s figures, which nevertheless are touted in all the media, it also shows that there is no indication that the Israelis are trying to wipe out the Palestinian people; that is, there is no genocide going on.

But it would be nice, if newer figures were available, to see if these anomalies are still there. This article is from March 6, so it’s pretty new.

Click “continue reading” to see the data

The data used in the analysis (click to enlarge):

 

As people continue to fight an uphill battle for free speech in the U.S.—at least on college campuses—various Anglophone countries are busy confecting new hate speech laws.  These include but are not limited to blasphemy laws, a subset of restrictions that prohibits dissing religion. Wikipedia gives useful worldwide surveys of blasphemy laws as well as hate speech laws, divided up by country. You’d be surprised at how many Western countries have both kinds of laws, though often they’re not enforced.  But the new ones might well be, and I’m especially concerned about Britain, which seems to be on a binge of arresting or threatening people for speech that would be legal in America.

In a new article at The Free Press (click below to read), Rupa Subramanya summarizes new hate speech legislation in Britain, Canada, and Ireland, and has a few words about the Biden administration’s attempt to cub certain forms of speech that adhere to the First Amendment.

I’ll summarize what Subramanya says by country. Her text is indented, and anything flush left is mine.

CANADA

Take Canada. Civil liberties groups north of the border are warning a new bill put forward by Justin Trudeau’s government will introduce “draconian penalties” that risk chilling free speech. How draconian? The law would allow authorities to place a Canadian citizen under house arrest if that person is suspected to commit a future hate crime—even if they have not already done so. The legislation also increases the maximum penalty for advocating genocide from five years to life.

These punishments depend on a hazy definition of hate that Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, executive director and general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has warned could blur the line between “political activism, passionate debate, and offensive speech.”

A life sentence for advocating genocide?!  (Note that the CBC below says that a life sentence in Canada is actually 25 years.) But advocating genocide is not even illegal in the U.S., so long as your speech is not inciting imminent and predictable violence. I could stand in downtown Chicago and cry “Gas the Jews” without violating any laws. Or give a speech on it, though of course nobody would invite me to do that save perhaps the SJP.  And that’s okay, because so long as you’re not intending to incite violence, your arguments could help opponents sharpen theirs, and at the least “out” you as a hateful bigot. Remember, free speech frees you from the legal consequences of your speech but not the social consequences. And of course you can be fired from some jobs for such expressions.

The first link above, from the CBC, verifies this, and says that “regular” hate crimes could carry a sentence of up to five years. It also shows how nebulous the proposed definition of “hate” and “hate speech” are these:

The bill proposes increasing the maximum punishment for advocating genocide to life imprisonment, and allowing sentences of up to five years in prison for other hate propaganda offences.

. . .[Hatred] will be newly defined as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification” that is “stronger than disdain or dislike.”

The bill also says that a statement that “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends” would not meet the bar to be considered promoting or inciting hatred.

The second bit—about what hate speech is not—is okay as it covers nearly all debatable issues, but basing true hate speech on interpreting an emotion is problematic.

Again from the CBC:

Jewish advocacy groups have welcomed the proposed changes, citing a sharp rise in antisemitism since the Israel-Hamas war began last fall.

In unveiling the potential life sentence for advocating genocide, [Justice Minister] Virani said he heard through consultation with stakeholders that the penalty should be increased.

Well, I’m a (secular) Jew, and I don’t welcome those changes. All they do is drive people who favor genocide underground, so though the proposed law may deter the expression of those sentiments, it won’t quash the sentiments themselves. Again, unless those calls actually lead to a genocide, or to immediate, intended, and predictable violence, both of which are unlikely, they should be legal.

IRELAND

In Ireland, the government is pressing ahead with controversial new restrictions of online speech that, if passed, would be among the most stringent in the Western world.

The proposed legislation would criminalize the act of  “inciting hatred” against individuals or groups based on specified “protected characteristics” like race, nationality, religion, and sexual orientation. The definition of incitement is so broad as to include “recklessly encouraging” other people to hate or cause harm “because of your views” or opinions. In other words, intent doesn’t matter. Nor would it matter if you actually posted the “reckless” content. Merely being in possession of that content—say, in a text message, or in a meme stored on your iPhone—could land you a fine of as much as €5,000 ($5,422) or up to 12 months in prison, or both.

As with Canada’s proposed law, the Irish legislation rests on a murky definition of hate. But Ireland’s Justice Minister Helen McEntee sees this lack of clarity as a strength. “On the strong advice of the Office of the Attorney General, we have not sought to limit the definition of the widely understood concept of ‘hatred’ beyond its ordinary and everyday meaning,” she explained. “I am advised that defining it further at this juncture could risk prosecutions collapsing and victims being denied justice.”

The law (see the link) also says you can go to jail for condoning, denying, or trivializing genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. You don’t even have to promulgate this stuff: just denying it or trivializing it can send you to the slammer.

A murky definition of hate is a bug, not a feature, and is intolerable, for ite depends on “the everyday meaning of hate”, which varies among people. Further, “recklessly encouraging other people to hate” is ridiculous; an infringement on even talking to people without any clear consequences. What’s worse is that if you have “hate speech” stored somewhere but not shared, you can still go to jail.

BRITAIN

In Britain, existing online harm legislation means that tweeting “transwomen are men” can lead to a knock on the door from the cops. Now the governing Conservative Party is under pressure to adopt a broad definition of Islamophobia as a “type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

Other parties have adopted this definition, and free-speech advocates in Britain worry that it is only a matter of time until a Labour-run government codifies the definition into legislation. To do so, they argue, would mean the introduction of a de facto blasphemy law in Britain.

There’s already a widely-used definition of “antisemitism” that can lead to punishment if it’s expressed in universities, and it’s this one:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

While such expressions are legal in the U.S., and in schools that adhere to the First Amendment, note that it refers to hatred of Jews, not of Judaism. The British government’s definition of Islamophobia refers to criticism of “Muslimness or perceived Muslimness,” which could be construed as a blasphemy law criticizing Islam.  In other words, the Charlie Hebdo or Jyllands-Posten cartoons could violate the law. But neither the expression of antisemitism nor either construal of Islamophobia (hatred of Islam or of Muslims) should be illegal.  They are legal in America, and I don’t believe our speech laws are a whit more divisive than they are in Britain, which seems to be undergoing a paroxysm of division.

As for the statement “transwomen are men” being illegal, that’s palpably ridiculous. It is in fact biologically accurate, and you shouldn’t be penalized for saying something that’s scientifically correct. The regulation is meant to buttress a gender-activist ideology to force society to give full rights to trans people as members of their assumed rather than their natal and defined sex. While nearly all rights for trans people should certainly be the same as for non-trans people, there are some exceptions—exceptions involve rape counseling, sports participation, and incarceration.

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I won’t go into the details about America and the Biden Administration’s failed attempt to get speech restrictions about matters affecting homeland security, but this sentence distressed me:

A worrying number of Americans appear to be sympathetic to [MSNBC legal analyst Barbara] McQuade’s argument. A 2023 Pew survey found that just 42 percent of voters agreed that “freedom of information should be protected, even if it means false information can be published.”

Well of course publication of some false information is already prohibited under the First Amendment, including false advertising and stuff that’s defamatory, but a lot depends here on what the public perceives as “publishable false information”. I think the American courts have already settled this pretty well, so I’m curious how many people even know the already-existing rules.

Please send in your photos. I got a new batch, so we have about three days’ worth of photos before this feature goes belly-up. Thanks!

Today being Sunday, we have some nice Australian bird photos from John Avise. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Australian Birds, Part 1 

This week’s post begins a mini-series on birds that I photographed on a business trip to Queensland, Australia in 2006.   I had just purchased my very first camera, so this was my initial foray into avian photography, and I had not yet begun to learn the subtleties of lighting, the importance of background and avian posture, or the art of bird stalking.  Also, it rained quite a bit during this nonetheless enjoyable expedition.

Australian Brush-turkey (Alectura lathami):

Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen):

Australian Pelican (Pelecanus conspicillatus):

Australian Pelican, flying:

Australian White Ibis (Threskiornis moluccus):

Bar-shouldered Dove (Geopelia humeralis):

Black-faced Cuckooshrike (Coracina novaehollandiae):

Blue-winged Kookaburra (Dacelo leachii):

Brolga (Grus rubicunda):

Brown Gerygone (Gerygone mouki):

I’ve just finished watching the movie “Rustin“, which came out last year.  Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was most famous for organizing the March on Washington in 1963, the event at which Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Over 250,000 people showed up, and the force of their presence, and of MLK’s speech, was arguably the pivotal event leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And he influenced Martin Luther King’s approach to civil rights activism, particularly by emphasizing nonviolence. But despite Rustin’s influence, how many people remember him?

They will if they see this wonderful movie, which recounts not Rustin’s whole life, but the short period of a few months over which he organized the March. Played by Colman Domingo in a bravura performance, Rustin was marginalized by the movement largely because he was a former Communist and had been arrested and served time for homosexuality—”sex perversion,” as it was called in those days. His homosexuality figures largely in this movie, threatening at times to derail the March, but King, with whom he had a fraught relationship, defended Rustin publicly and got the event back on the rails.

Domingo’s performance has earned him an Oscar nomination this year for Best Actor (awards yet to come), and the film nabbed a critics’ rating of 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a viewers’ rating of 85%.  Although it starts a bit slowly, it quickly gains momentum and culminates with King’s famous speech given as Rustin stands by with smiles and tears. By that point I was in tears, too. At the end, Rustin, taught to see anybody who helped their people as a worthy person, appropriates a garbageman’s sack and starts cleaning up the grounds around the Lincoln Memorial

Wikipedia notes that “Rustin” was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground, and it’s a worthy effort. It’s definitely a film worth seeing, and also carries lessons today about how a combination of peaceful behavior, a righteous cause, and civil disobedience can move mountains. I remember those times, but they seem to have vanished.

Here’s the trailer for the movie:

If you watch the film, you’ll surely want to learn more about Rustin, and, fortunately, you can do that by reading  Coleman Hughes’s new article in The Free Press by clicking below:

An excerpt:

When I was an undergraduate at Columbia University during the turbulent years of the Trump administration, there was a racial controversy on campus almost weekly, with some students claiming they experienced white supremacy “every day.” Yet as a black student myself, I detected almost no racism at all. In my search to explain this gulf between rhetoric and reality, I looked back at texts from the civil rights era and found, in the essays and letters of Bayard Rustin—texts I had never encountered on any syllabus—a prescient analysis of everything going on around me.

Rustin, who was born in 1912 and died in 1987, was a key ally of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

. . . . Rustin himself was a discovery; a courageous activist, organizer, writer, and descendant of slaves who had been arrested and beaten for refusing to sit at the back of a Jim Crow bus in 1942, when he was 30 years old—a full 13 years before Rosa Parks made history by doing the same. A Quaker and conscientious objector, it was Rustin who introduced Martin Luther King to Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance and persuaded King, his close friend and confidant, to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, though Rustin omitted the word Christian in his original plan.

Six years later, Rustin organized the landmark March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin had put it together in a matter of months and created “the blueprint for the modern American mass political rally.”

How was it possible for a figure so central to the civil rights movement—who had not only envisioned but helped bring about a world in which black Americans demanded and achieved full citizenship—to wind up, in the words of his biographer John D’Emilio, “a man without a home in history”? By any objective measure, Rustin belongs in the pantheon of great Americans every schoolchild should know. And yet, as D’Emilio put it in his biography, Lost Prophet, “Rustin hardly appears at all in the voluminous literature produced about the 1960s.”

The short answer is that Rustin lived as an openly gay man at a time when every state in the U.S. outlawed homosexuality. His civil rights colleagues could imagine the end of legalized white supremacy but could not envision a world in which Rustin could live as a gay man without fear of arrest. The long answer has something to do with those prophetic essays.

You can read about his “prophetic essays” and ideas in the rest of the article—views that are especially salient during today’s “racial reckoning.” Read the article (Hughes is, of course, a “heterodox” black man) and see the movie.

From Bored Panda (click on screenshot below) we get the story of Shrek, a messed-up cat that was rescued. Click on the screenshot to read:

Some excerpts:

An adorable and gentle cat named Shrek was found in a feral cat colony, but he didn’t really belong there, since he was bullied by other cats. Because of that, Shrek was malnourished and was covered in scars from catfights. But besides that, the poor guy was partially blind, with goopy, bagged eyes that resulted from a condition called entropion.

His story began when Emily Shields, the founder of Whiskers N Wishes Sanctuary in Marana, Arizona, took him in. Because of his weird look that resembled the ogre character from the animated movie, he was given the name Shrek.

Shrek’s story started at Whiskers N Wishes Sanctuary whose founder, Emily Shields, took him in from a cat colony where the poor guy was bullied by other cats

. . .After all of Shrek’s health issues were treated, he was adopted by a couple from New York, and now Shrek lives a comfortable house cat life.

Besides not getting enough food, Shrek also had entropion, which made it hard for him to see.

At first he looked like this (photo from Wishesrescue Instagram page):

“Shrek was living in a colony of cats near an airport in Tucson, but he was an outsider and was being bullied. He was found by Courtney of Poets Square Cats, which has over 1 million followers on TikTok. I was sitting in a movie theater – watching Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken with my kids – and Courtney texted asking if we had room for a friendly tom cat who was being bullied,” explained Emily.

Emily also described the condition he was in: “Shrek looked really rough. He wasn’t eating enough because of the other cats, and his eyes were pretty goopy and gross. Like many male street cats, he is FIV positive. He looked like a mess.”

Shrek had to get several surgeries due to his condition. Emily explained what was desperately needed and why

“Shrek had entropion, which is where the eyelids grow inwards and the eyelashes are stabbing into the eyeballs themselves. It’s painful and obviously made it hard for him to see. He was neutered and given his shots, then he ended up needing to have his eye surgery and dental surgery as well,” wrote Emily.

Here’s Shrek after surgery (photo form wishesrescue Instagram page):

In the end, Shrek had a happy ending and could leave his previous misfortunes in the past.

“Shrek was adopted by a wonderful couple in New York City, who run his various social media accounts. He is much loved and living an amazing life for a former Arizona street cat. His new dad flew to Phoenix, drove to Tucson, picked Shrek up, drove back, and flew back to New York all in one day to get Shrek home!” shared Emily lastly.

I have tremendous respect for those who take in sick and messed-up cats, giving them a nice, comfortable life with plenty of food and vet care.

Image: shrek.in.the.city

Photo from the shrek.in.the.city Instagram page:

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And, submitted for your approval, two videos. First, a bunch of cats doing funny stuff (7½ minutes). My favorites are “pool cat” at 1:11, yowling cats at 1:20, flehmen cat at 2:29, drinking cat at 2:55, banana-peel cat at 4:00, bath cat at 4:15 (what’s with that?), costumed cat at 6:16, “kissed cat” at 7:07, and cat mess at 7:20.

 

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And 4½ minutes of scaredy cats.  My favorites: cat scared by cucumber at 10 seconds in (I still don’t know if this is a real thing), sneezy cat at 0:19, bag cat at 1:04, lizard-encountering cat at 1:10, and toaster cat at 3:09,   But I don’t think people should deliberately be scaring their cats, as many do in this video.

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Lagniappe: I’ve told the story of Mrs. Chippy before, but reader Nigel sent a new link and visited her monument in Wellington, New Zealand (I can’t believe I missed it when I was there!) as well as his own photo taken in January:

I’m a regular reader of your blog and appreciate your robust defence of science as I know it. Keep up the good work. Knowing your interest in cats and NZ you may be interested in Mrs Chippy even if unlikely that you don’t know already.  Taken last week when I was there. This is the grave of Harry McNish, knowb as “Chippy” since he was the carpenter on Shackleton’s ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antaractic Expedition from 1914-1917. He eventually moved to New Zealand and died there in 1940. On his grave is a statue of his beloved cat Mrs. Chippy, who was shot when the men abandoned the sinking ship. Cat-loving visitors have left pebbles on the grave in the shape of a heart.

The tale of Mrs. Chippy in the cemetery:

h/t: Ginger K,

I have at most four installments of RWP left. If you have good wildlife photos and wish this feature to continue, please send them in. Thanks!

Today we have the penultimate installment of Antarctica photos by Robert Lang. Today: whales!  The captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Antarctica Part 6: Whales

During our two weeks on the boat (and sometimes when kayaking), we regularly saw humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), usually from a distance, like this one:

Most times, we were first alerted to their presence by the sound of a blow:

Typically we’d see one of three things: the hump, the blow, or the dive, usually ending with the tail out of the water. With this one, you can see a flock of Gentoo penguins in the background; they’re all feeding on the same school of krill:

The patterns on the tail are highly variable and distinct enough to recognize individuals. Here’s a group of tail shots taken during the course of the trip:

One night, we were fortunate enough for the whales to come quite close to the boat, and we spent about half an hour watching them in the pink sunset glow (it was about 11 pm). The whales were lunge-feeding; not quite bubble-netting where they come straight up underneath a school, but they were still herding their prey, then coming in together from the side. You can see the baleen in some of their open mouths here:

And here’s a short movie of this occasion, showing some of their behavior (with that incredible light as background):

The highlight, whale-wise, of the trip was a visit from a pod of orcas (Orcinus orca). These were Type B2 orcas, which typically hunt penguins, seals, and fish. We watched the pod from a distance for a while; then they turned toward us and came right up to the boat, where they stopped and (for want of a better word) played around a bit. Here’s two coming up to the boat; the one on the left is swimming inverted—I think it wants a belly rub:

Some of them turned vertically in the water, stuck their tails up in the air, and waggled them back and forth, like this one:

And here’s one as it started swimming away. The Type B orcas have a yellowish tinge, which comes from diatoms that attach to their skin (and will eventually be shed):

One of our group, Jack, had a GoPro camera going during the orca visitation, and with his permission, I’ve posted his full movie here (you’ll see Jack’s gleeful face at the very end of the movie). It starts slow, but gets pretty amazing:

Next: The tiny stuff.

My colleague the troublemaker Anna Krylov sent me this announcement from the prestigious National Academies of Sciences (NAS). I quote her with permission: “I read the policy and it is super annoying — patronizing and overreaching.”

This is a new policy for those engaged in NAS activities. There is to be no bullying, harassment, or discrimination among editors, authors, and reviewers. Not threats or intimidation, either, or “coercion to dominate others,” whatever that means. And if you commit these behaviors at meetings, workshops, conferences, or social functions that involve the National Academies in any way, you can get reported (a helpful link is given).

Now the behaviors singled out are indeed uncivilized behaviors that people should obey, and some are already illegal. However, to spell them out under threat of punishment is something you do to a two-year-old, not a grown-up scientist. It is indeed patronizing and offensive. Also, “aggressive behavior” or “coercion to dominate others” are slippery terms, and could be taken to mean being “domineering”—a regular feature of any group of scientists.

At any rate, it looks as though the latest trend in science is to not only specify minutely how they must and must not behave, but also threaten them if they don’t behave that way.

I wonder why this is happening now? I would guess that one reason might be legal liability, but these behaviors are already verboten in most venues, and there are already ways to prevent them.  Your guess is as good as mine.

This morning I prematurely put up my post with the title below, an analysis and critique of a wonky paper in American Scientist by two anthropologists, an anatomist, and gender-and-sexuality-studies professor, all arguing strenuously that sex isn’t a binary, nor is it best defined by gamete type.

What were the sweating professors trying to say? I’m putting up this post to call attention to the post that didn’t go out by email, since most people seem to read posts on their phones these days.

Click below to go to my original critique, or go here.

Really? Do I have to rebut the same arguments about the definition of biological sex again?  Well, here in American Scientist is a group of two anthropologists, one anatomist, and a gender-and-sexuality-studies professor, all telling us that there is no clear definition of sex, using the same tired old arguments to rebut the gamete-based sex binary. And once again, Agustín Fuentes from Princeton appears among this group of ideologues who say that the definition of the sexes depends not on gametes, but on a lot of stuff, depending what your question is.  Their object, of course, is to reassure those who don’t identify as “male” or “female” that they are not erased by biology.

Click below, or find the article archived here

The ideological motivation is clear from several parts of the paper:

Worryingly, even within the sciences, the term biological sex has become a transphobic dog whistle. Whereas once some of us used this term to differentiate the biological factors we study from social or cultural ones, it has now been co-opted by those who insist on a sex binary and who deny the relevance or even reality of diverse bodies and of gender identities, roles, and expressions in humans.

I recognize a sex binary, but also know that diverse gender identities are a sociological and anthropological phenomenon in modern humans. I don’t “erase” them!

There’s more ideology in the last paragraph (my bolding):

In science, how sex is defined for a particular study is based on what organism is being studied and what question is being asked. The criteria for defining sex will differ in studies of mushrooms, orangutans, and humans. It will also change if the purpose of the study is to look at genetics, or gross anatomy, or hormones, or reproduction, or gender. The truth is, sex is defined a lot of ways in science, but in none of them should individuals who are part of nature be ignored and excluded. That would be bad science.

Yes, “bad science” is, to the ideologues, science that could be used to ignore or exclude people. But if that exclusion occurs, it’s not the fault of the science itself, but of bigots who use science to denigrate others.  And so it is with sex. There are two sexes in all animals (and nearly all plants), but that doesn’t mean that the few individuals who are exceptions (0.018%, or about 1 in 5600 individuals) should be ignored or excluded. Only a callous person would treat people that way! As for those enacting “gender roles” that don’t mesh with the “traditional” behavior of human males or females, that’s irrelevant, for those roles have nothing to do with the definition of biological sex.

And so, in the service of Social Justice, we get the same arguments. (Excerpts from the paper are indented.)

Many factors define sex. 

There are many factors that define sex, including chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genitalia, and gametes (reproductive cells). But with so many variables, and so much variation within each variable, it is difficult to pin down one definition of sex. Some sex-defining factors are discrete traits, such as the number or type of chromosomes a person has. Other traits exist on a continuum, such as the arbitrary guidelines for how long an external genital organ must be at birth it to be classified as a penis instead of a clitoris.

Yes, some people may define sex using chromosome, genitalia, temperature (a sex-determiner in some reptiles), etc.  But biologists have settled on the gamete-based definition (males produce small mobile gametes, females large immobile ones) because it is both universal in animals and plants (only algae, fungi, and some other unisexual organisms have “mating types” that aren’t seen as sexes), and deeply explanatory, giving us explanations for phenomena like sexual selection, parental care, the fact that females bear young and produce milk, and so on. No hormone- or chromosomal-based definition can come close to explaining these phenomena.

There are intersex exceptions. Although intersex individuals—which are not, by the way, members of a third sex—are rare, the paper uses them to make what the authors see as a telling point:

These different traits also do not always line up in a person’s body. For example, a human can be born with XY chromosomes and a vagina, or have ovaries while producing lots of testosterone. These variations, collectively known as intersex, may be less common, but they remain a consistent and expected part of human biology.

Yes, these exceptions to the binary are indeed very uncommon and, as I said, not members of a third sex since they produce, at best, only the two gametes characteristic of the sex binary. (I have found no record of an intersex human producing both viable eggs and sperm.)  I don’t know what the authors mean by “consistent”, but yes, there will always be a low frequency of intersex individuals due to issues in development, but so what?

And “expected”? We don’t really expect intersex individuals from first principles, but we do observe them and have now, based on that, come to expect their appearance as rare phenomena. But that doesn’t matter, either: the way we treat such individuals doesn’t depend on how common they are or whether they’re “expected”. They are human beings like the rest of us, with the same moral claims as everyone else.

The definition of sex has changed over time. The authors then drag in the observation that definitions of sex, like race, have changed over time (of course they have: our knowledge expands!). But again, so what? Just because our understanding and hence definitions have changed doesn’t mean that what we use today is wrong. In fact, I suspect the gamete-based definition is here to stay, like the definition of a carbon atom. From the paper:

It may feel easier to accept that gender is a social construction given how rapidly gender norms can shift, the ample evidence of masculinity and femininity changing over time, and how entangled these constructions are with other aspects of identity such as race and ethnicity. We can recognize that how we understand what it means to be a Black man in 2024 is different than what it meant to be a Black man in 1992 after the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King, which is different than what it meant to be a Black man in 1965 when Martin Luther King, Jr., set out from Selma. Gender and race—and sexism and racism—reinforce ideas about people that put them into categories with certain builtin assumptions.

Only a true ideologue could drag in differences in how black people were treated over American history as a way to show that the definition of “black” has changed. Rodney King? Is he relevant to a biological argument?  What the authors are really describing is temporal change in how black people were treated.  You could do the same with any group, like Jews, but that doesn’t mean that the definition of “Jew” has changed. It is in fact true that giving the definition of a black person is difficult task because of population admixture that blurs the edges of ethnic groups, but genetics can still identify a self-identified black person solely by looking at his DNA, and do it with over 99.9 percent accuracy. And again, the fact is that how people are treated has nothing to do with the biological traits that define their group.

Oh, and here’s an argument that I don’t understand at all:

Characteristics that may appear to be biologically determined sex differences can actually be the developmental product of entangled biological and social factors. For example, you may have heard that postmenopausal women have a disproportionately increased risk of developing osteoporosis. Yet the data show that the development of osteoporosis relates not to one’s sex but to one’s engagement in physical activity and exposure to sunlight—factors that are differentially encouraged along gendered and ra-cialized lines. A 1994 study published in Osteoporosis International found that Chinese women working as agricultural laborers actually had increased bone content and density correlative to the amount of time spent outside doing physical activity. The more we learn of the human experience and its embodiment, the less possible it is to argue for discrete differences and categories.

My response to this is “so what?”  Just because a disease is affected by one’s environment as well as one’s sex says nothing about the definition of sex. Does a man with osteoporosis efface a gamete-based definition of males and females? Here the authors are just heaving a bunch of sand in the readers’ eyes, hoping that some of it will confuse them enough to accept their argument.

Here’s a common claim:

Humans differ in lots of traits, and accepting the sex binary ignores that variation. 

It is important to recognize variations in biology related to sex, because the science of sex is impoverished by an over-reliance on binaries. When scientists fail to recognize the reality of variation in biological traits, and instead rely on simplistic assumptions about uniformity in “male” or “female” categories, the results are not only myopic research but also dangerous consequences for a wide variety of people. Healthy people with natural variation may come to see their biology as pathological, and people with health conditions may go untreated as a result of irresponsible, inaccurate science. When we limit the scientific understanding of sex to two distinct types and do not make the extra effort to include the totality of biological variation (not to mention its interconnectedness with gender and culture), we ignore the true shape of human existence. How scientists define sex, then, needs to be based on the particular research question they are asking.

Again, no biologist ignores biological variation, including in traits related to sex, like hairiness or penis size. But again, that doesn’t affect the sex binary. Again, what we have is a denial of the binary because it’s said to “pathologize” people.

And I have yet to see a biological question for which one needs to define sex as more than binary. But of course variations in how the sexes are produced, look, or behave is and has been recognized, and is the subject of a lot of fruitful research. But the binary, like the Dude, abides.

The Argument from Seahorses, Hyenas and Orangutans. This is funny, as these arguments have been rebutted before.

Male seahorses produce sperm, but they also gestate embryos and give birth. Female spotted hyenas produce eggs and gestate their young, yet they give birth via a sex organ that is larger than that of male hyenas. Even though these naming conventions stem from arbitrary size thresholds, people still typically refer to hyenas’ larger female organ as a clitoris and the smaller male organ as a penis.

Yes, male seahorses have a pouch in which fertilization of the female’s eggs takes place and gestation of the embryos occurs, and then the pouch opens to release the newly-hatched seahorses. As I described in WEIT, this is because females produce eggs at a higher rate than they can gestate them, so there is competition among females for access to male pouches This is the reverse of the usual situation in animals, and so, according to sexual selection theory, it is the females rather than the males who are ornamented, trying to attract male attention to appropriate their pouches. But this is a difference in gestational roles, not in sexes. I’d like to ask Clancy et al, this question: “How do you know that the seahorses that gestate are males? And how do you know know that the hyenas with a big clitoris are females?  Here they implicitly assume a gamete-based definition of sex, and they’ve lost their argument.

Likewise, the orangutan argument is silly. There are two types of males and one of females, a phenomenon called “sex-limited polymorphism”. Here, read for yourself:

Physical and behavioral traits may distinguish types even when gametes do not. Orangutans include flanged males with impressive cheek pads, throat pouches, and gorgeous long auburn fur, weighing in at almost 90 kilograms. But they also include un-flanged males who, although they are also fully mature adults, have none of the fun bells and whistles of the flanged males, and weigh only slightly more than females. Both flanged and unflanged males mate with females and father children.

Yes, but how do the authors know that the flanged and unflanged individuals are male? It’s simply crazy to say that there are three sexes here. There are two, with sperm-producing males coming in two varieties. Again, the authors are implicitly admitting the sex binary.  Yet later on they imply that the definition of sex in orangutans differs from that in humans (my bolding):

In science, how sex is defined for a particular study is based on what organism is being studied and what question is being asked. The criteria for defining sex will differ in studies of mushrooms, orangutans, and humans. It will also change if the purpose of the study is to look at genetics, or gross anatomy, or hormones, or reproduction, or gender. The truth is, sex is defined a lot of ways in science, but in none of them should individuals who are part of nature be ignored and excluded.

Mushrooms have mating types, so yes, the definition of “sex” involves the ability of gametes to fuse with different gametes of like morphology. But for nearly all plants and for all animals, the definition of sex is the same, and based on gametes.  In what way do “the criteria for defining sex” differ in studies of orangutans and humans? It doesn’t! We explicitly recognize that the two types of male orangutans produce sperm, and they compete for the females, who produce eggs. The authors are dead wrong: the criteria for defining sex don’t differ between humans and orangs. Again, more sand in the readers’ eyes.

But they’ve forgotten to mention the clownfish, in which males can change their sex to female if an alpha female dies.  Where are the clownfish? Send in the clownfish!

There’s a lot more sand flung about, like conflating how sex is recognized in humans (usually by the genitalia of a newborn) with how sex is defined, but you’ve heard those arguments before, and I have to go to the dentist. All I can say is that this paper a root canal is no worse than the authors’ argument.  And we keep hearing those same arguments, often from the same people, over and over again.  That’s because the authors are committed ideologues, and won’t rest until they twist and distort biology until it fits into the Procrustean bed of their ideology. They are determined to see in nature what they want to be the case in human society.

We are down to about five batches of wildlife photos, so please send in your good ones. Thanks!

Today’s batch of lovely insect photos comes from regular Mark Sturtevant, whose captions are indented (he also provided the links). You can click on the photos to enlarge them.

As I have gotten very far behind in post-processing of pictures, this set is hot off the press and scandalously has not been shared anywhere else except for here and on my main Flickr page. All were taken around the house or from area parks in eastern Michigan, where I live.

Beetles dominate this small batch. First up is a Rove Beetle, possibly Platydracus, from a staged focus stacking session on the dining room table. Rove beetles form a large family of very active predatory beetles (Staphylinidae), and they are easily identified by their short wing covers. They can be difficult to photograph since sitting still is not what they do, so I got this one to pause for a moment on a perch.

Next up is a pea-sized Dung Beetle, Canthon sp. There were several of these trundling around little balls of dung in the amazing place I call the Magic Field, where one can find critters that I see nowhere else. I tried hard to get pictures of them rolling their little treasures, but they would immediately stop and bury themselves in the soft soil on approach, refusing to come out and do what Dung Beetles do best. I hope for better luck this season.  Dung Beetles are in another large family, the Scarabaeidae. I think most species have nothing to do with dung, but rather feed on roots, leaves, pollen, or fruits.

Here is a small beetle from another large family called the Leaf Beetles (Chrysomelidae). No matter the species, Leaf Beetles seem to always be bright and shiny, and they sit out in the open on vegetation. I somehow always know that I have a leaf beetle, even if the species is new to me as this one was. This one is the Sumac Flea Beetle, Blepharida rhois. Flea Beetles are Leaf Beetles that can jump.

Next up is an Assassin Bug, Zelus luridus. These common predators in the Hemipteran family Reduviidae can be found openly lurking on leaves along forest trails. Their extremely laconic nature makes me wonder how they ever catch anything.

The caterpillar shown in the next picture is the Bronzed Cutworm, Nephelodes minians. The larvae are generalist feeders on grasses, and are considered a pest on cultivated crops. No doubt I’ve seen many of the brown adult moths at the porch light, but there are so many species of “little brown jobbies” in their family (Noctuidae), that I doubt I would know them on sight. This larva was strangely inactive. Even moribund. It was either about to pupate, or it was terminally parasitized.

Back at the Magic Field, in the very early season one can find nymphs of my favorite grasshopper, the Coral-winged Grasshopper Pardalophora apiculata. These spend the winter as nymphs (in fact I just got back from visiting this field in February during a freakish warm spell, and sure enough the wintering nymphs were revived and hopping everywhere). But come this spring they will quickly grow up to be a robust Band-Winged Grasshopper with pinkish-orange hind wings, as can be seen in the link. They are a delight to watch as they ponderously launch themselves to fly, but they never go far owing to their chonkyness. The Magic Field proudly hosts at least six different species of Band-winged grasshoppers alone. Grasshoppers in this group usually have brightly colored hind wings, which among other things are used as a kind of deception to fool predators into thinking that they are brightly colored, while in fact when at rest they are well camouflaged. Band-wings belong to the short-horned grasshopper family Acrididae.

I hope I won’t sound callous or unfeeling if I argue that the food shortage in Gaza has been exaggerated by the UN and the world media.  I would argue that, from what I know, there is enough food in Gaza for everyone. The problem is that it’s not being properly distributed, as people are taking the humanitarian free food and selling it in the open market or the black market. And Hamas, of course, is purloining much of it for its own needs.  I am not arguing that people aren’t going hungry in Gaza. Old people, people without means to buy food from the market, and those who just can’t fight the scrum around the food trucks—these people are hungry and need help.

Now I’m not sure what kind of help they need given the three videos below from Tom Gross’s newsletter, but one thing that would help is to eliminate Hamas. Terrorists are stealing food meant as humanitarian relief, they are attacking and shooting food-truck drivers (see below), and they are hijacking entire trucks.  Further, UNRWA should not be in charge of distributing food, as they’re in league with Hamas. I’m glad that Israel seems to be doing quite a bit to help, especially in moving in food from the north and getting IDF soldiers to deliver it. This is going above their pay grade.

Here are three of Tom Gross’s videos and one additional one I found.  The titles in bold are from Gross:

Palestinian food market in Gaza that the western media won’t show you. Rafah. March 6, 2024

 

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Egyptians furious and scared as Hamas murder and injure humanitarian aid drivers

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And at the end of this one we have a staged example of a “victim”, presumably of hunger or the IDF, who miraculously revives when the camera turns off.

What is in those free Gaza food packages airdropped by the US? (Please watch this video to the end to see the hospital recovery)

Finally, from MEMRI, we have an article and a video about a Palestinian man disdaining airdropped food and throwing it in the bin.  Click on either the screenshot or headline to see the video. Here’s the transcript:

In a video posted on March 4, 2024 on Fouad – Palestine Gaza @Fouad_Diab80 on X (formerly Twitter) “Ibrahim from Gaza” complains about an  American aid packet and throws it in the trash. The man says that the packet contains “things you cannot even call food and they stink”, adding that he does not want aid airlifted from Jordan, and that he will not accept aid from a country that is “an accomplice to our starvation and to this genocide.” He continued to say that he wants aid from Arab countries, Brazil and South Africa.

Ibrahim:“This is the American aid that we are receiving by air. Let me show you what it is. Things that you cannot even call food and they stink. Here it is. Take a look. I don’t want aid that comes by air from Jordan. Am I supposed to accept aid from a country that is an accomplice to our starvation and to this genocide? I don’t understand. I don’t get it, okay?

If he’s starving (he doesn’t look like it), why does he throw food away, or at least give it to people who are starving? Has he no heart?  This doesn’t fit the narrative.

The solution to everything the world is asking for in Gaza seems to be eliminating Hamas and creating a governance for the area that isn’t full of terrorists. Yet the whole world, now including the U.S., seems bent on keeping Israel from eliminating Hamas. And the world also wants terrorists (aka the Palestinian Authority) to govern Gaza when the war is over.

I was sent this article from The Economist (as usual, authors’ names aren’t given), and I’m not sure whether that site leans right or left.  Nor do I really care, except that people might tend to dismiss its argument and its data on political grounds. And, as usual, that would be a mistake.

The thesis here—and I’ll show data—is that American universities are going downhill in many ways: bigger bureaucracy, less respect from the public, grade inflation, lazier students, declining in world rankings, and so on. Some of these contentions are new to me, but the article does paint a picture of a system going downhill. I’ll show the data and the Economist‘s indictment below.

Click to read the headline, or find the article archived here.

Excerpts from the piece are indented.  First, their thesis:

But thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

In theory, these difficulties could promote efforts to correct flaws that are holding back elite education in America. But they could also entrench them. “America’s great universities are losing the public’s trust,” warns Robert George, a legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton. “And it is not the public’s fault.”

This is accurate: other surveys show that public trust in American institutions of higher education is waning. And this despite the article’s claim that elite universities, at least, are getting richer and richer, both because tuition has risen so rapidly and because universities are now managing their endowments in a riskier manner. That new style of management has paid off since the stock market and real estate have boomed in recent years,

What this has done is created a two-tier system of universities: the “elite” ones, where everyone aspires to go, and the rest of the pack, which hasn’t changed that much:

All this has opened a chasm between America’s top-ranked colleges and the rest. A mere 20 universities own half of the $800bn in endowments that American institutions have accrued. The most selective ones can afford to splash a lot more money on students than the youngsters themselves are asked to cough up in tuition, which only makes admission to them more sought-after. Acceptance rates at the top dozen universities are one-third of what they were two decades ago (at most other institutions, rates are unchanged). Lately early-career salaries for people with in-demand degrees, such as computer science, have risen faster for graduates from the most prestigious universities than for everyone else. Higher education in America “is becoming a ladder in which the steps are farther apart”, reckons Craig Calhoun of Arizona State University.

Despite this, the reputation of elite universities has dropped, especially compared to Chinese ones, whose scholars are producing relatively highly-cited scientific papers. Two figures from the paper. These changes in research reputation are small, but they are all negative for the elite U.S. universities:

Same for highly-cited scientific papers; the Chinese are booming here while American papers are falling:

Now I don’t really care that much about whether other countries are doing okay or booming in scientific papers compared to the U.S., as science is a worldwide endeavor and, as I’ve said about this trend, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” But I care more about the reputation of elite universities, largely because I went to one for my Ph.D. and worked at one for 3 decades. I would care if the top American colleges stopped providing quality education, though maybe that’s just snobbery on my part. And of course the reduction in highly-cited papers is a side effect of a relative degeneration of quality education in the U.S.

But perhaps that’s just compared to China, and we’re doing as well as ever. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Here are some of the factors that the article points out are dragging down our top universities.

Bloated bureacracy.  If you work at one of these schools, you’ll have noticed this:

As challenges from abroad multiply, America’s elite universities are squandering their support at home. Two trends in particular are widening rifts between town and gown. One is a decades-long expansion in the number of managers and other non-academic staff that universities employ. America’s best 50 colleges now have three times as many administrative and professional staff as faculty, according to a report by Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. Some of the increase responds to genuine need, such as extra work created by growing government regulation. A lot of it looks like bloat. These extra hands may be tying researchers in red tape and have doubtless inflated fees. The total published cost of attending Harvard (now nearly $80,000 annually for an undergraduate) has increased by 27% in real terms over two decades.

The next item explains much of the bloat:

The expansion of DEI initiatives. This is another thing you’ll have noticed if you work at an elite school.  But it’s happening pretty much everywhere. As you probably know, Florida just passed a law, largely in response to the Supreme Court’s banning race-based admission, getting rid of the DEI programs in state universities. In some places, like Michigan, the bloat—and salaries devoted to DEI—is stunning. DEI officials in Michigan colleges can earn more than $200,000 per year. From the article:

More often blamed are administrative teams dedicated to fostering “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (dei). They have grown in size as the number of administrators of all kinds has increased. They have an interest in ensuring that everyone on campus is polite and friendly, but little to gain from defending vigorous debate. In theory they report to academic deans, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a member of a faculty group committed to defending academic freedom; in practice they move laterally from university to university, bringing with them a culture that is entirely their own. Critics of dei departments insist these offices have helped soak campuses with unsophisticated “woke” ideologies that depict complex problems as simplistic battles.

Changing admission policies favoring equity over merit.  This itself may be changing, as in the last several weeks schools like Dartmouth and Brown have reinstated the use of standardized tests like the SAT as requirements for application. (In many places they became optional or were, as in California, not wanted at all.)  Reducing the importance of standardized tests was originally done to boost equity of minority groups, but that wasn’t often admitted by colleges; “holistic” admissions were simply said to be better judges of future success, and schools boasted that there was no tradeoff between merit and equity.. But this is not the case—SAT scores remain the best predictor of academic success as well as admission to good graduate schools. I’m hoping that the pendulum will swing back towards merit again, though I still favor a form of affirmative action: preferential admission of minorities when they are just as qualified as nonminority applicants. From the article:

In theory the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial preferences last year should encourage posh universities to junk admissions practices that are even more irksome—such as favouring children of alumni. Instead many have made their admissions criteria even more opaque, potentially damaging universities’ meritocratic pretensions further. At the start of the pandemic, most stopped requiring applicants to supply scores from standardised tests. Now hard-to-evaluate measures such as the quality of personal statements are having to carry more weight. For some institutions that has proved unsatisfactory: in recent weeks Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardised test scores from applicants once again. They are the first Ivies to do so.

Lowering of standards.  The article implies that students are getting lazier with time.  Over the three decades I taught here, I can’t really vouch for that, at least in undergraduate evolution class.  Because of my lack of experience in more than one class, I’ll just reproduce what the article says, though of course grade inflation everywhere is real and has been amply documented. Nowadays everyone gets As, which of course reduces the value of even calculating grade-point averages. (Putting the median grade in a course on students’ transcripts would help with this.)

Universities stand accused not just of tolerating small-mindedness among their students, but of perpetuating it. One theory holds that, if elite universities worked their students harder, they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s the number of hours a week that an average American student spent studying declined by around one third, notes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Yet grades do not seem to have suffered. At Yale, the share of all grades marked “A” has risen from 67% in 2010 to around 80% in 2022; at Harvard it rose from 60% to 79%.

Boards of governance (trustees, etc.) have become too weak to enforce a climate of excellence. I know nothing personally about the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees, but at least at Harvard the Board of Overseers’ spinelessness was a major factor in prolonging the kerfuffle about ex-President Claudine Gay. The Overseers first denied charges of plagiarism, threatened the New York Post for trying to publish those allegations, continued to deny them, and then, after the outcry—largely prompted by Bill Ackman—grew too loud, finally asked Gay to resign. Further, the Harvard Overseeers, who are nearly wholly responsible for putting in place policies like freedom of expression and institutional neutrality, have done almost nothing on this account. In the Boston Globe, Steve Pinker called for Harvard to reform itself in five areas, and there’s now a group of professors at Harvard to apply pressure on the administration to behave properly. Fingers crossed.

From the article:

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Furthermore, trusteeships are often distributed as a reward for donations, rather than to people with the time and commitment required to provide proper oversight. Universities generally manage to snag people with useful experience outside academia. But many trustees prefer not to rock the boat; some are hoping that their service will grant children or grandchildren a powerful trump card when it comes to seeking admission. Too many see their job as merely “cheerleading, cheque-writing and attendance at football games”, says Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organisation that lobbies for governance reform. And at many private universities the way in which new trustees are appointed involves cosying up to current ones or to university authorities. Outsiders can struggle to be picked at all.

There’s a lack of political balance on faculties. Everyone knows that university faculties are almost completely on the Left side of the political spectrum. Look at this plot:

And it’s even more skewed at elite universities:

A second trend is the gradual evaporation of conservatives from the academy. Surveys carried out by researchers at ucla suggest that the share of faculty who place themselves on the political left rose from 40% in 1990 to about 60% in 2017—a period during which party affiliation among the public barely changed (see chart 3). The ratios are vastly more skewed at many of America’s most elite colleges. A survey carried out last May by the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, found that less than 3% of faculty there would describe themselves as conservative; 75% called themselves liberal.

One possible reason is that the definition of “liberal” has changed: that American politics in general have become more right wing, so that more centrist professors will now identify themselves as being far left or liberal. But I don’t think that’s true. Further, the article claims that conservatives have been forced out of academia or aren’t even being hired in the first place.  I don’t know the reason, but it is true that at least in elite universities, there is groupthink that demonizes conservatives. (Remember how Judge Duncan was treated at Stanford Law School?)

But I still think schools would benefit from increasing the diversity of political opinions, because sometimes conservatives have some good arguments, and at any rate without opposition from the other side, liberals have no way to test or hone their ideas. I would personally would benefit from more conservatives in my school, even though I identify as a classical liberal.

Given these problems, the solution is clear; do the opposite of what’s causing them. Pare down DEI, get better boards of trustees, put more emphasis on merit in admissions, require students to do more, somehow curb grade inflation (that seems nearly impossible to me!), hire more conservatives, and inculcate students with more information about free speech (we’re doing that here; see below). The return to an emphasis on merit seems to me the most important, but of course “progressives” define merit in ways that differ from how the term was used historically.

Here are a few suggestions in two paragraphs, with both Lukianoff and Ginsburg (head of the University of Chicago’s Forum to promulgate free expression) being liberals.

Better for universities to heal themselves. Smaller, more democratically selected boards would provide better oversight. More meritocratic admissions would improve universities’ standing. Greg Lukianoff of fire wants to see campuses stripped of bureaucrats “whose main job is to police speech”. Instead universities should invest in programmes teaching the importance of free and open debate, argues Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, who runs a forum designed to do just that: “If your ideas aren’t subjected to rigorous scrutiny, they’re not going to be as good,” he explains.

Reformers would also like more people in the political centre, and on the right, to make careers in academia. No one thinks this will happen quickly. But college bosses could start by making it clear that they will defend the unorthodox thinkers they already have on their payrolls, reckons Jim Applegate, who runs a faculty group at Columbia University that aims to promote academic freedom. They could discourage departments from forcing job applicants to submit statements outlining their dei approach (one study a few years ago suggested this was a condition for a fifth of all university jobs, and more than 30% at elite colleges). Lately these have looked less like honest ways of spotting capable candidates and more like tests of ideology.

h/t: Jean

Today we have a parliament of owl photos from reader Steve Adams. Steve’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them,

Here is a series of Short-eared Owls (Asio flammeus) that I have photographed over the past few months. I am fortunate that there is an area nearby that has extensive open fields and protected grasslands where the owls seem to have a preference for hunting. It is also an excellent habitat for Northern Harriers, which can often be seen hunting the same fields. These photos come from several outings I made from November through February.

In this first series, the late afternoon Sun cast beautiful light on this Shortie as it came in for a landing on a fence post.

This next set shows owls that overflew or nearly overflew me. I must admit that I almost missed these shots since I was so surprised by how close they came.

This last set shows those wonderful, piercing eyes that make them so good at hunting.

JAC: Here’s a range map of the species from Cornell’s Birds of the World:

 

Within about a month of each other, two articles came out discussing how America’s most prominent liberal newspapers—the New York Times and the Washington Post—have both abjured proper standards of journalism when covering the Israel/Hamas war. (Further, the other day the Torygraph wrote about how the BBC does the same thing.) And, of course since all three criticized venues are on the Left, their biases run in the same direction: towards Hamas or Palestine and against Israel.

The first headline below is from conservative National Review, and you can read it by clicking on the headline below or reading it archived here.   The second headline is from Quillette, and you should be able to access it directly by clicking on the second headline.

The articles differ slightly, with criticism of the Post dealing with its direct biases in reporting, while that of the NYT, written by a historian, showing its abysmal understanding of Middle East history, which, coincidentally, makes Israel look bad. (It’s clearly not a coincidence, as the distortions always fit the liberal narrative.). I’ll just give one or two examples of bias from each article because you can read them yourself.

This, from the WaPo, is a bad one, verging on blood libel against Israel. But there are lots of other examples that I’ll pass over:

Once more, three days after the Post’s flawed military analysis [denying Hamas’s use of hospitals as headquarters], a team of the outlet’s senior reporters, including its Istanbul and London bureau chiefs, wrote about Israel returning dozens of Hamas bodies recovered in northern Gaza.

The IDF initially brought the bodies back to Israel to determine whether they were in fact Israeli hostages. The IDF then returned those bodies it had identified as Hamas fighters.

In its report on the body return, the Post cites a statement from the “Hamas-run government media office,” advancing the well-worn antisemitic conspiracy that the Jewish state had “stolen” the organs of slain Palestinians and “mutilated” their bodies. The Post quoted the ministry as saying, “After examining the bodies, it is clear that features of those killed had changed greatly in a clear indication that the Israeli occupation had stolen vital organs from them.”

“The media office denounces in the strongest terms the Israeli occupation army’s disdain for the dignity of the bodies of our 80 martyrs that Israel had stolen during its genocidal war because it delivered them mutilated,” Hamas said.

“The claims could not be independently verified,” the Post wrote of the Hamas-ministry reports. “The IDF referred questions about the bodies to the Israeli agency for civilian coordination with the Palestinians, which did not immediately respond.”

Virtually all other reputable news outlets — Reuters, Barrons, the French wire service AFP, and the Times of Israel — decided not to lend any credibility to the preposterous allegation. But not the Post. The outlet stood alone in airing Hamas’s antisemitic conspiracy. Outlets across the broader Middle East such as the Yemen Press Agency, Al Jazeera, Iran Press, and Al Mayadeen English were not so circumspect, joining the Post in advancing Hamas’s claims.

“It’s factually absurd. They’re harvesting organs from dead terrorists who’ve been lying around for days?” Reed Rubinstein, deputy associate attorney general for the Trump administration, said. “For years, there has been, primarily in academia and Palestinian propaganda outfits, this claim that the Israelis are harvesting organs.”

“It evokes the worst of the blood libel; ‘taking the blood from little children’ kind of stuff which is still recycled to this day,” Rubinstein continued. “The fact that the Post would publish this, and that somehow it got by the editors, is frankly a damning indictment of the operation over there now.”

The “blood libel” claim Rubinstein refers to is a centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theory that holds that Jews use the blood of non-Jews in religious ceremonies. The ancient smear has in recent years morphed into the claim that Israel routinely harvests the organs of oppressed peoples: When Israel established a hospital in Haiti in the wake of that country’s 2010 earthquake, allegations that the IDF service members staffing the hospital had illegally procured patients’ organs to sell for a profit went viral.

Reached for comment, a Post spokesperson did not explain why the outlet chose to include Hamas’s blatant antisemitic conspiracy mongering in its coverage while most other reputable international outlets disregarded the remarks.

Yes, the Post had no comment, but it would probably say they were just “raising the possibility” that Jews stole the organs of dead Hamas fighters. The whole accusation is palpably ridiculous, even more so given that the bodies that supposedly provided organs had been dead for days.  You don’t “raise the possibilities” when they’re as stupid as this—not unless you want to sow doubt in the minds of Israel-haters. So it goes.

The Quillette article below is by the distinguished and reliable Israeli historian Benny Morris.

Morris analyzes a discussion in the NYT Sunday Magazine by six people (you can read it for yourself, archived here), and calls out most of the participants for arrant historical ignorance. His intro:

As we saw from the savage Hamas assault on southern Israel on 7 October, the Palestinians have certainly been active protagonists in their more-than-century-long battle against Zionism and Israel. But the New York Times would have it otherwise. Indeed, the underlying narrative in their magazine piece of 6 February 2024, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948,” is that the Palestinians have always lacked agency and have no responsibility for anything that has befallen them over the decades. This, plus a welter of factual errors and misleading judgments, has produced a seriously distorted description of the history of the first Arab–Israeli war and its origins.

The Times article consists of a lengthy “discussion” between Arab and Jewish scholars (three ostensibly from each side) and comments and clarifications (and mis-clarifications) by Emily Bazelon, the NYT staff writer who moderated the dialogue and put the piece together. Five of the six people involved can hardly be deemed experts on either the Arab–Israeli conflict or the 1948 war. Only one—Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington—has published works of some relevance: The Road Not Taken (1991), on the clandestine post-1948 Arab–Israeli peace talks, and The War for Lebanon (1984), on the Israel–PLO war of the early 1980s. During the discussion, the three Arab panellists—Nadim Bawalsa, an associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies; Leena Dallasheh, who is writing a book on Nazareth in the 1940s and ’50s; and Salim Tamari, a sociologist from Bir Zeit University in the West Bank—almost uniformly toe the PLO (or Hamas) line, which is indistinguishable from propaganda.

Bazelon, the moderator and staff writer for the NYT Magazine, seems to make repeated mistakes, and I’ll give one example below. First, though, a trope Bazelon uses several times:

Bazelon comments that in 1929 the “Palestinians rebelled” against the British and “violence first broke out over control of the holy sites in Jerusalem.” (Throughout the New York Times piece, Bazelon uses the phrase “violence broke out,” instead of explicitly stating that the Arabs assaulted the Jews, though she does concede that in 1929 Jews were massacred in Hebron and Safad).

The “violence broke out” phrase would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. The article is replete with mistakes, but here are two more excerpts:

Towards the end of the panel discussion, Bazelon asks: why did the Palestinians reject partition in 1947? This is the crux of the issue since their rejection of partition then is arguably the reason why the Palestinians do not have a state to this day. The panellists offer a variety of misleading answers. Abigail Jacobson, a historian at Tel Aviv University and one of the three Jewish participants, argues that the Palestinians could not accept a resolution that earmarked 55 percent of Palestine for the Jews, who only comprised a third of the country’s population, while the Arabs—two-thirds of the population—were only awarded 45 percent of the land. “If you were a Palestinian,” she asks her readers, “would you accept this offer?” But Jacobson forgets that most of the land assigned to the Jewish state was barren wasteland in the Negev Desert. She also elides the basic truth, which is that the the real reason the Palestinian leadership opposed the resolution was that they opposed the grant of any part of Palestine—no matter how small a percentage of the land—to Jewish sovereignty. In their view, all of Palestine, every inch, belonged solely to the Palestinian Arabs. Jacobson argues that “the Palestinian national movement was ready to accept the Jews as a minority within an Arab state.” That is correct. But the point is that they were only willing to accept them as such.

The “real reason” still holds: the Palestinians don’t want two states because they want Israel gone, and they might tolerate Jews in a majority-Palestinian state, but that’s unlikely since there are few Jews remaining in any Arab state. Jews in a Palestinian-majority state would most likely be doomed.

And once again Bazelon flaunts her ignorance:

Finally, the article’s meagre treatment of the 1948 War is itself fraught with errors. Take Bazelon’s introductory paragraph describing the war’s second half. Her first sentence is correct: “On May 14, Israel declared itself a state.” But then she adds, “The next day, the British began leaving, and Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq attacked the new state, later joined by Jordan.” This sentence contains no less than three basic errors. Firstly, the British had already begun their staggered withdrawal from Palestine in December 1947, and had lowered the Union Jack on 14 (not 15) May, though some small British units remained in the north of the country until the end of June 1948. Secondly, Lebanon never attacked Israel. And thirdly, Jordan participated in the pan-Arab invasion of 15 May, rather than joining “later.”

Three errors in one sentence, and Bazelon was wrong, as you can check.  Now this description of history isn’t all that consequential, but it shows a lack of fact-checking and of knowledge, as does the entire article. There’s a longer passage about something more important—the participation of Palestinians in the Second World War—but I’ll leave that for you to read.

I no longer get war news—or at least believe war news—from the NYT or the Post, but go first to the Times of Israel. Yes, it’s an Israeli paper, but I find it to be more accurate, and less likely to jump the gun, than American liberal media. And access is free.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “fired,” came with a caption: “Then we’ll troll you on social media until you delete your account.” The boys have a song for us today, which they don’t realize is really about them. (The theme of the strip is the Divine Duo’s inability to see their own flaws.)

This article in the “Reality’s Last Stand” Substack shows you how well oiled “affirmative therapy” is for gender transitions, at least at Kaiser Permanente, a medical organization. The take-home lesson is that there appear to be almost no points at which objective therapy operates to explore your feelings. Instead “rah rah” therapy is the rule, and the patient’s wishes override everything else. Further, it’s easy to get approved for dangerous surgery—”bottom surgery” for women is dire, ineffective except in creating a faux penis, and liable to serious complications—without full explanations of the consequences.

The story is this: Beth Bourne, a 53-year-old divorced mother from Davis California, had a daughter who came out as trans at about fourteen years old. Bourne was amazed at how few checks and balances there were with people uncritically accepting her daughter’s feelings.  Bourne’s concerns about gender activism eventually led to her estrangement from her daughter, but that gave her license to go ahead with her own actions, actions designed to show how easy it was to go the full route from woman through hormones to surgery to become a trans man.  Bourne didn’t take the hormones or have the surgery, but, as a test, she pretended to feel like a man to see how often people gave her empathic and objective care rather than “fully affirmative” care.

The answer was that virtually all the care was affirmative.  No objective therapy was offered, hormones were proffered easily and gladly, and there were no problems getting top and bottom surgery scheduled quickly, without what Bourne saw as necessary warnings of the dangers of both hormones and cutting. Yet even during the process Bourne raised red flags about her mental condition that should have served as warnings for doctors and therapists.

Bourne kept her ruse going for 231 days before stopping the pretense.

Click to read:

Some quotes:

Throughout the whole 231-day process of my feigned gender transition, the Kaiser gender specialists were eager to serve me and give me what I wanted, which would all be covered by insurance as “medically necessary.” My emails were returned quickly, my appointments scheduled efficiently, and I never fell through the cracks. I was helped along every step of the way.

Despite gender activists and clinicians constantly claiming that obtaining hormones and surgeries is a long and complex process with plenty of safety checks in place, I was in full control at every checkpoint. I was able to self-diagnose, determine how strong a dose of testosterone I received and which surgeries I wanted to pursue, no matter how extreme and no matter how many glaring red flags I purposefully dropped. The medical workers I met repeatedly reminded me that they were not there to act as “gatekeepers.”

I was able to instantly change my medical records to reflect my new gender identity and pronouns. Despite never being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, I was able to obtain a prescription for testosterone and approval for a “gender-affirming” double mastectomy from my doctor. It took only three more months (90 days) to be approved for surgery to remove my uterus and have a fake penis constructed from the skin of my thigh or forearm. Therapy was never recommended.

But of course Bourne was a middle-aged woman, not a child or adolescent. Shouldn’t she be able to get what she wants? She addresses this objection:

Critics might dismiss my story as insignificant on the grounds that I am a 53-year-old woman with ample life experience who should be free to alter her body. However, this argument for adult bodily autonomy is a standard we apply to purely cosmetic procedures like breast implants, liposuction, and facelifts, not “medically necessary” and “lifesaving” treatments covered by health insurance. Or interventions that compromise health and introduce illness into an otherwise healthy body. And especially not for children.

My story, which I outline in much more detail below, should convince any half-rational person that gender medicine is not operating like any other field of medicine. Based on a radical concept of “gender identity,” this medical anomaly preys upon the body-image insecurities common among pubescent minors to bill health insurance companies for permanent cosmetic procedures that often leave their patients with permanently altered bodies, damaged endocrine systems, sexual dysfunction, and infertility.

She then goes into the story, beginning with her change in pronouns and “self-described” sex. She then went through the process of scheduling top surgery (breast removal), all without any therapy and with just a few questions about suicidal thoughts and the like. Only thereafter did she have two one-hour Zoom “mental health” appointments, during which she dropped several “red flags” that would contraindicate her going further with gender transition, including mentioning that she had PTSD, eating disorders, and a family history of body dysmorphia. Then they got to the “fun stuff”: the top surgery and hormones, which were more or less self-prescribed (Bourne’s bolding):

[The Zoom therapist] told me that we had to get through a few more questions related to my medical history before “we can move on to the fun stuff, which is testosterone and top surgery.”

The “fun stuff” consisted of a discussion about the physical and mood changes I could expect, and her asking me about the dose of testosterone I wanted to take and the kind of “top surgery” technique I’d prefer to achieve my “chest goals.” She told me that all or most of my consultations for surgeries and hormones would be virtual

A 15-minute Zoom call with a primary care doctor led to a visit for a body chemistry workup and then an instant prescription for testosterone in the amount Bourne wanted to take. Bourne then said she wanted to have a phalloplasty (“bottom surgery,” or construction of a faux penis) along with a hysterectomy during the same operation where they would remove her breasts.  No problem: the referral for this was easily obtained after only a sixteen-minute Zoom consultation, and at that point Bourne stopped the ruse.  She concludes this (bolding is mine):

In fewer than 300 days, based on a set of superficial and shifting thoughts about my gender and my “embodiment goals” triggered by the mere mention of “gender” in a form letter from my primary care physician, and driven by what could only be described as minor discomforts, Kaiser Permanente’s esteemed “multi-disciplinary team” of “gender specialists” was willing, with enthusiasm—while ignoring mental health concerns, history of sexual trauma, and rapidly escalating surgical requests—to prescribe life-altering medications and perform surgeries to remove my breasts, uterus, and vagina, close my vaginal opening, and attempt a complex surgery with high failure and complication rates to create a functionless representation of a penis that destroys the integrity of my arm or thigh in the process.

This describes the supposedly meticulous, lengthy, and safety-focused process that a Kaiser patient must undergo to embark on a journey to medically alter their body. No clinician questioned my motivations. No one showed concern that I might be addressing a mental health issue through radical and irreversible interventions that wouldn’t address my amorphous problems. There were no discussions about how these treatments would impact my long-term health, romantic relationships, family, or sex life. I charted the course. The clinicians followed my lead without question. The guiding issue was what I wanted to look like.

No other medical field operates with this level of carelessness and disregard for patient health and welfare. No other medical field addresses issues of self-perception with surgery and labels it “medically necessary.” No other medical field is this disconnected from the reality of the patients it serves.

Even though she’s an adult making a decision that should be reserved for adults, the lack of checks and balances for her transition, despite Bourne’s deliberately raising warning flags, is disturbing. You can judge whether there’s something to worry about here. I think there is.

Two other points. First, this seems somewhat unethical in that medical insurance must have been needed to pay for part of Bourne’s hormones and consultations (she covered the co-pay). Thus someone paid for most of her ruse.  To me this is problematic, but in the end was worth it to get the full story of how easy it is to transition without the proper advice.  To get an okay for bottom surgery after only 16 minutes of consultation, without an attendant and extensive series of warnings and lists of possible consequences, and without being given a period to think about it, seems like malpractice.

Finally, the main issue for transitioning involves not adults—who are generally happy with their outcomes—but children or adolescents who may not have the maturity to make such a dramatic, body-changing decision, or who may be going through a period of stress and depression that could resolve in other ways besides surgery. (These young people often eventually come out as gay.)  There is no account similar to Bourne’s of a young person trying to see how easy it was to medically transition while faking the whole thing. What we do have are accounts by young people who have transitioned and then regretted it, or have recounted how easy it was to get affirmative therapy. That, in fact, is why the Tavistock Clinic in London was closed, why many European countries won’t allow giving hormones to young people except in clinical trials, and why several young people who transitioned are suing clinics and doctors. (It’s that in her account Bourne gives the names of many doctors who “helped” her.)

I think that in the future people will look back at this spate of gender transitioning and be shocked at how little controls were exercised during the process. Of course adults should be able to transition if they want, but, particularly with young people, the kind of therapy they should be given is in fact almost never given.

Yesterday I was walking through campus and noted that all the lamposts in the main quad are bedecked, illegally, with pro-Palestinian stickers. (It’s legal for student organizations to put up stickers, but only inatdesignated sites and so long as the organization is identified. Neither is the case here.

A few examples (there must have been about two dozen, all violating posting and demonstration regulations):

And pro-Palestinian students (considered, I think, “progressive” Leftists) are seen here in an illegal blocking of Levi Hall (the administration building) last November 3.  As far as I can find out, though this was against University rules, no punishments were levied against the participants. (I asked the admin but didn’t get an answer.)

Another illegal protest was a group of pro-Palestinian students holding a sit-in in the admissions office. In this case they were arrested, but the charges were dropped. The punishment by the University appeared to have been to write an essay about “my demonstration experience”, in which the students simply reasserted that they were right, claimed that they were being silenced by the University, and protested being punished at all.

But of course things can get even more aggressive and violent, like many of the demonstrations in London, the illegal blocking of highways and roads, and vandalism and graffiti (e.g. Jewish stars or swastikas posted in Jewish homes). You don’t see this kind of aggressive demonstration enacted by pro-Israel students or people out in the world, but those people are not seen as progressives, but as “white colonialists.”

I could go on. While most Black Lives Matter protests were generally peaceful, 7% involved violence.  Leftists opposed to Republicans felt free to confront GOP politicians and their families in restaurants, or make a fracas outside their homes.  I see that as a form of unproductive protest. Yet all of these people would be considered residing on the Left. (In this post I’m not considering violence from those on the Right, as during the January 6 insurrection.)

My assertion is that the farther on the Left you reside (i.e., the more “progressive” of a Leftist you are), the angrier you are in your public political acts and the more likely you are to either be in-your-face aggressive or to break the law. And while breaking the law for a cause is civil disobedience, it is done in a more violent manner than it was a few decades below. Further, “progressive” protestors, instead of willingly accepting punishment, assert that they should not be punished at all. (For examples on our campus, see here and here.) If that’s your view, you’re not doing civil disobedience.

I too was involved in activism during my college years, and I know how righteous you feel when you’re fighting for a cause you see as just. It not only adds a panache of virtue to your college experience, but also gives you automatic membership in a group of like-minded people.

In my case there were two causes worthy of demonstration: the Vietnam war and civil rights.  And in my memory—and I believe in general—both of these causes explicitly avowed nonviolence. Martin Luther King followed the nonviolent principles of Gandhi (granted, there were some civil rights groups, like the Black Panthers, who didn’t eschew violence), and the hallmark of the civil rights demonstrations—the things that made them effective—was their nonviolent character.  When civil rights protesters in Birmingham were attacked by police dogs and blasted with water hoses, and when white people dumped ketchup and milkshakes on civil rights demonstrators sitting peacefully at lunch counters in Greensboro, the immorality of segregation became palpably clear.

Nonviolence was, I think, the key to success—both in ending the Vietnam War and getting the Civil Rights Acts passed.  In my view, violent or angry demonstrations, like stopping traffic or yelling slogans in people’s faces with megaphones, are not devised to produce political success, but to flaunt virtue.  They are, I believe, counterproductive compared to what nonviolent or more peaceful demonstrations could do. They are counterproductive because they anger and inconvenience onlookers, and are designed to do that. You don’t get sympathy for Palestine by blocking traffic on Lake Shore Drive while shouting “From the river to the sea. . .  ”

Regardless, here is the question I’m asking, and to which I don’t have a satisfactory answer:

Why are “progressive” leftists so much angrier and violent in their protests than are more centrist leftists, as well as than were leftists of seventy years ago? What accounts for this anger?  

One explanation is that modern progressives feel that they’re on the side of history, more morally correct than their opponents. But that doesn’t wash because it was also the case for Leftist protestors of the Sixties.  I surely felt that I was more virtuous than those espousing segregation or touting the rectitude of fighting in Vietnam.

What baffles me is the much higher degree of anger from “progressive” Leftists than from more centrist ones, as well the willingness to display it in protests. I ask readers to weigh in. Perhaps you feel my data are wrong: that “progressive” protestors are not publicly angrier than liberal ones. If so, say that as well.

Twitter is good for some stuff, and the best are 1.) cat and duck pictures and 2.) finding out about new science papers, often before they’re published.  Remember the conflict last year about the frequency of women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies (see my posts here). The original paper in PLoS One by Anderson et al. claimed that not only did women engage in hunting in these societies more often than we thought (79% of a sample of such societies showed women participated in hunting), but they also hunted big game more often than we thought. The paper was meant to dispel “The myth of man the hunter” (part of its title) and was clearly meant to promulgate some kind of sex equity in hunting, though a separation of gender roles doesn’t demean women.

The paper was criticized a lot for using biased data (see the set of links above), and the bias, it seemed, either intentionally or fortuitously dispelled what was seen as a misogynistic view: men hunted and women stayed home to grow food, mend things, and take care of the children. It was certainly treated in the popular literature as a blow to both misogyny and the view that sexes had “roles” consistent across societies.

Then I saw this tweet by Alexander, who does cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and it pointed to a not-yet-published paper on BiorΧiv whose claims, when you read it blow Anderson et al. out of the water.  Now remember, it isn’t yet peer-reviewed, but its accusations—there are 15 authors—are devastating. If it’s true, Anderson et al. are guilty of incredibly sloppy scholarship.  And also perhaps ideologically-biased scholarship, since every error or miscoding they used biased the results in favor or women hunting more frequently or taking larger game.

First, the tweet.

Click below to see the pdf of the paper:

Venkataraman et al. find that the paper commits every error that it was possible to make in the paper: leaving out important papers, including irrelevant papers, using duplicate papers, mis-coding their societies, getting the wrong values for “big” versus “small” game, and many others.

Rather than go through the mistakes, I’m just going to show you the last three paragraphs of Venkataraman et al., which summarize the errors they found in Anderson et al.  Read it. If they’re even close to being right, PLoS ONE should retract the Anderson et al. paper.

We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with Anderson et al.’s (2023) analysis. Specifically, Anderson et al.’s (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from DPLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.

Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our re-coding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) societies in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our re-coding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., [10]), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.

The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups. Anthropologists have long recognized that the nature of cooperation in foragers is complex and multi-faceted, and women’s and men’s subsistence activities play important and often complementary roles. Moreover, women’s hunting has been studied for decades, and anthropologists have a good understanding of when and why it occurs. Yet, to focus on hunting at the expense of other critical activities – from gathering and food processing, to water and firewood collection, to the manufacture of clothing, shelters, and tools, to pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, childcare, and healthcare, to education, marriages, rituals, politics, and conflict resolution – is to downplay the complexity, and thereby the importance of women’s roles in the foraging lifeway. To build a more complete picture of the lives of foragers in the present and the past, it serves no one to misrepresent reality. In correcting the misapprehension that women do not hunt, we should not replace one myth with another

The truth is the truth, and, as Venkataraman et al. note repeatedly, the truth does not work to the detriment of women in these societies, who, with a frequent division of labor, work at least as hard as do the men.

h/t: cesar