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Here’s this week’s comedy/news bit on Bill Maher’s “Real Time” show.  His topic is voters who can’t seem to agree on a Presidential candidate, and how they should be voting for Kamala Harris.  Maher avers that if Harris loses, it will because of “progressophobia,” which he calls “Steven Pinker’s term for the liberal fear that of ever admitting when things are actually good.”

Maher’s point is that salaries and the economy are “great”, as he says, and that the perception that they’re not is not a reason to vote for Trump.  The predicted recession didn’t happen (note the very salacious==and somewhat tasteless–joke about Trump’s sexual proficiency, followed by a not-bad imitation of Trump himself. I love the “in this reality, if you can’t get bacon, you’ll die” statement, mocking one recent assertion of Trump.  One statement I don’t get, though, is this one: ” I don’t know if Kamala worked at McDonald’s, but she’s not Flo from Progressive.”  Help me out here.

It’s basically an endorsement of Harris, saying that although she’s not perfect, and is mostly campaigning by dissing Trump rather than advancing her own plans, Maher finishes by saying, “‘I’m not Trump’ is still a really great reason.”

I’m actually surprised that the article below was published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS), one of the more high-quality science journals, just a tad below Science and Nature in prestige. It has had a reputation for being “progressive” (e.g., woke), one that I discussed last year when Steve Pinker had an email exchange with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) President Marcia McNutt.

After McNutt, along with the Presidents of the National Academy of Medicine and of the National Academy of Engineering, issued a pro-affirmative-action and pro-DEI statement on June 30, 2023, Pinker wrote McNutt pointing out that such statements are incompatible with the NAS’s mission. His email (reproduced at the link above) contained this bit:

I would like to express my disquiet at the recent NAS Statement on Affirmative Action. The desirability of racial preferences in university admissions is not a scientific issue but a political and moral one. It involves tradeoffs such as maintaining the proportion of African Americans in elite universities at the expense of fairness to qualified applicants who are rejected because of their race, including other racial minorities such as Asian Americans. Moreover it is a highly politicized policy, almost exclusively associated with the left, and one that majorities of Americans of all races oppose.

It’s not clear to me how endorsing one side of a politically polarizing, nonscientific issue is compatible with the Academy’s stated mission “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology”.

The problem is worse than being incompatible with the Academy’s mission; it could substantially harm the Academy’s goal of promoting politicians’ and the public’s acceptance of science. Extensive research has shown that rejection of the scientific consensus on evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and other scientific topics is uncorrelated with scientific literacy but predictable from political orientation: the farther to the right, the greater the rejection of evolution and climate change.

McNutt wrote back, but declined to have her answer reproduced on this site. Nevertheless, from Pinker’s response to her response, you can gather that she defended the stand of the original three-President statement, apparently written to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision that college admissions could not be based on race.

Steve said this, among other things (again, see the whole of his email at the site):

Even more concerning, the statement could have been lifted out of the pages of any recent left-wing opinion magazine, since it reiterates the current conviction that racial inequities are primarily due to “past and current racial discrimination and structural, systemic, and institutional racism in education” and to “individual bias and discrimination.” Entirely unmentioned are other potential causes of racial discrepancies, including poverty, school quality, family structure, and cultural norms. It is surprising to see a scientific organization attribute a complex sociological outcome to a single cause.

Finally, the statement, and your letter, equate diversity of ideas with diversity of race. The advantages of intellectual diversity are obvious (though I have not seen any statements from the Academy addressing the shrinking political diversity among science faculty, nor the increasing campaigns that punish or cancel scientists who express politically unpopular views). The assumption that racial diversity is the same as intellectual diversity was exactly what the Supreme Court decision singled out and struck down, since it carries with it the racist assumptions that black students think alike, and that their role in universities is to present their race-specific views to their classmates.

Dr. McNutt replied, but again did not give permission for her letter to be reproduced.

I have to give McNutt credit, then, for allowing the two-page piece letter to be published, as it contains a pretty explicit criticism of McNutt, especially of a later piece by McNutt and Crow, “Enhancing trust in science and democracy in an age of information,” published in Issues in Science and Technology. McNutt and Crow bemoan the detachment of science from society and society’s ethical values and make this statement, which is debatable:

Therefore, we believe the scientific community must more fully embrace its vital role in producing and disseminating knowledge in democratic societies. In Science in a Democratic Society, philosopher Philip Kitcher reminds us that “science should be shaped to promote democratic ideals.” To produce outcomes that advance the public good, scientists must also assess the moral bases of their pursuits. Although the United States has implemented the democratically driven, publicly engaged, scientific culture that Vannevar Bush outlined in Science, the Endless Frontier in 1945, Kitcher’s moral message remains relevant to both conducting science and communicating the results to the public, which pays for much of the enterprise of scientific discovery and technological innovation. It’s on scientists to articulate the moral and public values of the knowledge that they produce in ways that can be understood by citizens and decisionmakers.

While the good part of McNutt and Crow’s message is their call for scientists to explain the scientific results of their work to the public, it’s a different matter to ask scientists to “produce outcomes that advance the public good.” That can be an explicit aim of science, as in producing golden rice or Covid vaccines, but many scientists doing “pure” science are motivated by simple curiosity. That curiosity, too, can have salubrious social outcomes, but most of the time it just enriches our knowledge of the universe.

Further, it seems excessive to asks scientists to also “articulate the moral and public values of the knowledge that they produce.”  Are scientists experts in morality? And what are “public values”—the latest ideology of the times? One might think from this piece, and the correspondence above, that McNutt does favor the politicization of science, but along the lines of “progressive” politics.

Thus I was pleased to see this letter, by evolutionary molecular biologist Ford Doolittle, appear as an opinion piece in the latest PNAS.  Here he takes issue not only with the politicization of science, but explicitly with McNutt and Crow’s article. You can read the letter by clicking on the screenshot below, or read the pdf here:

But Doolittle begins with a thesis that I find dubious: that “group selection”—the differential reproduction of genetically different human groups—has led to our drive to understand nature—indeed, to selection on many species to “understand” their environment. But, says Doolittle, group selection has not led to the drive to integrate science and social values. (Other species don’t really have “social values” anyway). Bolding is mine:

Most humanists and scientists now agree that science is special in its relationship to the real world, more special than are other human activities—religion and politics, for instance. But philosophers of science keep arguing about why that should be. There is, I believe, a good evolutionary explanation of why—one that incorporates what is often called group selection (1). But group selection will only move humans closer to the truth if researchers and others take care to ensure that social values don’t distract or mislead.

So, my plea is that scientists and others ensure that science remains independent from social values. Social values are constraints—limitations on the evolutionary process. I worry that mixing science and social values hampers scientific progress.

and this from Doolittle’s piece:

My evolutionary argument starts with the contention that there is a selective advantage at all levels to having a better map of reality. Having a better understanding of the world promotes fitness. Living things at all levels (genes, cells, multicellular organisms, species, multispecies communities, tribes, nations of humans, and even broader cultural frameworks) that have such a better map of the world leave more progeny or last longer than living things that don’t, all else being equal. This has been true from the beginning of life.

. . . And, of course, human groups—tribes, nations, and broader cultural collectives—that have better knowledge of the natural and cultural world have a better chance, all else being equal, than those that have less adequate knowledge.

This is a bit mixed up, for evolutionary group selection is a genetic phenomenon, not a cultural one, and in this case would argue that some groups of humans genetically endowed with better knowledge of the environment would survive and reproduce better than less-informed groups. And, over time, this would spread the genes for acquiring more and more accurate knowledge about the universe.

The problem, as always with group selection, is that, because it depends on the differential survival and reproduction of groups, it is much slower than selection acting on individuals harboring genes producing an ambition to know. Those genes would spread within groups and there is no bar to having individuals with such genes. (I think Doolittle’s misconception here is that only groups can differ in their urge to understand.) Group selection is usually invoked to explain the evolution of traits that are advantageous to groups but not individuals, like pure altruism towards nonrelatives. But over time, group selection has fallen out of favor; see this eloquent critique by Pinker on Edge: “The false allure of group selection“).

Doolittle notes that occasionally Darwin was a group selectionist, but in fact A. R. Wallace, in his first exposition of natural selection, published simultaneously with Darwin’s, was even more of one!

But I digress; natural selection acting on genes (Dawkins’s “replicators”) and the bodies bearing them (the “vehicles”) is sufficient to produce the drive to know.  Still, in the end it hardly matters. Humans are curious creatures, and there’s doubtlessly a big effect of evolution on that trait.

And it doesn’t even matter whether our drive to know is evolutionary rather than purely social if one argues, as Doolittle does, is that mixing science and politics is bad for science. Here’s Doolittle’s peroration about why mixing science and ideology is bad:

But outside certain limits, society is not ethically uniform, and important values are not shared. We are so politically polarized now that there is an ever-present danger of “weaponizing” the pursuit of knowledge, and thus of the results of earnest inquiry being dismissed by those whose social values disagree with those of scientists. We embrace political polarization to the detriment of both scientists and the scientific enterprise.

Science is based on the assumption that our collective understanding of the world, though always imperfect, generally improves over time and that there is no trade-off between what we think we should do and the scientific truth. As the 18th-century philosopher David Hume noted, you can’t derive “ought” from “is.” The consilience of scientists’ personal social values (which surely have changed over time) and modern, fundable science is precisely why I see current trends in politicization as dangerous to the scientific enterprise—a worry underscored when these trends are viewed through an evolutionary perspective going from genes to individual cells to tribes to broader cultural frameworks.

We scientists should be even more careful not to allow what we think is “right” (what we ought to do) to influence what we think is “true” of the world. What we think is right changes with time and context, but what we think is true should be our eternal goal.

Doolittle notes that “it is inevitable that science which does not agree with some aspect of society’s current value system has little chance of getting funded,” but that isn’t 100% true. Sure, if you want to show that there is “structural racism” in an academic field, then your grant may well get funded, but it could also get funded if you’re studying the systematics of ants, or string theory, or the migration distance of Drosophila. Those kinds of studies get funded based on merit, not on “society’s current value system”—unless, that is, you define “value system” tautologically as “what people want to fund”.

In the middle of the article, though, he’s careful not to go too hard after McNutt. But, again to her credit, she let this be published:

As an ethical constraint, the sentiments of Marcia McNutt, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, and her coauthor Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, might serve as a contemporary example (10). They write that science must “produce outcomes that advance the public good,” citing the Columbia University philosopher Philip Kitcher to remind us that “science should be shaped to promote democratic ideals.” Science, in other words, should be constrained by human social values. Perhaps they meant by this that science functions best (that is, provides better understandings of the world) in democratic societies, rather than arguing that democracy is best for our species. The former is an epistemic value, but the latter is a social value and thus an unnecessary constraint.

 

McNutt and Crow’s social values are mine, too, and those of many scientists, I hasten to add. . . .

As I said, if you want to stretch “ethical values” to become “the idea of what sorts of questions need answering,” then of course the science that people do, and especially the science that gets funded, will generally comport with social values. But McNutt, Crow and Doolittle are talking, I think, about prioritizing science that matches our current ideology (i.e., justifying DEI initiatives, documenting inequities, or trying to show that indigenous “ways of knowing” are coequal to modern science). Alternatively, McNutt and Crow might urge us not to do forms of science carrying any possibility that they could have bad social consequences (the classic example is studying group differences in IQ).

But it would have behooved Doolittle to give more examples of the kind of science that people are objecting to now. I’ve written a lot about the ways that ideology is intruding in science in detrimental ways: two examples are my paper with Luana Maroja on ‘The ideological subversion of biology” and also the Abbott et al. paper “In defense of merit in science.”

I see this has been a rather rambling post, involving group selection, the debasing of science by politics, and debates in the scientific literature.  So be it, and again I’m pleased that NAS President McNutt has allowed an op-ed to be posted in “her” journal that explicitly takes her to task. That is in the finest tradition of allowing open discourse in the literature.

h/t: Anna, Luana

I have about three wildlife-photo submissions in reserve, so we’re going to run out soon. If you have some good photos (not blurry or small!), please send them to me. Thanks!

Today is Sunday, and we’re resuming John Avise‘s series on the birds of Hawaii; this is the last installment. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Birds in Hawaii, Part 4 

This week we conclude our 4-part photographic journey into native and introduced bird species that you might encounter on a natural-history tour of the Hawaiian Islands.

Red-vented Bulbul (Pycnonotus cafer) (native to the Indian subcontinent):

Red-whiskered Bulbul (Pycnonotus jocosus) (native to Asia):

Salmon-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua moluccensis) (native to Indonesia):

Spotted Dove (Spilopelia chinensis) (native to the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia):

Wedge-tailed Shearwater (Ardenna pacifica) (widespread in tropical Pacific and Indian oceans):

Western Meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta) (native to North America):

White Tern (Gygis alba) (widespread in the world’s tropical oceans):

White Tern flying:

 White-rumped Shama (Copsychus malabaricus), male in bird-bander’s hand (native to India and southeast Asia):

White-rumped Shama female:

Yellow-fronted Canary (Serinus mozambicus) (native to Africa):

Zebra Dove (Geopelia striata) (native to southeast Asia):

Here’s the beginning of Wikipedia’s entry for Kathleen Hagerty, the Provost of Northwestern University here in Evanston, Illinois. It’s a screenshot, and I’ve marked it:

I don’t find any discussion about “antisemite” in the “history” section of the entry, so this description must have been in the original post created in August, 2020.

Now why would this description of Hagerty be added to her entry?  One thing I recall is that Northwestern was one of the few universities to actually bargain and strike a deal with the pro-Palestinian protestors at her school.  I find this from The Minnesota Lawyer (bolding is mine):

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a federal Title VI complaint against Northwestern University on behalf of the Young America’s Foundation, which has an active chapter on the university’s campus.

The complaint documents the university’s plan to offer nearly $1.9 million in scholarship funds, faculty positions, and student-organization space to Palestinian students and staff. As a recipient of federal funds, Northwestern University is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination “on the grounds of race, color, or national origin,” WILL said.

Northwestern University officials have struck a deal with pro-Palestinian protesters who set up an encampment on campus. In exchange for removal of the encampment, Northwestern agreed to provide a facility for Muslim student activities and fundraise for scholarships going to Palestinian undergraduates.

According to WILL attorney Skylar Croy, that deal violates federal law.

“You just can’t go get scholarships based on ethnicity because they rioted it and demanded it,” Croy said.

According to WILL, on April 29, 2024, University officials entered into an agreement with anti-Israel demonstrators occupying a space on campus called Deering Meadow. The officials involved in the agreement are University President Michael Schill, Provost Kathleen Hagerty, and Vice President Susan Davis.

Pursuant to the terms of the agreement, the University promised to provide the “full cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduates to attend Northwestern for the duration of their undergraduate careers.”

The agreement provides “funding two faculty per year for two years,” with the provision that these faculty will be “Palestinian faculty.”

Additionally, Northwestern University agreed to “provide immediate temporary space for MENA/Muslim students.” MENA is an acronym for “Middle Eastern and North African” individuals.

According to WILL, as a recipient of federal funds, the University is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination “on the grounds of race, color, or national origin.” By providing nearly $1.9 million in scholarships, two faculty positions, and “immediate temporary space” based on an individual’s status as Palestinian or MENA, the University is intentionally discriminating against non-Palestinian or non-MENA individuals on the grounds of race, color, or national origin.

WILL noted, as the United States Supreme Court recently held in a case applying Title VI, race and national origin may never operate as a “negative” or a “stereotype.” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181, 218 (2023). Discrimination in favor of Palestinians or MENA individuals is, in turn, discrimination against individuals not within those categories and is therefore illegal under federal law.

Did some pro-Israel editor stick “antisemite” in there somehow to reflect this bargain? If so, it’s not in the history of the entry. I don’t find the word in the entry for Northwestern President Michael Shill, and VP Susan Davis doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry.

But I expect that, now that I’ve called attention to it, this noun will be gone by the end of the day. Still, this deal is almost certainly illegal, but that doesn’t warrant such pejorative.

h/t: Peggy

Today’s photos are from California tidepools and were taken by UC Davis math professor Abigail Thompson, a recognized “hero of intellectual freedom.” Abby’s notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

September-October tidepools (Northern California).

September and October tides are not as extreme as the tides of midsummer, and by mid-October the lowest tides occur after sunset, which altogether makes finding creatures and taking pictures a bit more challenging.  As usual I got help with some of the IDs from people on inaturalist.

Phyllocomus hiltoni: this Doctor-Suessian marine worm washed up on the beach in a clump of eelgrass.    It was tiny; the photo is through a microscope.     I already thought it was amazing, but then (see the next picture) as a bonus it also sprouted tentacles:

Phyllocomus hiltoni with frills!

Porychthis notatus: these tiny fish showed up when I turned over a rock. They were very small, I assume newly-hatched:

Porychthis notatus: close-up:

Anthopleura sola (starburst anemone), one of the more spectacular sea anemones:

Phragmatopoma californica (California sandcastle worm): These worms often live in groups and form large conglomerations of the tubes they live in (the “sandcastles”).    The black shell-like thing on the left is the worm’s operculum, like a lid to close off the top of the tube when the worm withdraws.  The next picture is a close-up of the operculum:

Operculum close-up:

Triopha maculata: nudibranch; this one looks like he’s eating the pink bryozoan, but he may just be passing over it, I’m not sure what this species eats (nudibranchs are very picky eaters):

Epiactis prolifera (brooding anemone: probably): there are a few species of Epiactis sea anemones along the California coast; prolifera is the most common:

Halosydna brevisetosa: Eighteen-scaled worm, found on the underside of a rock.   There are 18 pairs of scales, with a close-up of them in the next picture.

Close-up of scales:

Low tide on this day was about an hour after sunset, which is a lovely time to be out on the beach:

Camera info:  Mostly Olympus TG-7, in microscope mode, pictures taken from above the water.  The first picture was taken with my iphone through the eyepiece of a microscope.

Well, I’ll be. The group of interns at the left-wing The Nation have objected to the magazine’s recent endorsement of Kamala Harris and published their gripes. Now why would that happen? We all know that many editors and reporters at the Washington Post objected to the paper’s failure to endorse Kamala Harris, but this kind of reversal is unexpected.  Well, sort of—unless you know how “progressive” young Leftists are beginning to change journalism.

So why the beefing? It’s Israel, Jake!

Here, from the “activism” section of the magazine (!), is the long gripe by The Nation‘s interns (click to read for free):

An excerpt giving the tenor of their rage:

We, The Nation’s current interns, find this endorsement unearned and disappointing. We have a different interpretation of the magazine’s abolitionist legacy, one that says a publication committed to justice must refrain from endorsing a person signing off on genocide. We do not support Donald Trump, but to champion Harris at this moment is to ignore the atrocities that are being carried out with weapons supplied by the Biden-Harris administration.

The Nation’s endorsement notes that on foreign policy the “positive case [for Harris] is harder to make,” adding that “she has failed so far to offer anything more substantive to the millions of Americans…desperate for an end to America’s unconditional support for Israel’s brutal war on Gaza.” Yet it goes on to endorse her anyway—implying that domestic concerns are somehow more important. We disagree. On the grounds of Gaza alone, Harris should not have received The Nation’s endorsement.

In the 12 weeks since she effectively became the Democratic nominee, Harris has failed to differentiate her policies from Joe Biden’s blank-check support for genocide. Instead, she repeats the same bland pronouncements about the need for a ceasefire and uses the same passive-voice support for the idea of Palestinian “freedom and self-determination.” Again and again, she has been asked by Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voters, along with a broad coalition of Democrats of conscience, to offer an alternative, and again and again she has refused. She would not even allow a pre-vetted Palestinian supporter of hers to speak at theDemocratic National Convention.

We have watched this abdication of moral responsibility by the Democratic nominee with a growing sense of dismay. As young journalists, we think of our colleagues in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 175 journalists in Gaza since last October—and right now, with US support and the Western media’s indifference, Israel is effectively issuing hit lists of reporters in Gaza. During the last year, The Nation has published dispatches from Palestinian journalists, from 14-year-old Lujayn to the journalist Mohammed Mhawish, both of whom have survived air strikes, most likely from US-made weapons. We cannot advocate for a person who is complicit in the murders of fellow journalists and the bombing of colleagues whose pieces we have fact-checked.

Even when they try to leaven  Harris’s position as a perpetrator of genocide with her “good” domestic policies, they can’t resist bringing up Gaza again and again:

Harris, for instance, promises to provide tax credits to families with newborns and to sign a law to restore the right to abortion nationwide. Yet her commitment to the welfare of children doesn’t extend to the more than 17,000 kids killed in Gaza, hundreds of whom died from inadequate postnatal care like incubators. She will fight for reproductive care in the United States, but in Gaza, tens of thousands of mothers have or will give birth without access to doctors, pain relief, hospitals, or food and water.

Harris also pledges to strengthen our healthcare system. But in Gaza, as many as 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed, 30 of 36 hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, and fewer than half are even partially functional. People routinely die from the blockade of basic sanitary equipment, ordinary medicines, and vaccines.

Harris’s plans to relieve the housing crisis in the United States ring hollow next to her support for Israel’s destruction of homes in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. With the Biden-Harris administration’s full knowledge and aid, 90 percent of Gazans have been forcibly displaced, and hundreds of thousands of homes have been damaged and destroyed. Nor has the administration done anything to stop the demolitions of houses and illegal expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

So who do the interns think the magazine should endorse for President? Nobody, of course. It’s curious that the Washinton Post would get slammed for not endorsing anybody, but the interns haven’t been slammed (or so I’ve seen) for the same action. Of course accusing Israel of genocide is perfectly okay with the “progressive” Left. One more bit from this execrable whine:

There will be people wondering whom we would endorse, if not Harris. Our answer is that we choose not to endorse any party’s candidate for president. We know that a second Trump presidency would be a disaster, but we believe that we cannot vote our way out of this genocide. And while some of us will be voting for president in November—and some of us will not—we all reject the idea that democracy will be safe under a Harris administration.

This is, to my mind, ridiculous, and exemplifies the Jew-hatred that is permeating young people and gradually working its way up into journalism, government, and corporations.  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that, in fact, the genocide is on the side of Hamas, which put into words (and acts repeatedly on) its desire to eliminate Israel. It is Hamas that deliberately tries to kill Jewish civilians, while Israel does its best to avoid killing civilians (its ratio of civilians killed to terrorist fighters killed is one of the lowest of modern times). Does Hamas warn Israeli civilians to get out of the way when it fires a rocket? No, it wants to kill civilians. It targets civilians, both with rockets and, of course, personally, as the October 7 massacre and subsequent acts of terrorism attest.

And, of course, we all know that part of Hamas’s strategy is to ensure that Gazan civilians get killed as a way of winning the world’s sympathy. They do this by embedding their fighters and rocket launchers among civilians and even in hospitals and humanitarian zones.  That guarantees not only that civilians will die as “collateral damage” (I hate that phrase, since all non-combatant human life should be preserved), but also that journalists, who have to be close to the action, will die as well. As the saying goes—and you know it’s true—”If Hamas put down its weapons, the war would be over. If Israel put down its weapons, all the Jews would be killed and Israel would disappear.” The reason Israel sustains fewer casualties is that it has more weapons than do the Palestinians as well as defense systems against rockets fired by Islamist terrorists.

I regard it as a touchstone of ignorance (willful ignorance, not simply “failure to know”) when someone accuses Israel of genocide when it’s palpably clear that Israel is not engaged in a program of eliminating all Palestinians, whose population has grown rapidly in the last decade. And of course where are the accusations of genocide against Hamas? I haven’t heard any lately, except, perhaps, by Israelis, but even then I can’t think of any.

I can’t print here what I think of these ignorant interns since this is a family-friendly site. Just let me say that I hope to Ceiling Cat that they don’t take over journalism and politics. Harris is already weakening American support of Israel by repeatedly calling for a cease-fire, which if effected now, would simply allow Hamas to regroup and continue perpetrating terrorism. If I were a paper and had to endorse a candidate (of course I don’t think papers should be endorsing candidates), it would of course be Harris. But to withhold that approbation because of a supposed “genocide” is sheer stupidity.

The abiding sin of the interns is their failure to blame Hamas rather than Israel for the deaths of Gazan civilians.  If beginning in 2005, a subset of Palestinians was not intent on killing Jews and getting rid of Israel, Gaza would now be a Mediterranean paradise, rich and full of big-spending tourists and beach resorts.

All day yesterday I was making my way back to Chicago from Ivins, Utah: first, a two-hour drive to Las Vegas, then a two-hour wait in the airport, with the flashing and music of slot machines IN THE WAITING AREA, and finally a four-hour flight back home. I am exhausted. Which is to say: posting will be very light today—if there is any.

But on the way home I read Salman Rushdie’s latest book, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, which came out in April. Click the screenshot below to go to the Amazon site. I have to say that the cover is wonderfully designed given the contents:

It’s a short (200-page) account of the attempted murder of Rushdie on August 12, 2022 by accused perp Hadi Matar, a Lebanese-American likely trying to fulfill the fatwa issued on Rushdie in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini.  The Ayatollah considered Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses as anti-Muslim blasphemy, and called for the author’s assassination. A $3 million bounty accompanied the fatwa. Rushdie went into hiding, but several people connected with the book were killed.

Finally, after 33 years, the fatwa was fulfilled when Matar ran at Rushdie as the author was about to address a Chautauqua, New York audience about the need for a “safe space” for politically demonized writers.  Matar apparently stabbed Rushdie 15 times in the neck, eye, chest, and hand, blinding him in one eye and rendering his left hand largely useless. For several days Rushdie hovered between life and death, but thanks to expert trauma care, he survived. His eye remains but its sightless, and his hand is only minimally useful. But, Rushdie avers, he was largely saved by the love of his (fifth) wife, the African-American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. In many ways the book is a paean to Griffiths, who was by his side the whole way, and the description of their mutual love is quite moving.

Rushdie, as you see from this book, is back in action, and on to another novel. I have read only one of his, but it was a corker: Midnight’s Children, which I picked up for a pittance in a used-book stall in New Delhi. I was mesmerized by the novel, which won not only a Booker Prize, but the “Booker of the Bookers“, an award for the 25th anniversary of the Prize. In other words, it was judged the best of the 25 Booker winners.  I’ve read a fair number of Booker-Prize winners, and think Rushdie’s award was well deserved. Midnight’s Children is a great classic, a magical-realism account centered on the partition of India in 1947. PLEASE read it if you haven’t.

Sad to say, that is the only novel of Rushdie’s I’ve read, and I must catch up. He’s written about 20 of them, apparently of varying quality, including an earlier autobiography called Joseph Anton, dealing with his post-fatwa journey. But I hear some of the novels are gems, and I must get to them.  He’s a likely future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which I think has been delayed only because Stockholm fears Muslim backlash if Rushdie wins.

As for Knife, it’s a gripping short read and the details of Rushdie’s assault and subsequent recovery make the book one that’s hard to put down. I recommend it highly for a short read and for those interested in Rushdie.  A fair amount of the last part of the book is a fictionalized dialogue between Rushdie and his assailant, which changes the pace of the book substantially. At first I didn’t like this bit, but the more I read it, the more I enjoyed it. It is, I suppose, a way for Rushdie to come to terms with Matar and his attack, trying to suss out why a New Jersey resident would knife the writer after so many years.

Below is a Wikipedia photo of the post-attack Rushdie. He decided not to have his eye removed but rather to hide it with a dark lens in his glasses. He does have macular degeneration in his other eye, and fears above all that he will go blind. But it looks as though they’ve stabilized his condition:

Elena Ternovaja, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Matar, by the way, is still awaiting trial. They delayed it because his public defender argued that Rushdie’s published account was essential for Matar’s defense.

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili has a message for us all:

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: About hope in hopelessness.
A: And what is your conclusion?
Hili: That it requires intelligence, knowledge and craftiness.

Ja: O czym myślisz?
Hili: O nadziei w beznadziejności.
Ja: I jaki wniosek?
Hili: Wymaga inteligencji, wiedzy i przebiegłości.

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili is doing an experiment:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m testing the efficacy of prayer for a rabbit pâté.

Ja: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Testuję skuteczność modlitwy o pasztet z krolika.

Several newspapers have refused to endorse any candidate for the upcoming Presidential election. These (infamously) include the Wall Street Journal  (which hasn’t endorsed a candidate since Herbert Hoover), and the Washington Post, but there are many other papers who refused to endorse as well, including the Minnesota Star-Tribune and the Tampa Bay Times, as well as several large newspaper chains.  In the case of the Post, owner Jeff Bezos said that the paper will no longer make any Presidential endorsements (that of course could change should the ownership change.) From the link above:

Big headlines popped up in media circles last week when the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times blocked editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris. News staff turmoil followed with resignations at the Times and op-eds and a petition from opinion writers at the Post.

USA Today, which endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its 38 years in 2020, has reverted to neutrality. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t backed a presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover. If it were to shift course in the next few days, that would be a true October surprise.

That leaves The New York Times by its lonesome among national newspapers in still endorsing (Harris, of course, several times over).

I had already been looking at regional papers, where the steady move away from taking sides in presidential elections has become an epidemic. The largest chains — Gannett and Alden Global’s MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing — have all stopped. (Hearst and Advance Local still leave their papers the option.)

Independent, locally owned organizations dominate the shrinking list of holdouts. Here, too, disengagement is becoming a trend. The highly regarded (and recently renamed) Minnesota Star Tribune alerted readers on Sept. 23 that no endorsement would be forthcoming.

When the Washington Post refused to endorse, the theory immediately spread that Jeff Bezos, who apparently overrode the editors’ decision to endorse Harris, had become “politically neutral” as a nefarious ploy as insurance against a Trump victory. (Apparently Amazon, also owned by Bezos, might stand to lose substantial government business, as Trump is known to be a retributive person.)

Now I am not sure what motivaated Bezos to do this.  But, as I said, I was willing to be charitable and assumed that Bezos, like the other owners, were being institutionally neutral as a way to maintain their papers’ reputation for objectivity in the news. Other people were not so charitable, and, in the end, we cannot know what was in Bezos’s mind.

But he did explain his decision in a new Washington Post editorial, and it comes down to the institutional neutrality explanation. (He does admit that the timing was bad.) You can read it yourself by clicking on the headline below or find the article archived here. Whether you believe Bezos or not is up to you, but I think that at least as a long-term strategy to prevent people from distrusting the media, journalistic neutrality in both news and lack of official endorsements is the way to go.

I’ll quote Bezos (indented):

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

. . . Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally.

. . . You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.

. . . While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it.

As I said, lots of people won’t believe him, nor do they think the L.A. Times‘s failure to endorse a candidate was principled, as the owner has $6 billion. But what about all those other newspapers and chains? All hedging their bets against a Trump victory?

Perhaps, but I am still in favor of ideological neutrality. And what paper would adopt such neutrality, say, two years after an election? The timing was uncomfortably close to the election, which is bad, but I still think Bezos’s decision is a harbinger of good things that promote freedom of speech and thought. And I now that many readers will disagree with me.

The paper even has an article about Bezos’s refusal to endorse, which you can read by clicking on the headline below, or reading the archived version here.

And some straight reporting on the fallout:

The op-ed, which appears in Tuesday’s print edition, comes as nearly one-third of The Post’s 10-member editorial board stepped down Monday in the wake of Bezos’s decision.

The board members — all of whom have said they intend to remain at the newspaper in other roles — include David E. Hoffman, a 42-year Washington Post veteran who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for columns on autocracy and resigned Thursday, the day before publisher William Lewis shocked the board by announcing the decision to cease a long-standing practice of issuing endorsements in presidential races. Board member Molly Roberts confirmed that she is stepping down. The third board member is Mili Mitra, who also serves as director of audience for The Post’s opinions section. Bezos made no mention of the resignations in his opinion piece.

. . . The Post’s editorial board is part of the newspaper’s opinions section, which operates independently from the staff that provides news coverage. The remaining members of the board following Monday’s board resignations are Shipley, Charles Lane, Stephen Stromberg, Mary Duenwald, James Hohmann, Eduardo Porter and Keith B. Richburg.

“It’s extremely difficult for us because we built this institution,” Hoffman said in an interview before the public announcement of his decision to step down. “But we can’t give up on our American democracy or The Post.”

Finally, as Bezos surely would have known, his decision to avoid endorsement cost the paper, and cost it seriously. The headline below tells the tale. Click on it or find it.  archived here:

An excerpt:

At least 250,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions since the news organization announced Friday that the editorial page would end its decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates. The figures represent about 10 percent of The Post’s digital subscribers.

The Post began experiencing a huge spike in the number of subscribers looking to cancel online starting Friday in the wake of the announcement by CEO and publisher William Lewis,according to documents and two people familiar with the figures who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to comment publicly. By Tuesday, the number reached 250,000, the documents indicate.

The number does not take into account how many new subscribers have signed up for The Post during the same period, or how many who canceled may have changed their minds later and re-subscribed.It’s also unclear how many of those who canceled subscriptions also receive print editions of The Post.

A Post spokeswoman declined to comment on subscription numbers. The Post is a privately held company that does not typically share such data with the public.

. . .But despite the assurances from Bezos and Lewis, the blowback has been intense. More than 20 Post opinion columnists dissented in a piece The Post published, and three members of the editorial board stepped down from that role, while remaining on the staff.

Tens of thousands of readers left comments on The Post stories about the fallout, including from those who said they were canceling subscriptions after being loyal readers for decades, alarmed by what they viewed as a capitulation to Donald Trump.

, , ,The Post saw its digital subscribers peak at 3 million in January 2021. It has dropped off since then to about 2.5 million now.

The company was projected to lose $100 million last year, but ended up losing $77 million after an employee buyout program reduced company staffing by about 10 percent. Bezos brought in Lewis this year to help recover lost subscriptions and grow other parts of the business.

Earlier this month, employees were told at a companywide meeting, which was also reported by the New York Times, that The Post was starting to see modest, positive subscriber growth after two years of declining numbers.

As I said, Bezos surely would have foreseen this. So if you take the less charitable view of his actions, he courted Trump knowing that it would cost the paper dearly, and even, perhaps, bring about its death. Perhaps he didn’t predict so many lost subscribers, and made a calculation that Trump’s favor (if he won) would be worth the subscription loss.

Readers have to decide for themselves here. I cannot psychologize Bezos, but in the end I think the trend towards increasing journalistic neutrality is a salubrious occurrence.

The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called “uncool,” came with this sentence:

I don’t think anybody’s going to like this one.

I like it, because it reminds me of the old Jewish joke, one I’m sure I told before:

Jewish pessimist: “Oy! Things can’t get any worse!”
Jewish optimist:   “Sure they can!”

Jesus and Mo wind up being Jewish optimists.

Yesterday we took a drive to Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park, a 2.5-hour trip from where I’m staying in Ivins, Utah.  Bryce is located where the red pin is in this Wikipedia map:

SANtosito, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It turns out that Bryce is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in America—indeed, anywhere on Earth. To me, its splendor, exemplified by the “amphitheaters” that contain the red geological spires known as hoodos, is unparalleled. I’ll show some photos below. First, a few words from Wikipedia:

The major feature of the park is Bryce Canyon, which despite its name, is not a canyon, but a collection of giant natural amphitheaters along the eastern side of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. Bryce is distinctive due to geological structures called hoodoos, formed by frost weathering and stream erosion of the river and lake bed sedimentary rock. The red, orange, and white colors of the rocks provide spectacular views for park visitors. Bryce Canyon National Park is much smaller and sits at a much higher elevation than nearby Zion National Park. The rim at Bryce varies from 8,000 to 9,000 feet (2,400 to 2,700 m).

And the geology, which explains these bizarre formations:

The Bryce Canyon area experienced soil deposition that spans from the last part of the Cretaceous period and the first half of the Cenozoic era. The ancient depositional environment varied. Dakota Sandstone and Tropic Shale were deposited in the warm, shallow waters of the advancing and retreating Cretaceous Seaway (outcrops of these rocks are found just outside park borders).

The Laramide orogeny affected the entire western part of what would become North America starting about 70 million to 50 MYA. This event helped to build the Rocky Mountains and in the process closed the Cretaceous Seaway. The Straight Cliffs, Wahweap, and Kaiparowits formations were victims of this uplift. The Colorado Plateaus rose 16 MYA and were segmented into plateaus, separated by faults and each having its own uplift rate.

This uplift created vertical joints, which over time preferentially eroded. The soft Pink Cliffs of the Claron Formation eroded to form freestanding hoodoo pinnacles in badlands, while the more resistant White Cliffs formed monoliths The brown, pink, and red colors are from hematite (iron oxide; Fe2O3); the yellows from limonite (FeO(OH)·nH2O); and the purples are from pyrolusite (MnO2).

So we have a sedimentary sandstone formation that of course formed the seabed, and, under the pressure of colliding tectonic plates (I’m dong the best I can here), produced a huge uplift of the seabed, with Bryce being part of a huge sandstone cliff.  Thrust above the ground, the cliff was subject to erosion as well as weathering as frost and ice invaded the cracks in the soil. That erosion of softer bits, as well as the cracking, created structures like these. These are “mini-hoodoos” that you see before you enter the Park itself:

The area is called “Dixie” because there was a period during which settlers tried to grow cotton in the area. This endeavor ultimately failed, probably because of extreme dryness and lack of water. They haven’t yet purged the name “Dixie” from many institutions and parks, but that will happen. There is even a “Dixie Technical College.”

These are just small previews of the Big Show that is Bryce Canyon:

Entering the park, you’re warned to stay away from prairie dogs (cute rodents in the genus Cynomys) who build extensive underground tunnel systems. Their fleas carry the bacterium the causes bubonic plague, which persists at a low level in the U.S (about nine cases a year in the past couple decades). Now that we have antibiotics, getting plague is no longer the death sentence it was in the Middle Ages.

The glories of the park are the series of hoodoo-containing ampitheaters, which you can see from above by climbing up a short path. They are breathtaking:

These spires are huge, not just small excrescences:

A panorama: be sure to click to enlarge the photo:

The day was bloody cold, with snow on the ground during much of the two-hour drive and some near white-outs. But the weather cleared sufficiently when we got to the Park so that photography was good, in muted light. Here’s my friend Phil Ward standing on the edge of the cliff, trying not to slip and fall into the canyon.

. . . and Professor Ceiling Cat in the same place: a vanity photo

More of the Canyon. It is much smaller than Zion but more breathtaking. You can pretty much take in the whole thing by climbing to one of the lookout points (this one was about 8,000 feet high, so you get out of breath hiking up):

Another panorama: click to enlarge:

After we froze our ears, hands, and noses (there was a stiff wind up there, and the temperature was below freezing), we parked the car overlooking some scenery and had a healthy Phil Ward-ian lunch (turkey breast and cream cheese on walnut bread, along with a ginger drink, a banana, and an apple). Then we repaired to the visitor center, which had good explanations and diagrams of how the park was formed. There were also relics from the Native Americans who lived in this area as well as the Mormon settlers. Here is a water jug from the late 1800s made of resin-coated wood:

There were lots of Bryce-related geegaws for sale in the gift ship, and I had a bit of fun with two pack rat puppets (rodents of the genus Neotoma).

Then it was time for the long drive home, and once again we had to go through snow and rain. But we were fortunate that the weather in the Park was good when we were there, and we could truly say this:

And when we got home, one of the people who co-owns the beautiful house where I’m staying served us raw oysters, grilled oysters, grilled burgers, and then two beautiful grilled ribeye steaks:

And the sun will come out tomorrow (in fact, today). The view from the house where I’m staying:

If you’re in southern Utah, you must visit both Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks. But if you can visit only one, it must be Bryce. Truly, I’ve traveled a lot of this planet, and seen some beautiful places, but Bryce is surely among the top ten. (Others include Mt. Everest from Kala Pattar, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal under a full moon, and almost any part of Antarctica, as well as the giant sequoias of California.)

Feel free to list below the most beautiful places you’ve seen! This might help me amend my bucket list.

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili has come to a conclusion:

Hili: Reality is unworkable. A: That’s why so few are treating it seriously.

Hili: Rzeczywistość nie nadaje się do użytku.
Ja: Dlatego niewielu traktuje ją poważnie.

I’ve always longed to go to Zion National Park in Utah, as it’s renowned for its beauty. My friend Phil Ward and I drove there for most of the day yesterday. First, a bit about its geology from Wikipedia:

The nine known exposed geologic formations in Zion National Park are part of a super-sequence of rock units called the Grand Staircase. Together, these formations represent about 150 million years of mostly Mesozoic-aged sedimentation in that part of North America. The formations exposed in the Zion area were deposited as sediment in very different environments:

• The warm, shallow (sometimes advancing or retreating) sea of the Kaibab and Moenkopi formations
• Streams, ponds, and lakes of the Chinle, Moenave, and Kayenta formations
• The vast desert of the Navajo and Temple Cap formations
• The dry near-shore environment of the Carmel Formation

Uplift affected the entire region, known as the Colorado Plateaus, by slowly raising these formations more than 10,000 feet (3,000 m) higher than where they were deposited.[54] This steepened the stream gradient of the ancestral Virgin and other rivers on the plateau.

Click the photos to enlarge them. You will find that there are more pictures of chipmunks and people feeding them than there are of the landscapes. Shoot me–I love chipmunks (and all animals).

First, I affirm my credentials as a Zionist. I’m wearing a hat that someone gave me, and it reads, à la the Larry David show, “Curb Your Antisemitism”:

The landscape is stunning, so let’s just look at some photos.

Sandstone cliffs, red but topped with some white sediments:

Even though it’s dry here, plants and even trees manage to eke out a living on the bare rock:

Some of the cliffs are topped with plateaus:

A panoramic view. Definitely click once or several times to enlarge:

There are all kinds of wave patterns in the sedimentary layers:

We had a mild hike up Canyon Overlook Trail (1 mile long) to get to this stunning viewpoint looking down into Zion Canyon.

Below, my friend Phil Ward at the overlook. He’s a Professor of Entomology at the University of California at Davis, and I’ve known him since he arrived there in the early 1980s.  His speciality is ants, and although one is not allowed to collect in National Parks without a permit (I used to get one to collect flies in Death Valley), he never leaves home without his ant-collecting kit, which includes ant bait, and that includes cookie crumbs.  It turns out that although we couldn’t collect ants, we used the bait to collect chipmunks (see below).

There were at least four species of flowers along the trail. This one is a California fuchsia (Epilobium canum):

Life is ubiquitous and tenacious, even in environments as dry and hostile as Zion.  Where water seeps through the rocks, plants and mosses about, and I think this is maidenhair fern (Adiantun pedatum aleuticum).

A great treat awaited us at the overlook. Because many tourists linger there for the view, the local chipmunks have learned to hang out there to beg for noms. They are lovely, tame, as fast as quicksilver, and will even dive into your backpack if you leave it open.  Phil gave me some ant bait (crumbled cookies), and, sure enough, the chipmunks went all over me to get them. (This reminds me of the Botany Pond Squirrels climbing up m leg for nuts.)

There are three species of chipmunk in Zion; I believe this one is the Uinta chipmunk (Neotamias umbrinus). It’s related to the East’s common Eastern chipmunk  (Tamias striatus), and used to be considered the same species, but now it’s been placed in a different genus.

The visitors were entranced by these rodents (they are as light as a feather, and when they climb upon you, it’s barely detectable). And so people pulled out their hiking food and gave some to the ‘munks. Sometimes three or four chipmunks would climb on a person at once. This woman is obviously delighted.

I love people being happy when interacting with animals.

A close-up of a nomming chipmunk:

This woman was part of a group of visiting British tourists. Since chipmunks are exclusively North American, it’s likely that this is her first close encounter with one. Like everyone, she was delighted when they took food. (And yes, I know you’re not supposed to feed the wildlife, but seriously, how can you resist?)

A two-fisted feed:

Look how happy she is! (And, I’m sure, so were the chipmunks.)

A closeup.  Phil and I discussed the evolutionary significance of the striping pattern; Phil thought it may be camouflage, but it seemed to me to not yield a very cryptic pattern. Perhaps, I thought, it was for members of the species to recognize each other, but I’ve always been wary of “species recognition” traits because it’s hard to see how they’d evolve (the trait and recognition of the trait must evolve simultaniously). In the end, we decided, “Well, we’re evolutionary biologists, and we could make up a hundred explanations, but how would we test them?”

Look at these little beauties, with their racing stripes, fluffy tails, and huge black eyes!

And a top view. As I said, they are so light—Uitna chipmunks weigh about 67 g, or 2.4 ounces—that you can barely feel them when they climb on you. And, like squirrels, when they take a tidbit from your hand you can feel their tiny claws.

Today, we go to Bryce Canyon National Park, famous for its geological “hoodoes“, tall and thin pillars of rock very different from what you see in Zion. Here’s a picture from Wikipedia:

Attribution: I, Luca Galuzzi; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili is preoccupied:

A: Can you have a look at this article?
Hili: Not now.

Ja: Czy możesz spojrzeć na ten artykuł?
Hili: Nie teraz

I’ve finally left the entrance to Hell, otherwise known as Las Vegas. Thank goodness the conference was there to provide respite from the noisy, jangling streets, filled with tattooed people swilling margaritas. But of course all I know of Vegas is the Strip, and I’m told there are parts of the city that resemble real urbanity.  So be it.

A few photos and a video from my stay:

The Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s Palace. For a mere $85 you get 90 minutes to stuff your gut with as much food as you can. And it’s good food, by and large, so I’d say the buffet is worth it. Given how fast i.5 hours pass, I didn’t have the time to photograph much of the food. This is the beginning of the carving station (the buffet is HUGE). The lamb t-bones, at lower right, are small cuts of lamb that were absolutely terrific (Mike Chen recommended them on his Bacchanal Buffet video).

Below: the beginning of the seafood station. My buffet strategy was to first eat crustaceans and oysters (crab claws, snow crab legs, oysters Rockefeller), and then head for the meats (prime rib and lamb), have an elote (Mexican ear of corn), and then fill in the remaining gastric corners with desserts. I believe I got my money’s worth. Here’s a man grabbing crab.

If you go (and you have to go to a buffet in Vegas), I’d recommend this one, but watch a few videos on YouTube about the offerings, which will help you plan your buffet strategy. 90 minutes go by awfully quick!

Caesar’s Palace is the height of kitsch, decorated with Greek and Roman statuses throughout. Here’s one with a statue next to an ATM:

Back the the Horseshoe, feeling like a python that’s ingested a small antelope.  These are scenes from the casino floor at the Horseshoe, where we were staying and the site of CSICon.

Slot machines are everywhere, and they are no longer one-armed bandits, but are designed to appeal to the video-game generation. They are loud and big, liable to set off epileptic fits in those susceptible to their flashing lights. Plus you’re allowed to smoke on the casino floor, so it doesn’t smell all that great.

The lacunae between machines are filled with craps, roulette, or blackjack tables. Here’s a craps table for betting on dice:

Lots of action around the tables:

I found a cat-themed slot machine called “Karma Kat”!

. . . and here is a short video I took of what it’s like on the casino floor. Even when it’s not busy, as below, it’s noisy. Look at all those slots!

My friend Phil Ward, an entomologist at UC Davis, picked me up at noon for the two-hour drive to his shared house in Ivins, Utah, near St. George. We went through a bit of Arizona and then entered Utah, where I’m staying for the next three days, planning trips to the National Parks like Bryce and Zion—places I’ve never been.

First, though, we passed through an Indian reservation (“Native American” reservation?), housing what is formally known as the Shivwits Band of Paiutes, who settled in the area around 1100 B.C. and were hunter-gatherers but also cultivated crops. The only members of the tribe I saw were at the gas station/convenience store, whose sign is below.

It immediately struck me that “Shivwits” sounds like a Jewish name, and it went through my head that this might be one of the lost tribes of Israel that settled in Utah. (Remember, Mormons believed that Jesus came to America.) And then a joke went through my head if that scenario were true: A Shivwitz male could say, “I am a Man of Shivwitz.” Get it? Of course I mean no disrespect to the tribe; it’s just wordplay.

Gas was about as cheap as I’ve ever seen here: about 3 bucks a gallon (I believe things sold on Native American reservations are exempt from tax), so we filled up for the trip to Zion today. Proof:

Ivins is small and inconspiculous, with houses built only one story high and deigned to blend into the mountain scenery. It is beautiful here. Below is the view from my bedroom window (the house belongs to four people: Phil and three of his friends):

Today we head for Zion National Park, a place I’ve always wanted to visit because of its geological beauty. I’m bringing my decent point-and-shoot Panasonic Camera and will post pictures. Here’s one from the Wikipedia site, labeled “Zion Canyon at sunset in Zion National Park as seen from Angels Landing looking south.”

Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili notices the changing seasons, but Andrzej is not optimistic:

Hili: We have autumn again. A: This time it’s the autumn of Enlightenment.

Hili: Znowu mamy jesień.
Ja: Tym razem to jest jesień Oświecenia.

 

 

Some wires must have gotten crossed, as Matthew hasn’t put up today’s Hili dialogue. But no worries–I called Malgorzata and got it. A day without Hili is like a day without sunshine! So here you go:

Hili: What do you think will happen now? A: Predicting the future is not my business. In Polish: Hili: Jak sądzisz, co teraz będzie.
Ja: Przewidywanie przyszłości to nie mój biznes.

I was up at 5 a.m. as I went to bed early with an incipient cold (or some other virus), and the insomnia is still with me. This morning I leave for Utah, but will put up here two articles I read yesterday as well as a clip from Bill Maher’s “Real Time”. I am still baffled that so many science-oriented skeptics think that one’s biological sex is what one thinks it is, regardless of other traits and despite the truth that what one “thinks” is based on biology (neurons and the like). Onwards and upwards.

Niall Ferguson, who happens to be married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and is also seen as a conservative, has what I thought was a good article in The Free Press, which you can access below or find archived here.  It’s about Israel’s continuous refusal to follow America’s marching orders in the Middle East. I’ll give a few quotes (indented):

First, of course, I have to give the usual disclaimer that I’m not a huge fan of Netanyahu, but I do give him credit for prosecuting the war successfully despite repeated American objections. An excerpt (the essay Ferguson refers to is Jake Sullivan’s “7,000-word essay published in Foreign Affairs one year ago”).

Since then, the region has been in a state of upheaval not seen in half a century—since the last surprise attack on Israel almost exactly 50 years previously, on Yom Kippur 1973. And at every single major hinge point of Israel’s war with Iran’s proxies, the U.S. has been as wrong as Sullivan was in that essay.

The White House said don’t go into Gaza. Israel did, and in a sustained campaign killed a high proportion of Hamas fighters. Team Biden-Harris said don’t go into Rafah. Israel ignored those warnings, too, and in February liberated two hostages there. Ten days ago, a routine Israeli patrol in Rafah spotted the mastermind of the massacre, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed soon after. Washington said don’t send troops into Lebanon. Israel sent them anyway and in a matter of weeks has inflicted severe damage on Hezbollah’s positions there.

Biden and Harris said “Ceasefire now!” but Israel had no interest in a ceasefire that gave Hamas breathing space to regroup. Finally, the U.S. warned against Israel directly attacking Iran. An as yet unidentified U.S. government official even appears to have leaked Israel’s plans to Tehran—a scandal that ought to be front-page news. You know what happened next.

The past year has revealed many things—not least the moral confusion of many young Americans—but two major points stand out. First, Israel has pursued a strategy of targeted retaliation of impressive precision and effectiveness. Second, the United States has lost all but a shred of the influence it once had over Israeli policy. Fact: As a share of Israeli national income, U.S. aid peaked at 22 percent in 1979. It’s now down to 0.6 percent.

The political consequences are twofold. First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has successfully outmaneuvered his critics at home and abroad, who wrongly assumed that, by relentlessly exaggerating the collateral damage of Israel’s campaign against Hamas, they would prevent Israel from exacting vengeance—and from reestablishing deterrence.

Second, the Biden-Harris administration has been left looking even more hapless in its national security strategy than Jimmy Carter’s did in 1980, when Ronald Reagan swept to victory with a promise to achieve “peace through strength.” The Iranian revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis, combined with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had made 1979 an annus horribilis for Carter.

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

Andrew Sullivan despises Trump, and has declared that he’ll vote for Harris, but that doesn’t stop him from calling her out. I’d say that such criticism is fair, since it’s designed not to defeat the Democrats but to correct them. Read by clicking below, or see the piece archived here . “Project Fear” refers to what appears to be Harris’s main campaign strategy: to continuously diss Trump (fair enough, and her criticisms are correct) but not to advance her own policies (not a good tactic). Read the transcript of Harris’s town-hall interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who also dislikes Trump.

An excerpt .from Sullivan:

And so the few undecideds are looking for a positive reason to vote for Harris. And this is the best she could do in her truly pitiable CNN town hall:

I think that the American people deserve to have a president who is grounded in what is common sense, what is practical, and what is in the best interest of the people, not themselves.

Weak. Lame. This is the first presidential candidate who doesn’t seem to want you to know what she’ll actually do, or what she really thinks about anything much, and who responds to every direct question with a meandering digression. Blathering about an “opportunity economy” and a “middle-class background” doesn’t cut it. With Anderson Cooper — who was superb — she memorably crashed and burned.

She had taken a day off to prep and yet still could not tell us what her first Congressional priority would be, what policies of the last four years she would change, how she would prevent illegal immigration, why Biden had not issued this year’s executive orders three years ago, and why she was now in favor of building a wall she once called “stupid, useless, and a medieval vanity project.” When asked to name just one mistake she’s made over the past four years, in life or in office, she said:

I mean I’ve made many mistakes, um, and they range from, you know — if you’ve ever parented a child, you know you make lots of mistakes. Um, in my role as vice president, I mean I’ve probably worked very hard at making sure that, um, I am well versed on issues, and, um, I think that is very important. It’s a mistake not to be well versed on an issue and feel compelled to answer a question.

Calling Michael Scott. Her entire performance was a near parody of why normal people hate the way politicians talk. Every answer seemed to be a form of damage control, not conviction. And her body language … well, a near-literal defensive crouch isn’t confidence-inducing. Nor is it reassuring to think someone who cannot crisply answer a straight question will have to make split-second, life-and-death decisions as president. She seems like a party functionary who has never known real political combat — maybe a decent low-level cabinet member. But president? C’mon. Even the Dem strategists after the town hall were bewildered by her “word salad city” — to quote David Axelrod. Substacker Adam Coleman wrote:

There are moments when she physically squirms as she searches for a canned response to give Anderson Cooper. She’s in a friendly environment on CNN, and Anderson Cooper absolutely hates her opponent, but even his basic questions made her squirm.

No one wants a president who squirms, laughs, and prevaricates on her meandering way to a calculated, canned response. The undecideds don’t. And the base is given nothing really to speak of, apart from abortion and the filibuster. She’s neither persuading the center nor rallying the faithful. Her final trump card is celebrity concerts and endorsements. Have the Dems learned nothing? And no serious presidential candidate should have a closing message like this one:

Let me, if I can, just speak to what people are feeling. We cannot despair, we cannot despair … Let’s not let the overwhelming nature of all this make us feel powerless, because then we have been defeated, and that’s not our character as the American people. We are not ones to be defeated.

Not exactly “Fired up! Ready to go!” is it?

Sullivan speaks the truth here, and I am truly baffled at those who think that Harris is a great candidate and will likely be a good President. Yes, she’s miles better than Trump, but that is still a long distance from “excellent”. I will be glad it she beats Trump, but I will still worry how Harris, who was roundly beaten the last time around, will handle the world’s most important job.  No, I feel no “joy”, just disappointment about how the whole thing was handled, from Biden refusing to bow out early enough to allow a proper selection of a Democratic candidate to Harris pretending that she has “earned” the nomination when in fact she inherited it.

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

Finally, here’s Bill Maher’s latest news-and-humor clip saying that what Harris needs is a “Sister Souljah moment“. You remember that moment, right? The Wikipedia link just above describes it, as does Maher in the video below. Maher even provides several SS moments that Harris could use.

(I do think that Maher’s comment about Monica Lewinsky was out of line.)

I’ve been busy at the CSICon conference, which included giving my own 30-minute presentation this morning. I had to modify it to take into account the misguided views of Steve Novella, who gave a talk yesterday about “When Skeptics Disagree.” It turned out to be largely a diatribe about how sex in humans is not binary, and in fact isn’t even to be defined by morphology or physiology. As far as I can see, Novella’s view of sex is that one is born with a “brain module” (which of course is biological) that determines which sex you are. No, not gender, but actual biological sex. You can have a “female” module or a “male module”, and regardless of gametes, hormones, genitalia, and so on, you are whatever sex your module dictates to your self-identification.

That makes no sense, because of course there are plenty of people that have ideas, right or wrong, about what they are, but in the end merely feeling something about your self doesn’t make it objectively true.  Does a full biological man, with the right genitalia, hormones and chromosomes, but who feels that he’s a woman, actually become a woman (or vice versa for women)? Of course not, unless you think that words mean whatever you want them to. This is why I believe that people can claim to be of any gender, but they can’t actually change their biological sex. (Clownfish can, but they are still only male or female.)

And what about those people—yes, they exist—who think they really are in the wrong body, and should be a member of another species, like a horse or a cat? Does that actually make them a cat or horse? Of course not.

One more example. There are people who are nonbinary, but are that way on a temporal basis: they change from feeling male to feeling female on a daily or even hourly basis. (Neil deGrasse Tyson defends this view here.) Does this mean that at one moment they are a male, and at other moments female, or some other unnamed sex in between?  I don’t think so.

Novella, of course, has been banging this drum for a long time (see here and especially the post here). His Science-Based Medicine (SBM) site even removed a favorable review of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage because the reviewer, SBM founding editor Harriet Hall, gave it a favorable review (see also here for Novella and Gorski’s pathetic defense of their unethical action). You can read about this fracas on Wikipedia, and find a copy elsewhere of Hall’s “problematic” review.

I was, frankly, appalled at Novella’s position, especially the revision that involved defining one’s sex as the part of the brain that makes you feel what sex you are, irrespective of gonads, gametes, chromosomes, or anything else that people use to define sex. (I use gamete type.). Novella got quite exercised towards the end of his talk, calling those of us who use other traits to define sex as “delusional”, and adding that other definitions of sex ignore or erase transgender folks or those who identify as members of their non-natal sex. This is when I realized that he’s gone full-out progressive woke, to the extent of ignoring scientific fact in favor of a sex definition that comports with his ideology.

Novella instantiated exactly what I was talking about in my own talk two hours ago: the distortion of biological reality in favor of ideology. It’s telling that Novella’s definition of sex was limited exclusively to humans (are foxes or parrots nonbinary?), which tells you immediately that it’s based on ideology. It’s what I call an example of the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”, deciding that what is good for society is what you must see in nature. I can express it more succinctly this way:

OUGHT —> IS 

You see that this is the inverse of the famous naturalistic fallacy, which reverses the position of the two words. But both are fallacies.

It’s sad that first, so many skeptics at the meeting bought into the notion that sex is not just a spectrum, but a spectrum based on brain modules (many people gave Novella a standing ovation). It’s doubly sad that this kind of misguided take on reality comes almost exclusively from the Left. And it’s the reverse naturalistic fallacy that, I think, has helped erode trust in scientists substantially in the last ten years, as well as public confidence in universities. People simply know that sex is not a spectrum, and when a fancy-pants doctor or scientist tells them otherwise, the savvy reaction is to distrust that “authority”

I talked about some of this material, but my one slide critiquing Novella’s views was made hurriedly in my room last night, and I could only put it up for a minute and tell people to take photos of it. But here it is (click to enlarge it):

But enough. Our talks will eventually appear on YouTube when the Center for Inquiry puts them up, and you can judge for yourself.

As for other talks, they’ve been of a high standard; you can see the schedule here.  Last night Neil deGrasse Tyson gave one of his patented science and humor talks based on an upcoming book. It involved things that people argue about at the Thanksgiving dinner table, including vegetarianism, space aliens, Civil War statues, race, and so on. Here’s a photo of the cover of that upcoming book:

And Tyson in mid-lecture.  He is a mesmerizing speaker, though of course I sometimes disagree with him! But I wish I had his eloquence, poise, and humor.

And since today is Caturday, I have one felid-related item. I met a couple, Michelle and Justin, at a cocktail event, and Michelle, who is a professional baker, had made three special cookies just for me. I was really touched, and you can see why:

. . . and a book-related one:

Fancy, no?  They are almost too pretty to eat, but I figure that after I photographed them, I can eat them. But not today, as I’m going to the Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s palace for a late lunch, and haven’t eating anything since lunchtime yesterday.

Da Nooz. 

Only one item today as I must rest (I’m coming down with a cold or something grotty):

*Israel, obeying orders of the Biden Administration, struck back at Iran yesterday, scrupulously avoiding Iran’s nukes and oilfields. An excerpt:

The Israeli military said Saturday that it had struck Iran in response to several Iranian attacks on Israel, raising fears that a long-brewing confrontation between two of the most powerful militaries in the Middle East could escalate into an all-out war.

The military said in a statement at 2:30 a.m. that it was “conducting precise strikes on military targets in Iran” in response to more than a year of attacks on Israel by Iran and its allies across the Middle East. Just after 6 a.m., the military said the strikes had concluded.

Iranian officials appeared to downplay the impact. Iran’s national air defense force said that Israel had attacked military bases in three provinces — Tehran and two near the Iraqi border, Ilam and Khuzestan. Iranian air defenses were able limit the damage, the statement said, but it was continuing to assess.

Three news agencies run by different branches of the Iranian authorities said that the city of Tehran itself had not been hit and that civilian airports were operating normally. The blasts were close enough to the Iranian capital for them to be seen and heard by residents, bringing close to home a war that had felt remote for many.

On Saturday, Israeli officials said that more than 100 combat aircraft, including fighter jets and unmanned drones, hit roughly 20 sites in Iran, Syria and Iraq. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the military operation, said that Israel targeted air defense systems and long-range missile production sites in Iran.

The Israeli strikes came 25 days after Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the assassinations of several officials of Iran and its allies. While Israeli air defenses intercepted many of the Iranian missiles, the attack forced millions of Israelis to take cover in bomb shelters, damaged several homes and air bases and killed a Palestinian in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

For years, Israel and Iran have fought a clandestine war in which both sides targeted each other’s interests and allies, while rarely taking responsibility for their attacks. That turned into open confrontation, as the war between Israel and Hamas, Iran’s ally in Gaza, pulled the two countries toward a direct clash.

I still would have preferred Israel to go after Iran’s nukes, but of course that could have touched off a big conflagration in the Middle East. Instead, Israel obeyed the marching orders of the Biden Administration, which will, in the end, allow Iran to have nuclear weapons, and after that all hell will break loose.

Stay tuned for more news: tomorrow I head to Utah and the Zion area for a few days with an old friend, and I suspect I’ll have photos.