Why Evolution is True Feed

We have a small set of photos today taken in Florida by Bill Dickens. And there’s a video (also by Dickens) at the bottom. Bill’s captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

An Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) has taken to dropping by weekly to my backyard on the Banana River in Cocoa Beach Florida.

Here’s some photos and a video of it eating a live Hardheaded Catfish (Ariopsis felis). It’s somewhat gruesome as it starts by eating the gills on one side, so it takes a while for the unfortunate fish to succumb.

The Osprey is still wet from having been in the water.

It takes around 20 minutes to consume most of the fish – they’re around 12-inches long. It messily leaves some of the carcass behind on the lawn. There’s a possum living in a brush pile in my yard that has learned to scout around under the tree at night to clean up the remains.

A video:

I thought I was clever when I decided that an alternative word for a woke person could be a “Passive Progressive”, but then was told that woke people aren’t passive because they create a lot of noise and kerfuffle. I still like my new term, though, as by “passivity” I meant “performativeness”.  That is, a woke person espouses progressive Leftist ideals but does not do anything to enact them, ergo the passivity.

But I digress. While poring through some scientific literature yesterday, I came upon an issue of The American Naturalist from July 2022. This used to be one of the go-to journals for publishing evolutionary biology, and I was a corresponding editor for a while, but in my view it’s slipped a bit. This issue, with its special section on “Nature, data, and power” is about as ideologically captured as you can get. And this was three years ago! Well, capture started well before that. If you want to read any of these articles, just click on the screenshots below (there are two because the section is so long. There are other real science papers not soaked in politics, but I haven’t put them down.

Which paper is your favorite?

 

This article actually appeared on the Museum of New Zealand’s website, and is about as explicit an argument for the country adopting indigenous “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori, or MM) as I have found. You may remember that MM is a mixture of practical knowledge, religion, superstition, morals, teleology and guidelines for living.  Despite this mixture, there has been a constant battle to get MM taught as coequal with modern science, though the argument has euphemistically changed to coequal “ways of knowing.”  The “coequal” bit derives from a slanted interpretation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (the sacred “Te Tiriti” that you encounter in all of this literature), a treaty that said nothing about schools teaching equal amounts of Māori or “Western” knowledge. But that’s how it’s interpreted, for Māori see coequal teaching as a way to retain power in their society.

The problem is that MM is not a “way of knowing” in any scientific sense, for it lacks explicit tools for finding out truths about the universe. Any “way of knowing” that relies on superstition and legends cannot possibly be coequal with modern science, though it can be usefully taught in sociology or anthropology classes.  In the article below (click to read) several white women (“Pākehā “, meaning a New Zealander of European descent) and one Māori woman discuss how they can create a teaching site that centers MM.

The conclusion: white “ways of being” are not good ways to teach Māori “ways of knowing.” In other words, only Māori should control the teaching of MM and, further, the Pākehā corrupted their society and distorted their ways of knowing (the piece is imbued with victimology).  When you read it, you may well come to the conclusion that my NZ correspondent did when he/she sent me this piece:

This blog from our national Museum is a good example of the extent to which Critical Social Justice Ideology has deranged our institutions:

Click below to read:

The aim:

Two wāhine from different backgrounds reflect on their growth developing Ko Au Te Taiao, an online learning resource that seeks to centre mātauranga Māori values. As Mero Rokx and Sarah Hopkinson worked through the complexities of this project, they discovered much more about themselves and their relationships to each other, place, and the cosmos. In this article, the co-authors consider ways of working together that enable authenticity and provide reflective questions for other practitioners embarking on similar kaupapa [policies or proposals].

Rokx is Māori and Hopkinson Pakeha, here is the photo they provide with caption. Rokz sports a chin tattoo, something that is not rare in Māori women but I thought I should explain to readers who haven’t seen them.

The authors begin with a long recitation of their backgrounds. The piece is heavily larded with Māori words, but fortunately most of them can be translated (not always accurately) with a click on the website.

The Treaty is of course of central importance here, for you can’t teach MM without mentioning Te Tiriti as the rationale:

Ko Au Te Taiao centres Te Tiriti o Waitangi and aims to support the broadening of perspectives among teachers and learners throughout Aotearoa [New Zealand]. It is an online resource providing teaching and learning activities for connecting with te taiao. It is far from perfect, but in the attempt, a great deal of lessons have been learnt.

In creating Ko Au Te Taiao, we have discovered more about ourselves, our relationships to te taiao and the work we do at Te Papa. The collaborative and organic nature of its design has resulted in the development of a taonga that carries the mauri of all those that contributed, it is living evidence of the process becoming the outcome.

“Mauri” is the teleological Māori term for “vital essence,” and in indigenous ways of knowing it is explicitly teleological, with everything having a vital essence of life force. This emphasis on mauri, though ok here, is one thing that makes MM unsuitable for being taught as equivalent to modern science.  Nor can MM really be a “way of knowing” since there is no evidence for a “mauri” in science.

There is a lot of this kind of stuff from the authors. Mero says this, among other things:

One of the beautiful things about whakataukī is the way that they expose perspectives through interpretation. Ko au te taiao, ko te taiao ko au is much deeper than the expression ‘I am nature’.

Ko au – I am.

I am the legacy of my ancestors – tūpuna who go as far back as the beginning of time, and beyond. I am Papatūānuku, I am Ranginui, and I am everything that exists between them. The innate philosophy that I have of being a descendant of the earth, the stars, and the sky is what ko au te taiao, ko te taiao ko au means to me.

Ko au – I am.

I am a mother, he ūkaipō. I reflect on my role as a mother, and the inherent obligation of continuing the legacy passed down to me. I feed my offspring into the night, such as the expression ‘he ū-kai-pō’, both fuel to physically grow, and knowledge to understand the responsibilities that they will inherit as being descendants of Ranginui and Papatūānuku.

And Sarah says this:

Ko Sarah Hopkinson tōku ingoa. My ancestors came from England, Wales, and Norway. I grew up at the ankles of Taranaki on Ngāti Ruanui and Te Atiawa whenua. I am a māmā, a strategy creator, a curriculum designer, an urban farmer, a storyteller, and earth dreamer. I have been working alongside Te Papa Learning to develop online resources that connect schools across the motu with Collections Online. Mero and I have co-developed Ko Au Te Taiao , the latest resource from Te Papa Learning.

With that self-identification out of the way, they reflect on why MM simply cannot be taught in a “white” framework, whatever that is.

There has been momentum in recent years, through both the Ministry and NZQA, to recognise the equal status of mātauranga Māori in schools. It is a lofty ambition, and one that deserves attention. But it comes with considerable challenges, not least of which is that almost 75% of teachers in schools are Pākehā, and mātauranga Māori belongs with hapū, iwi, and those who whakapapa Māori. There is a tension and challenge between these two truths.

Note first that MM and (presumably) modern science are considered “two truths”. But MM is in no sense a monolithic “truth”!  Note too the “equal status” to be recognized for MM. But equal to what? Clearly it must be an “equal status as a way of knowing”, and that really means science. But the paragraph also implies that MM cannot be properly taught by white people, or in a framework of white methods of acquiring knowledge and teaching about it. This is a clever strategy, because it prevents students from being exposed to MM and modern science by the same teachers. It is a way to gain power.

And Sarah comes precisely to that conclusion. I started out bolding bits of this, but I bolded nearly the whole thing. So I’ll go ahead and do it, as this is the heart of the piece, and here is its main conclusions:

Through the process, I have learnt that:

• Mātauranga Māori values are informed by practice that is led by Māori, rather than by what might be learnt abstractly.
• Knowledge is deeply place-based and has evolved from embodied ways of living in relationship with te taiao, over generations.
• There is no fixed content, no singular truth or universally accessible information that is available to all.

I think there are lots of Pākehā, like me, who support the vision of Aotearoa being a place in which te ao Māori is revered by all, cultivated and celebrated. An Aotearoa in which indigenous ways of knowing lead us forward.

I also think that many of us are still realising that there is really no way to do this inside Pākehā systems as they stand. Put simply, Māori ways of knowing are not best supported by Pākehā ways of being. And knowing this, if someone asked us to start the project again, Ko Au Te Taiao would almost certainly not be on a website. It’s somewhat of an oxymoron.

So for me, alongside a commitment to centring mātauranga Māori, there also needs to be an acknowledgement that we cannot do this inside Pākehā models of transmission. And I don’t want to write myself out of employment here, but perhaps Pākehā like me are not that useful in the design of new ways of being. We just don’t know what we don’t know. And that’s okay. It’s important we accept the un-knowing.

The conclusion then is that European New Zealanders simply can’t get near MM because they don’t have the “right model of transmission” and never will.  But since MM has coequal status, this gives Māori control of half of the educational system, at least as far as “ways of knowing” are concerned.  Yet Europeans constitute 67,8% of New Zealanders, Maori 17.8%, Asians 17.3%, and other Pacific peoples 8.9%. (Māori is also spoken as a daily language by only 4% of New Zealanders—the same as Chinese) compared to over 95% who speak English.  Clearly the indigenous peoples are asking for a huge inequity in education, but of course they use the Treaty of Waitangi to buttress their aims to transform education.

Finally, behold the claim that “knowledge is deeply place-based”, which is surely not true for modern science and should not be true for MM if it really is a “way of knowing”.  As readers have pointed out, any knowledge that purports to be scientific cannot be place-limited, for then every region (e.g., the Pacific Northwest) has a “way of knowing” that applies only to that region. Of course, if your “knowledge” deals with phenomena or things that occur only in your country, then it could be place-based, but that can lead to nonsense like the millions of dollars spent on Māori-guided initiatives like playing whale songs to kauri trees (and rubbing them with whale oil) to cure a fungal disease that is killing those iconic trees of New Zealand. After all, Māori legend tells us that whales and kauri trees used to be brothers, but the whales made off for the sea, and the kauri trees got sick because, as landlubbers, they were lonely. I am not making this up, and see those defending MM emitting an angry response to the post I just linked to.

That dumb kauri/whale project cost $4 million NZ.  It is a total waste of money since there is no scientific reason to play songs to trees and rub them with whale oil especially because we know that the cause of “kauri dieback” is an organism that infects the trees underground: oomycetes, a fungus-like eukaryote. If kauri dieback is to be solved, it will be the methods of modern science that does it (indeed, that’s how they identified the cause), not indigenous knowledge, which doesn’t have the tools or tradition to deal with problems like this.

Finally, by saying what’s b elow, Hopkinson explicitly disqualifies MM as any real kind of knowledge- or truth-generating system.

There is no fixed content, no singular truth or universally accessible information that is available to all.

The conferring of primacy on indigenous knowledge is part of the Critical Social Justice ideology mentioned by my correspondent. The other part is the implication that the Māori are victims of ongoing colonial bigotry, something that may have been true in the past but is not true now: if anything, there is strong affirmative action in the country favoring Māori.

Sarah admits her white guilt, as if the article was a sort of struggle session:

When I take a look around Aotearoa New Zealand, it is abundantly clear that all is not well. The values that my Pākehā ancestors brought to this land have also brought us to this moment, a time where those in kāwanatanga spheres of power are not informed by life giving systems. From inside a Pākehā worldview that continues to individualise, capitalise, exploit and commercialise, it is impossible to be in a living relationship with Papatūānuku.

And note that she has been educated by Mero, who apparently has adopted a role of a Kiwi Robin DiAngelo:

Over the course of developing this resource, Mero and I have begun a wonderful friendship. We have found ourselves talking widely about our histories, experiences, and truths, about what it is to be a Māori woman and what is to be a Pākehā woman. Our lives have deep contrasts and many things in common. Both are delightful to notice. And I have learnt so much about so many of my Pākehā habits and assumptions, because hard things have been able to be talked about with softness.

The last sentence implies that Rokz has, perhaps unconsciously, made white guilt sprout in Hopkinson.  Imagine what it would look like if Rokz, the Māori woman, said that she had learned about so many of her Māori habits from Hopkinson, and that was hard for her to hear! That would be pure blasphemy.

At any rate, do remember that this screed appeared on the website of the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington, a wonderful place where I visited for hours. Sadly, like the rest of New Zealand’s scientific establishment, it is in the process of being captured by Social Justice Ideology.

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior contributes another text-and-photo essay to the site, this time showing how a thorough knowledge of ecology is required to save a declining species. His ID’s and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The butterfly, the plant, and the ant

All news is bad news, it seems, especially about the environment. Melting glaciers, oceans choked with plastic, relentless deforestation, extinctions. In the face of such a depressing deluge, we could do with a feel-good tale. And as inspiring tales go, it’s hard to beat the Large Blue Story.

The large blue butterfly (Phengaris arion) has always been rare in Britain, but its numbers were found to be alarmingly low by 1972 and falling steadily thereafter. In 1979, it became extinct in the British Isles. At first, collectors were blamed for the large blue’s demise, which was a reasonable explanation considering the rarity and the appeal of such a beautiful butterfly. But soon attention was directed to another possibility: the depletion of wild thyme (Thymus praecox), the main food for the butterfly’s early larval instars (developmental stages). It turned out that food losses contributed to the large blue extinction, but the plot was considerably thicker.

The large blue butterfly, Phengaris arion. The species’ taxonomy is a matter of dispute, so it is also known as Maculinea arion © PJC&Co, Wikimedia Commons:

The large blue and about 75% of the 6,000 or so related species (family Lycaenidae) are myrmecophilous, that is, they are associated with ants. These butterfly-ant relationships vary in form and intensity, but in the case of the large blue, red ants (Myrmica spp.) mean food: without them, the butterfly cannot survive.

A female large blue lays her eggs on the flower buds of wild thyme – wild marjoram (Origanum vulgare) would do, but it usually flowers too late in the season for the butterfly. The emerging caterpillars eat the wild thyme flower heads and seeds for the first few weeks of their lives, like any ordinary butterfly. Siblings are also fair game: if two eggs hatch on the same flower, one baby caterpillar will eat the other. Then the surviving one goes full Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The grown caterpillar drops to the ground and starts releasing substances that attract worker ants, including pheromones that mimic the aroma of red ant larvae. When an ant bumps into it, the caterpillar stretches and twists to assume the shape of an ant larva. So instead of attacking the juicy, soft and nutritious caterpillar, the chemically mesmerised ants take their ‘stray young’ back to their nest. There the caterpillar is cared for just like the ants’ own brood.

Once inside an ant nest, some lycaenid species adopt a cuckoo lifestyle; they induce the ants to nurse and feed them through regurgitation. Not the large blue (and some related species): they feed on ant larvae, all the while secreting sugary substances to keep the ant workers happy.

A greater large blue (P. arionides) caterpillar feeding on M. kotokui larvae © Ueda et al., 2016:

The caterpillar carries on eating ant grubs until it pupates the following spring. The emerging adult crawls to the surface and seeks refuge in the nearby vegetation, where it expands its wings and flies away in search of a mate.

A gravid female butterfly (1) is attracted to wild marjoram (2) and lays her eggs on suitable flower buds (3). A fourth-instar caterpillar drops to the ground and is ‘adopted’ by ants (4). The caterpillar spends 11 months inside the ants’ nest, feeding on their brood (5) © Casacci et al., 2019:

The above was a summary of the complex biology and ecology of the large blue: UK butterflies has the full story.

The large blue’s reliance on wild thyme and red ants has been known for a long time, but none of the conservation efforts prevented its extinction in 1979. Things started to change when a PhD student – today Professor Jeremy Thomas, OBE, made a crucial discovery. Not just any red ant would do for the large blue. It needs one specific species: M. sabuleti (M. scabrinodis is an alternative host, but butterfly survival is poor with this ant).

Myrmica sabuleti, the crucial host for the large blue © B. Schoenmakers, Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas’ findings opened a whole new perspective for large blue conservation. If M. sabuleti populations are not doing well, the butterfly cannot do well either, regardless of the quantity and condition of the host plant.

It turns out that the survival and abundance of this ant depend largely on one factor: sunshine, which warms their nests. If grasses that grow alongside wild thyme are too tall, the ant nests will become shaded, cold and wet: the colonies will fail or be too small to sustain large blue populations. One caterpillar may require 200 ant larvae to reach adulthood, and about 350 ant workers may be needed to rear a single caterpillar. The conclusion from these findings was that fencing, thought to help the butterfly by keeping thyme-munchers at bay, is actually bad for the ants.

Wild thyme in full sunshine maintains healthy M. sabuleti colonies © GT1976, Wikimedia Commons:

Armed with this information, Nature Conservancy (now Natural England) and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology launched a reintroduction programme, and its linchpin was the creation and management of adequate conditions for both the butterfly and the ant. Conservation organisations, land managers and volunteers set out to monitor large blue and M. sabuleti populations, manage grazing to keep the grass short, clear scrub and plant wild thyme. When a pilot site was considered in favourable condition in 1983, large blue specimens were brought in from Sweden. More releases followed at several suitable sites during subsequent years. Today, large blue colonies are more abundant and larger than they were in the 1950s.

The rescue of the large blue butterfly is a textbook case of species conservation, known and celebrated around the world. It inspires and shows us that science, hard work and goodwill go a long way to restore and protect our natural world.

I’m feeling grotty today, probably because of dysthymia compounded by lack of sleep. I hope to be okay tomorrow, but in the meantime we have show and tell. The show and tell today involves the Alpine Ibex (Capra ibex), the subject of a nice seven-minute video.  It concentrates on their remarkable ability to climb on ledges that look unclimbable, something the many goat species can do as well.  The videos mentions that young goats must “overcome their fear,” but I wonder if they really feel fear.

Note the morphological traits that have evolved in concert with this behavior, including body shape. Surely the ability to climb (a behavioral trait) preceded the evolution of things like those split hooves with soft pads, supporting Ernst Mayr’s claim that many key adaptations begin not as changes in morphology, but changes in behavior that give a premium to later morphological evolution. I just opened a book that was perhaps the most influential volume of my career, Mayr’s 1963 Animal Species and Evolution. I found this sentence on p. 604:

“A shift into a new niche or adaptive zone is, almost without exception, initiated by a change in behavior.”

Mayr was a smart guy, and was probably right. The important question, though, is, though, “do those changes in behavior have a genetic basis“? It’s hard to see, for example, how a goat with a greater propensity to climb, but not one based on genetic differences from other individuals, could possibly kick off a bout of evolutionary change, for there would be no increase of climbing behavior unless it came with an adaptive advantage that could be passed on via genes.  If the first climbers did have genetic differences from non-climbers, and climbing resulted in more of your genes being passed on, you would get an increase in the behavior over time since it conferred a reproductive advantage. (This didn’t start with some individuals climbing sheer cliffs, of course!). After that, any mutations changing the hoof or body shape would be subject to natural selection.  In this case, simple behavioral variation not based on genes wouldn’t, I think, kick off behaviors and morphologies like those shown below.

I can think of one exception: the famous case of cultural evolution of milk-drinking in British birds, first noted by Fisher and Hinde in 1949 (they studied blue and great tits). This was apparently a case of cultural evolution, which started with one or a few individuals prying the tops off milk bottles left on doorsteps and drinking the cream. This spread rapidly throughout the UK, so rapidly that it must have been a spread via imitation—that is, cultural evolution, not genetic evolution. Of course that would be followed by natural selection leading to things like prying the caps off better (beak changes?), locating milk bottles more readily, and digesting the milk. I don’t think anybody has studied any subsequent evolution in the birds (for one thing, milk isn’t delivered on doorsteps any more!); but this is one case in which a potential change in an “adaptive zone”—however you describe it—began with a simple behavioral change not based on genetic differences.

Sorry, I was just thinking on paper. Watch the video, which is amazing and instructive:

I haven’t been accumulating these much, probably because I stopped reading the main source, The Huffington Post.  Ergo some of these may be repeats from days of yore, but so be it, as we have new readers. I’ll give just three:

1.)  “Advancements” used instead of “advances”.   The longer version, which as far as I can see is identical to the older but shorter one, seems to be taking over (I’ll give one example below).  Why is this happening? Only, as far as I can see, because “advancesments” sounds fancier and more intellectual than the simpler “advances.” Let’s go back to the shorter word!

Here’s a Huffpost example from 2011 (click to read if you must):

2.) “Stakeholder” used as “someone with a material interest in a (usually) political or ideological discussion”. This word is not per se offensive, but is inevitably associated with wokeness, like “problematize” or “intersectional.” Particularly in science, it is used to argue (often without reasons) that some people have a say over how science is done. Example: cases in which animal bones or Native American found on government property automatically become controlled by Native American “stakeholders” from a given tribe, even if it cannot be shown that stakeholders from the tribe ever had any stake in the objects at issue (see Elizabeth Weiss’s book).  I consider the word is a canary in the coalmine of woke prose.

HOWEVER, although one sees this word frequently, I notice that those who police language now consider it offensive, as in the articles below (click to read):

From Research Impact Canada:

The second site reports why the word is bad and some suggested replacements (which nobody seems to be using):

The word stakeholder is becoming increasingly contested due to its colonial connotations. Has this hit your radar and are you trying out other words?

In November, Mark Reed posted a thought piece on the use of the word stakeholder concluding “ultimately that means re-thinking our use of the word “stakeholder”.”

The issue with the word stakeholder is that in a colonial context, a stakeholder was the person who drove a stake into the land to demarcate the land s/he was occupying/stealing from Indigenous territories. Continued use of the term can be construed as disrespectful of Indigenous people as well as perpetuating colonization and re-traumatization.

Mark’s post was followed up by a fairly lively LinkedIn discussion. The only conclusion was that everyone respected the discussion. Some options to replace stakeholder were rights holder, KMb constituents, actant and potential beneficiaries.

On November 25, Research Impact Canada (RIC) held a discussion on the use of the word stakeholder in a Dr RIC session – a monthly member driven call where RIC members craft the agenda. About 25 RIC member participants were present. In advance, I sent around Mark’s first post and the subsequent LinkedIn discussion to get everyone on the same page. Some interesting points arose in the discussion:

• Stakeholder isn’t used by some who have a community-based research practice. It comes across as corporate.
• It has a “man vibe”
• I checked with co-chair of Indigenous Council at York University, and he was not aware of the issue. It doesn’t mean it isn’t, just that it is not a discussion that has permeated all Indigenous settings.

One take away is that this is an issue beyond Indigenous contexts so an important discussion whether or not you are approaching this as decolonization.

Some options to stakeholder were

• Those in the circle

• Those who do/should care

• Partners – although that was acknowledged as having a legal definition

3.) “Dudebros”.    This is often used as a general disparagement of men in general, not just a certain type of man. If people want to disparage, say, pretentious college frat guys as “dudebros”, then say whom you’re disparaging. The term should be as offensive to men as the word “chicks” is for women.

*********

The object here is for readers to add their own phrases they don’t like (one I considered here was “it is what it is”, though it can have a real meaning, like “accept things that can’t be changed.)

Do not bother to correct me as to what you see as the “real” meanings of these words, as I am simply giving my own personal reasons to dislike them.

Reader Robert Lang and his wife lost two homes and a studio in the Los Angeles Fires.  That’s horrible news, but if there’s any silver lining, it’s that Robert has time now to put together and describe a large collection of photographs from the Pantanal of Brazil for this site: a set of 13, no less. I will be putting them up over the next weeks and months, and thanks to Robert for using his free time this way.  Here is the first set with Robert’s captions and IDs indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Note that the next-to-last photo is a “spot the jaguar” quiz:

Readers’ Wildlife Photos: The Pantanal, Part I: Jaguars

In mid-2025, my wife, Diane, and I visited the Pantanal, which is the most incredible wildlife area that no one seems to have heard of. It is an enormous flat basin in Brazil, smack-dab in the middle of South America (where Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay come together). Like the better-known Okavanga Delta in Africa, it annually floods from runoff from surrounding highlands, then slowly dries out over the dry season, creating an always-varying patchwork of wetlands, grasslands, and forests, and supports an amazing diversity of wildlife that are far more accessible and visible than those in the much more famous Amazon rainforest to its north.

Most of the Pantanal is privately owned and used for open-range cattle ranching, but because of the annual flooding, the cattle density is quite low, leaving plenty of room for the wildlife to get about. In recent years, eco-tourism has grown, particularly due to the charismatic jaguars, leading to a virtuous cycle: the ranchers have learned that the jaguars bring tourist dollars, so they no longer shoot the animals (which do take the occasional cow); the reduced hunting pressure makes the jaguars less shy and wary, leading to more sightings by the tourists, leading to more tourist dollars. (Fortunately, the tourism numbers are still low enough that their deleterious impact remains low.) During our 10-day trip, we experienced 10 different jaguar sightings, as well as over 100 different species of birds and numerous other mammals, reptiles, and invertebrates. I’ll show some of all of these over the next several RWP installments.

Climate change is affecting wildlands throughout the world, and the Pantanal is no exception; just a few weeks before our visit, they had experienced their worst wildfires ever recorded, and in some parts we visited smoke still hung thickly in the air. Even so, in many places, only the understory had burned, leaving taller trees intact, and in just a few weeks new greenery was re-sprouting through the charred landscape. (In retrospect, it was an omen of things to come closer to home, as the Eaton Fire tore through my town of Altadena just a few months later).

And with that, let’s dive into the animals, with the stars of the show, the jaguar (Panthera onca)! It’s the largest big cat in the Americas, more robust than the similar-appearing leopard (Panthera pardus) of Africa. (Easy way to distinguish them in photos: leopard spots form empty rings; jaguar spot rings often have smaller spots in the middle.) Unlike the other big cats, which usually kill by biting their prey’s neck and suffocating it, the jaguar typically bites directly through the skull of its prey with one of the most powerful bites in the animal kingdom. Jaguars can kill and eat caimans larger than themselves. We saw most of our jaguars along riverbanks (we were in boats) and a few at watering holes (we were in safari vehicles); while they certainly knew we were there, they pretty much ignored us, allowing plenty of time for observation and photos.

This first one was on a riverbank. A female, if I recall correctly, with an injury on her face that was likely from a fight with another jaguar.

Another on a riverbank. This one hung out here for quite a while, and ignored us and the several other boats that eventually showed up. (As we’ve also seen in Africa, the local guides all share sighting locations with each by walkie-talkie.)

This one, too, was on a riverbank, about 15 feet up. Also had an owie on her face.

After a while, she moved a few feet into some foliage, which made a nice frame and allowed me to take what was my favorite photo of the entire trip:

And then she yawned. Pretty impressive choppers, those.

Another riverbank photo. This one was sitting in a natural cave formed by the overhanging riverbank and a curtain of roots.

This one was in dense foliage, and while we knew it was there, for the longest time, we could only see the stirrings of the leaves that concealed it as it moved back and forth (shades of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park!). Eventally, though, it moved into a clearing, and we got our shots.

This one was on a sandbar in the riverbank and gave us a lovely concert of roaring (which is a forbidding sound—I’ll post a movie, with sound, in a later installment from this trip).

And the last one was on the far side of a watering hole that we drove by in one of our safari jeep drives.

We saw a few other jaguars, but these were the ones I got decent pictures of. Except for the incredible spotting talents of our guides, we’d have missed some of them entirely, like this one. Spot the jaguar!

I’d rate this one as somewhere between easy and medium.

The jaguars alone were worth the journey, but we saw many more animals of other species; those will be the subject of the next several installments from this trip.

JAC: Try your hand at the above, and then go below the fold to see the answer. (Click “continue reading”)

Here’s a close-up photo of the jaguar in the last photo above the fold:

 

 

 

The latest monologue from Maher’s show is called “Eat the rich,” taking off from the murder of the United Healthcare CEO and arguing that it’s AI more than people like the CEO who makes healthcare decisions, as well as players hospitals and pharmacies who rip people off in a system full of different parties all dedicated to enriching themselves.  In the end, he indicts hospitals as the main venal actors, but notes that Americans, obese and sugar-hungry as we are, bring a lot of illness on ourselves.

He moves on to “GenZers, calling many of them “fucking stupid,” dividing the world up to oppressed and oppressors: a Manichean view of the universe that led to Brian Thompson‘s assassination.  He adds, “It wasn’t that long ago when liberals thought shooting people who don’t share your politics was bad – or at least a micro-aggression.”

It’s not one of Maher’s best bits, but has some good parts, and conveys the lesson that urging violence on your political opponents is stupid and nonproductive.

My favorite zinger: “You don’t hate the rich; you hate that you ain’t the rich.”  That reminds me of a certain blogger. . .

h/t: Divy

I’ve read Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, and it’s pretty good, making a material—in his view, neurological—case for determinism, though the book is a bit long and can be tedious in parts if you don’t want to plow through a lot of neurobiology. But I think that in the end he makes his case (of course, I’m a hardcore determinist so I’d agree!). If you don’t want to read 528 pages, there’s also Sam Harris’s Free Will or Gregg Caruso’s books on free will (he’s a determinist).

But Sapolsky’s book has gotten some negative reviews, and I should have realized that writing about determinism will immediately get people’s hackles up, because their feeling of having free will (and I’ll be talking here about libertarian “you-could-have-chosen-otherwise” free will) is so strong that they can brook no determinism. I’ve already recounted how I was menaced by a a jazz musician for intimating that is “extemporaneous” solos were determined before he ever played them, and was also kicked out of a friend’s house simply for calmly espousing and explaining determinism. As I always say, it’s harder for me to convince a creationist that evolution is true than to convince a “free willer” that determinism is true. And there are a lot more of the latter than the former!

But of all the reviews I’ve read of Sapolsky’s book, by far the worst just appeared in what was once a great venue, the New York Review of Books. (It went downhill fast when its wonderful editor Robert B. Silvers died in 2017.)  The review is free to access (also archived here), and you can read by clicking on the headline below.  It shows no understanding of the free-will controversy, or of science itself, and offers no alternative to determinism (it has to be some magical nonphysical agent that can affect material objects), though I suspect the author, because of her frequent references to God and theology, might believe that free will has a goddy supernatural origin. (Even if it doesn’t, libertarian free will has to rely on something supernatural.) Here’s the description of the author from the NYRB:

Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford. She is currently writing a book about the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the history of evolutionary theory. (February 2025)

Although I’m usually loath to dwell on credentials, a historian, even of biology, is not the person to review Sapolsky’s book. Perhaps a philosopher or a neurologist, but I can explain the pervasive awfulness of Riskin’s review only by appealing to massive ignorance of the topic.

I really don’t want to go through this long review bit by bit, but I’ll highlight a few weird things.

Ignorance of science.  Riskin doesn’t realize that getting evidence for phenomena (e.g., evolution) is very often a step-by step-process: you have an initial hypothesis, and then you either reinforce or reduce the likelihood of its being true with new data. This is a Bayesian approach, though often it’s implicit rather than specified using Bayes’s theorem.  You don’t “prove” determinism or free will, you simply gather evidence that makes one of them more likely. I would note that determinism should have high priors simply because our brains and bodies and environments, the source of our behaviors, affect our behaviors materially–usually through neuronal wiring.  (That’s why Sapolsky concentrates so much on neurons.) And material objects universally obey the laws of physics.

Riskin WANTS determinism to be proved, and says that Sapolsky doesn’t do it. But I say she’s put the bar too high, that Sapolsky makes a good case and that, combined with the presupposition that true libertarian free will must involve forces that we don’t know about—while the laws of physics appear to apply universally—should put Riskin on the defensive (which she is).

Not only are we “not captains of our ships,” he writes, “our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.” (This gives a taste of Sapolsky’s late-night-dorm-room literary style.) [JAC: it’s not ALL like that, so her comment is inaccurate.]

How does he know? Because of science. Sapolsky tells us that “the science of human behavior shows” it to be deterministic. But none of the scientific evidence he offers turns out to demonstrate this. He describes psychological studies revealing changes in people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) taking place milliseconds before they were aware of making a decision, but he dismisses these—reasonably enough—as “irrelevant.” He presents other studies demonstrating that people can be subconsciously manipulated; that hormones, cultural beliefs, and moral values influence behavior; and that maturation, aging, and experience induce alterations in people’s brains and bodies with corresponding behavioral changes. After each discussion he asks, “Does this disprove free will?” and responds—again reasonably—with “nah,” “nope,” “certainly not,” and “obviously not.” Readers might wonder, equally reasonably, why they’ve slogged through all this irrelevant nonevidence.

That might be a fair criticism of Sapolsky’s style, but I don’t remember him saying that this evidence is irrelevant (it’s been a while since I read the book). But I do think that predicting behaviors before one is conscious of performing them raises the priors of determinism, as do the many, many ways that you can trick people into thinking they have agency when they don’t (brain stimulation, effects of drugs, computer experiments) or thinking they are not doing something consciously when they are (Ouija boards). Sean Carroll’s essay “On Determinism” (with extensive quotes by Massimo Pigliucci) makes a good case that the universality of the laws of physics leaves no room for libertarian free will. (Sean is a compatibilist and, although a determinist, says we have “free will” in a different sense. Dan Dennett used to say the same thing.)

More waving away of the notion of  proof:

Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds. Here’s another from Sapolsky’s final chapter: “What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning.” This might sound like the opposite of saying that science shows there’s a divine intelligence behind the world-machine, but it’s the direct descendant of that earlier claim, and comes to the same evacuation of meaning and agency from the mortal world. This isn’t a scientific proposition. It remains what it has been from the beginning: a theology.

This is wrong. One can gather data for and against determinism. If, for example, we found out that people could move objects by thinking about them, that would suggest that there is some nonmaterial brain force that can actually influence events, buttressing (but not “proving”) the case for free will. And saying that determinism is “a theology” is also wrong, for theology in the West is involved in exegesis of the Bible and beliefs in a supernatural being.

What’s the alternative to determinism?  Here Riskin is silent, though it looks from her frequent references to God and theology that she sees divine action as a possible counter to determinism and a buttressing of free will. (I can’t be sure of this, though, as Riskin doesn’t lay out what she sees as a viable alternative to determinism.) Riskin has described herself as a “Jewish atheist”, and given that she herself doesn’t see divine provenance out there, the onus on her is to admit that she is invoking some kind of supernatural but non-Goddy action.

Her only argument seem to be that because people look like they have “agency” (and they do in the trivial sense of being able to do things), this is evidence for free will. For example, this part seems deeply confused:

It’s because the many factors influencing behavior, Sapolsky thinks, place the burden of proof on defenders of human agency. It’s they who need to show that neurons are “completely uninfluenced” by any external factors and that “some behavior just happened out of thin air.” But why must human behavior be either deterministic or impervious to any influence? Sapolsky doesn’t explain; he takes as given that to show any influence at all is to show a determining influence. Similarly, he writes that we have “no control” over our biology, culture, or environment. Sure, we don’t control these things, but there’s an important difference between not controlling something and having no effect on it, or at least so anyone with teenagers is inclined to hope. Biology isn’t insulated from behavior any more than behavior is from biology. As Sapolsky himself points out, virtually everything a person does has an effect on their physiology. And a wealth of empirical evidence from Aristotle to Oprah suggests that people can indeed have cultural influence.

What is the sweating reviewer trying to say here? That there is some free will? I cannot tell. In fact, her own confusion and incoherent arguments seem to be imputed to Sapolsky, as if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve read the book, and I disagree. And “cultural influence” my tuchas! What does that have to do with refuting determinism?

Is there a god in this argument? The author makes the old “why is there something instead of nothing” argument:

Sapolsky’s turtles are of course metaphorical; they stand for deterministic causes, and by “a turtle floating in the air” he means a magical event. We must accept a strictly causal chain extending back to the beginning of time or acknowledge that we believe in miracles. But why are these our only choices? And are they really so different? Wouldn’t a chain of deterministic causes imply a miracle of some sort at the beginning—the old infinite regress problem rearing its domed shell again?

Yes, and we don’t know why there is something instead of nothing, though there have been some scientific suggestions that do NOT involve miracles. And obviously since Riskin is an atheist, she doesn’t believe in miracles. So what is her answer. She doesn’t tell us.

More touting of “agency:

Sapolsky tells the story of Phineas Gage, who suffered a metal rod through the brain while working on a construction site in Vermont in 1848 and was never quite the same afterward. He offers Gage as evidence that people’s personalities depend on their “material brains,” which he thinks poses a challenge to anyone who wants to defend the idea of free will. But why should the fact that humans and their brains are made of material parts mean there’s no such thing as human agency? There’s a good answer, but it’s historical rather than scientific: because determinism retains crucial elements of the theology from which it arose, according to which the material world was a passive artifact lacking any agency of its own.

It would be nice if Riskin would tell us what she means by “agency”.  Real “I could have made either choice” agency or simply the appearance of agency? The intimation that determinism is a form of theology again arises, but denial of free will in the world is simply not theology. It’s analogous to denial of a supernatural being, which Riskin presumably does in her atheism. Is this atheism theological?

I won’t go on here, as I don’t want to waste my time. I will simply say that Riskin sounds like she’s trying to be clever, but in so doing fails to confect a consistent argument against determinism. Her sniping at Sapolsky may occasionally hit home, but she comes nowhere close to dispelling determinism, simply because she doesn’t engage in the necessarily arguments. Read for yourself how she throws in lots of historical figures like Darwin and Paley and Laplace to show her erudition, but doesn’t deal with what libertarian free will would really entail. 

This egregious review also goes to show how far the mighty New York Review of Books has fallen. Yes, it likes cleverness and erudition, but in the old days it also liked substantive arguments in its reviews. Riskin doesn’t provide any. But don’t take my word for it; if you’re interested in the topic, read the review and see if you can find any structure or coherence in it.

 

h/t: Barry

While perusing the Bad Gray Lady this morning, I saw two headlines that, in light of what I knew about events in Gaza and Lebanon, looked dubious. Sure enough, the headlines and the news below them gave a distorted view of the situation. Here’s the first one (click to read, or find article archived here):

Note first the order of events: Israel blacks Gazans from north while accusing Hamas of a cease-fire breach.  The order of events should have been reversed, with the headline saying “Israel accuses Hamas of Cease-Fire Breach, blocks Gazans from North.” That may seem a trivial difference , but I’ve seen too many headlines with Israel identified first as the perp, with the stated reasons for their actions given second.

But the lack of explanation for what’s happening is much more important. The real situation is that Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in which all civilian hostages were to be released first, and, yesterday at noon Israeli time, Hamas was also to provide Israel with a complete list of the hostages they had or knew about, specifying whether they were living or dead.  Hamas did neither; they are still not releasing one civilian woman (she was held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but Hamas is a partner organization and could easily have arranged for the woman’s release). The four women released yesterday were in the IDF. The NYT notes this further down:

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that it would not allow Gazans to head north “until the release of the civilian Arbel Yehud has been arranged,” leaving the timing of the troop withdrawal and the residents’ return unclear.

And here’s another violation described by the Jerusalem Post:

Hamas has not yet provided Israel with the list revealing the status of the hostages held in Gaza captivity, which it was obligated to provide by Saturday under the ceasefire agreement.

According to a Walla report citing Israeli officials, the list was expected to include details on how many of the hostages remaining in Hamas captivity are still alive and how many are deceased.

An Israeli official reportedly said that failure to provide the list by the end of the day would be another violation of the agreement by Hamas.

Hamas could not explain either of these violations of the agreement. It’s clear that they are toying with Israel and playing psychological games that of course are deeply injurious to the hostages’ friends and families. This is why Israel did not withdraw from northern Gaza or allow residents to return home. (Note that Israel still has not fired on bullet.) The “blocking” is Israel’s nonviolent response to the actions of Hamas, the party that first violated the cease-fire.

I don’t think this bodes well for a continuing peace in the region, which, at any rate, I don’t think will be permanent so long as Hamas runs Gaza.

Here is the second headline about doings further north. Click to read, or find it archived here:

And an excerpt (bolding is mine)

At least 15 people were killed and more than 80 injured by Israeli forces on Sunday in southern Lebanon, Lebanese officials said, as the 60-day deadline for both Hezbollah and Israel to withdraw from the south expired and thousands of Lebanese displaced by the war poured onto roads leading south back to their homes.

The agreement, which was signed in November and halted the deadliest war in decades between the two sides, stipulated that both Hezbollah and Israel withdraw, while the Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers would be deployed in force to secure the area. Negotiators had hoped the cease-fire deal would become permanent, returning a measure of calm to a turbulent region.

But as the deadline passed on Sunday, a very different scenario was taking shape.

Israeli forces remained in parts of southern Lebanon in violation of the cease-fire agreement, stoking fears of a sustained Israeli occupation and renewed hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. Israeli officials warned Lebanese not to return to their homes in many towns and villages in the south.

“In the near future, we will continue to inform you about the places to which you can return,” Avichai Adraee, the Arabic spokesman of the Israeli military, posted on social media on Sunday morning. “Until further notice, all previously published instructions remain in effect.”

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that those killed and injured on Sunday morning had been trying to enter their villages along the border when they were attacked by Israeli forces. Residents of some southern towns had called for their neighbors to gather early Sunday morning and head to their homes in a convoy, despite the warnings from Israel. The Lebanese military said it was accompanying civilians returning to several border towns to try to ensure their safety. The military said in a statement that a Lebanese soldier was among those killed by Israeli fire.

What is not explained: What Israel and Lebanon agreed to was that Israel would occupy the region between their northern border with Lebanon and the Litani River, and then would withdraw back into Israel after the Lebanese Army (note: there is one, and it’s not Hezbollah), in concert with the UN army forces of UNIFIL, would destroy all of Hezbollah’s weapons and facilities between the border with Israel and the Litani River. Until then, villages in that area would be evacuated (Israeli villages south of the border with Lebanon have also been evacuated, displacing 80,000 people).

Of course UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army have done little or nothing, and Hezbollah, despite the agreement, will not withdraw north of the Litani River; armed Hezbollah fighters remain in the forbidden region while UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army does bupkes.  The Israelis fired on a group of people marching back to their homes in violation of the agreement, accompanied by armed people; this was perceived as a threat [see below].

At any rate the bolded text above implies that Israel was violating the cease-fire agreement while Lebanon adhered to it. That is a falsehood. Lebanon first violated the cease-fire agreement big-time, and in response Israel did not withdraw.

From the Times of Israel:

The Lebanese health ministry said 15 people had been killed, including a Lebanese soldier, and some 83 had been wounded by IDF fire in southern Lebanon since the morning.

The crowds appeared to be largely made up of Hezbollah supporters. Hezbollah’s al-Manar television, broadcasting from several locations in the south, showed footage of residents moving toward villages in defiance of Israeli orders, some holding the terror group’s flag and images of Hezbollah fighters killed in the war, as well as slain Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

An Israeli military official told reporters that hundreds of Lebanese, among them Hezbollah operatives, tried to reach villages in southern Lebanon while carrying out “provocations.”

The official said the military had prepared for civilians attempting to reach the border villages at the end of the 60-day truce, despite its warnings.

The IDF said it opened fire on suspects who approached troops still deployed in southern Lebanon and who posed an “imminent threat.” Troops also detained several suspects, according to the military.

Here, from Wikimedia, is a map showing the Litani River and the area south of it before one gets to the Israeli border (dark grey line). That is the region that was subject to the truce agreement.

******

In both cases above, Gaza and then Lebanon violated a cease-fire agreement with Israel, and Israel did not violate that agreement–until the terrorists (and the UN and Lebanon) violated the agreement.  Yet somehow the NYT makes Israel look responsible here rather than terrorists violating a cease-fire agreement. Such is mainstream journalism. In Gaza, for instance, if Hamas would just let the Israelis go as agreed, the cease-fire would be obeyed by Israel, which already has released the hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails per the agreement.

Biologist John Avise has sent us another batch of butterfly photos. They are below: John’s IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 7 

This week continues my many-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  The intent of this series is to introduce (or remind) WEIT readers about the diversity and beauty of this continent’s Lepidopterans.

Funereal Duskywing (Erynnis funeralis):

Gabb’s Checkerspot (Chlosyne gabbii):

Eastern Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes), topwing:

Eastern Giant Swallowtail, underwing:

Golden Hairstreak (Habrodais grunus):

Gray Comma (Polygonia progne), topwing:

Gray Comma, underwing:

Gray Hairstreak (Strymon melinus) male topwing [JAC note: the three hairstreak photos seem to show that a “false head”, complete with antennae, has evolved at the rear end of the wings, surely to attract predators to the “wrong” part of the body. Note how inconspicuous the vulnerable head is!]

Gray Hairstreak, female topwing:

Gray Hairstreak, female underwing:

Great Southern White (Ascia monuste), topwing:

Great Southern White, underwing:

Here is day 2 of our 3-day conference on Censorship in the Sciences at the University of Southern California, with all talks contained in the 6½-hour video. I will recommend one, and since I missed the bit beginning at 3:30, will give the recommendation of a friend who watched the whole day. I’ve given the whole schedule below.

The first talk you might watch is the first one of the day, a zoom talk by Stavroula Kousta, the Chief Editor of the Springer journal Nature Human Behavior. It begins at 0:00 and ends at 23:49, with the Q&A ending at 34:24.

The journal and its editor became infamous in August of 2022 when it published a paper called “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans” (see my post here), which notes this:

This new article in Nature Human Behavior Is well-intentioned, aiming to purge bigotry from science, but goes way over the top in three ways. First, it claims that science is complicit in structural racism at present.  That’s not true, though in the past some scientists and institutions were guilty of this. Second, it assumes that papers submitted to the journal are going to be rife with racism, bigotry, misogyny, and anti-LGBTQ+ bias that will cause “harm”, and therefore authors must be warned in a long document about their biases and how to avoid expressing them. The piece thus gives a long set of rules that actually conform to woke practice. Third, it explicitly states that even papers with publishable scientific results can be rejected if the facts presented are deemed liable to cause harm. And “harm” is often in the gut of the beholder. The article is thus a threat that unless articles conform to a specific ideological stance, they can be rejected even if the data themselves are worth publishing.

As you’ll hear, Kousta somewhat hedges her original claim that papers should not be published if they cause “harm” to readers, including psychological harm.  She notes that the journal’s guidance isn’t about suppressing clear results of research but the conclusions drawn by research. “Harm” could be conclusions—I note that there is often no clear distinction between results and conclusions—that hurt any groups whose rights are protected by international treaties.  She doesn’t discuss the hard cases, for example research reporting any differences in IQ or educational attainment between ethnic groups. She also suggests that the “harms” of research could be minimized by the journal by giving “accompanying commentary” or an “accompanying editorial.” Those, however, an implicit view by the journal that the paper cannot stand on its own. Her talk sounds like an attempt to rebut the criticisms of the paper that arose immediately.

The first question (23:53) was by journalist Jesse Singal about one example of a potentially harmful result, emphasizing the slippery-ness of the concept of “harm”.  Julia Schaletzky, on my own panel, asks the third question, and it’s a good one, dealing with “harms” whose prevention could lead to longer-term harms to the community. (Somebody should have asked Kousta to give a concrete example of a piece of research that should be deep-sixed from the journal because it harmed a group of people.)  Kousta implies that this could never happen, but it in fact a manuscript from a federally funded study, showing that giving children puberty blockers does not increase their overall psychological well-being, has been withheld (by the author, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, not by the journal) certainly because those results don’t jibe with what gender ideologists want to see.

Pinker’s tweet:

My objection to this kind of vetting of articles when the concept of “harm” is so badly slippery these days was echoed in a tweet by Steve Pinker:

Journalists & psychologists take note: Nature Human Behavior is no longer a peer-reviewed scientific journal but an enforcer of a political creed. I won’t referee, publish, or cite (how do we know articles have been vetted for truth rather than political correctness)? https://t.co/3qXFGizt6h pic.twitter.com/G5BgB2hpqD

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 26, 2022

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

Luana recommends Cory Clark‘s talk, “From worriers to warriors: The rise of women in science and society,” which begins at 5:13:40 and ends at 5:37:01, followed by Q&A that ends at 5:48:20. Her hypothesis, which is hers, is that many of the ideological problems that plague science now, as well as some salubrious effects, are actually the result of the success of women, whose evolutionary past bequeathed them a set of behaviors different from those those of men.  Clark’s contention: women evolved to hold grudges longer than men, are more empathic than men, more egalitarian, and so on. She goes on to show surveys of sex differences bearing on cancelation and wokeness.

These differences, she says, lead to an increased emphasis on equity and on avoidance of harm, as well as to an increase in ostracism, producing not only wokeness in academia but also a cancel culture relying more heavily on female than on male beliefs. There are salubrious effects as well, such as the female emphasis on reduced animal testing and “the fall of competent but criminal men.” Women, she says, are more likely to be “social warriors.” It’s really an encouragement to take an evolutionary-psychology look at how sex differences in behavior have influenced academia. In the Q&A, Clark notes how she’s been ostracized, and one questioner says she would like to push Clark down an elevator shaft and that nursing, a woman-dominated profession, does not suffer from the problems that, Clark says, affect academia. Another questioner agrees with Clark’s patterns, but attributes them to acculturation rather than evolution.

When I wrote last week about the great guitar solo in Steely Dan’s son “Kid Charlemagne, a solo played by studio magician Larry Carlton, I forgot that Walter Becker, a regular member of the Dan, played a great solo on the enigmatic song “Bad Sneakers“. The song is from the Dan’s 1975 “Katy Lied” album. (There’s a rare live version here.)  I suppose I’ve read interpretations of the song’s lyrics (below), but it still doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m sure it made sense to Fagen when he wrote it, though. (You can hear one dubious interpretation here.)

The solo goes from 1:55 to 2:26; a 30-second work of genius. I love it when the keyboard and wailing guitar seem to go off on their own tempo with everything coming back together at the end.

And I’ll still argue against those who criticize Fagen’s voice; I think it’s perfect for the songs, even though he’s lost it in his dotage.

The opaque lyrics (I’d be delighted if anybody wanted to offer an interpretation!):

[Verse 1]
Five names that I can hardly stand to hear
Including yours and mine
And one more chimp who isn’t here
I can see the ladies talking
How the times are getting hard
And that fearsome excavation
On Magnolia Boulevard[Pre-Chorus]
Yes I’m going insane
And I’m laughing in the frozen rain
Well I’m so alone
Honey, when they gonna send me home?[Chorus]
Bad sneakers and a piña colada, my friend
Stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend

[Verse 2]
You fellah, you tearin’ up the street
You wear that white tuxedo
How you gonna beat the heat?
Do you take me for a fool?
Do you think that I don’t see
That ditch out in the valley
That they’re digging just for me?

See rock shows near Chicago Get tickets as low as $50 You might also like Your Gold Teeth Steely Dan Push Ups Drake we can’t be friends (wait for your love) Ariana Grande [Pre-Chorus]
Yes I’m going insane
You know I’m laughing at the frozen rain
Well I feel like I’m so alone
Honey, when they gonna send me home?[Chorus]
Bad sneakers and piña colada, my friend
Stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend[Instrumental Break]

[Pre-Chorus]
You know, going insane
Yes I’m laughing at the frozen rain
And I’m so alone
Honey, when they gonna send me home?

[Outro]
Bad sneakers and a piña colada, my friend
Stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend

Do we really need the UN any more?  For a long time I’ve felt that some parts of it, including UNRWA and the International Court of Justice, both with their obsession against Israel, should be deep-sixed (UNRWA is the only UN refugee agency tasked with “refugees” in one area, and several countries, including the US, have defunded it). Seriously, how much good does the UN really do?

If you need more evidence that parts of the UN are actually complicit in terrorism, have a look at the allegations of the three young Israeli women just released by Hamas.  Yep, they said they were held in a UNRWA-run “humanitarian camp”.  The article below also discusses claims that other hostages were held in Gazan hospitals, hospitals that were raided by the IDF to the loud objections of the rest of the world.  If you think the UNRWA people who ran the camp were totally unaware of the fact that it contained Israeli hostages, well, . . . . . that’s not the way it works in Gaza.

Click below. I’ll give an excerpt from each source (indented). The first is from the think tank FDD, which describes itself as nonpartisan but Wikipedia calls “neoconservative” and was founded as pro-Israeli. But it’s no matter: the three allegations below have appeared on several sites as well.

• Israeli Hostages Held in UN camp: The three female Israeli hostages released last weekend following the ceasefire in Gaza revealed on January 21 that they were incarcerated in a refugee camp operated by UNRWA — the United Nations agency catering exclusively to the descendants of Palestinian refugees — for part of their time in Hamas captivity, according to Israel’s Channel 13 network. Details as to which of the eight camps run by UNRWA in Gaza were used have not been made available. Following the October 7, 2023, atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel, in which several UNRWA employees participated, Israel accused the agency of actively colluding with the Iran-backed terrorist organization, passing legislation last October barring it from operating in the Jewish state.

• Trump Halts UNRWA Funding: Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump halted U.S. funding for UNRWA via an executive order on his first day in office on January 20. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, strongly criticized UNRWA and labeled the United Nations a “den of antisemitism” during her Senate confirmation hearing on January 21.

• Hamas Kept Hostages in Hospitals: According to an exclusive report from Fox News Digital, Hamas terrorists captured by Israel confessed that Israeli hostages had been imprisoned in the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza at different times during their ordeal. Anas Muhammad Faiz al-Sharif, one of the terrorists in Israeli custody, was quoted as describing the hospital — which was raided by IDF troops on December 28, resulting in the arrest of more than 200 terrorists — as “a safe haven for them because the [Israeli] military cannot directly target it.”

From the Jewish News Service (again, click to read). Note that the UN knows of these allegations and are taking them seriously (see video below).

An excerpt:

Reports that freed Israeli hostages had been held in U.N. shelters in the Gaza Strip amount to “a very serious allegation,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told JNS on Wednesday.

“We call on those who have information on this to share it formally with UNRWA or other parts of the United Nations so that we can investigate it further,” Haq told JNS at the global body’s press conference in New York.

Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, who were released on Sunday, said Hamas had held them in U.N. camps that the global body created during the war to protect Gazan civilians and to provide them with food and water.

It wasn’t clear from public records and reporting in which camps they were held, when and for how long. Israeli intelligence, taken from captured Hamas terrorists, assessed that several Israeli hostages were held at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, Fox News reported.

These are different hostages from the ones released the other day (four more will be released tomorrow), but of course when the IDF raided that hospital because of reports that Hamas was there, they were excoriated for raiding a hospital. The director of the hospital, now in an Israel jail, was a colonel in Hamas, tons of weapons were found, and several captured Palestinian terrorists admitted that the hospital held hostages at one time.

This, of course, needs to be investigated, as the UN official (Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General), says in the video below, but I wouldn’t lightly dismiss the allegations of all three recently-released women hostages that they were held in a UN camp. This video starts at the time when Haq is questioned about the hostages (22:45), and you need listen for only a couple of minutes.

And here’s a report (perhaps a bit superfluous) from Israeli “citizen spokeswoman” Ruth Wasserman Lande, discussing the hostages’ claim of being in an UNRWA,  The sensible thing is to simply dissolve UNRWA, which is, as Lande says, “a Hamas front”, and fold its mission into the existing single UN organization that deals with refugees.

I was quite surprised three days ago when I argued that Elon Musk’s “Hitler salute”  at the post-Inaugural rally simply seemed to be a gesture of exuberance made by an overexcited and awkward man and was not a Hitler or Mussolini salute. He said, when he made the “Sieg Heil”, that “My heart goes out to you,” and, indeed, touched his heart three times while extending his arm twice. See the video below, noting also his awkward dance moves when he also pumps and extends his arms:

It amazed me that this caused a fracas not only in the media, but on my own website, with a lot of people asserting unequivocally that it was Musk’s tribute to Hitler/white supremacy or that he was trolling the Left by doing something that would anger them. Musk himself has denied the allegations. From the BBC:

Some on X, the social medial platform he owns, likened the gesture to a Nazi salute, though others disagreed.

In response, the SpaceX and Tesla chief posted on X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

But of course to enraged “progressives” on the Left (and do I need to explain again that when I put that word in quotes, it’s perjorative?), Musk’s denial means absolutely nothing. He was lauding Nazis!

My interpretation of the “Hitler salute” explanation is that it is made by people who feel they must demonize their political opponents in the worst way possible, even though there’s a more charitable explanation. And we have to be more charitable in the future, including admitting when our opponents do things that are actually good.

Further, as the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that combats anti-Semitism) explains, people are touchy after Trump’s inauguration, and this explains why some could mistakenly interpret an “awkward gesture” as a Hitler salute. One would think that the ADL’s take would give people pause, but not wokesters like AOC, who, in what some called “Jewsplaining”, tells the ADL that they were actually defending a Hitler salute:

Just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity.

People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information now. You work for them. Thank you for making that crystal clear to all. https://t.co/0gLdMCU3UV

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 21, 2025

This leads to the second issue with the Hitler take: it makes Leftists look loony, ready to demonize their opponents and lose their heads over something that at worst is dubious and at best (and most likely) is simply an “awkward gesture.”  Even the ADL realizes that the Hitler take is not going to reduce antisemitism and, in my view, it simply reduces the credibility of the Left in general.  Surely ludicrous interpretations of gestures as Hitleresque bespeaks a mindset that helped cost us the last election.  So, like Helen Pluckrose in her website post below, I agree that people have to stop this nonsense.  Even if you don’t like Musk, he was not giving fealty to Hitler.  If Democrats don’t regroup and get sensible, we’ll keep on losing elections.

So I’ll quote Pluckrose in extenso, and if you don’t like what she says, take it up with her.  I’m not arguing any more about this issue; I’ve pondered the Hitler argument, dismissed it as a misguided and kneejerk overreaction (Pluckrose calls it “deranged”) and I’ll move on.  But click below to read.

Pluckrose is no fan of Musk, but calls for a thoughtful rather than a reactive rebuttal of his views. Quotes from her piece are indented.

This makes it especially important that those who are concerned about his influence over the policies of the most powerful country in the world and the largest forum for public political discourse, and the impact the combination of these factors can have on the rest of the world conduct themselves as serious and responsible adults in their critiques of him.

Admirers and supporters of Mr. Musk who believe these concerns to be unfounded range from thoughtful, well-informed politically engaged people who support his general views and overall aims and believe that the benefits his expertise, his stances and his influence bring outweigh any personal foibles to utter lunatics, wedded to ideological narratives divorced from reality and engaging in tactics common to both the woke left and the woke right. It is important that his thoughtful and serious critics engage in good faith with his thoughtful and serious supporters and address the reality of his influence in ways that focus on what is true, what is significant and what has real impact on the world.

It is already the case that Musk’s least thoughtful and serious supporters on the woke right typically shut down any criticism of him by claiming it to be a symptom of “Musk Derangement Syndrome” (MDS). This accusation, when made spuriously, functions in a very similar way to the woke left’s use of the DiAngelo style concept of ‘whiteness’ (an unconscious drive to uphold the systems of white supremacy for one’s own political benefit). That is, it functions as a Kafka Trap in which any attempts to deny that one’s motivations in criticising Musk’s or DiAngelo’s ideas are caused by either of these pathologies are evidence of the pathologies. By formulating concepts of MDS or whiteness which contain within them the premise that any denial of them are evidence of the derangement or unconscious bias skewing the speaker’s judgement, it preemptively shuts down the possibility of any critique being legitimate. This kind of circular reasoning is not persuasive to reasonable, ethical people who care about what is true and share the stated aims of Musk to oppose censorship and dismantle governmental corruption or of DiAngelo to oppose racism and dismantle racial prejudice (my readers are likely to support both) but think that doing so in an evidence-based and consistently principled way is essential

Nevertheless, if one wishes to counter claims that any criticism of Musk is a manifestation of Musk Derangement Syndrome, it is important not to be deranged.

She gives a number of social-media examples of this “derangement”, and then analyzes interpretations of the gesture, all three of which followed my post:

. . . . even if there is a possibility that [Musk] was deliberately making a Nazi salute, mindreading him as doing so and responding in a hyperbolic and overwrought way is not remotely helpful whatever the motivations were. Consider the reasonable responses people are likely to make to such interpretations in any scenario.

1. Musk was simply illustrating his heart going out to the people he was speaking to.

People will see the woke left doing its “Everybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi” thing again and the perception that it should not be taken seriously is strengthened.

2. Musk was trolling with the gesture and trying to provoke this response in order to illustrate how deranged ‘the left’ is.

Well done. You played right into that and consequently reduced the credibility of left-wing critiques of Musk including from those of us who are not deranged.

3. Musk really does have sympathies with Nazi ideology and intended to convey that he will influence the Trump administration in that direction.

This would be highly alarming and indicate a need to seriously and carefully scrutinise his policy recommendations and shore up your credibility so that you are taken seriously should you find indications of it. The worst thing to do is shriek “Nazi” spuriously and increase the tendency of reasonable people to assume that somebody being accused of being a Nazi has simply said something considered problematic using the tortuous reasoning of the Critical Social Justice Left and ignore it rather than have a look to see if they have, in fact, expressed views compatible with a genocidal antisemitic and/or ethnonational ideology.

Stop it.

There is never a good time for hyperbolic, overwrought and, yes, deranged accusations of Nazism, fascism or far-right beliefs and intentions based on little to no evidence, but of all the times when this is a terrible idea, this is probably the worst. The Trump administration is in power, Elon Musk has significant influence on it, the power and influence of X as a platform for news has never been higher and policies that impact not only Americans but the rest of the world are already underway. This is a time to be serious grown ups and carefully, thoughtfully and honestly scrutinise both policy decisions influenced by Elon Musk and the impact of his social media platform on the state of political discourse and what everyday people who vote and influence culture believe to be true and ethical. It is a time to be particularly conscientious when evaluating the views and actions of Musk, give him credit for anything positive and beneficial he achieves in an ethical way, and present any concerns that arise in a serious, well-evidenced and well-reasoned way.

If there is reason to be concerned about the power, influence and character of Elon Musk (and I suspect there is), the people who will need to be convinced of this will be serious, ethical, thoughtful, American conservatives who care about what is true and what is morally right, who are currently of the view that Musk is beneficial to their great nation (and hopefully the world) and are absolutely sick of the authoritarian irrationality and spurious name-calling of the Critical Social Justice left.

I beg you, please stop being deranged.

Helen Pluckrose knows whereof she speaks, as she’s been a critic of “Critical Social Justice” for a long time, including her book with Lindsay, Cynical Theories (yes, Lindsay has gone a bit off the rails after the publication).  Her take on this whole kerfuffle is sensible and, I think, correct.

The best criticism is often satire, and here’s some: first a take from the Babylon Bee, and then a Musk interpretation of the often-used “Hitler goes nuts” scene from the 2004 movie Downfall:

HITLER REACTION SURFACES https://t.co/xRTNjzlTEK

— Adam Collett (@AdamCollettX) January 22, 2025

Mark Sturtevant is back with some lovely insect photos (and one gastropod). Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Hello, everybody. Here are pictures of insects (mostly insects) from where I live, which is in eastern Michigan. Let’s get started.

First up are pictures of Thynnid Wasps (Myzinum quinquecinctum), which are odd-looking wasps that grow up as parasites of soil dwelling beetle larvae.

Next is a small group of tiny Acrobat Ants (Crematogaster sp.) that are tending aphids for their honeydew secretions. Acrobat ants are easy to recognize by the distinctive joint that allows them to elbow their abdomen upward to release a venom at prey or at enemies.

Next up is a bug-eyed Mayfly which I think is in the genus Stenacron.

Every summer or two I try to spend time alongside a particular area of the Flint River, as it is a great spot to photograph American Rubyspot Damselflies (Hetaerina americana). A particular aim, as it is a challenge, is to hang over the edge of the riverbank to get pictures of the brilliantly colored males while they are back-lit from the late afternoon sun. So here you go.

Next up are some beetles. First up are a pair of Six-spotted Tiger Beetles (Cicindela sexguttata), which a species abundant along woodland trails. This is among the most alert species that I know so I seldom get pictures, but when mating they are a bit distracted.

During a narrow window in the summer, I will find many of these small dung beetles (Canthon sp.) in the place I call the Magic Field. People take dogs and horses into the field, and their droppings provides support for this population. I swear these do roll little balls of dung around (I often see them trundling across a trail with them), but they immediately stop when I approach, darn it.

Here is a terrestrial snail which I photographed because I liked the branching pattern under its shell. I am not a snail person, but through iNaturalist I was able to narrow it down to an Amber Snail (family Succineidae).

Late summer is my favorite time to go to the Magic Field. It abounds with many species of grasshoppers, and the air is crackling with them as they fly about. But by far the most common ones are the ubiquitous Carolina Grasshoppers (Dissosteira carolina), which probably everyone in the U.S. has seen. These are the grasshoppers with flashy black hind wings, as shown in the linked picture. Anyway, Carolina ‘Hopper mating season is in the late summer, and one sees the following scene quite often.

Early in the morning, sleeping bees and wasps are commonly seen on plants, so here is a sleeping Common Eastern Bumblebee (Bombus impatiens). I really like how this picture turned out.

But now we get to a kind of finale from the Magic Field. The Eastern Cicada Killer Wasp (Sphecius speciosus) is probably the largest wasp in our area, and they are certainly the largest by weight. As their name explains, the females hunt cicadas, which they paralyze and store in an underground burrow with eggs. The Magic Field has a large population of them in late summer, and then certain areas become landscaped with their large burrows and earthen mounds. You see one of their burrows in the first picture, complete with its characteristic landing strip trough and just look at all that soil which was dug out! There will be several chambers deep inside, each intended for a larva and cicadas.

The next picture shows one of the wasps as it was exiting its burrow. I was just as nuts about insects as a kid as I am now, but back then I was also rather jumpy around these impressively large wasps. But now I know that they are completely indifferent to us humans and all our tribulations, so getting very close with the macro lens is never a problem. They really just don’t care about us.

There were dozens of burrows in a small area, and so over a few days I managed to photograph several of the wasps as they landed by their burrow with a helpless Cicada, their arrivals being announced by the loud droning that they make while flying. I could only get maybe one or two pictures off before they disappeared down the hole with their prize.

And finally we have a mystery. There are many species of solitary wasps at the Magic Field, but during these sessions I noticed these little wasps (do you see it?) that showed an inordinate interest in me and in Cicada Killer Town. They would investigate my camera gear, scurry about the mounds of earth, and even venture down the C.K. tunnels (!) ceaselessly searching for … ?? Well, this made me curious, and my next post will reveal what I managed to learn about them. The investigation led to my most favorite picture of the entire season, so stay tuned!

If you want to see a compilation of all of Trump’s executive orders, you can find links here that will take you to the contents of the official orders.

I’ve talked about the new rules on sex and gender before, but wanted to discuss them again, briefly. Click the screenshot below to see Trump’s EO on those issues:

It’s a long document (four pages when printed out single-space in 9-point Times type, but the upshot is an official recognition of two sexes (male and female, of course), which are seen as immutable. Coupled with that is a refusal to use, on government documents or in government work, any concept of gender.

One excerpt:

It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.  These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.  Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality, and the following definitions shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy:

(a)  “Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.  “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”

(b)  “Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.

(c)  “Men” or “man” and “boys” or “boy” shall mean adult and juvenile human males, respectively.

(d)  “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

(e)  “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

(f)  “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.  Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.  Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.

(g)  “Gender identity” reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.

While most of this seems okay to me, I’d make two changes. First, sex is not recognizable, at least via the apparatus to produce gametes, at conception, when we have only a single cell. With high probability you could identify its sex via DNA testing, but the reproductive apparatus develops only later. Ergo I would substitute “at birth” for “at conception”.

Second, it makes no provision for true intersex people, who cannot be identified as either male or female (hermaphrodites are one example). Though such people are vanishingly rare, so that sex is about as close to binary as you can get, they are not nonexistent, and constitute somewhere between 1 person in 5600 to 1 in 20,000.  There has to be some provision for identifying the sex of these people, perhaps with an “I” for intersex.

It also deals with women’s spaces:

Sec. 4.  Privacy in Intimate Spaces.  (a)  The Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security shall ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers, including through amendment, as necessary, of Part 115.41 of title 28, Code of Federal Regulations and interpretation guidance regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act.

(b)  The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall prepare and submit for notice and comment rulemaking a policy to rescind the final rule entitled “Equal Access in Accordance with an Individual’s Gender Identity in Community Planning and Development Programs” of September 21, 2016, 81 FR 64763, and shall submit for public comment a policy protecting women seeking single-sex rape shelters.

Sec. 5.  Protecting Rights.  The Attorney General shall issue guidance to ensure the freedom to express the binary nature of sex and the right to single-sex spaces in workplaces and federally funded entities covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  In accordance with that guidance, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Labor, the General Counsel and Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and each other agency head with enforcement responsibilities under the Civil Rights Act shall prioritize investigations and litigation to enforce the rights and freedoms identified.

In general I agree, but there may be specific cases, for example a trans woman in jail for embezzlement and not sexual aggression, might be placed in a woman’s prison. Even so, a trans woman is a biological male and on average men are more aggressive than women, but on the other hand a trans women in a male prison may be at risk of becoming sexually assaulted.

Also, re rape counseling and running women’s shelters, I do not think that there should be legal prohibitions against hiring trans women to do the job, I can’t imagine, in a private organization, of favoring their hiring. I said as much in two previous posts (one of which is here) in which I agreed with Ed Buckner. Buckner’s words are indented, mine doubly indented (bolding is his):

Coyne does offer some opinions that are related to ethics, of course.

For example,

Transgender women, for example, should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison.

My own “ethical” opinion is close to Coyne’s. I would probably—but only after I studied the matter more carefully, including discussions with rape counselors and probably even with women who’ve been victims of rape or of women-batterers, modify some of what Coyne wrote slightly to say:

Neither men or women, cis- or trans-gendered, should serve as rape counselors and as workers in battered women’s shelters, unless the counselors or others working there pass a background check; even then, no one should so serve unless the clients are aware of and accept the status of the counselors/workers.

I can imagine circumstances where there might be an advantage to victims of having a man or a trans woman on hand, but the rights, needs, and wants of the victims, even if sometimes irrational, should be paramount.

In response, I agreed:

I think the second version, expressing Buckner’s views, is better than what I wrote, and it does summarize views I already held (but failed to express). While I still think that at present tranwomen should not compete against biological women in sports, and shouldn’t really be running battered women’s shelters, they should not be completely barred from that job nor from acting as rape counselors—so long as (as Buckner writes), they undergo a background check and the women residents of shelters or women being counseled for rape or sexual assault are made aware that the counselor is a trans woman (a biological man) and are okay with that. This view will, of course still be seen as “transphobic” by some extremists, but there’s a very good case for holding this view in light of the rights of biological women. This involves a conflict between two groups’ “rights”, and in the interests of fairness and the needs of biological women, I come down against sports participation of transwomen and cast a very cold eye on the other two issues.

In other words, I’d make the rule: “Any woman seeking counseling for rape or sexual assault, or seeking entry into a woman’s shelter, should have the right to have a woman counseling and dealing with her psychological or medical needs.”

In that sense I’d modify Trump’s rules.

h/t: Jay

The Brandeis center has announced a settlement in its civil lawsuit against Harvard University for allowing the creation of an anti-Semitic atmosphere, and Harvard will make some changes. The deal is announced by the Center, and you can see the announcement by clicking below:

Harvard, of course, has admitted to neither wrongdoing nor liability; I suppose it’s just making these changes because it’s the right thing to do. LOL!

From CNN:

One day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who has said he would “remove the Jew haters” if reelected, Harvard University has settled two lawsuits accusing the Ivy League school of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic bullying and harassment on campus.

In the settlement with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education, and Students Against Antisemitism — a group of six Jewish students — Harvard agreed to make several changes to how it addresses antisemitism on campus.

Among them is adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism when reviewing complaints of antisemitic discrimination and harassment and posting a document online that clarifies people who identify as Jewish and Israeli are covered by the school’s non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies.

Additionally, the school agreed to draft an annual report for the next five years that details its response to discrimination and harassment; hire a point person to consult with on all complaints of antisemitism, and provide training on combating antisemitism for staff who review the complaints.

“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” a Harvard University spokesperson said in a statement. “We will continue to strengthen our policies, systems, and operations to combat anti-Semitism and all forms of hate and ensure all members of the Harvard community have the support they need to pursue their academic, research and professional work and feel they belong on our campus and in our classrooms.”

Harvard has come under fire in the past year for how it addresses antisemitic bullying on campus. Much of the criticism and complaints from students and faculty stemmed from the protests and vandalism on campus following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

Last year, Harvard received a failing grade from the Jewish civil rights advocacy group Anti-Defamation League for its policies to protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus.

It also has the lowest Free Speech rating from FIRE among all 251 schools.  The two others right above it also have ratings of “abysmal”: NYU and Columbia, and both are, as I recall, subject to similar Title VI lawsuits.

I have no idea whether this settlement has anything to do with Trump’s threats, nor do I much care; I suspect, though, that a settlement was in the works before Trump was inaugurated. Harvard has not looked good after Claudine Gay stepped down on January 2, 2024, plagued by accusations not just of personal plagiarism, but of Harvard hypocrisy in how it dealt with speech.

At any rate, the IHRA definition of antisemitism is so tame that I don’t know why it’s even controversial. Here it is from their page of explanation:

Note that the definition doesn’t include anti-Zionism, but does state this:

Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

To me, that means that if you deny the right of Israel to exist, that’s anti-Semitism, for it conceives of Israel, because it’s the one Jewish state, as the one state that has no right to exist. We all known that “Zionist” has long since become a euphemism for “Jews” by pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli demonstrators, and this ruse no longer carries water. That’s the point made by Natasha Hausdorff in the Munk debate on whether anti-Zionism is the same as anti-Semitism, and Hausdorff and her partner, Douglas Murray, did change the mind of the audience about this. I’ve watched this video several times; Hausdorff’s final metaphor is brilliant.

As for the other agreeements, about annual reports, point persons, and the like, yes, they are necessary to combat the atmosphere of anti-Semitism that Harvard itself tacitly admitted by settling the lawsuit.

None of this, however, should be construed as prohibiting acts of speech that are anti-Semitic or anti-Israel.  A Harvard student still has the right to stand in Harvard Yard holding a placard reading “Gas the Jews.” (It won’t do his reputation much good, however.)  It’s only when a multiplicity of anti-Semitic acts, teaching, and speech add up to create an atmosphere that discriminates against Jews, or creates a climate that chills the speech of Jews, that lawsuits must be filed.

Next, Columbia and NYU. . .

Even long-time readers are dominating threads with too many comments, which reduces intellectual diversity.  Please note this from Da Roolz (the posting guidelines) on the left sidebar:

9.) Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.

I am not calling out specific violaters, but asking for self-restraint. Perhaps everyone should refresh their knowledge of Da Roolz.

Thank you.

Natasha Hausdorff, barrister and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, discussed the prospects for peace between Israel and Palestine—I don’t say Hamas, because I don’t think either Natasha or I think there will ever be peace between Israel and Hamas—with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk TV yesterday.  In this seven-minute conversation, Hausdorff believes that the chances for peace, while not solid, have been increased with the new administration.  Trump may do (and is doing) a passel of crazy things, but most friends of Israel think he offers a more salubrious future for the Jewish state than did the Biden administration.  The Forward agrees, though it notes that Rubio’s support for Israel has by no means been sycophantic or 100%.  But it’s surely better than Anthony “There’s a Red Line Around Rafah” Blinken.