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Bill Maher, rebuking the Democrats for losing the election, knocks it out of the park in this week’s 8-minute comedy/news bit. Although many people (viz., Laura Helmuth) are calling Republicans “stupid” for voting for Trump, Maher shows that there’s no shortage of stupidity among Democrats, either—especially in the “progressives.” As he says, “What good is liberalism if you don’t win elections?” According to Maher, the entire Democratic party has become “a Portlandia sketch.”

Maher excoriates Trump, of course, but I agree with him: if we’re going to win future elections, Democrats need to figure out why they lost an election that should have been a walk in the park. (I have to mention, because readers will bring it up, that Maher also implies that science showed that the covid virus spread because it escaped from the Wuhan lab, something that now seems improbable.)

Maher’s lesson is now familiar: make Democrats more centrist than progressive, and find out what’s going on with the other side. As he says, “Stop screaming at people to ‘get with the program’ and instead make a program worth getting with.”  At the end he expresses his own disaffection at losing the chance of fixing the two things he cares most about: the environment and democracy.

The Fibonacci series is defined thusly:

. . . . the series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. For example,

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, …

Mathematically we can describe this as:

xn= xn-1 + xn-2

It is the basis of a spiral figure, too, though it’s not quite the same as the “Golden Spiral,” which itself is defined as “a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor is φ, the golden ratio. That is, a golden spiral gets wider (or further from its origin) by a factor of φ for every quarter turn it makes.  And that factor is one that satisifes the quadratic equation

φ²=φ+1

1.618033988749….  (this is an irrational number, like pi or e. 

But we’re talking about the Fibonacci spiral, which is this:

Another approximation is a Fibonacci spiral, which is constructed slightly differently. A Fibonacci spiral starts with a rectangle partitioned into 2 squares. In each step, a square the length of the rectangle’s longest side is added to the rectangle. Since the ratio between consecutive Fibonacci numbers approaches the golden ratio as the Fibonacci numbers approach infinity, so too does this spiral get more similar to the previous approximation the more squares are added, as illustrated by the image.

And how it’s constructed: you see here the rectangle with added squares, and how a spiral that touches each junction between the squares becomes the Fibonacci spiral.

FakeRealLogSpiral.png: Cypderivative work: Silverhammermba & Jahobr, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

But on to the cats, which, according to this article from Bored Panda, occasionally form themselves into something approximating a Fibonacci spiral:

And one from reddit:

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I thought of cheetahs as a solitary cat, but Wikipedia says that this is not exactly true:

Cheetahs have a flexible and complex social structure and tend to be more gregarious than several other cats (except the lion). Individuals typically avoid one another but are generally amicable; males may fight over territories or access to females in oestrus, and on rare occasions such fights can result in severe injury and death. Females are not social and have minimal interaction with other individuals, barring the interaction with males when they enter their territories or during the mating season. Some females, generally mother and offspring or siblings, may rest beside one another during the day. Females tend to lead a solitary life or live with offspring in undefended home ranges; young females often stay close to their mothers for life but young males leave their mother’s range to live elsewhere.

Some males are territorial, and group together for life, forming coalitions that collectively defend a territory which ensures maximum access to females—this is unlike the behaviour of the male lion who mates with a particular group (pride) of females. In most cases, a coalition will consist of brothers born in the same litter who stayed together after weaning, but biologically unrelated males are often allowed into the group; in the Serengeti, 30% of members in coalitions are unrelated males.

Here’s a BBC Earth video showing a group of cheetahs filmed in Maasai Mara park in Kenya. There are eight: five males (clearly from a “coalition), one female, and her two cubs. The males are obviously competing with each other for access to the females. What beautiful cats!

Just to throw this in, here’s a wild cheetah that I photographed when I visited Manyeleti Game Reserve earlier this year. You can see how tame they can be around humans from this photo, taken with a zoom lens on a point-and-shoot camera from an open vehicle. Clearly the cats are used to the human presence.

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Everywhere She Travels, a lovely website written by Canadian traveler Caitlin Mundy, has a guide to the friendly cats of Istanbul, I will just use Catlin’s text and illustrate her words with my own photos of Istanbul, taken in April, 2008. Catilin’s text is indented.

This is all true!

If you’re heading to Turkey for your next trip, I sure hope you’re an animal lover! In particular, a cat lover. Not only will you find lots of cats wandering all over the streets of Istanbul, affectionately nicknamed Catstanbul, but you can find them in cities and towns all over the country too! From the back corner of a mosque, to perched on top of a pole, walking on a ledge, or sitting in a store window, cats are everywhere. Seriously, you’d be hard pressed to make it more than 10 minutes without seeing one. And not only are there a lot of them, they might just be the friendliest cat population in the world! Just bend down near one, and chances are it will be running over for pets. So, if you have a love of animals, then Istanbul is certainly a special place to visit.

If you want to see a wonderful movie about the cats of Istanbul, find the movie Kedi (“cat” in Turkish), which has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 98% from the critics. Somehow filmed at the level of a cat’s eyes, it is a mesmerizing documentary—even if you don’t like cats.

Another time cats love to approach people, is when they are sitting at a restaurant. Several times throughout the 5 days I spent in Istanbul a cat wandered up to me while I was sitting at a restaurant and made his/herself at home. This was always a welcome surprise for me, though it did make eating a little difficult sometimes.

I believe this is a Turkish Van cat with odd-colored eyes:

On my first night in Istanbul, I met some girls at Cheers Hostel who had been in the city for a few days at that point. I decided to join them in visiting the Hagia Sophia at night, to avoid the long daytime lines. While wandering around, I noticed a sweet cat cuddled up under a table. My first (of many) indoor cat sightings! I went to find my new friends to point her out. Look how cute, there’s a cat in here! I said. They smiled politely and told me they weren’t surprised. There are cats everywhere here. As an avid cat lover myself, this came as great news. And throughout my trip, I made sure to pet and photograph as many cats as I could.

I did, too! In the Hagia Sofia they might have seen Gli, who died in 2020, and whom I was fortunate enough to meet (and feed; see below):

Now you might wonder, with so many stray cats, what kind of shape could they be in? The answer is excellent. Walking around Istanbul on my first full day, I immediately noticed how healthy all the cats looked. If I had seen any one of them on the street somewhere else, I would have guessed they were a well loved pet cat way before I would have guessed a stray. But, in a way, they’re both. They may be strays but they are definitely well loved too and seem to be, in general, quite happy cats.

To pull from the popular saying it takes a village to raise a child, in Turkey it takes a village to care for a cat. And it’s true, the whole community seems to step up and look out for these cats! From restaurant owners, to friendly neighbors, and people out for a walk, it seems like just about everyone has a sweet spot for these adorable Turkish cats.

The first clue of this is the abundance of water bowls, small containers of cat food, and little cat houses found outside restaurants, in public parks, and next to people’s homes. These cats are certainly not going hungry or lacking a cozy place to curl up for a nap.

. . . .With all the kindness shown to these beautiful felines, it makes sense that they are friendly in return! I mean, if you are used to receiving pets, treats, and love from humans, why wouldn’t you seek them out? One of my first moments interacting with a cat in Istanbul started with me trying to take a photo. The sweet little white and black cat was standing on a rock near the river, so I bent down to get a good shot. She immediately ran over, climbed onto the purse hanging off my shoulder, made herself comfortable and started purring. After a few moments of crouching down and petting her, I moved over to the rock. We sat there together for at least 20 minutes, while I fantasized about bringing her home with me.

Yep, this is me with a friendly Istanbul moggy!

Me petting Gli, the late but very famous cat who dwelled in the Hagia Sofia. Like many residents, I carried a bag of dry cat food around with me, and Gli got some:

And of course I was lured to this rug shop, and the rest is history: I bought several small rugs from this guy, which were beautiful (like the cats):

Having cats around your store is a sure way to lure in ailurophilic tourists!

Part of the affection towards cats in Istanbul, and Turkey as a whole, can be attributed to Islamic culture. In Islam, cats are admired for their cleanliness. Since they are seen as clean animals, they are welcome in people’s homes, as well as into mosques. In fact, it’s even considered acceptable to use water from a bowl a cat has drank from for religious purposes, or to eat food from the same bowl as a cat.

The connection between Islam and cats dates back to the time of the prophet Muhammad. Muhammad is said to have been a cat lover himself. In particular, he had a cat named Muezza who he loved dearly. A famous story about Muezza says that one day she was sleeping on the sleeve of Muhammad’s prayer robes. Instead of disturbing her in her slumber, he simply cut off the sleeve of his robe before going to pray. Clearly this story has set a precedence for how cats are treated, even today.

Mosque cats (see Gli above):

This cat doesn’t look like it’s in as good a shape as the others (you’ll notice the rest of them, which are feral, are nonetheless looking good). This was on the grounds of a mosque, and the Turkish reads “Do not step on the grass.” But of course that doesn’t apply to cats, nor does it apply to urination!

h/t: Michael

After today’s photos, we have only tomorrow’s photos, the regular Sunday contribution by John Avise.  After Sunday: bupkes! Please send in your wildlife photos.

Today we have the fifth and final set of photos taken by reader Chris Taylor on his recent trip to Queensland (see here for earlier photos).  Chris’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

This is the final part of the photographs from Queensland.

In the final week of the trip, we spent the time back on the coast, visiting a number of locations.

This is the white form of the Pacific Reef Heron, Egretta sacra, seen on the rocks at Flying Fish Point.

There are a number of Mistletoes in Australia, most of which are parasitic on other trees and shrubs such as Eucalypts. The seed needs to be deposited on the branch of the host tree where it can germinate and grow its roots under the bark of the host tree. Mistletoes have coevolved with the Mistletoe Bird and a strategy has developed to ensure this is not left to chance. The seeds of the plant are enclosed in a fruit that attracts the bird to eat it. The seed quickly passes through the gut of the bird, which then defecates the seed onto the host plant. The seed retains a sticky coating which fixes the seed onto the branch, ready to grow and infect the host.

Mistletoe Bird, Dicaeum hirundinaceum, eating a berry of Jointed Mistletoe, Viscum articulatum, which is growing on a small eucalypt tree.

Nearby was one of the Clearwing Swallowtail butterflies, Cressida cressida. Unusually for a butterfly, they have few scales on the front wings, giving them a translucent appearance

Next, we went south to the area at the foot of the Wooroonooran range. The two highest peaks in Queensland, Mt Bartle Frere and Mount Bellenden Ker, are in this range. Although not tall by comparison to other mountain ranges, at only 1622m and 1593m elevation respectively, the range undoubtedly has a big effect on the weather of the Wet Tropics. We stopped in the town of Babinda, claims to be the wettest place in Australia, a distinction also claimed by the nearby town of Tully. Both of these towns have an annual average of more than 4.25 metres of rain. Because of the high rainfall, there are a number of pristine rivers flowing out of the range, such as Babinda Creek, here flowing out of the rainforest cloaking the slopes of the mountains

The mountains are made up of a lot of hard granitic rocks, and so there are a number of waterfalls in the range; these are the Josephine Falls

On the flatlands below the range is the Eubenangee Swamp. There is a small nature reserve here with a short hike through the rainforest. Lots of birds were calling, along with a colony of Fruit Bats. But they all kept up in the canopy, where they were well hidden, so the smaller denizens were the ones that caught our attention. For some reason most of the insects we saw here were dark in colour!

This butterfly is the Evening Brown, Melanitis leda. This insect is remarkable in that it takes two different forms, dependent upon the season. This is the Dry season form, which resembles a dried-up leaf. The Wet season form has a lighter brown colour and black and white spots.

Also here were some Dingy brown, Mycalesis perseus.

And Yellow-eyed Plane, Neptis praslini:

Even the dragonflies here had dark wings! This is the Painted Grasshawk, Neurothemis stigmatizans.

In the dim light of the rainforest canopy, there was an exception to this rule. This is the Red-banded Jezebel, Delias mysis.

We left Eubenangee in the late afternoon, as the sun was making a light show through the Wooroonooran range, a finale to our stay in Queensland. Next day we caught the plane to fly back to Canberra.

I have never singled out a single factor that I considcered crucial in Trump’s victory against Harris, because there were so many factors in play. These include immigration, the economy, wokeness among Dems (loudly decried by Trump’s ads), Harris’s failure to choose Josh Shapiro as a running mate, Biden’s failure to resign, the word-salady nature of Harris’s campaign and her refusal to answer questions like “How would your administration differ from Biden’s?”, and, of course, the blame people affix to Republicans, saying that they are simply misogynistic, stupid, and nationalistic yokels.  A change in any of these factors might have changed the election’s results, but, in truth, we don’t know. All we can offer is post facto analyses. That’s why I simply post a diversity of takes so readers can hear all viewpoints.

In response to one public post I recently put on Facebook about Laura Helmuth leaving Scientific American after going on an expletive-laden post-election rant that demonized Trump voters as “fucking fascists”, as well as “mean, dumb, and bigoted,” I got one comment that basically agreed with Helmuth:

I think the outcome of the election was abysmal, dreadful, and maybe the trans activists were a small part of the problem, but a much bigger problem is the poor state of American education and the country’s persistent religiosity. Again, not the fault of the left.

In other words, this commenter agreed with Helmuth, throwing into the mix the high religiosity of Americans.  I haven’t talked to enough people in my elite “bubble” to know how pervasive this feeling is.

In the 38-minute video below, a segment of Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” show, New York freshman Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres, only 36, says that the Democratic left basically scuppered the election by infusing the party with progressive ideology, refusing to address the two issues that really mattered to the middle- and lower-class voters: immigration and inflation. Torres represents the South Bronx, and his district is characterized by Wikipedia as “by one measure the poorest congressional district in the United States.”

A couple of quotes from Torres:

“My diagnosis is that we have to Stop pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter and Tik Tok than it is to the real world  and start listening to working-class people of color—working class people in general—who have historically been the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”

“The movement of ‘defund the police’ has done almost irreparable damage to the brand of the Democratic Party. . . . if the objective is to win elections in the real world, then we have to marginalize the far left in favor of working class Americans.”

Torres is not hesitant to criticize Biden or Harris, calling Biden’s actions on immigration “political malpractice”, which aroused clear signs of popular discontent well before the election.

Senor, who comes from a Jewish background, then brings up an issue that most commenters have neglected: the Jewish vote. As he notes, Jewish voters went for the GOP in higher proportions than previously, so that in this election Jewish voters were largely “up for grabs”—unsure about how to vote. Slogans from the far left like “globalize the intifada,” or “from the river to the sea,” says Torres, alienated Jewish voters, most of whom support Israel.

Torres theorizes that the Jewish vote may have been decisive in states like  Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, all of whom went for Trump. He adds that the says far left “chose to wage an antisemitic smear campaign in an attempt to sabotage Josh Shapiro, simply because he was a Jew who spoke out against the antisemitism after October 7. . . . The far left’s hatred for Donald Trump was exceeded only by its hatred for Israel and for any Jew who identifies unequivocally as pro Israel. And that to me was the ultimate example of how destructive the far left can be to our ability to win elections.”

Torres argues that Harris herself wasn’t anti-Israel, but a mainstream, pro-Israel centrist who was falsely painted as anti-Israel by the far left. Nevertheless, as you may know, Harris talked out of both sides of her mouth, always mentioning the suffering of Palestinian people when she defended Israel. As Senor says, Harris was, on the Gaza War, talking out of both sides of her mouth to appeal to both sides.  Senor argues that this kind of moral equivalency, or moral equivocation, cost Harris Jewish votes.

Torres chimes in eloquently, saying that in all politics, candidates must espouse “moral clarity”, and Jews didn’t feel Harris’s pious mouthings “in their kishkes“. (Torres gets extra points for the Yiddish.)

30 minutes in, Torres goes on an eloquent tear, including stuff like this:

“The fact that the far left would wage an antisemitic smear campaign against the most popular governor of the most pivotal swing state: that should have been a wake-up call that the far left is  willing to sacrifice what is best for the Democratic party on the altar of ideological purity and anti-Zionism.”

Senor adds that pro-Hamas and anti-Israel protests weren’t just a Jewish issue—that others look at people celebrating Hamas and Hezbollah and get turned off by the far left.  Torres thinks that the failure to deal with such protests undercut Americans’ sense of safety and convinced them that government cannot keep people safe. This, he sayus, was an indictment of the governments of both New York State and New York City.

In the end, since people of color, both middle-class and impecunious ones, are Torres’s constituents, he concludes that, at least in his district, the cost of living far, far outweighed their concern for a war 5,000 miles away.

I recommend this video not because it gives the reason why the Democrats were routed, but why they were routed in a poor, black district. And, to me at least, having sympathies for Israel, it makes Torres look like a guy with an exceedingly bright future in Democratic politics.

Watch it!

From Bluesky via Dr. Cobb:

I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief. I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I’d like to share a very small sample of the work I’ve been so proud to support (thread)

— Laura Helmuth (@laurahelmuth.bsky.social) 2024-11-14T19:23:01.434Z

You can follow the thread by clicking on the tweet.

One can only speculate about what happened, and that is unproductive. The facts are that Helmuth had a total social-media meltdown the night of the election (see her tweets here), for which she later apologized (see tweet here).  People called for her to be fired given the tenor of what she wrote, but I’ve never done that. We don’t know if she resigned or was fired, and it really makes no difference. I just hope the magazine hires a successor who can pivot the magazine back to doing what it’s famous for: having real scientists write engaging and instructive real science articles.

As for Helmuth, I wish her well. Everybody should have a second chance, and she does, after all, have a long history of science journalism in other places.

I keep thinking that Pamela Paul, who is consistently heterodox by criticizing the “progressive” left, will be given the boot as a regular NYT op-ed columnist. But I’m happy to see that she’s still in there swinging, this time criticizing the progressive (do I need to keep calling it that?) brand of transgender activism in favor of common sense. This is not a “transphobic” point of view, but a liberal and empathic one.

It so happens that Trump campaigned against the extremist, activist form of gender activism, and that helped him win, but aspects of his transgender policy, like cutting off federal funding for people transitioning at any age, are not palatable to many of us. But many of us still refuse to countenance the participation in women’s athletics of men identifying as women, or the placement of  trans women in rape-counseling centers, women’s shelters, or women’s prisons.  Those are the trivially few (but fair) exceptions to otherwise complete legal and moral equality of trans people, and favoring them does not make you transphobic.

Nevertheless, Paul is going to be called transphobic for standing up for reason.  In the article below she points out that her position, which is also mine, is classically liberal:

Democrats have long been on the right side of health care, scientific progress, women’s rights, gay rights and education. This is the party that truly cares about families and aims to address their needs, especially on the more pressing economic issues that have many Americans feeling that their backs are up against a wall. But on transgender issues specifically, one way to make clear that Democrats are listening to their constituencies would be to accept a broader range of perspectives.

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

 

Paul points out the inordinate effort the Trump campaign put into opposing “progressive” gender issues, and notes that those ads had an effect, even though only a a small proportion of Americans are transgender. That’s because the ads pointed out a strong tilt of Harris’s campaign (and Biden’s administration) towards wokeness, even though I was convinced when Biden was elected in 2020 that he would be more centrist.

Paul:

During the closing weeks of the election, Republican campaigns spent over $65 million on ads ridiculing, among several candidates, Kamala Harris for supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” and “illegal aliens,” all ending with variations on the tagline: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

At campaign events Trump attacked the idea of letting transgender girls and women play on female sports teams, and implied that children were having gender surgery in classrooms.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin, “and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation?”

Why did Trump and his allies devote so much attention and resources to something that seemingly affects a small number of people compared with top voter concerns like immigration, the economy, crime, abortion and democracy? Maybe because it worked. According to Harris’s leading super PAC, viewers shifted 2.7 percentage points toward Trump after watching one of these ads.

If that was true in general, then this issue alone would be sufficient to have swung the election towards Trump. But those who opposed Trump, including both Paul and me, have the concerns that I noted above, including as well some schools hiding children’s changed gender identities from their parents, as well the dangers of “gender-affirming care”:

Trump’s charge that children are undergoing gender transition surgeries in school is obviously absurd. But his words may have struck a chord with those who disagree with school districts that have teachers and administrators hide from parents that their children have adopted new gender identities. As The Times reported last year, one mother of a 15-year-old only accidentally discovered her child’s public school had been covering up the fact that for six months, her child had been going by a new name and using the boys’ bathroom.

In recent years, the concepts of gender identity and the possibility of being born in the wrong body have been introduced as early as elementary school. But a Washington Post poll found that 77 percent of Americans do not want teachers discussing these ideas in kindergarten through third grade and more than half oppose trans identity being talked about even in middle school.

The Democratic Party’s platform includes a pledge to defend gender-affirming care for minors. For people who are not well versed in the issue, this may sound like therapy to make children feel comfortable in their bodies; what it usually means in practice is allowing children to adopt a new name and pronouns, and in many cases, enabling them to change their bodies to resemble that of the opposite sex. This process can include puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones and, in some cases, surgery. More than 14,000 American children had gender-related medical interventions between 2019 and 2023.

While much of Europe has been pulling back from the gender-affirmation model, evidence has emerged that in the United States, proponents of this approach have let politics color science.

Trust in Democrats has also been hurt by their refusal to publicize data that might hurt the progressive form of gender activism, and that is offensive not just to the public, but also to scientists:

To cite two recent examples, one prominent advocate of gender-affirming care suppressed her own government-funded research because she feared it might be “weaponized” against her agenda, The Times reported. Meanwhile, Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary of health and human services chosen by President Biden, worked to get a transgender organization to remove age limits from its proposed guidelines for surgeries, including mastectomies and hysterectomies for minors, because she said they would give fuel to political foes, according to recently released court documents. After this disclosure, the Biden administration released a statement saying it opposed such surgeries for minors.

Yet the Department of Health and Human Services continues to say that gender-affirming care is “crucial” for young people and “has been shown to increase positive outcomes for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents” — even though the most comprehensive overview of research, which assessed all major American and global studies on the subject, found scant evidence of this. Even so, all the leading American medical associations continue to back gender-affirming care.

I have written about this before,(so has Paul) and it’s simply wrong to remove age limits for surgeries (I favor 18 or 21), much less to suppress research showing that gender-affirming care isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and doesn’t have the uniformly positive results that many advocates claim. Suppressing results that hurt your political platform, of course, is harmful because it injects ideology into science, but, more important, this impedes proper treatment of gender-dysphoric children.

In the end, people of good will are not “transphobic” in the sense of being bigoted against trans people. But there are limits—limits based on fairness and danger to women—in saying that transwomen should always be treated the same as biological women, and the same goes for transmen being treated as men. But those are exceptions, and I utterly reject people saying that those views are transphobic. As Paul says at the end:

Democrats should fight these tendencies and ensure that everyone, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, is respected and protected under existing law. Rather than double down on beliefs and policies that are out of step with the best medical evidence, Democrats and everyone else who support transgender rights should embrace a common-sense approach from their government, their schools, their mental health care workers and their doctors. Vulnerable people are depending on it.

May she have a long run at the NYT!

It is surely within the ambit of scientific journals to take stands on issues that affect the fields they cover, but endorsing political candidates is a dangerous matter. In 2020, for example, Nature endorsed Joe Biden for President (a first for them). It did not change the readers’ views of Biden, but it eroded the credibility of both the journal and science in general. This is according to a study by Floyd Zhang published in Nature Human Behavior, and is summarized in a later issue of Nature:

Overall, the study provides little evidence that the endorsement changed participants’ views of the candidates. However, showing the endorsement to people who supported Trump did significantly change their opinion of Nature. When compared with Trump supporters who viewed Nature’s formatting announcement, Trump supporters who viewed the endorsement rated Nature as significantly less well informed when it comes to “providing advice on science-related issues facing the society” (Fig. 1). Those who viewed the endorsement also rated Nature significantly lower as an unbiased source of information on contentious or divisive issues. There was no comparable positive effect for Biden supporters.

Zhang also found that viewing Nature’s political endorsement reduced Trump supporters’ willingness to obtain information about COVID-19 from Nature by 38%, when compared with Trump supporters who saw the formatting announcement. This finding echoes other work on how partisanship influences interest in scientific information5. Furthermore, Trump supporters who viewed the endorsement also rated US scientists, in general, as much less well informed and unbiased than did Trump supporters who viewed the formatting article. There was no comparable positive effect for Biden supporters.

This lesson was apparently lost on Nature‘s American competitor, Science, which (like the new Nature article below it), is calling for scientists to hold Trump to account on things like climate change, pandemics, and so on.  That’s fair enough, but then they politicize the whole thing by demonizing Trump from the outset, doing exactly the thing that will erode confidence in the journal and its pronouncements.

The article was written by Science‘s editor, Holden Thorp. He considers himself “progressive,” and has debated my partner in crime, Luana Maroja, on the role of politics in science (see also this video).  Thorp also devoted a column in his journal to criticizing a paper on which both Luana and I were coauthors, a paper on “In Defense of Merit in Science” by Abbot et al.

Click to read:

Here’s the way it starts, guaranteed to alienate Republicans:

The reelection of Donald Trump for a second, nonconsecutive term as US president—mirroring only Grover Cleveland’s 22nd and 24th presidencies after the Civil War—underscores a reality: Although his success stems partly from a willingness to tap into xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, nationalism, and disregard for truth, his message resonates with a large portion of the American populace who feel alienated from America’s governmental, social, and economic institutions. These include science and higher education. Winning back this disaffected group will require science leaders to foster and promote a more inclusive scientific landscape for all Americans and lay out how science can be successful under Trump.

How willing will readers be to take these lessons to heart if they are Republicans? (Granted, most readers, who are budding scientists, will be Democrats, but then they don’t need these lessons.) Who wants to be implicitly told that they are xenophobes, racists, sexists, and nationalists?

And there’s a statement whose first part is tautological and the second part is debatable:

Make no mistake, the political assaults on science stem largely from those who seek to undermine the truth for political gain, and this dynamic is the major contributor to declining trust in science.

Some of the declining trust in science is also due to scientists’ changing their views, as during the COVID crisis, but much of that was simply due to the acquisition of new information and is not the fault of scientists. We are supposed to change our minds when new data undercuts our previous stands. But that erosion is not due to scientists “undermining the truth for political gain”. There is no mention of Nature’s contribution to declining trust in science by simply endorsing a candidate in 2020.  Other erosion of trust occurs when scientists or journals make statements like “human biological sex is a spectrum,” something that is flatly wrong and contradicts what people already know.

The article above, then, is not only bound to do precisely what it’s decrying—eroding trust in science by politicizing it—but is also disingenuous by neglecting the causes of distrust in science that come from progressive politics, as well as from the infusion of politics in science.

The rest of the article is anodyne, urging scientists to change their minds when they’re wrong, not to engage in falsifying results (duh!), and not to blame “their students and postdocs for problems” (duh again!).  The article ends by taking another swipe at an administration that hasn’t yet begun:

The attacks [on science] are going to keep coming and probably accelerate for the next 4 years. As painful as that will be, it’s up to the scientific community to respond in a way that makes those blows less successful.

The “four years” implies that the Trump administration will be bad for science. That may well be true, but we don’t know yet! Here we have journals playing Chicken Little.

Nature, already stung by its endorsement of Biden in 2020, didn’t endorse anyone in the last election, but might as well have endorsed Biden if you read this article. The piece also contains a survey showing that nearly 40% of  Nature readers in the U.S. would consider moving out of the country if Trump won. I wonder how many actually will move?

At any rate, the new Nature article below also evinces fear of the Trump administration, but does so in a fear-mongering way that I wouldn’t employ were I editor. It also gives anodyne advice. But it’s not as bad as the Science article:

A few excerpts:

When Donald Trump was first elected to the US presidency in 2016, Nature advised scientists to constructively engage with Trump. We said that the incoming president’s contrary approach to evidence, among other things, had no place in modern society. We added that the science community had a responsibility to step up and work with the president and his new administration so that they govern on the basis of research and evidence.

. . .The United States has now re-elected Donald Trump as president. Many researchers have told Nature that they are in despair, seeing the election result as a step backwards for facts, reason, knowledge and civility.

Last week, Nature said that the United States needs a leader who respects evidence. The incoming administration must embody this principle. On behalf of the research community, we will hold it to account if it falls short.

We hope that the incoming administration will govern in the best interests of the United States. That means holding on to the best of what the previous administration did, and not returning to some of the policies of the first Trump presidency.

Is it journalism to cite the “many scientists who are in despair” without mentioning that some scientists (granted, a minority, given our political leanings) are happy?  This is a slanted take.

The article then calls out the Trump administration (properly) for its weakness on recignizing climate change and for threatening to defund the World Health Organization.  But then it becomes anodyne like the Science article above, and ends on a lame note:

The research community must engage with the new administration with courage, tenacity, strength and unity. At the same time, scientists in the United States must know that they are not alone. The research community is a global one. We need to stand together and stand strong for the challenges that are to come. And that will mean continuing to speak facts to power.

“Stand together” clearly means “stand together against the Trump administration,” and I think that’s obvious to any reader with eyes.

Readers here know that I abhor Trump, but even more than that I abhor the ideological erosion of my beloved science. In four years Trump will be gone (hopefully to be replaced by someone who’s not mentally ill), but any damage done to the reputation of science by journals rushing to take sides will last a lot longer.

Send in your good photos, please, as every day the tank gets lower.

But today we have a text-plus-photo essay by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior on one of his favorite subjects: plant pollination. Athayde’s comments are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: hover through the fog and filthy air (The Weird Sisters)

Most angiosperms (flowering plants) need an agent to move pollen from one flower to another. This service could be provided by the wind, water, bats, birds, or, for the overwhelming majority of cases, insects. But a plant must advertise itself to attract visitors to its flowers. Visual traits such as colour, shape and size are effective lures, but for short distances only because most pollinating insects see as well as Mr Magoo: their visual acuity ranges from centimetres to a few metres, at best. A red flower must have a diameter of at least 26 cm to be recognised by a honey bee (Apis mellifera) 1 m away (Chittka & Raine, 2006). Insects’ vision is mediocre during daytime and goes down to irrelevant at night, except for a few specialised nocturnal species. Other sensory signals such as temperature, texture and even electrical fields are involved in flower recognition. But to attract insects from afar, plants rely on scent.

The majority of flowering plants produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a group of organic chemicals (that is, they all contain carbon) that quickly evaporate and disperse in the air. VOCs can act as herbivore deterrents, but a huge variety of them attract pollinators. These volatiles, released by petals or other plant tissues, persist long enough to reach insects and guide them to the flowers, but not for too long so that they don’t accumulate in the air and overwhelm insects’ sensorial capacity. Most of the attractant VOCs are ‘flowery’ scents such as benzyl acetone, which is one of the most abundant aromatic lures in flowers. You are likely to have smelled it from raspberries, cocoa butter, soaps and perfumes.

Ladies making potpourri, a source of benzyl acetone © Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911), Wikimedia Commons:

Pollinators are experts in detecting particular compounds from odour blends. And crucially for the pollination angle, they learn to associate specific fragrances with food, so they return repeatedly to its flowery source.

Tracking VOCs seems like a convenient and efficient way to get to pollen and nectar, but there are complexities involved. Scents released by a flower do not travel in a straight line the way light and sounds do. Air turbulence disperses, dilutes and mixes compounds, so that an odour plume is not a well-defined strand of airborne chemicals. And yet, pollinators manage to sort out the chaotic environs and make a run for the smell’s origin. Watch fruit flies navigating confidently through a turbulent atmosphere.

Top: a section of an odour plume, where the shaded area is the projection of an average conical plume. Crosswind transport and odour concentration decrease rapidly outside the cone. Bottom: a two-dimensional section of two blending plumes © Celani et al., 2014:

We don’t have a complete understanding of the ways pollinators track scents to find flowers, but we do know that the presence of certain compounds, their ratios in volatile blends, and the magnitude of the olfactory signal are important. The processes involved are complex, specific, and vulnerable to disturbances. Such as those created by a diesel-guzzling SUV driven to the farmers’ market for the purchase of locally grown organic carrots.

The engine invented by Rudolf Diesel (1858-1913) is the most fuel-efficient internal combustion engine because it converts more heat to mechanical work than any of its alternatives. It is also reliable and sturdy, so it was quickly adopted by industry, agriculture and transport to become the main source of power that keeps the world going. The diesel engine largely did away with coal and revolutionised the world’s economy by generating power efficiently and inexpensively. But its allure suffered a serious blow in the 2010s, when the first studies about its collateral effects came to light.

The combustion (burning) of diesel fuel results in a complex mixture of water, gases and aerosols. Study after study have shown that some of these by-products such as particulate matter (soot), nitric oxide (NO), carbon monoxide (CO) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx), are serious health hazards. They cause all sorts of ailments, from lung inflammation to exacerbation of emphysema and asthma. The World Health Organisation considers diesel exhausts carcinogenic agents as dangerous as asbestos. As if this evil cocktail wasn’t bad enough, it also promotes the formation of other harmful compounds such as ozone (O3). In the upper atmosphere, this gas is essential for life on Earth because it blocks most of the ultraviolet radiation from the sun. At ground level, ozone is a pollutant resulting from chemical reactions between NOx and VOCs in the presence of sunlight. These ground level VOCs have nothing to do with plants; rather, they come from solvents, biomass burning, industrial processes and, most importantly, incomplete fuel combustion.

Formation of ground level ozone © DANMUSISI, Wikimedia Commons:

Ozone is bad for us and bad for insects. It degrades plant-emitted VOCs and changes the ratios of compounds in a scent blend. As a result, pollinators detect VOCs at shorter distances, become confused, or worse: they may no longer recognise flowers’ chemical signals (Farré-Armengol et al., 2015). In a laboratory setting, adding ozone at concentrations commonly found in rural areas to the scent produced by the jasmine tobacco (Nicotiana alata) disrupted the attraction of one of its main flower visitors, the tobacco hawkmoth (Manduca sexta) (Cook et al., 2020).

Effect of ozone pollution © Langford et al., 2023:

The pale evening primrose (Oenothera pallida) grows in sandy and rocky habitats in the arid regions of northern Mexico and western USA. Its flowers release a scent loaded with monoterpenes, a class of chemicals found in various herbs, spices, conifers and fruits. Monoterpenes attract several visitors including the tobacco hawkmoth and the white-lined sphinx (Hyles lineata), which are two of the plant’s main pollinators. These moths have a keen sense of smell and can track pale evening primrose flowers from several kilometres away. But this plant-moth interaction can be severely disrupted by the nitrate radical NO3, a gas resulting from the reaction of ozone with NO2, the latter spewed by wildfires, power plants and diesel engines. Monoterpenes break down quickly in the presence of NO3, drastically reducing the reach of olfactory cues that moths rely on to locate flowers. In wind tunnel experiments, nocturnal levels of NO3 typically found in urban settings caused a 70% drop in number of flower visitations, resulting in a 28% reduction in fruit set (Chan et al., 2024). Sunlight degrades NO3, so this chemical is primarily a nighttime pollutant – bad news for moths and other nocturnal pollinators.

A white-lined sphinx visiting a pale evening primrose flower © Ron Wolf, US National Science Foundation:

Image of hawkmoth (Hyles lineata) pollinating Oenothera flower. Researchers at the University of Washington found that nitrate radicals (NO3) in the air degrade the scent chemicals released by a common wildflower, drastically reducing the scent-based cues that nighttime pollinators rely on to locate the flower.

With the industrial revolution, urban spaces became choked with foul air. People in charge slowly woke up to the problem, and today many countries drastically reduced atmospheric pollution thanks to ever improving filtration technologies and strict regulations. Despite these advances, diesel exhaust and other emissions remain major environmental problems, particularly in countries undergoing rapid economic growth such as China and India.

Global emissions of NOx, particulate matter with a diameter of 10 μm or less (PM10), ammonia (NH3) and global exposure to tropospheric O3. Tg: teragrams, ppb: parts per billion © Duque & Steffan-Dewenter, 2024:

The progressive deterioration of worldwide air quality is a serious threat to human health and certainly doesn’t bode well for plant reproduction, although the magnitude of this effect can only be guessed at. We already knew that clean air is vital for our eyes and lungs: more and more evidence tell us that it is also important to pollination services.

Haze over London caused by air pollution. Bad for us and for pollinators © shirokazan, Wikimedia Commons:

I passed these leaves on the way home, which immediately recalled this song about the waning of the year—and of life.  And the most plaintive version, of course, is by Willie Nelson:

I noticed last week that the followers of my Twitter account had dropped by several hundred, and then I realized that a lot of people are going to the alternative site Bluesky, presumably because they don’t like Elon Musk because he gave a lot of dosh to Trump (and now has a job in the Trump Administration).

Matthew went from “X” to Bluesky a while back, and has been telling me to move as well. He said this:

People aren’t leaving (just) because they hate Musk – the site [X] doesn’t work. Posts aren’t seen, even if you follow people your timeline gets swamped with blue tick reply guy crap. To see what people post you have to go onto their timeline. And fewer and fewer people are there. You have 40,000 followers [JAC: it’s 36,400] – how many interactions with your tweets? How many of those followers are either a) human or b) active? And – though this isn’t why you use it – the fun component [like the tweet he sent about fat cheetah cubs]) has disappeared from X completely. The Guardian has stopped posting there. User numbers are dropping. Not a useful or fun place to be any more.

Yes, there appear to be advantages of Bluesky, which seem to include these:

1. Everybody seems to be going there, though I haven’t done any systematic checking, as I don’t formally follow anyone on Twitter
2. You can directly embed the posts (they are apparently called “skeets”) into my website without going through the complicated process of embedding Tweets
3. It appears to  have more fun stuff on it, though I like a mixture of fun and serious stuff (e.g., animals and politics)

The downsides seem less important, but include two:

1. How do I get all the people who follow me now to go there? I suppose by telling them on X.
2. I am old and lazy, and it takes a bit of effort—though not much—to open an account.

I don’t particularly feel compelled to leave X just because Elon Musk runs it, as I have no strong feelings about that, but I suppose I’ll move after I check Bluesky. But I wonder about readers’ experience with these two cites. Please give your take below (not advice on whether to move, but the relative advantages of the two sites). Which site do you use or occupy? Are there any other advantages, issues or features that I don’t know about?

Eric Bailey, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “reason,” the barmaid suggests that both Jesus and Mo are going to hell. I am puzzled; why would they? They are prophets and, in Jesus’s case, the son of God/God. 

Today we have photos from South Africa taken by reader Phil Frymire on a recent trip. Phil’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them.

Here are some more photos from an August trip to Timbavati and Mala Mala in South Africa that occurred at the same time as our host’s visit. I previously submitted some leopards, lions, elephants and rhinos. Rounding out the Big Five, here are some African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) along with some spotted hyenas (Crocuta Crocuta), Burchell’s zebras (Equus quagga burchellii) and Northern giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis).

A resting buffalo:

A herd of buffalo. The male in the foreground has an impressive “boss” (the area where the horns grow together in the middle):

A “dagga boy” as Jerry’s guide Dan called them. Our guide Mike called them “retired”. These are old males that no longer travel with the herds. They will likely be taken by lions (but see the photo below). This one is accompanied by a red-billed oxpecker (Buphagus erythroryncha):

When we first encountered these lions at Mala Mala, they were walking with their left sides facing us. One of the females was limping pitifully. After we drove around for a better look, it became obvious why she was struggling. If you look carefully at the female on the right you will see a gaping, horrific wound on her right front leg running from the shoulder to the elbow. She never emerged from the bushes while we observed her so I couldn’t get a clear photo. Mike was very confident that the injury was caused by a buffalo horn. Predators fight for a meal, but prey fight for their life. Predators don’t always emerge from the fracas unscathed. Revenge of a dagga boy?:

Profile of a spotted hyena:

The same hyena intently staring at us:

Hyena with a black-backed jackal (Lupulella mesomelas) in the foreground:

The same hyena literally eating bone. The crushing sounds were very impressive:

A beautiful zebra:

Posing above a waterhole:

Why do zebras have stripes? Jerry mentioned in one of his posts that the scientific evidence supports the hypothesis that the stripes deter biting flies. I asked our guide Mike what he thought. He favored the idea that the stripes break up the body outline and confuse predators. He didn’t cite any scientific papers, but he did cite this view of a mother and foal:

Another mother and foal at a waterhole:

Four male giraffes:

Frontal view of a male showing the thick ossicones that they use in combat with other males:

Profile of a giraffe with an oxpecker on its neck:

Today is a video day since the news is the depressing same-old-same old. Instead, I found this amazing three-minute video of a deep-sea (“benthic”) octopus, Graneledone boreopacifica, who brooded her eggs for more than FOUR YEARS (to be precise, 53 months). That is by far the record for any animal, as the video says. (The previous record for any animal was 14 months.)  Octopuses are smart, and I wonder if she got bored sitting in the same spot for all that time.

Do realize that she almost certainly had nothing to eat over that period.

As far as I know, this guarding/brooding behavior is known in all octopuses that have been studied, and the sad part is that after the babies hatch, the mother simply withers and dies. This means that females reproduce only once.

 

h/t: Matthew

Everybody has their own theory about the most important factor leading to the Democrats’ loss a week ago.  People blame Biden, Harris, the Republicans (whose supporters are characterized as fascistic racists), the left-wing press, and the wokeness of Democrats, which pushed Harris and the party away from the center towards the “progressive” (far Left) side.

In the 40-minute video below, Sam Harris zeroes in on the last factor—the fulminating wokeness of Democrats. Make no mistake about it, Harris was a vehement opponent of Trump, but here he is—as I often do—noting the problems with “Democratic” views that make them lose elections.  In this case, it’s wokeness, especially the brand centered on “trans” issues.

Sam’s overall take: the Left “did not pivot to the political center in a way that the voters found credible.”  He adds that the planks of Harris’s platform were “rotten”, especially those supporting identity politics. As he says,  “identity politics is over, nobody wants it.”

In particular—and for this Sam will be excoriated for transphobia, though he’s not transphobic—he says that “activism about transgender politics has deranged our politics as long as Trump has been in politics.”  Harris emphsizes that he supports transgender rights (meaning “legal rights”), but thinks the electorate rejects the idea that males identifying as females should be competing in sports against biological females. Neither do I and neither does Sam, but he adds that “if [that] sounds like transphobia to you, then you are the problem.”  He goes on to characterize gender activism as a “new religion” or a “cult”, but again emphasizes that it is the excesses of that movement that turns him off just as it repelled potential voters for Harris. (Sam says, as an aside, that “We should help those who are truly gender dysphoric.”)

Where readers might disagree is Sam’s emphasis on gender activism as THE factor that turned off centrists and moderates, and may have swung the election. As he says,

 “A shocking percentage of Democrats imagine that all the controversy about trans rights and gender identity in kids is just right wing bigotry, and a non-issue politically, whereas it is obvious that for millions of Americans it might as well have been the only issue in this election–not because they’re transphobic assholes, but because they simply do not accept the new metaphysics, and even the new biology, mandated by trans activists and the institutions that htye have successfully bullied and captured. . . . Congratulations, Democrats: you have found the most annoying thing in the fucking galaxy and hung it around your necks.”

Sam has apparently abandoned the calmness accompanying the meditation he practices, for the piece is larded with uncharacteristic profanity, including Sam’s peevish claim that if we Democrats continue this way, “You’re going to get President Candace Fucking Owens some day.”  But I applaud the increasing use of profanity in such podcast, for that’s the way people actually talk.

Sam then appends the claim that cultural issues, not inflation or the border, may have been the crucial factor that swung the election towards Trump—although of course there may have been many factors, each of which, if mitigated, could have changed the course of a close election. These include the following:

a.) The degradation of major cities run by Democratic mayors, who don’t do anything about homelessness or pervasive theft in retail stores.

b.) The lack of policing or criticism of policing in many places. As he says, officials  “won’t police the streets but they police the language.”

c.) The failure of Democrats to take Islamism, and terrorist organizations like Hamas, sufficiently seriously. “Democrats needs to figure out,” he says,  “that civilization needs to be defended from barbarism.” While he notes that both Biden and Harris did support Israel, during the election they—and by this he means Kamala Harris—”talked out of both sides of their mouths.” Indeed she did, for I paid close attention.

In the end, Sam concludes that “Democratic moral confusion cost the Democrats millions of votes.” While you may say that equivocation and both-sides-of-the-mouth talking is the heart of politics, Sam is saying that the moral rectitude was not rocket science, but comprised centrist and populist views that wokeness prevented Democrats from espousing.  And the GOP picked up on this moral weakness, making it the subject of many pro-Trump ads like the one below.

I recommend that you listen to Sam’s audio here. I’ve put two extra items below it.

Here’s one of the Trump ads that excoriated Democrats for wokeness, concentrating on Kamala’s support for government-funded gender surgery for incarcerated immigrants who entered the country illegally (yes, she did say that):

And here’s a kerfuffle at CNN showing how vehemently some liberals take gender activism. One guy goes ballistic when the speaker, Republican Shermichael Singleton, suggests that boys (who assume the female gender) shouldn’t be able to compete in in women’s athletics, saying “they’re not boys”. And then the room explodes, with the moderator demanding “respect” for that view and suggesting that the athletics ban is “transphobic”.  Singleton keeps saying that this is what “regular people” think, and he’s right.  It’s the insistence on that kind of misguided activism that, says Harris, is precisely why the Democrats lost. Well, weigh in below.

“I am NOT going to listen to transphobia at this table!”

CNN panelist loses their mind over “slur” used by Republican strategist during trans sports debate. pic.twitter.com/5PXnSJW4A0

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) November 9, 2024

 

Today’s photos come from reader Rik Gern of Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Earlier this year I sent you a few batches of pictures of fungi taken in Wisconsin’s Northwoods in September of last year, mostly from Copper Falls State Park. These pictures are from the same trip, but with the camera pulled back to reveal larger growth and let the region show off its fall colors. Unfortunately I was not using the Seek by iNaturalist app with these shots, so I’ve had to try to identify species by comparing my pictures to images found using a search engine. Consider all species identification tentative!

The trip began near Eagle River, an area full of small lakes. Fortunately, the fall colors were in full force!:

Along the way we stopped by the Smith Rapids covered bridge in Fifield.  The bridge is not the rustic relic of the past one might expect; it was built in 1991! Here it is, next to a nice looking balsam fir (Abies balsamea):

Copper Falls State Park has eight hiking trails, totaling seventeen miles. With limited time and accompanied by my 89 year old mother, we opted for the shortest trail, Doughboys Nature Trail, which is is a little less than two miles long. As you enter the trail, the woods are heavily populated by white pine (Pinus strobus), though maple trees are also in abundance, as can be seen by their leaves along the path.

Here is a lot of young growth, mostly white pine, birch and maple:

Paper birch   (Betula papyrifera) gives a light touch to the woods:

The mushrooms sprouting from this recently fallen tree show how quickly the forest recycles itself. Maple saplings are all over, ready to replace the falling trees:

Here is a white pine that didn’t even bother to fall down before rotting away!

A stairway leads to an observation tower where you can get a more elevated perspective of the trees.

I’m not sure if these are red maple (Acer rubrum) or sugar maple (Acer saccharum).  I don’t know botany, but I know what I like!:

Here are some smaller maples. The picture wouldn’t cooperate with me, so I played around to give it sort of an impressionistic look:

For all the wide-eyed gazing I did, I’m sure I missed more than I saw. Though I didn’t observe any animal life, I was no doubt observed by many woodland critters who remained hidden to me. That thought inspired this image (taken from the same stand of young maples as the previous picture) and an accompanying haiku:

Predator and prey
Blending with nature’s patterns
Playing hide and seek

Someone sent me this old video of Mr. Rogers singing a song about sex, and oy, would he be excoriated if he did this today. In fact, they wouldn’t even let this song on the air. :”Boys are boys from the beginning; only girls can be the mommies,” etc. That just won’t fly in today’s world!

When I sent it to a friend, I got the response, “You know the world is fucked up when Mr. Rogers would be cancelled.”

Abigail Shrier is the author of two books that I’ve recommended, the first of which was predictably attacked by progressives:  Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Her second book was Bad Therapy: Why the Kids aren’t Growing Up.  You may remember that ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio broadcast that he wanted to get the first book banned (yes, an ACLU lawyer), as he considered it “transphobic”.  And you can find my review of Bad Therapy here.

Now Shrier, who is basically an investigative reporter, has written a long piece for the Free Press about how secondary-school teachers throughout America are secretly propagandizing kids to favor Palestine and hate Israel (and Jews) in the Gaza War. You can read the piece by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived here.

The propagandizing is ubiquitous, from California to New Jersey, and is fostered by often-“progressive” teachers unions.  Because it’s illegal to do this (as Shrier notes, “public school teachers have no First Amendment right to express their political views in the classroom”), teachers often do it in secret, even taking kids on field trips to anti-Israel events without broadcasting it. An example:

In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students.

But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion?

“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”

Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”

The crowd burst into approving laughter.

Isn’t that hilarious? But of course, this kind of stuff eventually produces anti-Semitism in school, leading to the taunting and bullying of Jewish students (Shrier gives examples).

Worse than these one-time incidents, however, it he constant infusion of antisemitism in to the school curricula. It particularly infects “ethnic studies” classes, required for students in states like California.There we saw a huge fracas about antisemitic materials in the ethnic studies curriculum, a fracas that’s still going on. Here’s a summary of what Shrier found in her swing across America:

Four years ago, I was among the first journalists to expose the widespread incursion of gender ideology into our schools. Once-fringe beliefs about gender swiftly took over large swaths of society partly thanks to their inclusion in school curricula and lessons.

Today, extensive interviews with parents, teachers, and non-profit organizations that monitor the radicalism and indoctrination in schools convinced me that demonization of Israel in American primary and secondary schools is no passing fad. Nor is it confined to elite private schools serving hyper-progressive families. As one Catholic parent who exposes radicalism in schools nationwide on the Substack Undercover Mother said to me: “They’ve moved on from BLM to gender unicorn to the new thing: anti-Israel activism. Anti-Israel activism is the new gender ideology in the schools.”

Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology. And very few educators are standing against it.

Much of the anti-Israel vituperation slides into classrooms through a subject called ethnic studies. In 2021, California became the first state to adopt it as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Legislatures of more than a dozen states have already followed suit, incorporating ethnic studies into K–12 curricula.

Here’s an image shown to students at Lowell High School as part of their Ethnic Studies class. (From The Free Press)

In principle, these laws require schools to teach the histories and cultures of African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Native Americans. In practice, they grant teachers license to incorporate lessons that often divide civilization into “oppressed” and “oppressor.” A primary fixation of ethnic studies is demonizing Israel.

Activist-led organizations readily supply instructional materials. Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA; creators of the Teach Palestine Project), Teaching While Muslim, Jewish Voice for Peace, Unión del Barrio, and the Zinn Education Project regularly furnish distorted histories with eliminationist rhetoric against Israel.

Especially in the year since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, the anti-Israel materials have become pervasive. It’s not surprising that they are found in world history and current events lessons. But demonization of Israel is now taught in art, English, math, physics, and social-emotional learning classes.

At the teachers’ meeting described above, they pondered the question of how to teach this stuff “without getting fired”. They’re still doing it because although it’s forbidden to propagandize students in class, it’s up to the schools themselves to find out about it and control it, and they don’t seem much interested. Also, the parents have to KNOW that this stuff is going on and get involved, and parents are reluctant to do that. Further, schools, though required to release instructional material to parents, have fought such releases.  Finally, states can set school curricula, and if those curricula include anti-Israel tropes, as in California, then teachers are free to teach that material.

At any rate, here are a few anecdotes and some material that Shrier got with the help of the Free Press:

A Jewish ninth grader, “Sam,” attends a Bay Area high school where, after October 7 of last year, posters declaring, “Ceasefire Now!” and “Free Palestine” began appearing on the walls. Because Sam’s family considers itself very progressive, Sam was not bothered by the posters.

Then one of Sam’s friends sent him a long diatribe that read in part (spelling from the original), “I would just like to say that u are an ignorant ass white ass privileged boy u are so privileged to not b one of those children being killed rn in Gaza…solidarity and indigenous solidarity is something you could never understand as you have grown up your whole life with no culture and money and you been brainwashed by isreali and western media the world stands with Palestine and frankly it’s embarrassing to be anything different, when mostly all people of color stand with Palestine and you stand with ISREAL, that’s how yk ur in the wrong bud oppressed people stand with oppressed people in solidarity SOMETHING YOU COULDD NEVER UNDERSTAND.” The text concluded: “FREE PALESTINE TILL ITS BACKWARDS BITCH!!!!”

I spoke to Sam’s mother, and her perception was that the message didn’t sound like her son’s friend. The jargon and gist appeared to come from adults. Only the self-righteous fury and the message’s abusive conclusion belonged to the boy.

another:

I also spoke to the mother of “Dana,” a sixth-grade girl at a Bay Area elementary school. In a social studies unit on ancient civilizations last year, the teacher encouraged students to share their “feelings” about “Israel and Palestine.” Students shouted: “Fuck Israel!” and “Israel sucks!” Dana was the only Jewish child in the class.

Please, sir, can I have some more?:

One of Danny’s teachers posted a running tally, in the front of the classroom, of the number of Palestinians allegedly killed by the IDF. She says, “So every day, when my son came into class, it would say how many people Israel has killed today.” (The Free Press has confirmed this with photographic evidence.)

Danny, who is black, said to her, “If there was an image of a noose, we would not hear the end of it. There would be protests, people would be going crazy. But it’s always okay if it’s anything anti-Jewish.”

One more bowl of porridge:

At a Fort Lee, New Jersey, high school, world history teachers confiscated students’ cell phones before giving a lesson that presented Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than an internationally designated terrorist organization. Teachers also showed a map of Israel that falsely presented Palestinians as the sole indigenous natives of Israel. (The Free Press has obtained a copy of the presentation. Click here to see it.)

Here are two slides from that lesson dealing with Hamas (“a resistance movement”) and October 7 of last year.

I’ll finish with an excerpt that has two more audiovisuals:

Kaplan says, “In math class, they can be studying charts and are told, ‘Look at this pie chart of the number of Palestinians murdered. This slice shows the number of Israelis that were killed.’ ”

That example was actually presented to elementary school students in New Haven Unified School District, California. The chart is labeled “People Killed Since September 29, 2000” divided into Palestinians and Israelis and asks: “What information is this pie graph showing us?” The obvious answer: Far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis.

What “noticings do you have?” (Can’t these people even write?)

Image obtained by The Free Press.

Another mother sent me an example of an assignment used in a physics class at Cupertino High School, which asked students to consider the “Effect of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza” on climate change. (Arrow is mine)

Image obtained by The Free Press. At schools where anti-Israel propaganda is promulgated, schoolchildren are turning against their Jewish classmates. Dozens of interviews with parents, teachers, and people at nonprofits revealed that discussions of Israel quickly become personal, and American Jews—even children—are the inevitable targets.

All of this guarantees that America will become yet more antisemitic in the future as these kids grow up and assume positions of power—or become teachers themselves.

I’d like to point out one more thing: I am not aware of teachers spreading anti-Palestinian propaganda like this, so it’s not as if Shrier is just singling out “her side” (she’s Jewish) for support. This kind of brainwashing, and nearly all the riots on college campuses the past academic year, are anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. It’s not hard to understand why when you realize that Jews are now regarded as white “settler colonialists”, and Palestinians as “oppressed people of color without agency:—a trope that has been instilled in both college and secondary-school students for a long time. This trope is spread by DEI organizations.

Thanks to some generous readers, we now have about four batches of wildlife photos. But we always need more, you know.

I’m delighted today to welcome back ace bird photographer Colin Franks, who contributed a batch of photos that haven’t been published here. Colin’s website is here, his Facebook page is here (lots of new bird photos), and his Instagram page is here.  His text and IDs are indented below:

It’s been a little over three years since my diagnosis of PLS (a form of ALS).  In spite of major changes in my life due to that, and a steady decline of my balance and walking, I continued with my bird photography as long as I could.  Back in July of this year I made my final post on FB and IG, as I could no longer negotiate the terrain required.  It was a very sad time.  About a week ago I discovered and purchased an “All-Terrain” walker, and this has allowed me to once again visit some of my old haunts.  There is still much in the way of gnarlier terrain that I cannot traverse, but at least I can keep on a little while with this great pastime. Here are some older shots not yet shared on WEIT.

American Kestrel (Falco sparverius):

Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas):

Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus):

Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias):

Barred Owl (Strix varia):

Long-billed Curlew (Numenius americanus):

Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna):

Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum):

Marbled Godwit (Limosa fedoa):

Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica):

Western Sandpiper (Calidris mauri):

Black-bellied Plover (Pluvialis squatarola):

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus):

Here’s Bill Maher’s 7-minute comedy/news bit from Friday’s “Real Time.”  The title of the episode refers, of course, to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s statement at a Trump Rally in NYC: “”There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”  It was not funny, and did not go down well, though of course nothing hurts Trump.

In this bit Maher is calling attention to the human-caused “death of the ocean”.  He avers that un-polluting the ocean will be much harder than curbing global warming.  And what we see on the surface (there’s one “garbage island” the size of France!) is only the tip of the iceberg:  70% of the garbage, much of it plastic, sinks to the bottom.

Curiously, Maher avoids discussing the election results save to say that Harris was part of the only party that even deals with the environment, yet she never mentioned pollution and even reversed her earlier anti-fracking position. Maher clearly sees oceanic pollution—and environmental pollution in general—as critical but ignored issuea.  Recycling, he says, is a crock, since only 9% of plastic gets recycled.

. . . and here’s his 3½-minute monologue about the election itself:

From January 10-12 (Friday through Sunday), there will be a substantial conference at the University of Southern California on censorship in science, and by that they mean all the sciences: STEMM.  You can see details about the conference at the website below (click on screenshot), and view the preliminary program here.  (There was an sketchier announcement of the conference in August, but now things are in their final stages.)

You can register here; the fee is $200 ($100 for students), and that’s not a bad deal given that the registration includes lunches, coffee breaks, and receptions with drinks and food.  And the participants include, beyond a passel of working scientists, people like Jonathan Rauch, Jesse Singal, FIRE President Greg Lukianoff and, mirabile dictu, Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Science.

And of course there’s this by way of self-promotion (end of the meeting):

Yes, I team up again with my partner in crime Dr. Maroja, on a two-person panel moderated by UC Berkeley molecular biologist Julia Schaletzky.

I hear that space is filling up, so if you want to register, and have the time and ability to go to USC (in LA), I recommend registering ASAP.