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

September-October tidepools (Northern California).

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

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

Phyllocomus hiltoni with frills!

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

Porychthis notatus: close-up:

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

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

Operculum close-up:

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

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

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

Close-up of scales:

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

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

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

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

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

An excerpt giving the tenor of their rage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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