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In light of the absence of news as well as my recurring insomnia, which has made me unable to brain, I’m posting a list of what I consider the three best cuisines in the world.  What I mean by this is that if I were constrained to eat only one nation’s cuisine for the rest of my life, these are the three I’d choose among.

Now I have experience with all of these on their home turf (and I’m also a decent Szechuan cook), so I know I’d be happy with them. One notable omission is Italian, although it’s only because I’m not familiar with the cuisine and have been to Italy only a handful of times. I suspect if I knew it better, that would be on the list.  Here we go, and in no particular order:

French (all regions)
Indian (all regions, particularly the north where wheat and meat dominate over rice and vegetables, but I would never neglect the great food of southern India as well).
Chinese (again, all regions, though Hunanese and Szechuan are my favorites)

I’ll add that I am not looking for haute cuisine, particularly in France. The dishes that regular people eat are the dishes I want.

Sadly, I see Jewish food as constituting a mediocre cuisine. Yes, some Jewish food is great—latkes, pastrami, and (if you consider it Jewish) cheesecake—but you can’t eat just that for the rest of your life.

Of course you should weigh in below. And remember, this is a purely subjective list, but it is based on considerable experience.

A specimen of French food: a cassoulet:

BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Indian: A biryani, Hyderabad style

Mahi Tatavarty, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And mapo dofu, one of the glories of Szechuan cuisine (I ate it at the place in Chengdu where it was said to have been created):

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Several people, whom I won’t name, have taken to commenting more often than is suggested by Da Roolz. Let me reiterate the relevant one: Rool #9:

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

This is a guideline, not a hard-and-fast dictum, but be aware that comments should be informative, advance the discussion, and aren’t there just so you can tell the world that you exist.  Comments that say “+1” are particularly egregious because they say nothing more than “I agree,” evincing a laziness that can’t even produce those two words! (And even “I agree” is not that useful.)

Thanks!

 

 

I can’t resist calling your attention to a 2016 article on free will, mainly because it appeared in The Atlantic—a magazine many here (including me) admire. And as I’m reading Matthew Cobb’s terrific new biography of Francis Crick, I see that Crick was a determinist like me, though he realized that different phenomena require different levels of analysis. Crick didn’t think that free will was even worth considering, and avoided it like the plague though he was deeply concerned with consciousness. His research program for understanding the brain is deeply deterministic and pretty reductionist. But read Matthew’s book for yourself.

In view of Crick’s ideas that I’ve just learned about, and a reader calling my attention to this article, which I haven’t seen, it’s worth seeing how author Stephen Cave deals with determinism.  You can read the article by clicking below, but since it’s likely to be paywalled you can find it archived here.

The article’s main points are these, two of which are summarized in the title and subtitle (my take):

1.)  We have no such thing as free will in the libertarian sense of “you could have done other than what you did”

2.) But studies show that if you reject free will, you are likely to cheat, be lazy and fatalistic, and reject the idea of moral responsibility

3.)  To avoid these injurious social effects, we must confect a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better. This can enhance “autonomy” (not “agency” or “autonomy in the sense of ‘ability to govern oneself'”, neither of which we have) but “autonomy” in the sense of “adhering to behaviors that help our selves and society”.

Now #3 may look like a bogus solution, and author Steven Cave sort of admits that, but we can clearly improve our behaviors with the right carrots and sticks.  It’s a misconception about determinism that people’s behavior can’t be changed. Clearly, the influence of others, blaming and praising people for actions they consider respectively injurious and admirable, can, over time, change your neurons in such a way that you begin behaving in ways better for you and for society.  The fly in this ointment is the infinite regression of determinism: whether and how we even try to change people’s minds is itself determined by people’s genes and environments. But I won’t go down that rabbit hole here.

Cave’s solution is at least better than that of compatibilists like Dan Dennett, who simply redefined free will so that we could tell people they had it. Since Dan adhered to point #2, thinking that belief in strict determinism was bad for everyone, he wrote two books designed to convince people that they had free will in a meaningful way. I found his arguments unconvincing.  Dan later stressed that he was not making this “little people’s” argument, one similar to making the “belief in belief” claim that even though there’s no God, it’s good for society to be religious. But in Dan’s own writings I did find him making the Little People’s argument, which I quoted in a post here in 2022:

Here, for example, are two statements by the doyen of compatibilism, my pal Dan Dennett (sorry, Dan!):

There is—and has always been—an arms race between persuaders and their targets or intended victims, and folklore is full of tales of innocents being taken in by the blandishments of sharp talkers. This folklore is part of the defense we pass on to our children, so they will become adept at guarding against it. We don’t want our children to become puppets! If neuroscientists are saying that it is no use—we are already puppets, controlled by the environment, they are making a big, and potentially harmful mistake. . . . we [Dennett and Erasmus] both share the doctrine that free will is an illusion is likely to have profoundly unfortunate consequences if not rebutted forcefully.

—Dan Dennett, “Erasmus: Sometimes a Spin Doctor is Right” (Erasmus Prize Essay).

and

If nobody is responsible, not really, then not only should the prisons be emptied, but no contract is valid, mortgages should be abolished, and we can never hold anybody to account for anything they do.  Preserving “law and order” without a concept of real responsibility is a daunting task.

—Dan Dennett, “Reflections on Free Will” (naturalism.org)

But you can be a “hard determinist” and still believe in responsibility!

Dan is no longer with us, but I did post these when he was alive, so I’m not beating a dead philosopher.

I will try to be brief, discussing the three points above. Quotes from the Atlantic article are indented, while my own take is flush left:

1.)  We have no such thing as free will in the libertarian sense of “you could have done other than what you did.” To his credit, Cave admits this straight off, noting that science supports determinism.

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

. . . . The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This is what I believe, and also what Crick believed.  Now we’ll never know enough to be able to predict people’s behavior, but if quantum effects don’t manifest themselves in behavior (making you choose a salad rather than french fries, for example), then yes, determinism could lead to absolute predictability. But that will never happen, because we’d have to know enough to predict environmental factors like the weather. Besides, scientists have not decided that quantum phenomena affect behavior. Crick himself rejected that as “woo”, and I’m awaiting evidence for such influences. (We have none.) Finally, even if quantum effects do scupper determinism for some behaviors, they are not effects that we can control by “will.”

I won’t add here the many experiments showing that you can largely predict people’s (simple) decisions before they’re made, beginning with the study of Libet.  As these studies continue, we can, by monitoring brain activity, predict what people will do in simple binary tasks farther and farther ahead of the time they’re aware of making such decisions (up to ten seconds, I believe). Free willies, however, always find ways to reject these studies, since that work suggests that our feeling of agency is a post facto phenomenon occurring only after the brain’s neurons have made a “decision”. 

2.) But studies show that if you reject free will, you are likely to cheat, be lazy and fatalistic, and reject the idea of moral responsibility.  Much of this is based on an early study of Vohs and Schooler showing that college students who are “primed” by reading passages on determinism are more likely to act badly and to cheat than students primed by reading about free will.  But that was just over a very short time, was a highly artificial study on college students, and a later meta-analysis showed no deleterious effect of rejecting free will on “prosocial” behaviors. (Note that most of the studies tested behaviors lasting at most a week or so after “priming”.  Cave does, however, mention one study suggesting inimical effects of belief in determinism, though:

In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic. I suggest you look at that study (it appears to be Stillman et al. 2020, “study 2”), as it doesn’t contain a multifactorial analysis using all the cross-correlated factors. Furthere, the p values are low, yet the authors did not correct for multiple tests of significance using something like the Bonferroni correction.

But even if the evidence did show small deleterious effects on behavior stemming from determinism, are we supposed to pretend to believe we have agency so we can behave better? How can you pretend to believe something you don’t? It would be like asking atheists to believe in God because that belief has salubrious effects. It can’t be done—at least not for rational people. It’s like asking a lion to stop chasing gazelles and start eating salads. It’s not in us!

Two other points.  We always feel like we have free will, so I doubt that the scientific truth will make people fatalistic. Whether this belief evolved by natural selection or is merely an epiphenomenon of our evolved brain structure is not clear, and I doubt we’ll ever know.  So I don’t take point #2 seriously in most circumstances. Where it IS important to recognize the truth of determinism is in our system or rewards and punishment, most notably in the legal system.  If people who act badly are simply people with “broken brains,” then how we treat them depends crucially on recognizing this.  A society in which we realize, for instance, that a thief had no choice about whether or not he stole, or a killer about whether or not he pulled the trigger, we would have a very different system of punishment than a society in which we think people had a choice of how they behaved. (Yes, I know that some people say that belief in libertarian free will wouldn’t change how we dispense justice, but I reject that view.)

This does not mean that we should do away with the idea of responsibility and punishment. Far from it. While I don’t consider people morally responsible in the sense that they could have done something “moral” rather than “immoral”, that doesn’t mean that every criminal obtains a get-out-of-jail-free card. People are responsible for their acts in the sense that they are the people who do the acts, and that leads to the idea that those people need, for their own sake and society’s, to be punished or rewarded. Punishment is still justified under determinism to keep criminals out of society, to give them a chance to be rehabilitated, and (to most) as a form of deterrence. What is not justified is retributive punishment like the death penalty, as that implicitly assumes the criminal made a choice (the death penalty isn’t a deterrent, anyway, and can’t be revoked if someone is later found to be innocent).

Finally, praise is as justified as punishment, for praising people for some actions, even if they had no choice, will almost always lead them to perform more good actions, because we’re evolved to appreciate praise, which raises our status. In the end, though none of us have choices about how we behave, we go about our lives feeling as if we did, and that’s enough for me. When the rubber hits the road, as when determinism really matters (as in punishment), we can still revert to what science tells us.

3.)  To avoid this injurious social effects, we must confect a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better, which can enhance “autonomy” (not “agency” or “autonomy” in the sense of “ability to govern oneself”, neither of which we have, but “autonomy” in the sense of adhering to behaviors that help our selves and society.  Author Cave is wise enough to accept the science and the determinism it suggests, but he still thinks we need a solution to the problem that belief in determinism leads to bad behavior.  I am not convinced that this is true, as different studies show different things. And I don’t think we need to do what Dennett did, writing big books confecting new definitions of a “free will worth wanting.”  It is this last part of the article that most disappointed me, for Cave suggest a tepid solution: we all need to behave better. (He cites Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University):

Yet Waller’s account of free will still leads to a very different view of justice and responsibility than most people hold today. No one has caused himself: No one chose his genes or the environment into which he was born. Therefore no one bears ultimate responsibility for who he is and what he does. Waller told me he supported the sentiment of Barack Obama’s 2012 “You didn’t build that” speech, in which the president called attention to the external factors that help bring about success. He was also not surprised that it drew such a sharp reaction from those who want to believe that they were the sole architects of their achievements. But he argues that we must accept that life outcomes are determined by disparities in nature and nurture, “so we can take practical measures to remedy misfortune and help everyone to fulfill their potential.”

Of course Obama was determined to say this via the laws of physics, but his words may still have had a good effect on society. Poor people don’t choose to be poor, nor homeless people to be homeless. We need to realize this, for that form of determinism is good for everyone (except perhaps for some Republicans).  Cave admits that accepting determinism but trying to be good is somewhat bogus, but at least it’s nor harmful—not in the way I think Dennett’s views were.

Cave:

Understanding how will be the work of decades, as we slowly unravel the nature of our own minds. In many areas, that work will likely yield more compassion: offering more (and more precise) help to those who find themselves in a bad place. And when the threat of punishment is necessary as a deterrent, it will in many cases be balanced with efforts to strengthen, rather than undermine, the capacities for autonomy that are essential for anyone to lead a decent life. The kind of will that leads to success—seeing positive options for oneself, making good decisions and sticking to them—can be cultivated, and those at the bottom of society are most in need of that cultivation.

To some people, this may sound like a gratuitous attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. And in a way it is. It is an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst. President Obama—who has both defended “a faith in free will” and argued that we are not the sole architects of our fortune—has had to learn what a fine line this is to tread. Yet it might be what we need to rescue the American dream—and indeed, many of our ideas about civilization, the world over—in the scientific age.

Well, that’s a bit dramatic, but we do need to reform our notions of praise and—especially—blame. I’ve outlined some of the changes in the justice system we should make in light of determinism, and Gregg Caruso (e.g., here) has done so far more extensively.  But I don’t think we should go around telling people that the classical notion of free will is true.  Although I’ve been kicked out of a friend’s house and also threatened by a jazz musician for defending determinism (in the latter case by telling him that his saxophone solos were determined rather than improvised under free will, so that he could not have played a different solo), I’m still a diehard determinist.

Yes, the Atlantic article is nine years old, but the field hasn’t moved very far since it was written. Do people even need to think and write about free will, then?  Certainly Francis Crick didn’t think so: he completely ignored the problem in his late-life work on the brain, dismissing free will as a nonstarter. But because notions of free will still permeate our justice system in a bad way, yes, I think everyone needs to think about determinism and accept the science buttressing it. Then we can go about our everyday lives acting as though we have choices.

h/t: Reese

And to complete the wildlife today, reader Rodger Atkin sent in some flowers. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

This flowered last night in our garden in Thailand. From Wikipedia:

“Dracaena fragrans (cornstalk dracaena), is a flowering plant species that is native to tropical Africa, from Sudan south to Mozambique, west to Côte d’Ivoire and southwest to Angola, growing in upland regions at 600–2,250 m (1,970–7,380 ft) altitude.”

Wikipedia does not mention it but ours flowers only at night, giving off a very heady perfume. I have never seen anything to pollinate it and have never seen fruit on the plant.

The second two pictures were from the next morning:all finished, and and we’ll wait for next year.

We now have 1.4 sets of photos besides this one, but that is not going to last long. However, yesterday Greg Mayer sent in two of his own animals, a ball python and a common snapping turtle (cleverly named “Snappy”), both decked out for the holidays.

by Greg Mayer

Having been treated to a a feline parade for the inauguration of Coynezaa, here, for day three, are some Holiday Herps, Vivian and Snappy.

Vivian the Ball Python (Python regius) in her Christmas scarf.

 

Snappy the Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina) in a Winter Wonderland.

These photos were entered in a “Whisker Wonderland” photo contest for holiday pet pictures. WEIT readers will be glad to know that cat photos won all the actual prizes (People’s Choice and Jury)–as the award announcement said, “…it was a cat sweep!” However, among the reptiles entered, Vivian got the most People’s Choice votes. Plus, a couple of non-domestic species gives at least a hint of wildlife for today.

Well, at least we still have Caturday felids, as there is never any end to cats appearing on the Internet.  But the dearth of comments always makes me think about dispensing with this feature, too.

The last Caturday Felid post featured the legend of the murderous Icelandic Yule Cat, called the Jólakötturinn, described by Wikipedia as

. . . . . a huge and vicious cat from Icelandic folklore that is said to lurk in the snowy countryside during the Yule season and eat people who do not receive new clothing. In other versions of the story, the cat only eats the food of the people who had not received new clothing.

Here’s a short holiday ad for Icelandair featuring an interview with Jólakötturinn. He is not a crook! Sadly, Yule cat resents the lack of credit he gets for looming so large in the Icelandic psyche and for ensuring that many Icelandic children get new clothes.

. . . and one more, also from Icelandair. Here Yule cat, at first rejected by a family, is finally accepted—and allowed to go on a trip with them—after he gets cleaned up and has a shrimp dinner.

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Here is a happy Christmas tail that appeared in the Torygraph on Christmas Day. I’ve linked the screenshot below to an archived site, so click below to read about the reappearing Bindi.

The story:

Bindi the cat has been reunited with its family for Christmas, five years after it went missing.

The black feline “vanished into thin air” from its home in Haddenham, Cambridgeshire in August 2020.

Jilly Fretwell, Bindi’s owner, had moved house since the disappearance but thanks to microchip technology, vets were able to pull off “a real Christmas miracle”.

Ms Fretwell, 29, said: “She used to go out for a couple of hours and then come straight back, so it was really odd for her to be missing for more than a day.”

Despite posting appeals on social media and searching local walking routes for several months, the software project manager was unable to find her pet.

She had become convinced Bindi would never come home until a phone call from vets on Dec 18 brought welcome news.

Ms Fretwell said there were “no clues” about where Bindi may have been over the last five years, but that she had clearly been “looked after by someone” as she was in “great shape”.

She described her cat as “the most cuddly”, adding that it will “put her paws on either of your shoulders to give you a real cuddle”

Ms Fretwell said: “I think she’s been looked after by someone, she looks in great shape.”

Describing the moment they got the phone call, she said: “We were just in complete disbelief. It wasn’t really until we saw her that we believed it was her.

“We’re just so glad we had her microchipped and that she was alive and well. I’ve never heard of anyone’s cat going missing for so long and turning up absolutely fine.”

Here’s Bindi in a FB post from the Manchester Evening News:

Some info added by The Daily Fail:

The cat, now 10, was in good health and had been ‘well looked after’ and ‘instantly’ recognised her family.

Jilly told the BBC: ‘She’s been missing for five years and we got a call on Thursday from the lovely vets in Witchford to say they had scanned her microchip and she was coming back home to us.

‘She had a couple of little scratches on her that the vet wanted to see to, but other than that, she looks great. She’s lovely and glossy, well-fed and has been looked after somewhere. But we have absolutely no idea where she has been the last five years.’

Bindi disappeared during the Covid pandemic and Jilly spent her daily walks searching for her, sharing appeals on social media and asking people across Haddenham to keep an eye out.

Despite being 10 years old and having spent so long away from her family, Bindi remains affectionate, happily cuddling up to Jilly and settling on her lap.

Other stories frequently use the word “miracle” to refer to Bindi’s reappearance. What tails she could tell, but nobody will ever know. (I suppose the vet could reveal who turned her in, but that may be unethical for vets.).  We send Bindi and her staff thoughts and prayers for the holiday season.

Be sure to get your cat chipped, even if it’s an indoor cat.

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Finally, we have a story from the Guardian about Sylvia Townsend Warner (1973-1978), a lesbian writer described by Wikipedia as:

. . . .an English novelist, poet and musicologist, known for works such as Lolly Willowes, The Corner That Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin. She spent most of her adult life in partnership with the poet Valentine Ackland.

And here’s Valentine Ackland:

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Warner was a bit of a polymath, and you can read about her accomplishments in several fields here, or in her biography at the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (with more pictures).

But today we’re featuring her role as an ailurophile, and of a new and wonderful statue of Warner—avec chatte—that has just been produced and unveiled.

Click headline to read:

An excerpt:

The thing all women hate is to be thought dull,” says the title character of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel, Lolly Willowes, an early feminist classic about a middle-aged woman who moves to the countryside, sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.

Although women’s lives are so limited by society, Lolly observes, they “know they are dynamite … know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are”.

Warner herself was anything but dull: a writer, translator, musicologist and political activist who wrote seven novels, extensive poetry and contributed more than 150 short stories to the New Yorker, more than any other female writer. She was also a communist who volunteered for the Red Cross during the Spanish civil war and an LGBTQ+ pioneer, living with the poet Valentine Ackland for decades in a quiet Dorset village, in a partnership they described as a marriage.

In the 1930s, Warner was described as “famous in two continents for numerous and brilliant contributions to literature”, but though many of her works remain in print, her name has faded from widespread recognition, even in the county where she lived.

The Guardian article was written on December 12. More about the statue, which is a big megillah. It was controversial because the cat was modeled on a local cat named Susie and people argued that the cat statue (see below) didn’t look much like Susie. Oy!

That is due to change this weekend, when a statue of Warner will be unveiled in Dorchester. The sculpture by Denise Dutton shows Warner sitting on a bench accompanied by a cat, in a nod to the creatures she loved and the witch’s companion in her best-known novel.

Anya Pearson, who led the campaign to erect the statue, said that by placing the lifesize figure in the town’s main shopping area, “we are saying very clearly that women’s stories and queer women’s stories belong in our public spaces”. “Sylvia pushed boundaries, wrote without fear and lived authentically. This statue finally allows us to celebrate her as her authentic self, proudly and openly, in the town she called home.”

Pearson is a veteran of this kind of thing, having previously been the force behind a statue of the Victorian fossil hunter and palaeontologist Mary Anning in nearby Lyme Regis. After that statue was unveiled to great local enthusiasm in 2022, Pearson set her sights on her home town of Dorchester, where statues commemorate the writers Thomas Hardy and William Barnes – but until now, no non-royal women.

The campaign, which asked for nominations of overlooked women, received more than 50 names that were shortlisted then put to a vote. Warner “won by a landslide”, says Pearson, who works at Arts University Bournemouth. The £60,000 cost was raised through crowdsourcing and a number of significant international donations.

Here’s a video of the appeal for funds for the statue, and gives more photos  (a couple with cats) and info about Townsend:

Warner apparently loved cats, and had several. Like many artists, she tended to favor Siamese cats (some day I’ll figure out this correlation), and you can see two photos of her with her felids at the gallery section of her society.

It was hard to find a good picture of the statue that doesn’t appear to be copyrighted, and here is one, from Discover Dorchester., which has no photographer attribution. It’s a great statue, with Townsend sitting on a bench with books at her feet and a cat rubbing against her leg:

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Lagniappe:  Four lion cubs and mom. It appears that there are more, but they are being taken care of by other lionesses in the pride (it’s not clear whether that mother had nine cubs, which would be a LOT for a single mother). This was shot at Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, adjacent to the Serengeti.

h/t: Robert, Ginger K.

This is very sad, as there will be no photos on the third day of Koynezaa. We are at rock bottom, kaput, tan muerto como una roca, mort et bien mort. I have none in the queue save a few singletons, and that bodes ill for the future of the feature.

BUT, if you have good wildlife photos, send them in pronto.

Here are a few penguin and landscape pictures I took in Antarctica in 2022, just so you’ll have something:

A chick:

 

Here is a specimen of the well-known podcast “Ask Haviv Anything”, with the moderator being Haviv Rettig Gur, described in a Sam Harris podcast as “a veteran Israeli journalist who serves as the senior analyst at The Times of Israel. He has covered Israel’s politics, foreign policy, and relationship with the U.S. and Jewish diaspora since 2005, reporting from over 20 countries. Since October 7, he has been touring the English-speaking world — the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. — to discuss the war in Gaza, resilience, and antisemitism.” In this 70-minute video, Haviv interviews Ashley Rindsberg “an American writer and a senior editor at Pirate Wires, an American online media company. He is the author of Tel Aviv Stories and The Gray Lady Winked: How The New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions & Fabrications Radically Alter History.”

The subject is how Wikipedia, as well as reddit, have distorted the facts about Zionism and Israel by adopting a progressive, left-wing, and, yes, antisemitic stance. As I wrote a few days ago:

Wikipedia’s main “Israel” entry now declares that “following the October 7 attacks… Israel began committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” placing a blatant lie in the lead section meant for basic, non-contentious context.

As evidence, I heard from a reader who, upon sending me the video, added this:

As an example, a friend of mine noted that the Wikipedia article on Israel states that Israel started a genocide on Oct 7, 2023. She decided to try and edit it. She jumped through several hoops and I will share a quote from what Wikiedia sent her:

In short, you are not permitted to edit any page on Wikipedia related to the Arab-Israeli conflict until your account is 30 days old with 500 substantive edits (not edits made simply to reach 500). I will tell you that the current wording of the article was reached after extensive discussion and deliberation amongst Wikipedia contributors; you are free to review that discussion yourself, it may be accessed from Talk:Israel (see the FAQ at the top). 331dot (talk) 19:38, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

Edit requests are permitted if they are wholly uncontroversial (something that no reasonable person could possibly disagree with) and do not require extensive discussion to reach a consensus. 331dot (talk) 19:48, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

But this kind of redaction is only the tip of the iceberg. In this discussion you’ll learn about the “Gang of 40”, a group of ideologues who seem to spend nearly all their time as lay editors of Wikipedia articles about Israel, Palestine, and Zionism.  (There is even an article on “Gaza genocide recognition.”) You’ll learn that Wikipedia either has no response to this kind of bigoted malfeasance or doesn’t seem to want to fix it. Yet Wikipedia was, at the outset, dedicated to giving just the facts and documenting them.

And it’s not just Judaica.  Rindsberg notes that Wikipedia is also determined to ensure that the “lab leak theory” for the origin of covid remains a “conspiracy theory” (I myself am agnostic about the issue), and to the denigration of Trump.

The lesson: crowdsourcing does not ensure neutrality, and there is no chance to defeating a dedicated group of ideologue editors who dominate some topics. Rindsberg does discuss how to fix the problem of bias in Wikipedia, which is really a serious problem for some topics since Wikipedia is automatically given a #1 search rating by Google, making it the go-to source for people seeking information. The fixing begins with the kind of outing of sites instantiated in this discussion.

I am averse to long podcasts, but the eloquence of the discussants and my own interest in the topic kept me listening to the end. Even if you think Israel is committing genocide (and Ceiling Cat help you if you do), you will at least learn some things about the biases promulgated by one of the world’s most important sources of information. (Note the shorter discussion near the end arguing that reddit does the same thing.)

The piece ends with criticism of AI. Bogus AI writing and its bogus claims have apparently made their way into the scientific literature. Then these claims make their way back into popular culture when people cite “scientific information” that was actually written by AI in the first place.  That doesn’t mean that we should stop using AI and ChatGPT, but that we have to carefully check any of their factual assertions.

Merry Christmas and happy First Day of Koynezaa!  We’ve collected 64 photos of cats from readers, and we’ll introduce them with two images. The first, clearly depicting a Jewish cat, was sent in by Stacy (not her cat, but a meme):

And an introductory greeting from Laura:

We don’t currently serve as a cat’s staff, but we’re out in Palm Springs for a few days. and saw this bit of graffiti art:

NOW FOR THE READERS’ CATS:

Andrew Petto’s cat, Grace. wreathed in a wreath:

Grace was rescued by our granddaughter from a barn as part of a litter abandoned by their mother. She was the last one unclaimed. After waging war against pathogens from at least 3 phyla, Grace thrived and grew to the contented feline she is today.

From Dave and Brandie Aylsworth:

Here’s is a picture of Andy and Emily, 1 year-old sisters who we starting serving after a friend moved and couldn’t keep them. They’re enjoying their first Xmas with us in Tampa on their new tower.

From Rachel Sperling:

Gloria (orange) and Cordelia (brown tabby) enjoying their cat-safe menorah on the last night of Hanukkah last year. Gloria is three and Cordelia is seven; they love everyone except each other (but they mostly get along).

From Linda Taylor:

Maxi and Milo spend the summer in the catio under a tree so naturally they spend Christmas under the tree.  I only meant to have one kitten but when I went to pick him up I discovered they came as a two pack, like milk at Costco.

From Kurt:

Neo the Cat arrived at his permanent home from the animal shelter in November 2024.  This photo was taken on either 25 or 26 of December 2024 showing that the then 5 month old Neo had decided that the bowl on the Christmas table was a purrfectly fine location for a nap.

From Wesley Segarra:

Here is a picture of one of my cats, Finn. He loves sleeping under the tree because he finally learned to not sleep in the tree.

From Kira Heller:

Gitel of the Tetons investigates our Chanukah sagebrush before booting it off the windowsill.

From Sarah Nunes:

Stanley is a 14 yr old shelter cat; my daughter volunteered with the shelter her first summer home from college and convinced us to adopt him.  He remained with us when she left home permanently after graduation.

From Naama Pat-El:

This is Kiki, the most recent addition to the TexasLinguist tribe. She definitely knows who the real present is.

From Miriam Meyerhoff, yet another Jewish cat:

Honu was a rescue cat, now 14 years old. She came from a house with eighteen cats and was very shy and prone to biting when she came to live with us, nearly three years ago. She didn’t purr and didn’t like being touched at all. My husband’s extraordinary patience with her has worked wonders. She now likes to curl up with you on the couch, plays with toys and will come and meet strangers. ‘Honu’ is Hawaiian for ’turtle’. We know she’s a calico and not a tortoiseshell, but it’s a good name for a cat.

From James Blase:

I don’t celebrate religious holidays (except Dec 25; which is my birthday – I’ll be 75), but here is the late Flats Cat Blase, helping celebrate “Festivus” on Dec 23 of last year:

From Terry McLean: my favorite species and my favorite beer:

Here is my Christmas cat photo contribution. Thought you might appreciate a ginger cat / Timothy Taylor’s Landlord combo. Ruby adopted us 5 years ago and is now the Landlord. A perfect angel. I think she has realized that she can’t fit in the Christmas tree anymore.

From David Brunsting:

Here is a photo of our kitten Hazel insinuating herself in our Christmas tree. She is our first cat and I am almost 70!  Your blog inspired us and we are so glad to have Hazel in our lives!”

Howie Neufeld doesn’t have a holiday picture, but did send in an awesome cat:

My favorite photos of my son, Ross, when he was 3 in 1991, with his cat (found in my backyard when I lived in Oregon, breed unknown). The cat was named Oscar, because he was a slob in terms of cleaning himself when first adopted (was so small then I had to feed him with a plastic syringe of milk). But he was a gentle cat. When we moved 5 miles away in NC to a new home, he disappeared for 6 weeks, only to show up at my former home. We were fortunate to get him back. Oscar died around 1995, young I admit, but the vet thinks he got into some bad food on his journey back to his original home, and that unfortunately shortened his life. A great cat – he would walk with us just like a puppy when we took hikes in the nearby woods. And never once scratched anyone. Ross received his MS in cybersecurity policy from Ga Tech on Saturday, where he works as a cyber security expert.

From Carl Morano:

Angel with ceramic tree.  Angel was a stray kitten that appeared in our backyard 2 years ago.  After a week of visits for food, we took her in.

From Paul T.:

Apollo was checking out the newly-placed presents.  Thankfully, the indoor tree has never been much of an interest to him, nor to our greyhound.

From Lucinda and Stan:

Here is a picture of our cat Frillybear, who loves to “help” with all chores, especially ones that make enticing noises.

From Cathy Hamm:

This is Wrigley, “The Great Destroyer of Christmas Trees.” We adopted him from our local cat shelter as a kitten. He is almost two years old and this is the second Christmas tree he has expertly dismantled. The tree is now back in storage under the stairs. It’s a good thing we adore Wrigley, and he is still getting his favorite toys for Christmas. Just not under the tree, LOL!

From:

Yeti (white Birman-ish lady on left) and Jessie (Turbo torby on right) waiting to share their morning fancyfeast. These girls started life in a feral colony. Were captured and neutered in a cat-ice raid, and adopted as “bonded pair”. Supposed to be siblings but the odds?

From Anne Lear:

The attached photo is of Tigger, a dedicated foodie, sidling across the table at Christmas dinner and aiming to approach the plate on the right without being noticed.  He had already been slipped pieces of turkey and was having difficulty waiting for his share of the scraps.The house rule is ‘no cats on the table at mealtimes’, which the cats have interpreted as meaning  ‘at least one foot on the chair’. Tigger was adopted as an extra to his brother Rusty because he was being bullied in the kitten cage at the vet. He was an ebullient character and an excellent mouser, but afraid of rats – one evening he sat beside me and watched a rat as it ran over my foot and into the bushes.  Unfortunately he lived only 9 years before dying of renal failure of unknown cause.

From Amy Perry:

Our sole outdoor Christmas decoration every year is this lighted star of Bethlehem in our front window. The black cat in the back, Circe, is 100% black and so skittish that she rarely lets us touch her. The cat in the front, Ella, a dilute tortoiseshell, frequently asks to be petted and we oblige her.

From Ginger K., another Jewish cat:

Attached is a Catnukkah photo of my friend’s cat from 2024. Kitteh’s name is Jackson and he is about 3 years old. He is a Very. Big. Kitteh. Not a chonker, but a tall and large-framed kitteh. He is cautious around strangers, but once he gets used to you he’ll allow you to pet him.

From Divy we get Jango:

 KitKat extraordinaire, Hili lover and master of his staff. [JAC: Jango is enamored of Hili and gazes at her photos often.]

From Donna Harris in Winnipeg:

This photo is not the very best pic I’ve taken, but it has the most meaning.  We adopted Brillo 2 years ago.  Pretty much feral. He’s also FIV positive.  It’s taken him a long,long time to get  used to us and our other 3 cats. But he’s come a long way.  We still can’t hold him and pick him up. But, he loves getting his fur brushed! This pic was a surprise. He found a new place to nap recently!!

From Alex Skucas:

This is Oreo.  Also known as The Great Fox Chaser.  When he is not actively hunting chipmunks, birds, squirrels, rabbits, snakes, and mice, he is lying in wait behind a tree or bush hoping for a fox to pass by.  When a fox gets close enough, Oreo will spring out and chase the fox over quite a long distance.  It is a game for Oreo and neither he nor the fox seem to realize that there is a significant size discrepancy between the two that actually favors the fox.  Here is Oreo in the morning after a night of predation.

From Tamara Sharoff, whose cat apparently wrote the entry:

My name is Squirt, a name I acquired when rescued as a young kitten 18 years ago outside a cafe in California. I spent my first 16 years living the good life as a barn cat. Now retired to the indoors. Not super crazy about the 2 leggers, but I’m slowly warming to them and their craziness like this weird thing behind me.

From Regina Jammen:

Here is Max, our orange tabby cat. When he is not gazing out the window here in Boston, Max loves decorated trees, lengthy books read to him, and lots of hugs.

From Tom Steinberg:

You’ve met Sparkle in her apple tree from the photo I send last June that you kindly featured. I was touched and honored by that. Here she is in her Usual Spot in Eugene with her orange highlights (hence the name), and one coy white paw. Her paws, belly, and chest are white.

Sparkle is helping me wrap a present to a granddaughter. And this was last minute! I took the photo ~ 15 minutes before Deadline.

From Kevin Henderson in New Mexico:

Iris, Jules, Lyra.  Waiting for Advent calendar salmon treats.

From Pamela we have “Freddy, the Atheist Cat”:

From Mary Lou and Jim Mayfield in Iowa:

“Tuxedo” dresses his best for the Holidays!

From Dave McCrady:

Say hello to Murphy the tomcat, circa 1975 or so.    A rescue, with us since he was a kitten.  Murphy was part of our family for the next 14 years or so.  He loved a good tussle and knew that when I put on the heavy mitt, claws were allowed.  He would latch on with all four feet.

From David Jorling:

I would send a video with the train running but the cat, named Mia, would knock it over. The train is a model of the Milwaukee Road’s “Cannonball”, which was the only commuter train in Milwaukee that ran from Watertown WI to Milwaukee.  

As you will see from the photo, I have an HO scale train around my holiday tree.  Last night we had guests for dinner and I turned on the train.  After dinner I went into our living room and Mia was on one of the chairs looking at me and yelling (meowing) at me like she had never done before.  I turned off the train and she immediately went across the tracks under the tree and curled up.  She was  yelling at me to turn off the train so she could cross the tracks, apparently.

From Steve:

Mabel is the 8th kitten we’ve fostered this year. We were a little sad when the previous kittens were adopted, but they went to good homes.

When my wife left 40 years of breakable ornaments in storage and started putting plastic ones on the tree, I went to the shelter and filled out the paperwork. Termed a ” failed foster”, Mabel has found her forever home.

Addendum: “Mabel takes just one ornament off the tree every day.”

From Darrell Ernst:

This pic is of Princess Leia, relaxing after rearranging the Christmas Village to her liking.

She is one of three cats we currently share our home with. We found her at the local Humane Society when she was about three months old. She was a stray trapped with some litter mates then handed over to the HS.

She is the archetypal cat, lithe, strong and pure grace in every movement. When playing she often stops the other cats in their tracks with an impossible seeming maneuver. Like a ballerina ninja. She is also possibly the sweetest creature I’ve ever known.

From Jay Lonner in the state of Washington:

Attached find a photo of Fitz and Ollie, our ~7 year old mackerel tabbies that we adopted as a bonded pair from the local humane society. They’re sweet boys who, despite their destructive tendencies, are a constant source of joy and love. What I find interesting about them from a biological perspective is that they are basically wild type cats — no pedigrees here! They are phenotypically indistinguishable (at least to my untrained eye) from African wildcats, and I appreciate the combination of chaos and cuddliness they bring to our otherwise staid lives.

From Debra Coplan:

This is Peaches trying to help celebrate Hannukah as best as she knows how.  Latkes were out of the question.

She is about 14 now. Adopted about 6 years ago after her owner died. I found her in an ad in the newspaper.

Happy Hannukah to all!

From Reese Vaughn:

Cider and his sister Razz (short for Raspberry) survived Hurricane Harvey in 2017 so they are eight years old. Thus is as Christmasy as they get.

Also from Reese:

This is Razz enjoying a Christmas treat from a hand-painted oyster shell, a traditional Texas Coast ornament. No, she didn’t eat the elf; she’s just blocking his body in the photo.

From Simon:

Balian (foreground) and Harry (headshot in the background) are now 3 and a half. In the ten days since this picture was taken they have been selectively removing labels from gifts put under the tree as well as a number of the lower decorations. No evidence of climbing it yet. They are about to be joined by our kids, their spouses and an 18-month-old grandson who enjoys a fraught personal relationship with his parents’ cat. He has yet to meet these two, and I anticipate a strong disapproval from the cats. And keen interest from the kid, from whom the first distinguishable work that I heard was “kitty”

From Susan Harrison:

Boris is seen here making a polite request: “When will my ornaments be up?”  He and Natasha are always pleased to have the tree brought in, adding visual interest to their domain.  Luckily, though, at age 13 and with their laid-back Ragdoll personalities, the two of them are not much of a threat to dangly breakable objects.

From Bob Woolley:

This is Lucy, a few years ago. The festive garb stayed on her for less than a minute, because she found them incompatible with her comfort and dignity. I think you can see her displeasure in her face.

From Peggy:

This is Minnie (Minuit) on a well-deserved rest after helping me put all the candles in for the last night of Hannukah. She is 16 and this is her 15th Hannukah; her first was spent in a Michigan barn with no Jews around). Still, I told her she cannot help me light the candles. Despite her Hebrew name, Minnie’s sister Tula (תולה is short for חתולה) wanted nothing to do with the menorah.

From Kathleen Vincent:

Perspicacious is his name. But we call him Percy.

From Bobbie Mason-Gamer:

We adopted the appropriately-named Noel from a shelter about a month ago. She likes the Christmas tree, alternating between naughty (batting the decorations) and nice (resting underneath). It must be a big surprise for a cat to suddenly find an indoor tree covered with things resembling cat toys, so I can’t fault little Noel for wanting to play with it! 

From Steven Eakman:

Here is our holiday cat photo for this year. It features a new addition to our family: This is Neville*. He is the successor to our beloved Nigel, who appeared in several prior holiday photo postings. Nigel was the benevolent ruler of this household for 17 years but, sadly, left us last February. Neville is about to turn six months old and is a pure feline chaos generator. Boundless kitten energy and the classic “who, me?” cattitude. In the photo he sports a bow/ribbon that he pilfered from a holiday package and subsequently had great fun playing with. The photo was taken as evidence of his guilt, not that he was at all repentant… *No, Neville is NOT named after Chamberlain, Longbottom, or any other real or fictional human of that name.

From Ashleigh G.:

This is my cat Grace who died last october. Here she is in her Christmas dress:

From Susan Wearn, who calls this “not much of a holiday cat.”

Here is my pitiful contribution of Murphy, the neighbor’s visiting cat, with a German incense smoker in the background. Feel free not to use this! I tried to take his picture under the tree, but he was having none of it.  He behaves very much like the male orange cat he is. 

From Roz:

Mendel and Yoda bundled in a shawl on their heated blanket. (We do winter rather than holidays over here—too dangerous to light Hanukkah candles with Devon Rexes around.)

Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas.

From Erik Levin:

This is Schrodinger. The bag is his holiday bag from a friend, with tube treats and a new blanket. He is fifteen years old, arthritic, and kidney stage three, as well as a true smuggler lap boy for life, and still a fierce bug killer and winter mouser. They find a way in when the temperature drops below -10C. 

From Ursula Goodenough:

Edith in her Christmas stocking, a gift to her lover Ursula

Another Jewish cat from Michele Miller:

Photo of my Yiddish cat, Meshuggah—she earns her name (‘crazy’ in Yiddish) as she is quite the hyper scaredy cat also known for wild zoomies. If you look carefully, you will notice her left ear is ’tipped’ showing she was once part of a feral colony. Usually ferals are tipped after TNR (’trap and release’ neutering) but for some reason she was taken in by a rescue where I adopted her at 9 months old—I work professional with quite a few rescues and end up taking home the ones no one else wants to adopt. 

Here’s Matthew Cobb’s cat Harry next to “an Xmas bauble the children painted to resemble Harry.”

Harry is 10, born on Halloween when a heavily pregnant stray cat walked into a neighbour’s back yard. She had 3 kittens. The first we heard about this was when they escaped at about 7 weeks old and the neighbor went nuts looking for them. They were up a tree. [Matthew took one who became Harry.]

From Elizabeth Leahey-Martinez

This is Lulu, full name Louise. She appeared one day in our parking lot late November 2 years ago and was quickly a foster fail as we fell in love with her. This is her favorite time of year as there is a tree in the house covered in toys!

From James Joy:

On July 4, 2021, my wife and I returned from a family get-together to find a very small kitten on our patio, all alone. We of course adopted her, making her the tenth rescue cat in our household.  We named her Coco, but as time went on she earned the nickname Punky. A few months later, we tried to put a Santa hat on her to take a photo for our Christmas card.  She refused to wear the hat, so this photo was our Christmas card.

From David Riddell, a Kiwi:

When our cat Kifi was little she used to climb up our old tinsel Christmas tree (an heirloom from my wife’s family), and she still gets very excited when it goes up each year.  She loves Christmas time -always lots of new boxes to check out for size!

From John Wilson:

Sunspot is dressed up as one of the holiday lions guarding the Art Institute of Chicago (it was his Halloween costume).

From Taryn Overton:

This is Hitchens.  He joined me in my second year of vet school and has been my sidekick through five states and seven moves.  He’s 15 years young.  Favorite pastimes: zoomies around the home, sunbathing no matter the temperature, and batting the eyelashes of his staff at 3:30 am when he’s hungry.

From Greg:

This is a photo of Perry. He is patiently waiting for Santa.

From Stephanie: Another Jewish cat, and with Hanukkah gelt (traditional foil-wrapped chocolate coins).

Lulu is a Jewish cat, of course, but isn’t sure whether she wants to try the gelt because she thinks the foil on the outside might irritate her fillings.  Just kidding, she doesn’t have many teeth because she had most of them pulled (she probably could have used some fillings).

From Iain:

I hope this gets to you in time. Here’s Jemima. She is floofy and likes to sit in her scratching box. She also has a rumbly purr and can hold a full conversation with her humans.

From Julia:

This is our ginger bit of fluff, Marlowe. Named after Shakespeare’s friend Christopher Marlowe for his colouring and our suspicion that he will also meet his end in a tavern brawl.  Here he is meeting Santa with my daughter. A bit of a scared kitty.

From Wendy:

Gracie! Peace on earth, or at least in bed.

Happy holidays from PCC(E) and, I presume, all the cats.

I’ve often argued that the Free Press is soft on religion, even more so than its MSM equivalent, the New York Times. The editor of the FP, Bari Weiss, is Jewish, and although it’s not clear to me exactly what she believes (is there a God?), you’ll never see her criticizing religion. Her partner, Nellie Bowles, converted to Judaism, (I believe you have to espouse belief for that–a double entendre), and I can’t remember ever reading anything antireligious or pro-atheism on the site. (I may have missed something.) And now the editors have recruited at least four more religionists as part of a long series about religion celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

There will be monthly paeans to religion for a year, and it may already have been going for a while.  One of the paeans is below: a long, tedious piece about how American required not only the Bible to attain equality of its citizens, but the Old Testament. It’s no accident, of course, that the author, Meir Yaakov Soloveichik, is an Orthodox rabbi.  (More rabbis to come!) The American experiment, he avers, involved the replacement of an earthly king with a heavenly one: God (Yahweh in his case). Well, maybe he was right, but in the end there’s no evidence for a God who makes us all equal. And religion, despite the rabbi’s claim, is waning in America, but the idea of equality remains.

Here’s the editors’ intro to the piece (bolding is mine):

Of all the radical ideas at the heart of the American founding, freedom of religion stands apart. Rarely in human history has a nascent nation rejected religious uniformity and bet instead on liberty, trusting that faiths can live side by side, peacefully and equally. In doing so, America didn’t banish faith, but made room for it to thrive in all its depth and diversity.

For this month’s installment of our America at 250 series, a yearlong celebration of the country’s big birthday, we’re spotlighting faith and how it helped build our nation. You’ll hear from Catholic magazine editor R. R. Reno on how his marriage to a Jewish woman drew him closer to God; from David Wolpe on two towering prophets of history; from Matthew Walther on the kaleidoscope of American religious life; and more.

Today, we kick things off with the great Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who explains why the flourishing of biblical faith in the new country provided the basis for American equality. For, he writes, “In rejecting monarchy, Americans were not insisting that they had no king, but that their king was God.”—The Editors

If you subscribe, click below to read what the sweating rabbi is trying to say. If you don’t subscribe, well, you have an extra hour to do something fun:

The piece is not particularly well written, and I don’t think it makes its case, but I don’t want to waste time doing an exegesis of this. I just want to show how the Free Press keeps highlighting the benefits of faith—in this case historical ones—over and over again. And I’ll omit all the well-known stuff about the role of religion in the Continental Congress (objections to prayers, etc.) But here’s what the piece says about the Jewish foundation of Americ (all quotes are indented).

John Adams wrote that evening [in 1771] to his wife: “I never saw a greater Effect upon an Audience. It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that Morning. I must beg you to read that Psalm.” A passage from the Hebrew Bible, describing a divine defense from one’s enemies, so united the members of the new Congress that it seemed heaven-sent.

For the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, this anecdote highlights the prominent role played by the stories, imagery, and ideas of Hebrew scripture in the American revolution. In contrast to Christian texts, which are devoted to describing a kingdom that is “not of this earth,” the tale of biblical Israel is all about a polity that is very earthly indeed. Thus, as Novak noted in On Two Wings, his account of the role of faith in the American founding, “practically all American Christians erected their main arguments about political life from materials in the Jewish Testament.” The story of the Jews offered early Americans a tale from which they could find inspiration in their own crisis.

It also offered another advantage. Focusing on Judaic texts allowed the revolutionaries to avoid exegetical issues pertaining to Christian theology. “Lest their speech be taken as partisan,” Novak added, “Christian leaders usually avoided the idioms of rival denominations—Puritan, Quaker, Congregationalist, Episcopal, Unitarian, Methodist, and Universalist. The idiom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was a religious lingua franca for the founding generation.” As a means of uniting the diverse group, Novak continues, “the language of Judaism came to be the central language of the American metaphysic—the unspoken background to a special American vision of nature, history, and the destiny of the human race.” Psalm 35 would serve as a symbol of the fact that patriots across America could indeed pray together.

Here it’s not just religion that was the bedrock foundation of America, but Old Testament Judaism.  Of course, the vast majority of Americans when the country was founded were Christians, and presumably accepted the Jesus stories, but this shows how historians can emphasize some stuff as opposed to other stuff to make their case

And here’s how Thomas Paine, himself an atheist, nevertheless foisted “belief in belief” on Americans in his influential pamphlet Common Sense. “Belief in belief”—the view that it’s good for the “little people” (Americans) to believe in God even if the intellectuals don’t—seems to be the point of view pushed by the Free Press, and, to me, explains why they don’t publish articles that dismantle belief. But I digress.

Paine privately denied the reality of revelation and scorned scripture as fantasy. (He would later voice his views on religion in The Age of Reason, ruining his reputation in America.) But America was a biblically literate land, and with Benjamin Rush’s help, Paine wrote for his audience in Common Sense. The pamphlet—probably the most influential published polemic in the history of the world—changed the way in which Americans regarded their king and monarchy in general.

The essence of Paine’s argument is easy to miss today. In rejecting monarchy, Americans were not insisting that they had no king, but that their king was God. “But where, says some, is the King of America?” Paine asks in Common Sense; “I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain.” Not all patriots approved of the pamphlet; John Adams thought its arguments overwrought and exaggerated. But Paine spoke for the many whose own sentiments were evolving. Subjects who had once revered their king were beginning to conclude that the texts of ancient Israel pointed to a new way of seeing themselves.

The tale of America is not merely that of a break with Britain; it is equally a tale of a group of colonists who came to conclude that their equality derived from the monarchy of the Almighty.

There’s more:

But the fact remains that shorn of biblical faith, no cogent explanation can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Indeed, the other sources of antiquity to which the Founders turned for inspiration—the philosophers of Greece and the statesmen of Rome—denied human equality and held a worldview that there were those destined to rule and others born to serve. As the Yale legal scholar Stephen L. Carter reflected in Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, to this day “faith in God provides a justification for the equality that liberal philosophy assumes and cherishes but is often unable to defend.”

This is bushwah. Of course a cogent nonreligious argument can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Read any ethical philosopher (John Rawls is one example), or read the article on “Eauality” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where the word “God” appears precisely once, and only in a discussion of how Christianity espoused an equality of humans before God.

But even if this historical interpretation be true, as Americans become more and more either atheists or “nones” (those not affiliated with a specific church or faith), the rationale for equality would seem to have disappeared. It hasn’t, because we now base it on humanism, not religion. If you stopped someone in the street and asked Americans why all people are equal before the law, I doubt they say “because that’s what the Old Testament dictates.” They may mutter something about all men being created equal from the Declaration of Independence, but philosophers who give us a rational basis for equality rely not on Divine Command but on secular arguments.

At the end, Rabbi Soloveichik raises the new canard that the waning of religion in America has slowed. They make a great deal about the plateau shown below:

Europeans may wonder at the way our politics is consumed by a culture war that is linked to differences regarding religion, but these debates endure in America because, unlike the largely secular continent across the ocean that was once the cradle of Christendom, faith continues to matter to so many millions of Americans. Even the much-discussed contemporary phenomenon known as the rise of the “nones”—Americans who do not belong to a faith at all—seems to have slowed. Few Americans today know the final lyrics of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” but when God is invoked in our public life, it is meant to remind us of the unique way equality emerged in America, the way religion impacted how Americans came to see themselves.

As we mark America’s 250th anniversary, it is impossible to know with any certainty what the next decades will bring for our country. But looking back on the past, one prediction can be safely made. Religion in America has always defied the predictions of its demise, and on the 300th birthday of the United States, there will be citizens of this country who will rejoice in their equality—and thank the almighty monarch of America for it.

Mind you, religiosity hasn’t reversed its long-term trend of decreasing; it just has hit a plateau.  Here’s a graph from the Pew article cited by the rabbi:

BUT that goes back to only 2007, and deals only with Christianity. (I bet Islam would show growth.) Let’s take a longer view, looking at Pew data from 1972 to about 2021.  Christianity has fallen nearly 30%, and if you looked way back to the turn of the 20th century, I bet you’d see a much bigger decline. The “plateau” touted above—believers never mention the long term—is just a small segment of the graph, and while religion may increase or remain static, that’s not the long-term trend. In the meantime, “nones” have increased nearly sixfold, and other religions just a tad. Nope, the rabbi’s huzzahs ring hollow.

Look again at the last sentence:

But looking back on the past, one prediction can be safely made. Religion in America has always defied the predictions of its demise, and on the 300th birthday of the United States, there will be citizens of this country who will rejoice in their equality—and thank the almighty monarch of America for it.

That’s bogus.  There are two predictions that can be made. The first is the rabbi’s obvious one: America will always have some religious people. Yes, faith is sadly still alive, and we’ll have to wait a few centuries until we become like Sweden or Iceland. But the more important prediction is that faith is waning. It ain’t dead yet, but it’s dying. Even so, Americans still espouse equality.

It’s time for the Free Press to publish some stuff about unbelief, its increase over time, and the reasons for it.

I couldn’t help myself. I asked ChatGPT to illustrate some early Americans worshipping God as a king. Not bad, eh?

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “repertoire”, shows the boys onstage, and once again Mo shows his characteristic flaw: behaving exactly in the ways he’s criticizing.

There’s a message on the site: “Merry Xmas from the boys.”

This is the penultimate of the two batches I have, so why not get your wildlife photos together instead of snoozing after that big Christmas feast? Today we have the final installment of Holiday Mushroom photos by reader Rik Gern from Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here is the final batch of mushroom pictures taken in northern Wisconsin last September.

I saved this batch for last and am a bit chagrined to send them because most of these pictures are of species I was unable to identify. I’ve been using iNaturalist, but it jammed up a few times. It would seem to identify the genus and species, but then I would get the infamous spinning wheel, which would persist until I exited the application. I thought it was recording the data, but later discovered that it wasn’t. I hope you will be willing to let your more knowledgeable readers weigh in on the species identification. [JAC: yes, please, if you know the species, do weigh in]

The cap on this mushroom has a woody look. This was the only example I ran across.

This one has nice, delicate looking gills. I think it might be a Destroying Angel  (Amanita bisporigera), but the pictures I saw showed some kind of flap on the stem which this specimen lacks.

Whatever this is, the small cap looks like a cookie dusted with cinnamon.

Something sure found this mushroom tasty!

This mushroom is in an intense tug of war with a thick spider web!

You can see from this image that the web is layered in three sheets.

I’ve see time lapse films of orb weavers weaving their webs, but I can’t imagine how this web was constructed.

Mushrooms are so often associated with psychedelia that I couldn’t resist closing this series by playing with a closeup image of the pores on the underside of the Chicken fat mushroom (Suillus americanus) to give it a trippy psychedelic feel.

Just as an interest in Photoshop led to an interest in photography, the thrill of having pictures on whyevolutionistrue alongside those of learned naturalists and scholars has piqued my interest in learning more about the world of fungi. I’ve been asking friends to recommend books that give a broad overview of fungi. Guide books only make my eyes glaze over and tie my brain in knots, as I don’t seem to have a good mind for that kind of detail, but I can grok the big picture when it’s presented well. There’s a book coming out in May called The Complete Fungi: Evolution, Diversity and Ecology by David S. Hibbit that looks fantastic. I have pre-ordered it, and thought some of your readers might be interested as well, so here is a link.

This will be the final reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme, a holiday them, or a or Hanukkah theme (we now have many Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have now acquired more than 65 photos for posting. (Note: do not send AI pictures like the one I made below.)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! It should be holiday-themed and have a few words about the moggy, including its name. Also your name of pseudonym. (No videos, please, as I can’t embed them.)

I’ll move the deadline forward to 11 a.m. Chicago time TODAY; Christmas Eve and Koynezaa Eve. Sorry, but I can’t accept late entries.

The cats will be posted on Christmas Day—tomorrow morning. It’s a great panoply of furballs!

Yesterday I wrote about the segment of CBS’s “60 Minutes” show that was removed from the schedule by news editor-in-chief Bari Weiss shortly before it was to air. It was about American detainees, accused of immigration violations, who were sent to a notorious and horrible prison in El Salvador, CECOT.  Here’s an excerpt of the NYT story on the incident:

In a move that drew harsh criticism from its own correspondent, CBS News abruptly removed a segment from Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Ms. Weiss said in a statement late Sunday: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”

It seems to me, and even more now that I’ve seen the show, that the reasons for taking it off there air were, as Alfonsi claims, not really editorial but political. Why would Weiss do that, though?  Perhaps because, she doesn’t want to incur the wrath of Trump, who doesn’t want the information in this show to be aired. There are several reasons why Weiss might have wanted administration pushback. First, the Trump administration approved the acquisition of Paramount (which owns CBS) to Skydance, and, after this, we can’t have CBS criticizing the administration.  Second, this year Trump sued CBS for airing an edited interview with Kamala Harris; Trump won and got $16 million. So there’s every reason to think that Trump would be really upset if CBS’s 60 Minutes criticized his administration, which is the show does implicitly. You can see that below.

Nevertheless, a fair number of readers here defended Weiss, arguing that Alfonsi did NOT ask enough U.S. administration officials to criticize the show. 60 Minutes did not, for instance, consult Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and “the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.” Weiss helpfully suggested that they ask Miller.  But, as you’ll see in the 14-minute segment, which was aired in Canada, the show did ask for comment from the White House. The response? Here’s what Alfonsi says in the piece:

“The Department of Homeland Sexurity declined our request for an interview, and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador.  The government there did not respond to our request.”

Now isn’t that enough asking? After all, the show asked the proper government agency to respond. That agency, DHS, referred CBS to the El Salvadorian government, which didn’t respond.  That is two asks, and to the right people. Isn’t that enough? How many bits of investigative journalism have you read that end with something like, “We asked X for a comment on this story, but we have gotten no response.”  Do you beef about them not having asked more people, up until they get a critical response?  No, I doubt it.  And the editors of this story were satisfied with that, as am I.  Weiss’s insistence that CBS keep asking people until someone in the Trump administration did respond critically constitutes micromanagement, and I fail to understand that this is justifiable grounds for pulling the story.

Before I make a few more comments, why don’t you watch the show? The links to the Canadian broadcast, apparently identical to the American one, are below, as “The Streisand Effect” has spread them all over the Inbternet.

First, from The Breakdown.  I’ve put the links to that site here, and you can watch the Canadian version by clicking on the headline below. The quality isn’t great, but you can certainly see the show.  It’s about the right length for a “60 Minutes” segment, being 14 minutes long (most are between 12 and 15 minutes). The site’s comment:

The segment apparently aired on Canada’s Global TV app and was shared by this Bluesky user @jasonparis.bsky.social. You can watch the entire segment below!

On The Reset, Yashar Ali also has a link to the full video; click below to access it (h/t reader Dave). THIS IS THE BEST AVAILABLE VERSION. That site says this:

The decision to pull the story was made by CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, and it triggered a firestorm within the network and, subsequently, in the public. Here’s some info on the controversy and when I update this story shortly, I will link to additional reporting, but I wanted to publish this video immediately as a version of it was taken down on YouTube.

It turns out that the network delivered the segment to Canada’s Global TV app (it has since been pulled).

As I understand it, this is only part of the overall story, but this 13-minute-long video— sent to me by a source —is what exists. [JAC: I have no idea what they mean by “part of the overall story”. If something more was there, I’d like to know what it is.]

(An earlier version of this story had a video that was filmed with someone’s smart phone, this is a broadcast quality version),

Click the screenshot below to access the video, scrolling down a bit after you get to the site:

I also found a good version of the entire show, including the controversial segment, at an archived site.

There’s also a YouTube version embedded within a MayDay discussion.  The CBS segment goes from 4:49 to 15:20, so it’s shorter than other versions. I have not checked to see what, if anything, is missing from the video below compared to those above.

Finally, this Bluesky post begins a series of five shorter posts that contain the segment. Again, I haven’t checked this one to see if it’s “complete,” at least compared to the first two above:

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog.xyz) 2025-12-23T01:28:12.219Z

So, what have we here? The piece is mostly about Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration from the U.S. to a horrible prison (CECOT) in El Salvador.  The purported reason was that they were terrorists or violent criminals. Most of the video is taken up with shots of the prison and interviews with Venezuelans who had been deported to CECOT and later sent on to Venezuela (and presumably freed there) in a prisoner swap.

CECOT is hell on earth, far worse than the Supermax prisons in the U.S.  The lights are on 24 hours per day, cells are overcrowded, there is no outside light or fresh water (prisoners say they drank water from toilets), the food is dire, and the El Salvadoran prisoners (presumably gang members) in CECOT will never get out again. They are treated like trash, and manhandled and beaten regularly. It is surely hell on earth.

Note that the people interviewed by 60 Minutes are not El Salvadoran gang members, but some of 252 Venezuelans who entered the U.S. illegally and were deemed suitable for sending to CECOT

CECOT, or Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, was constructed three years ago.  Wikipedia adds this:

With a capacity for 40,000 inmates, CECOT is the largest prison in Latin America and one of the largest in the world by prisoner capacity. In March 2025, the Salvadoran government accepted over 200 deportees that the second Donald Trump administration alleged were Venezuelan and Salvadoran gang members and incarcerated them in CECOT. Among them was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose case received widespread media attention in the United States. The Venezuelans incarcerated in CECOT were repatriated to Venezuela in July 2025 following a prisoner swap involving El Salvador, the United States, and Venezuela.

According to the 60 Minutes report, the U.S. paid El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees, characterizing them as “heninous monsters: rapists, kidnappers, sexual assaulter, and predators”, and “the worst of the worst.” Were they? Human Rights Watch, quoted in the show, concluded that nearly of the Venezuelans sent to CCECOT “had no criminal history” save illegal entry into the U.S. They add that only 8 prisoners, or 3.1%, “were convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.”

But surely none of these prisoners deserve this kind of punishment, even if they were murderers! Yet the vast majority were guilty of no crimes save illegal entry. ICE’s own records were consulted and reviewed by 60 Minutes. Even having a tattoo was apparently sufficient reason to warrant a Venezuelan’s deportation to CECOT, but tattooes aren’t reliable ways to identify Venezuelan gang members. And don’t even ask about “the island”: a punishment cell in which prisoners were beaten every half hour. You may have seen the “commercial” with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem (the department asked for comments!), showing a group of heavily tattooes prisoners, actually shows El Salvadoran prisoners accused of being gang members, not Venezuelans deported by the U.S. Here’s an AP video of Noem’s visit. The prisoners shown are El Salvadoran, most with tattooes indicating gang membership. But remember, even these baddies to not deserve to be in such hell.

The show then interviews a group of students at U. C. Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. These students investigated the prison and verified that the deportees’ stories were true and that the conditions for all prisoners “violated UN minimum standards for prisoners,” constituting violations of human rights.

Yes, there are two sides for every story, but I can’t see another side of this one: a side that vindicates what the Trump Administration did.  But have a look for yourself (I recommend the second link, the one from Reset). What is the other side?

It seems to me that Weiss was micromanaging this video on ideological grounds, presumably to soften its implicit attack on the Trump administration.  Taking this segment off the air because they didn’t ask the Administration for enough comments appears to me as dissimulation.

Judge for yourself.

Today we have some lovely bird photos from Scott Ritchie of Cairns, Australia. Scott’s captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Scott’s Facebook page, full of great photos, is here. (Photos used with permission.)

Social media, including Facebook, gets quite a bit of negative press these days. I get that. But one of the great values of social media is that it can put you in contact with people who can really help you out. In Sept. 2025, I started posting bird photos from my Western Australia trip. I was contacted by John Edmond, who lives in Perth. Last year, I met John in Cairns on our regular Tuesday AM bird walk, and then showed him some local birds along the Cairns Esplanade. John loves a twitch, and was especially happy to see Nordy, Nordmann’s Greenshank.

So John reached out on FB and offered to take me for a day’s birding in Perth. We had a great time and I particularly liked touring around Herdsman Lake. Here are some of my favourite images from that day’s birding.

The Pink-eared Duck [Malacorhynchus membranaceus] is one of my favourite birds. I was lucky to get nice close images of this bird. If you’re wondering about the name, look carefully at the head. You can just see a little bit of pink behind his eye. Personally, I’d name it the Zebra-breasted Duck.

And another. The flaps along the bill are used to help funnel microbe-rich water into their mouth.

The Great Crested Grebe [Podiceps cristatus] is another amazing bird. I just love the hairdo and the neck feathers during breeding season. Interestingly, this bird is found in wetlands from Asia Europe, Africa, and Australia. This is one of the grebes that does a upright mating dance that you may have seen on TV:

So am I gonna get lucky tonight? Let me think about it:

JAC: Here’s a YouTube video I found of the mating dance of this species. Don’t miss any of it!

I love the raking light on this stunning bird:

The Australian Shelduck [Tadorna tadornoides] during breeding season. The female is the one with the spectacles. It’s obvious she’s the only one with a good sense to wear glasses:

I like these this couple out for an evening promenade in the quiet water:

Herdman Lake like has more than water birds. This pair of Tawny Frogmouths [Podargus strigoides] are a bit of an institution there. People come around looking for these interesting, well camouflaged birds. See me if you can:

Australian Reed Warbler [Acrocephalus australis] was regularly heard singing in the rushes. Lovely calls—the sound of the Aussie wetlands:

At an earlier stop, I was happy to see the Western Spinebill [Acanthorhynchus superciliosus]. It’s not the world’s best shot, but it’s still beautiful bird and I hope to get better views of it in the future:

And finally, I’ll leave off this WA tour with a robin, a male Scarlet Robin [Petroica boodang]. Robins are so cute and they sit nicely for the camera, not jumping around like some crazy caffeinated gym rat like so many birds do. Speaking which I’m off for a coffee and a workout to work off some of the pounds I put on this trip:

The attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach near Sydney (the capital of New South Wales), was horrific: fifteen people were killed (not including the perps) and 40 injured. It was clearly a terrorist attack designed to kill Jews, putting the lie that this kind of violence is “anti-Zionist” rather than antisemitic.

Australian Jews have been warning for a while that something like this could happen, as antisemitism is not rare in the country and there have been plenty of anti-Israel demonstrations.  Further, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been criticized for not doing enough to combat the growing antisemitism in his country.

Now the PM and the state of New South Wakes are trying to do something, by banning certain forms of “hate speech”. But it’s too little and too late, and banning “hate speech” that doesn’t threaten to create imminent and predictable violence won’t work. (This kind of “hate speech” is, in my view, properly permitted under the U.S.’s First Amendment.)

Click below to read the story from the Times of Israel:

 

Excerpts:

The Australian state of New South Wales is planning to ban “Globalize the intifada” chants, according to a Saturday BBC report, amid a crackdown on “hateful” rhetoric and slogans in the wake of Sunday’s devastating terror attack at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah event.

New South Wales is home to Sydney and its iconic Bondi Beach, where 15 people were killed and dozens wounded by two gunmen who opened fire on a crowd celebrating the Jewish holiday.

. . . .The mass shooting was Australia’s worst in nearly 30 years and is being investigated as an act of terrorism targeting Jews. Authorities have ramped up patrols and policing across the country to prevent further antisemitic violence.

Since the attack, New South Wales Premier Chris Minns has said he plans to convene the state’s parliament and pass stricter hate speech and incitement laws.

According to the BBC, Minns is looking to classify the “Globalize the intifada” chant, popular among anti-Israel activists, as illegal hate speech, and aims to encourage a “summer of calm,” without mass anti-Israel demonstrations.

Critics point in particular to a now-infamous protest in Sydney held a few days after October 7, 2023, where video footage appeared to show demonstrators celebrating the attack and chanting “gas the Jews” and “f— the Jews,” rhetoric they say foreshadowed later acts of violence.

However, New South Wales police later claimed there was no evidence of the chant. The pro-Palestinian rally, which gathered over 1,000 people, also included the burning of an Israeli flag and the firing of several flares.

“Foreshadowing” apparently means that the chants occurred before the violence, and presumably quite a while before. Under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, such chants would be legal. They’re prohibited only if they are likely to involve either “fighting words” or to create “imminent and predictable violence”. As Wikipedia says in its article on exceptions to the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech:

Hate speech is not a general exception to First Amendment protection. Per Wisconsin v. Mitchell, hate crime sentence enhancements do not violate First Amendment protections because they do not criminalize speech itself, but rather use speech as evidence of motivation, which is constitutionally permissible.

. . . The Supreme Court has held that “advocacy of the use of force” is unprotected when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely to incite or produce such action”.

A bit more from the TOI:

Many in Australia’s Jewish community say the government, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in particular, “abandoned” them, arguing that clear warning signs were ignored in the lead-up to the Bondi massacre.

Under pressure from critics who say his center-left government has not done enough to curb a surge in antisemitism, the prime minister has vowed to strengthen hate laws in the wake of the massacre.

“We can’t be in a position where we see a repeat of Sunday. We need to do everything within our power to make that change,” Minns told reporters.

As I implied, banning “hate speech”, which is a slippery slope if ever there was one, is not the way to go in this case—not if Australia wants to have free speech like the U.S. does. Now you can argue that the U.S. is too permissive, or that Australia, with its particular situation, needs hate speech laws that America doesn’t have.

That said, I don’t think banning “globalize the intifada”—or perhaps “From the river to the sea. . .  “, which could be construed as hate speech, and certainly “Gas the Jews—will reduce the amount of antisemitism, or the frequency of antisemitic acts, in Australia. All that will do is drive the antisemitism underground, but also prevent us from knowing who holds those views since they can’t espouse them publicly.  And yes, I would even favor the already-conferred right of people to stand in the middle of a public park (or the quad at the University of Chicago as well as at public universities) and shout “Gas the Jews.”  That isn’t liable to lead to imminent lawless action on the part of the targets.

And, of course, “hate speech” is very often subjective. Criticism of the tenets of Islam, for example, can be deemed “Islamophobic hate speech.”  Calls for banning trans-identified males from competing in women’s sports can be deemed “transphobic”. But in both cases there can be no palpable hate, but simply the desire to discuss rights and harms.

How do you stop antisemitism in Australia without banning “hate speech,” then?  Counter speech is a good way, though it’s not guaranteed to work.  But for sure banning “hate speech” is not going to reduce antisemitism in Australia. What it will do is reduce the frequency of publicly expressed antisemitic sentiments. That is not the same thing.

h/t: Peggy

As you know, when Paramount Skydance acquired the television station CBS, Bari Weiss, still editor of the Free Press, was also appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News. I worried about that, as CBS has a long reputation for quality news, and I couldn’t see Weiss—whose Free Press site seems both center-right and lacking gravitas as well as reportorial quality—actually improving CBS News. But we’ll give her a chance. So far, she’s blown it, but it’s early days.

Weiss is new on the job, but is already putting her fingerprints on the broadcast news, and not in a good way. First, she held a Town Hall in which Weiss (unusual for an editor) appeared as an interviewer questioning Erika Kirk, the widow of the assassinated Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk. It was a debacle, with Weiss not pressing Erika and letting her spew Christianity all over the show. (We’re promised more town halls with Weiss in the future.)

Now, according to several sources, including the NYT article below, Weiss has done something even more serious: she had a segment of the excellent news show “60 minutes” pulled—and apparently for ideological reasons, Click below to read, or find the article archived free here.

Here’s an excerpt:

In a move that drew harsh criticism from its own correspondent, CBS News abruptly removed a segment from Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Ms. Weiss said in a statement late Sunday: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”

Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia about Alfonsi, who’s been with the show for a decade:

Sharyn Elizabeth Alfonsi (born June 3, 1972) is an American journalist and correspondent for 60 Minutes. She made her debut appearance on the show on March 1, 2015. In 2019, she received the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award journalism award and has reported from war zones in Iraq, Gaza, and Afghanistan.

More clues as to why the story was spiked:

The segment was focused on Venezuelan men who were sent by the Trump administration to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a notorious prison in El Salvador. In a news release on Friday promoting the segment, CBS News said that Ms. Alfonsi had spoken with several men now released from the prison “who describe the brutal and torturous conditions they endured.”

Ms. Weiss first saw the segment on Thursday and raised numerous concerns to “60 Minutes” producers about Ms. Alfonsi’s segment on Friday and Saturday, and she asked for a significant amount of new material to be added, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions.

One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff.

Ms. Weiss also questioned the use of the term “migrants” to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally, two of the people said.

In her note, Ms. Alfonsi said that her team had requested comment from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security. “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote.

This is ludicrous. The story was vetted five times and cleared by CBS sttorneys. The team working on the story asked for comment from the three most relevant agencies: the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.  They refused to participate.  That would have been enough to add to the story: three “no comments”. But Weiss stuck her nose in and helpfully supplied Alfonsi with yet another administration official, a deputy chief of staff in the White House. (Did Weiss know what that person would say? If so, how?) It’s not the job of the reporter to keep asking administration officials until they find a cricial comment. Alfonsi is right: this appears to be Weiss’s attempt to get someone to badmouth or contradict the story. Alfonsi added this:

“We have been promoting this story on social media for days,” Ms. Alfonsi added. “Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.”

“I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight,” she wrote.

Reached on Sunday evening, Ms. Alfonsi said, “I refer all questions to Bari Weiss.”

Here, from “X”, is Alfonsi’s full email to the “news team,” presumably those people who worked on the story (click screenshot to go to site, Stelter is CNN’s chief media analys):

Alfonsi is clearly pissed off, and is going to fight (given Weiss’s position, Alfonsi will probably lose). But the whole thing smacks not only of censorship, but of Weiss’s attempt to micromanage “60 Minutes” stories, makng sure the Trump administration can weigh in publicly.  That’s not what reporting should do.,  Alfoni’s memo and stand is proper, and is that of a working reporter. Weiss has little experience with this end of reporting, and she screwed up by desperately trying to get someone from the Trump administration to criticize the story. Weiss’s overweening ambition to build news organizations is already starting to do her in. If she keeps acting this way towards CBS reporters, they will leave and the station will be left with a bunch of neophytes. (Some CBS employees are already threatening to quit.)

If you want other versions of this story, you can find them at CNN, NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, and Fox News, which adds a response from Weiss:

“My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready,” Weiss said in a statement.

Weiss should never have taken this job, for I foresee a lot of micromanagement that is not to the taste of the newspeople themselves. She is is clearly not ready to be CBS’s news editor-in-chief, and we may have to watch the news division go down the tubes before Weiss learns enough to manage the news section properly.

 

h/t: Douglas, David

Today we have more lovely butterfly photos sent in by Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistician at Oklahoma State University, who notes that “the first twelve are photographed by me and the last two by my wife (Sreemala Das Majumder). She is a Ph.D. student in Environmental Sciences at Oklahoma State University.”  The pair has a bird-and-butterfly photo site called Wingmates. Pratyay’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. 

We have photographed many butterflies over the last couple of years, so I wanted to share on more batch of them – this time some larger ones from the family Papilionidae that are all commonly known as swallowtails.

Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes), our largest butterfly species. The flower is of Tall Thistle (Cirsium altissimum), which is native in our region:

Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) on wild coneflower (I believe Echinacea pallida) and looking like a fancy kite! These are probably the most common breeding Swallowtails in our area. We had many caterpillars on our fennel this year:

Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor) – Gotta love these with all the beautiful iridescence. They are relatively easy to invite into your area if you have pipevine on your property. They avoid predators by being poisonous/distasteful:

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), a common migrant:

This one is also an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), but it is a dark morph female. While males are always yellow, females have two morphs – yellow and dark. It is thought that by being dark, they benefit from mimicking the distasteful Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor). This is true for some other species such as Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus), Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes), Red-spotted Purple (Limenitis arthemis) etc.:

Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus), which looks quite similar to a Black Swallowtail:

Dorsal side of the Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes):

This one is not from Oklahoma. These two Palamedes Swallowtails (Papilio Palamedes) chasing each other in the swamps of North Carolina:

Zebra Swallowtail (Eurytides marcellus), another Eastern species. Love their long tails!:

I think this image captures all the common Western swallowtail species. The one coming in and the one in front at the right are both Two-tailed Swallowtails (Papilio multicaudata). One on the left is definitely a Pale Swallowtail (Papilio eurymedon), and I think the one behind the right Two-tailed is a Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus), but please correct me if I am wrong. All of these congregated in this rocky area to get the necessary nutrients on a sunny day in the Rocky Mountains, of Colorado:

Another Two-tailed in flight and some others from the same area:

A black-on-black image of a Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) hovering over garden phlox:

These last two photos are by Sreemala:

Symmetry! Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) coming in:

Yet another photo of a Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes) from our garden:

This will be the penultimate reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have several Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired many photos for posting. (Note: no AI picturess like the ones I made below.)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; Christmas and Koynezaa Eve.  It’s simple: just send a photo the name you want to go by, and then the name of the cat and some information about it.

First, an interfaith celebration (Hanukkah is over):

But we can’t forget the atheist cats!!!

A reader sent me a video-containing email with the header “John Oliver destroys Bari Weiss”, with the message below saying, “Somebody had to do it.”  Well, yes, somebody should criticize the Free Press, which is becoming, in my view, more political (right-centrist) and less full of news. And even news stories aren’t really written by seasoned reporters, and it shows.  Plus the site has a lot of clickbait.

Further, CBS New’s decision to make Bari Weiss a big macher in the news division shows questionable judgment at best. Weiss, who’s enormously ambitious, has simply spread herself too thin, and it shows.

Those are some of the things criticized by “comedian” John Oliver in his 34-minute rant below. Oliver is rightfully distressed that Bari Weiss has suddenly become editor-in-chief of CBS News, something that concerns me.  CBS has a distinguished history of reporting, including Edward R. Murrow, who took down Joe McCarthy on that network, as well as America’s Most Trusted Anchor, Walter Cronkite. Granted, Weiss is not an anchorperson, and editors usually stay off the air, but she’s already hosted a town hall interview with Erika Kirk, something I found cringeworthy. And Weiss promises that there will be many more town halls to come. Oy!

But Oliver, whom I almost never watch, goes after Weiss and CBS in the too-long and unfunny rant below.  I’m always mystified that people find Oliver worthy of watching. He’s like the latter-day Jon Stewart, all sweaty, ranty, and, most sinfully, not funny at all.  He doesn’t make you think, as Maher does: he goes after the low-hanging fruit that his followers want to eat.  To me, his humor and political perspicacity are far less engaging than Bill Maher’s.  And Oliver is hyperbolic, and when he characterizes Weiss’s written resignation from the NYT as “self-mythologizing.”  He also faults her for having control over the direction of CBS news but “not being a reporter.” Well, she was a columnist and surely engages with the news, so I don’t find being a “reporter” disqualifying from being an editor.  But others may disagree.

That said, I am losing interest in the Free Press as well, and yet I keep subscribing—almost entirely because I love Nellie Bowles’s Friday TGIF columns.

I’ll quote with permission from an email sent me by reader Jim Batterson when I sent him the link to the rant below. He stopped subscribing to the Free Press a while ago. Bat:

I think Bari lost her focus. She had a good focus on Israel and antisemitism as well as the excesses of Woke back when she left the New York Times. She started off Common Sense and early versions of The Free Press with proper in-depth critique if I recall correctly, but at some point spread herself all over the map…more chaos than heterodoxy.  I unsubscribed from TFP somewhere around when she was giving oxygen to the “it escaped from a lab” speculation, piling on Fauci, and starting her love affair with religion (I had thought her Judaism was much like my ow—cultural— and that she was of the Jewish people, not a deeply observant Jew).

Listening to Oliver is a painful experience to me.  Freddie deBoer points out the problem with Oliver’s sneering, progressive condescension.  deBoer’s column is largely about gender, but I’m highlighting the problems with Oliver’s progressivism combined with his hyperbolic humorlessness:

I get it: nominating John Oliver as a symbol of liberalism’s failures was well-worn territory a decade ago. This argument has already been made, all the ideological fruit plucked. And the broader debate about liberal condescension as a profound political advantage for the right has percolated in its current form since the 2016 election and in a more general sense for longer than any of us have been alive. I hate to fight yesterday’s war, and I hate to bore you with arguments that have already been made. But at some point, when you see liberals share the same videos week after week of an annoying British man sneering down a camera lens to tell you how stupid everyone else is, you do have to ask if the American left-of-center has any sense at all of how much their project has been damaged by their reputation for patronizing self-righteousness. If the Trump era has proven anything, it’s just how wildly sensitive voters are to the perception that someone somewhere is judging them. That level of sensitivity to vague slights is stupid and the grievance usually disingenuous, but that’s politics, baby. And Oliver is such a pitch-perfect caricature of progressive self-regard – snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious – that I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation.

One of the great weaknesses of contemporary liberalism is the absolute inability to take an L on any issue; scroll around on BlueSky and you’ll find, for example, vast throngs of progressives who are completely unwilling to admit that mass immigration of unskilled labor into the United States is deeply unpopular. I think the left’s control of our arts, culture, and ideas industries have left too many of us thinking that we can’t lose a culture war. But in the broad sense, we currently are.

A pox on both their houses. Without further ado:  Oliver tires to take down Weiss.