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Here’s a rare example of animal behavior being fossilized. In this case it’s in termites, whose modern representatives engage, as pairs, in a behavior called “tandem running”. This occurs after a group of reproductive termites  who have left their natal nest fly away, a behavior certainly evolved as a way of staring new colonies.  Unlike other social insects like bees, a termite colony contains both reproductive males and females, both of which have wings, eyes, and the capacity to mate and start new colonies (other workers lack wings and eyes). At mating time, a swarm of reproductive individuals fly away at random (they’re not good fliers), and then alight on the ground or, in the case at hand, on a tree trunk.  After dropping their wings, they form mating pairs, each of which can start a new colony. To find that colony, a male and a female engage in “tandem running,” with (in the species below) the female running around with the male close behind, his head contacting her abdomen. Apparently some species can have either a male or a female as the leader in the tandem run. I can’t find out whether mating occurs before the tandem run or after the pair burrow into the ground to found their new colony.

When the female finds a site she likes, the pair digs in (most termites nest underground), and, after mating, the female becomes the “queen”, and the male the “king”.  They remain monogamous, with the male continuing to fertilize the female throughout the life of the colony. This implies that all the termites in a colony are brothers and sisters. Since “kings” and “queens” can live for decades (25-50 years, according to one site, the colony can last a long time sending out reproductives to found new colonies.

At any rate, below you can see two examples of tandem running in reproductive alates (winged termites that have lost their wings). This is the behavior that appears to have been “fossilized”.

The YouTube notes:

When male and female termite alates (flying termites) pair up, they break off their wings and the male starts following the female around until she finds a suitable spot to start a new nest. This activity is called termite tandem running.

And so to the new paper in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, which you can read by clicking on the title below or reading the pdf here.

The authors had a piece of 38-million-year-old Baltic amber, which is fossilized plant resin. (Baltic amber containing animal or plant inclusions like this can sell for a lot of money.) When resin or sap falls to the ground, it can, over long periods, be converted to amber by pressure and temperature of the sediments above. Eventually it becomes quite hard and can be mined.

In one pice of amber, the authors found two termites that looked as if they might have been tandem running when they got stuck in the sap and then preserved. Here’s a photo of their specimen, which is of the extinct species Electrotermis affinis.  The caption to the partial figure below is “E. affinis pair in Baltic amber. (A and B) The dorsal and ventral sides of the tandem, respectively, with (B) an arrow pointing to the 15-articles antenna of the tandem leader.”  The scale bars represent 0.5 mm.

This certainly looks like a tandem pair, but the problem is that they are not straight head-to-abdomen, but twisted a bit, so they are more side to side.  Because it’s hard to get a good look at specimens in amber, and you can’t cut the amber open (that destroys the specimen), the authors used  X-ray microtomography (a 3-D reconstruction using X rays) to show that the male is the one on the right in (A) and left in the ventral view (B); he’s smaller and the sexes can be told apart by the shape of the seventh “sternite”, or abdominal plate. They also saw that the female’s mouthparts were in contact with the tip of the male’s abdomen, which is what happens in tandem running.  So we have a male and female in the right contact position, buttressing the idea that this is a tandem pair.

The authors then hypothesized that this was indeed a pair that was doing tandem running (probably on a tree) when they got stuck in sap, and the side-by-side position resulted from the pair trying to get unstuck.  They failed, and eventually became part of a piece of amber.

To test this “position change” hypothesis, they put tandem-running termites of a living species, Coptotermes formosanus, in a sticky trap, a flat piece of cardboard covered with a sticky substance (I used them in the lab to catch cockroaches). This mimics a pair getting stuck in resin, and, as in resin, the pair could move around a bit after they got stuck.  Would the tandem runners move more side by side?

Indeed they did. The stickiness led to the tandem pair shifting their positions as they tried to free themselves. In fact, they assumed a more side by side position once stuck. (I have to say that I find this experiment disturbing, as it involves killing insects for the sake of science. However, I killed cockroaches to keep my lab free of organisms other than fruit flies.)

Here’s what they found in 17 termites that didn’t escape the trap:

The spatial orientation of the leader and the follower after entrapment was significantly different than in natural tandem runs. The distance between the body centroids of the leader and the follower was smaller in trapped pairs than in natural tandems (Fig. 2 D–G and SI Appendix, Fig. S2, Exact Wilcoxon rank sum test, W = 599, P < 0.001). This is because partners of trapped pairs were often positioned side-by-side, differing from the linear positioning of natural tandems (Fig. 2 D–G). The shorter inter-individual distance could result from the two individuals entering the sticky surface together and becoming stuck near each other without the ability to move away, rather than their active behavioral interactions to maintain proximity.

And a picture of a living tandem pair (female in front) that wound up stuck more side by side, like the fossilized ones above:

(From paper): The relative position of females and males forming mating pairs. (A–C) Mating pairs of the termite C. formosanus in (A) a natural tandem run and (B and C) on a sticky surface. Females are marked in red and males in blue. The convoluted lines indicate the trajectories of a female and a male during 30 min after the pair entered the sticky trap.

They also concluded, from a complicated logistic regression, that the probability was 74% that the following individual was a female.

Finally, here’s a reconstruction in the paper of the original event that led to the fossil. Note that the “fossilized behavior” term is a bit incorrect, as what gets fossilized is not their normal behavior, but what seems to be the behavior of a tandemly running pair that’s gotten stuck.  But given that there are individuals of both sexes in this pair, and that the antennae contact the abdomen, combined with what’s seen in the “resin mimicking” experiment, it’s seems likely that the authors are correct.

(from paper) Artistic reconstruction of E. affinis tandem pairs running freely on a tree bark and one tandem trapped by tree-resin.

What about other examples of fossilized behavior? I want to put in a paragraph about this from the paper, just for your delectation:

Some fossils preserve the “frozen” behavior of animals in actions at the moment of death (9, 10). However, our results demonstrate that animals on the sticky trap are not instantaneously immobilized and change their postures on the surface. These experiments imply that the spatial orientation of animals preserved in sticky matrices, such as in tree resin prior to fossilization into amber, is influenced by the process of entrapment. Therefore, the interpretation of fossilized behavior can be dramatically refined or even corrected by observing the behavior of living organisms under entrapment conditions. Some behaviors fossilized in amber may remain unaltered by the entrapment process. For example, the preservation of mating moths in copula (14) or hell ants grasping prey items (12) suggests that the inter-individual interactions of these behaviors are strong enough not to be disturbed by the movement on the sticky surface. However, entrapment in amber likely affects many other behaviors. For example, insects dispersing through phoresy [attachment to other insects as a way of moving around] can be preserved detached from the host insect, perhaps because the host struggled on the sticky surface before complete encasement (37). The consequence of different behavioral responses can be studied using extant relatives. Furthermore, animals have evolved behavioral responses to sticky objects. For example, recent studies have revealed that ants are not passively affected by sticky objects but actively modify them. Red imported fire ants cover sticky surfaces with soil particles to access food resources (38), and granivorous desert ants remove sticky spider webs from nestmates to rescue them (39). Scavenging insects can be attracted by large animals trapped on a sticky surface (11, 35), and the spatial distribution of these insects may have reflected their foraging behavior. Thus, future studies on behavioral responses to sticky objects by animals will increase our understanding of fossil records in amber, as well as shed light on the behavioral capacity of extant insects.

I found it really interesting that ants can get around the danger of sticky substrates by covering them with soil, and can even remove spider web stuck to other ants. Ants have brains about the size of a grain of sand, but this behavior is somehow coded in there (or else they learn to do this, which seems less likely).

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Reference: K. Mizumoto et al, 2024.  Extinct and extant termites reveal the fidelity of behavior fossilization in amber.  Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2308922121

 

We’re almost at the bottom of the tank again, so please send in your good photos. Thanks.

Today we have some fall photos from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous. But he/she added this:

 I’ve attached some pics of fall foliage, from right here at my home in NY’s Hudson Valley.

There’s a new 38-minute movie out, “Man of Steele”, made by filmmaker Eli Steele about diversity, the attempted removal of AP classes, and antisemitism in a ritzy California school district.  The movie, however, was was apparently removed from both YouTube and Vimeo—just for two seconds of video that someone claimed constituted “copyright infringement”. It appears to be fair usage, which isn’t really infringement, but fortunately you can still watch the movie. As Steele notes in the second headline below (click on each one to read):

The complainant was Menlo-Atherton High School’s newspaper, M-A Chronicle, and they objected to the inclusion of a two-second clip in the Killing America trailer. I checked the trailer’s YouTube page and, indeed, it had been removed.

Here’s are three Substack sites that explain the situation (the links to the movie are below, or you can click on the first headline).

I’ve watched the movie, and you won’t lose much more than half an hour if you do, but I have to say that it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, as it mixes together diverse subjects (removal of AP classes from a high school, equity, diversity, a school board’s musing over the advanced-placement classes, and the reaction of one parent whose son goes to the Bay Area school at issue).  Perhaps I was tired, but I didn’t find it particularly coherent. That said, it’s still worth watching to see the parents battle over whether “tracking” students creates inequities and is unfair, or whether it allows students to reach their full potential. It’s worth it to see the school board dissimulate, and it’s worth it to see the odious, antisemitic and pro-Palestinian lies that some teachers tell to their students. But the film fails explain clearly how equity is connected with anti-Semitism, although one can intuit that the connection is via a DEI mentality, which promotes equity and denigrates Jews at the same time (Jews are seen as white, oppressive colonialists). And the occasional insertion of Russian stuff, like their national anthem, baffles me. Is Steele saying that Marxism is behind some of this? Who knows?

In the end, one doesn’t know what happens in the school district, but perhaps because the school board hasn’t decided what to do.

Here, from one of the posts, is the creator’s explanation of why he wanted to get the movie out (I know him only by the name “Man of Steele”):

That is why I’m releasing the film now — to force the following issues to the forefront:

• Free Speech — what are we teaching students at high school newspapers when we tell them to embrace censorship, not free speech, as their weapon of choice?
• Artistic Expression — are we going to let documentaries and other art forms be censored by activists, especially those in wealthy, elite neighborhoods?
• Hate/Antisemitism — Why has this school and district largely ignored the rising antisemitism on campus? We know if it was blacks who were on the receiving end, the response would be different. This double-standard must end.
• Ideological Capture/Lowering of Education Standards — For too long these education activists, many from Stanford University and beyond, have been given free reign to impose their ideologies onto students. As a result, the quality of education has declined significantly.

People often ask why I made Killing America and Diana Blum, the film’s main subject, once said something that summed up my thoughts perfectly: “With this film, I wanted to give parents a voice because they’ve been silenced and ridiculed for so long by the school board, activist teachers, and the school authorities. This film is our way to get around that ideological resistance and be heard for once and for all.”

I don’t have to say it but the irony here is that it is these education ideologues that are trying to take our voice away once again.

To watch the movie, click on the headline below, go here (same place), or watch it on Steele’s tweet below.

Again, I emphasize that you should watch this movie, but realize that it’s not a fully-formed documentary. The fact that the school is trying to censor it on trivial grounds tells you all you need to know.

After enduring a week of unwarranted takedowns of the Killing America trailer on @Youtube and @Vimeo as well as receiving a baseless cease and desist letter that seeks to prevent my documentary from being shown in its original form, I’ve decided to release the full (38 min)… pic.twitter.com/KL6RxeJ3KE

— Eli Steele (@Hebro_Steele) April 5, 2024

If you want to donate to Steele to support the movie, go here. I also found this on the donation page, which clarifies the film a bit.

THE STORY: In August of 2023, I was contacted by Bay Area parents who recently learned that Sequoia Union High School District had been removing honors classes for the past 8 years. Not only that, they were infusing other classes with liberated ethnic studies curricula. At first, I thought that this was an old story. We saw how Virginia and Manhattan parents fought over the schools for the past three years.

Then October 7 happened.

It quickly became apparent to us how the immediate and unapologetic rise in antisemitism in the Bay Area schools was related to the elimination of honors classes as well as the oppressor-oppressed model that ethnic studies brought into the classroom. We knew then that we had a film here and “Killing America” is the result.

h/t: Luana

 

I’ve posted fairly often on the videos of German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder , who posted YouTube videos dealing not only with her heterodox approach to modern physics, but also with subjects like consciousness, free will, and transsexuality. According to Wikipedia, her most recent academic positions were at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (until 2023) and since then at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich’s Center for Mathematical Philosophy. (Her personal website is here.)

No longer. In this 14-minute video called “I failed,” Hossenfelder explains why she now has no formal academic job but is doing only YouTube videos.

The story is familiar to many Americans. Unable to secure a permanent, tenured position, Hossenfelder was told that because she was a woman, she should apply for female-limited scholarships that weren’t tenured and depended on getting grants to get a salary.  So, as for many academics in America, that academic job depended on getting grants. And those grants come with substantial “overhead” given to the institution: money that can be used to support other endeavors of the institution. (In America, federal grants can come with 50% or higher overhead, so if you get a million bucks for your own research, the institution gets $500,000+ on top of that. It’s supposed to be used to support the infrastructure of your lab, like water, electricity, maintenance, and the like, but the university simply puts it in a big pot and uses it for nearly anything.)

This system is a way to turn untenured faculty into money earners to support the institution, and explains why so many faculty, tenured or otherwise, are under constant pressure to get grants. Even if you have tenure, in many places your promotion and salary increases depend getting grants, though the University of Chicago is one of the few places I know of in which discussion of grants is forbidden when the tenure and promotion committee decides your fate. Research accomplishment, service to the university, and teaching are all that matters.

As an untenured academic, Sabine had no security, and on top of that she became part of the system (also prevalent in America), in which a senior professor heading a lab simply tells his minions what to do and then slaps his or her name on whatever papers come out of the lab. This “paper production machine,” as Sabine calls it, is a way for the Boss to get a c.v. bloated with many papers on which he or she didn’t do any work, but procured the money to support. In other words, the Boss writes the grants and the minions do the work that helps the Boss advance and get further grants.

I have to say that I find this system repugnant, but it’s what both Americans and Sabine have to deal with. I avoided it by doing my own research with my own hands—after all, that, and not writing grants, was the fun part—and by not putting my name on papers in which I didn’t actively participate (correcting a student’s paper or just funding the work doesn’t count!). But I also discovered that the NIH, which funded my research throughout my career, didn’t care whether or not my name was on the papers I listed as “accomplishments” in my grant proposals; they wanted only to see what you had done with the money (i.e., how many decent papers came out of my lab, whether or not I was an author). Thank goodness for that! But see below for its effects on my psyche.

But I digress. Sabine went through a series of jobs and grants, constrained by the German system to do research that was a bit “edgy,” but not the kind of research she wanted to do. Caught up on this grant-and-paper recursion, unable to do the research she loved, and married (with twins) to a man who worked in Sweden (e.g., commuting), she became unhappy and depressed.  Eventually, as she says, she applied for grants in areas where she did want to work, but she didn’t get grant funding. Without that money, she didn’t have a job.  And so she had to leave academia.

As she says matter-of-factly (but clearly distressed), her academic career finished as “the story of a young scientist whose dreams died” and “the story of an old scientist who thinks they a who could have made a difference if it hadn’t been necessary to get past five reviewers who didn’t share [her] interests.” She tries to put a good face on her tale by saying that she found on YouTube “a community of people” who share her interests. In the end, she says she’s found an honest trade by swapping knowledge for viewers’ attention.

The video ends with a bump as she says, “I’m not sure if I’m going to post this video. It’s a bit too much, isn’t it?”  She did post it. No, it’s not too much, though it’s sad and it tells you how the system works for both tenured and untenured academics.

Watch below, and then I’ll say a bit more afterwards.

I want to tell a personal story that buttresses Sabine’s tale of the importance of grants. From the beginning of my career, it was necessary to get federal grants, and for two reasons. Most important, I was an experimental evolutionary geneticist, and needed money to support my lab and my students.  Your “setup” money that they give you when you begin a job (my first position was at the University of Maryland) runs out after a year or two, and you have to start writing grants as soon as your butt hits your first office chair.

Second, at Maryland grants were important to do the research that would get you promoted to tenure. Even at Chicago, I couldn’t do lab work or support my Ph.D. students unless I had a grant. And without research and publications, one couldn’t do the work you wanted, and your career would tank.

Fortunately, I was funded by the NIH from the outset, and was lucky enough to keep the same grant for 33 years without an interruption of funding. (There was pressure to get more than one grant, but I resisted it; I was happy with a single grant that could fund the work I wanted to do, and didn’t want to spend my life writing grants so I could be part of “the paper production machine.”) Grants are hard to write, and I usually began writing one six months before it was due.

The way the NIH informs you of your fate is first via a letter—a letter in which there is a pink piece of paper that gives you your rating: at that time ratings went from 100 (best) to 500 (worst).  That number give you an idea if your grant fared well, but whether or not you get funded came via a subsequent phone call.  I remember how my hands shook when I opened the NIH letters, and how pleased I was to see a good score (my last one was 103, nearly perfect).  From the score, you had a good idea if you’d get funded, and, after the phone call confirming that came, I was very happy that I had another 3 years of funding (I had 11 straight funding bouts).

But, as a lugubrious Jew (is that redundant?), my happiness was ephemeral. For I almost immediately began worrying about the NEXT grant. Would I be able to do the research I was just funded for so that I could get the grant renewed again?

The day I decided to retire, I felt a great weight lift off my shoulders, but I didn’t understand why. Then I realized: I never had to apply for another grant again! It turns out that during my whole career, the fear of losing my grant had gnawed silently at my insides, like a tapeworm. Now there was no more fear, and for several years I simply enjoyed my research and stopped worrying about grant deadlines and renewals.

The upshot is that I fully understand Sabine’s malaise.  The academic grant-and-paper system isn’t great, but I don’t see an alternative right now. But I do know that grants should be given for research accomplished rather than research proposed (the latter, occupying about 15 single-spaced pages, is what took me so long to write a grant). If this alternative were the case, I wouldn’t have had to spend six months planning what I would do in advance—a nearly impossible task anyway.  I understand, although I may be wrong, that this is how the Canadian granting system works: everyone gets some money for their first grant, and then for subsequent grants you write a very short proposal whose kernel is describing what you did (and published) with the last grant. If you keep your record of accomplishment going, you keep getting your grant. That system saves an enormous amount of time.

h/t Norm

We’re back because a few readers have sent in some photos, but I can always use more.  Today we have Doug Hayes of Richmond, Virginia, of “Breakfast Crew” fame, giving us a view of the latest crew. Doug’s notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The Breakfast Crew is becoming more active now that warmer weather has arrived. My neighbor and I also took trips out to the Chamberlane Swamp and to the Richmond Flood Wall to check on some of our favorite birds.

The dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) are still hanging around the yard. We only got a dusting of snow a few months ago, but the snowbirds are still here:

Lots of male Northern Cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) are zipping around the neighborhood, squabbling with each other and staking out territory as mating season draws near. This guy was hanging out in our front yard, keeping watch for rivals:

This American Robin (Turdus migratorius) decided to check out the suet:

A male House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) enjoying a hearty breakfast:

I’m seeing more Eastern bluebirds (Sialia sialis) this year than previously. They have also turned up earlier than usual:

A juvenile European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) waiting his turn at the suet feeder:

Carolina wrens (Thryothorus ludovicianus) are the most numerous birds in the yard after sparrows. They seem to have an endless curiosity about everything, going inside boxes, under tarps and poking around objects left on the patio table:

There has been a population explosion among Chipping Sparrows (Spizella passerina). Huge flocks of these little birds have shown up in the past few weeks:

A few Brown Thrashers (Toxostoma rufum) have been living on the edges of the yard for some time, usually keeping close to the bushes and trees. This one finally figured out how to get to the suet feeder:

Northern Mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos) usually keep to the yards across the street and it is unusual to see them in my back yard. This one decided to go for the suet:

Downy woodpeckers (Picoides pubescens) are quite common throughout the neighborhood. Several are regulars at the feeders:

This striking-looking Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura) showed up a couple of weeks ago. A change from the usual gray:

My neighbor and I took a quick trip to the Chamberlane Swamp a few days ago, but it was something of a disappointment. Only a handful of great egrets (Ardea alba) were around, but I got a nice shot of this one taking flight:

The James River was very high thanks to recent heavy rains. The swift current didn’t stop the Double-crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) from diving and fishing:

Large numbers of Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) were out along the James River, but fishing was poor due to the high, fast-moving water. This bird perched on the flood wall, keeping a watch for fish and rival ospreys:

Camera info:  Sony A7RV mirrorless body, Sony FE 200-600 zoom lens and 1.4X teleconverter, all shots hand-held. Photos processed with Adobe Photoshop 2024 and Topaz Photo AI for noise reduction in high ISO shots.

It’s very strange that there are some people who claim that there is no real difference in the harmfulness of different religions as practiced during our day. As nearly all the Four Horsemen maintained (and Sam Harris continues to do so eloquently), Islam is the faith that, as practiced now, causes more harm than any other faith, and certainly more harm than does Christianity. And yes, I freely admit that between the 12th to the 18th centuries—the period of the Inquisition—Christianity was the world’s most harmful faith. But we mustn’t forget the Aztecs, who routinely engaged in mass and gruesome murders of both their own people and prisoners.

But now the most pernicious faith seems to be Islam. Certainly many Muslims (and I know some) practice their faith benignly and even charitably. But many others don’t, and they enable harms throughout the world—harms that were never produced by Christianity or that have been largely abandoned by them. Here are some practices promoted or exacerbated by Islamic doctrine:

• Islamism: the desire to dominate the world with Islamic doctrine, including sharia law
• The codified oppression of women. In many places women must be veiled, put into cloth sacks, can’t go out without a male guardian, can’t go to school or get many jobs, must walk behind their husbands, can be beaten (or divorced) by their husbands without sanction, can be stoned to death for adultery (a practice just resumed by the Taliban in Afghanistan), and so on.
• Honor culture: killing of family members who supposedly sully a family’s “honor”
• Female genital mutilation, which is encouraged in many places by Islam
• Sharia law, which is also oppressive. For example, the testimony of women under sharia law counts only half as much as a man’s
• The oppression of gays, including outright murder in places like Gaza and legal execution in places like Iran.
• Blasphemy laws, under which you can be killed for insulting Islam or burning the Qur’an
• The demonization and sometimes the killing of apostates or atheists
• The issuing of fatwas when Westerners insult Islam, sometimes calling for killing those perceived to insult the religion (Charlie Hebdo, Salman Rushdie, etc.). This is connected with the blasphemy laws mentioned above
• Divisiveness within the religion that leads to war and death: Sunnis kill Shiites and vice versa, so there are internecine killings as well as cross-cultural killing
• The propagation of hatred of Jews and propagandizing of the young
• Favoring religious teaching in madrassas above secular teaching
• The suppression of freedom of speech in general, particularly that which criticizes the government, often an explicitly Islamic government.  Masih Alinejad, for instance, fears for her life in America because she criticizes Iran, which has tried to both kill and kidnap her in separate incidents. Why? Because she’s against mandatory wearing of the headscarf (hijab) for women.

I could go on, but I’ll stop here so I can finish this post.

While I suppose you can find instances of some of these practices among Christians (e.g. honor killings, Orthodox Jews inhibiting secular learning, the demonization of gays), you would be a fool to say that the harm caused by Islam, as instantiated by the acts above, is as serious as that caused by Christianity in our era. There’s simply no argument to be made for it.

Except, of course, by P. Z. Myers, because Richard Dawkins has just defended Christianity against Islam in the way I have above, and we all know that P. Z. Myers is obsessed with criticizing Dawkins. And so Myers does, in a deeply misguided and logically confused piece on Pharyngula called “Banality and bigotry“.  The point Myers wants to make is that Dawkins, as a “cultural Christian” who also sees modern Christianity as morally superior to modern Islam, is thus bigot against Islam—an “Islamophobe”, if you will. (I prefer to think of “Islamophobia” as “fear of the consequences of Islam, which isn’t bigotry.) I won’t psychologize Myers, as I just want to rebut his argument, but I’d suggest that he reflect on his obsessive animus against Dawkins.  In this case, the animus has forced Myers to twist the facts to imply that Christianity is precisely as bad for the world as is Islam.

Myers’s jihad comes from the video below, in which Dawkins conveys an “Easter message” of the moral superiority of Christian behavior over Muslim behavior—comparing behaviors based on religious dictates. The interlocutor is journalist Rachel Johnson, and the venue is LBC, originally the London Broadcasting Company. It’s an interesting discussion, for Richard also queries Johnson about her own beliefs, sometimes making her squirm.

But the main error of both her queries as well as Myers’s article is to claim that because there are bad behaviors inspired by both Christianity and Islam, they must be equally bad. And if you say that, you’re a bigot. The error, of course, is the neglect of the real issue: how often do bad behavior promoted by the two faiths occur?  Further, says Myers, both the Bible and Qur’an promote some bad behaviors, so the two faiths again must be pretty much equally bad. Here I’d disagree, maintaining that the Qu’ran is full of more hatred, animus, and oppressive dictates than is the Bible. (Yes, I’ve read both.) But that’s really irrelevant to the question at hand, as most modern Christians don’t follow the bad parts of the Bible, while the Qur’an hasn’t been equally defanged.

Click to listen:

Dawkins mentions some of the bad behaviors inspired by Islam that I’ve listed above, including hostility to women and gays. He adds that “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time. It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in the way Islam is not.”  It seems clear that he’s referring to behaviors emanating from the religions today, which is further clarified when Dawkins says that, if given a choice, he’d prefer to to live in a culturally Christian than in a Muslim country—though he “doesn’t believe a word of Christian faith”.

I’d agree, and I’m betting that, given a choice of living in the U.S. or U.K. on the one hand or Iran or Afghanistan on the other, Myers would choose the Christian countries. You don’t have to believe the tenets of Christianity to make that no-brainer choice, nor do you have to believe that liberal democracies are the inevitable result of Christianity. It’s simply a matter of the average well-being in a country taken across all of its inhabitants.

Here, however, is how Myers deals with Dawkins’s claim that he’s a “cultural Christian” because he likes church music and cathedrals, even though he entirely rejects Christian doctrine:

 It’s meaningless and trivial to say that we have all been shaped by our environment…although, of course, many Christian believers think that this is a huge deal and are acting as if Dawkins has renounced his unbelief.

He has not. What he then goes on to do, though, is to declare his bigotry, and that is what I find disturbing.

He likes hymns and cathedrals and parish churches — fine, uncontroversial, kind of boring, actually. But then he resents the idea that people would celebrate Ramadan instead of Christmas. Why? They both seem like nice holidays, that some people follow a different set of customs shouldn’t be a problem. Then he goes on to say that Christianity is “a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that Islam is not.”

How so? Because Islam is hostile to women and gays. He goes on to talk about how the Koran has a low regard for women.

Jesus. It’s true, but has this “cultural Christian” read the Bible? I don’t see any difference. The interviewer tries to bring up the record of actual practicing Christians, and he dismisses that as only those weird American protestants, as if jolly old England has no gay baiting, no murders of young women, and as if JK Rowling were just an open-minded, beneficent patron of the arts. Many American Christians are virulent homophobes who treat women as chattel, but his equally nasty culturally English Christianity has people and organizations that are just as awful.

70% of women teachers in the UK face misogyny. The British empire left a legacy of homophobia. The UK is so transphobic that some people are fleeing. Cultural Christianity does not seem to have made Great Britain a kinder, gentler place, but Dawkins must have some particularly rosy glasses that he wears at home, and takes off when he looks at any other country.

Dawkins has come out as sympathetic to Christianity, but only because it justifies his bigotry. At least he’s being open and honest about both biases.

Here Myers makes the two mistakes I mentioned above. First, he sees no difference between the proportion of bad stuff in the Bible and the bad stuff in the Qur’an. I do see a difference (I presume Myers has read both, as I have), but, as I said this is really irrelevant.

The main question is where one wants to live: in a Christian or a Muslim country, and whether Islam has more pernicious effects on the modern world than does Christianity. Which religion promotes behaviors that lead to a better, more desirable society?  To me the answer is clear, but apparently isn’t to either Myers or his faithful acolytes.  For crying out loud, America doesn’t systematically execute gays (yes, very rarely one gets killed). And yes, some Christians are “virulent homophobes”, but it’s insane to argue that, across all Americans (or American Christians), homophobia or oppression of women are just as bad as they are in Muslim societies. Perhaps 70% of women teachers in the UK have faced sexual harassment, a figure that is 70% too high, but in Muslim countries women can’t even become teachers, nor can women and girls become students. If you followed John Rawls and, behind the curtain of ignorance, had to choose whether you’d grow up as a women in a Muslim or Christian country, knowing nothing else about your circumstances, I think the choice would be clear.

The British empire left a legacy of homophobia? Well, I don’t know much whether that was a ubiquitous result of colonialism, but for the sake of argument I’ll agree. The point, however, is that homosexuality is a capital crime in many Muslim countries.  That’s why the notion of “gays for Palestine”, seen on some banners and placards, is so ridiculous. Below is a map showing where homosexuality is legal versus illegal.  Notice anything?

From Statista and Equaldex

Myers ends by accusing Richard of bigotry, presumably because Dawkins thinks that Christianity breeds better societies than does Islam. One can look up the data on various indices of social well being, happiness, and so on (the situation for gays is in the map above), and I’ll let the readers investigate, but the bullet points I’ve given already show that there are very great harms in some Muslim countries that one doesn’t find in majority Christian countries.

To conclude that Dawkins is a bigot, then, you have to not only cherry-pick the data and add confirmation bias, but also decide that making a rational argument supported by data is an instance of “bigotry”. This is the same error as concluding that it’s “Islamophobia”, a form of bigotry, to argue that Muslim societies are more dysfunctional than Christian (or atheist) ones.  In reality, you can hold the argument I’ve made above without being bigoted towards individual Muslims. “Islamophobia” should be a term for “fear of what Islam does”, rather than a form of bigotry.

It’s Sunday, and that means a dollop of photos from John Avise. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Here we have part 5 of John’s birding trip to Australia.

Australian Birds, Part 5 

This week’s post concludes a five-part mini-series on birds that I photographed on a business trip to Queensland, Australia in 2006.Then next week, PCC(E) willing, we can begin a tour of birds from several other countries. 

 Silver Gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae):

Spangled Drongo (Dicrurus bracteatus):

Spotted Catbird (Ailuroedus maculosus):

Straw-necked Ibis (Threskiornis spinicollis):

Wompoo Fruit Dove (Ptilinopus magnificus):

Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita):

White-bellied Cuckoo-shrike (Coracina papuensis):

White-breasted Woodswallows (Artamus leucorynchus) (they typically huddle like this when perched):

White-cheeked Honeyeater (Phylidonyris niger):

Garden Sunbird (Nectarinia jugularis), male:

Well, the headline is a bit hyperbolic, at least as far as losing the war is concerned, but it may not be far off. This hasn’t seemed to be announced in the MSM I read, but it’s all over the Israeli papers, like the Jersalem Post (click to read):

An excerpt:

The IDF on Sunday announced that it had concluded the active invasion stage of the war for now while leaving open the possibility of a future new invasion of Rafah in deep southern Gaza.

In terms of IDF soldiers, this means that the IDF has withdrawn all of Division 98 from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza while maintaining one plus brigades – the Nahal brigade and portions of Brigade 401 – in northern and central Gaza.

Although a top IDF official said that this change had nothing to do with US pressure, the timing was unmistakable in coming right after the IDF’s disastrous mistaken killing of seven humanitarian aid workers last week.

The decision also came less than two days after Israel opened the Erez Crossing and Ashdod port to transfer humanitarian aid, decisions made under threat by the US of potentially losing weapons support after Jerusalem had refused these requests from Washington for months.

Critically, this means that Palestinians can, on one hand, move freely within southern Gaza and Khan Yunis and that there is a complete vacuum for preventing a return of Hamas governance, but the IDF is keeping northern and central Gaza cut off from the south.

What this means, of course is that will be no invasion of Rafah, regardless of “the possibility of a future new invasion of Rafah in deep southern Gaza”.  This decision—which must have been made by Netanyahu, who has consistently and adamantly maintained that the goal of Israel was to destroy Hamas, and that couldn’t be done without taking Rafah—is baffling, and, I hear, has also baffled the Israeli people.  It means that Hamas, which has four brigades (and most hostages) sequestered in southern Gaza, has “a complete vacuum” for returning to power, at least in the south. It means that the most powerful leaders of Hamas, either in southern Gaza or Egypt (or some other country) remain alive to revitalize their terrorist organization.

And if Hamas returns to power in southern Gaza (can northern Gaza be far behind?), then Israel has lost the war. As one Israeli leader said (I can’t remember who), “there is no use in putting out three-quarters of a fire.” But that’s exactly what Israel has done.

Why did this happen? I have pondered the possibility that it may be a trick, but I don’t believe it. It almost surely results from pressure coming from the U.S., and if that’s the case, then America has achieved what I always said Biden wanted: for Israel to lose its ability to defend itself, and to remain surrounded by terrorists. He’d prefer to win an election than to lose Israel.

Any pressure from the U.S. surely intensified after the killing of seven humanitarian aid workers (though the U.S. killed far more innocents via “friendly fire”), and after the world, predictably, took the side of Palestine. I suspect Biden threatened Netanyahu with a complete cessation of future aid, and a severance of Israeli/US relations would be an absolute disaster for Israel.

What about the hostages? Who knows? They are undoubtedly with the Hamas leadership, and an attack to rescue them would be disastrous. But if Israel is this timorous, it will likely exchange thousands of jailed Palestinian terrorists, many of whom are in prison for killing Israelis, for a fraction of the remaining hostages, many of whom are now dead.  Hamas will keep others (the soldiers, young people, and younger men) to use as future bargaining chips.

In other words, in the War Cabinet’s own assessment of what it means to “win” this war, Israel has lost.  I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think Israel would lie about what it’s doing.

From yahoo!life, apparently originating at Fox News, we hear of a stray cat that interrupted a wedding.  The outcome was inevitable; click on screenshot below to read:

An excerpt:

A stray kitten was adopted by an adoring couple after she interrupted their wedding last year.

Cat owner Cara racked up over 3 million likes after posting video of her meow-filled wedding ceremony on TikTok. The wedding was held at Curry Estate in Hopewell Junction, New York in September 2023.

Video shows the groom reading his vows to the bride when audience members suddenly hear a cat – now named Daisy – loudly meowing.

Cara told Fox News Digital that she originally didn’t hear the chatty cat.

Here’s what I think is that the Tik Tok video:

@gatsby.and.daisy

The cat distrubtion system was working overtime for this one! #cat #weddingtok #catdistributionsystem

♬ Here Comes the Sun – Relaxing Instrumental Music

Besides the wedding, there is of course another happy ending: the stray kitten got adopted:

Cara’s sister, who served as the maid of honor, then called the couple’s attention to the matter.

“[She] kindly let us know that there was a cat right there meowing,” the wife explained. “She was so perfectly perched on a tree stump behind us demanding to be heard.”

According to Cara, she and her husband were already “huge cat people” before the ceremony – and the feline’s unexpected appearance was a highlight.

“We have a cat that we adopted together, Gatsby, [and] our friends have celebrity nicknamed us Catt (Cara + Matt), and we even had cat cake toppers,” she explained.

“It felt like this was all meant to be when she showed up.”

After the bride and groom fell in love with the kitten, the couple’s families and friends worked hard to look for her – but had no luck.

“All anyone could talk about was the cat. It was the highlight of the night… I knew we had to have her.”

All’s well that ends well:

Two weeks later, Cara and Matt were contacted by their wedding venue. After trying for days, staff were finally able to lure the stray with leftover shrimp from past weddings.

“We were on our honeymoon [when they said] they had gotten her and that she was headed to a shelter if we wanted to adopt her,” Cara explained.

Cara said Daisy perfectly integrated into her household. She was named after Daisy Buchanan from “The Great Gatsby” to match with her sibling, Gatsby.

“She is the most affectionate cat and loves nothing more than spending the day curled up inside our sweaters,” Cara said. “It got even better when our resident cat, Gatsby, befriended her so quickly.”

And a wonderful three-minute news video of the whole affair. Be sure to watch the whole thing showing Daisy finally adopted by the ailurophilic newlyweds.  I love that the cats are named after characters from The Great Gatsby.

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

Ginger, who sent this video of a New Age full-body cat massage, said, “You don’t have to watch/listen to the whole thing, but that is one HAPPY cat!  Every cat should have such treatment a least a few times in their nine lives.”

The maker, itzblitzz, adds this note:

(Update: We adopted her). Hi everyone  In today’s video, I will be giving our current foster kitten a relaxing massage . This has been one of my most HIGHLY requested videos of all time! I hope you find it relaxing and enjoyable. We have fostered 4 cats so far this year and it has been a very rewarding experience. Start the video at 2:30 when the ad ends and the massage begins. It’s pretty New-Agey, so you can just look in on this 41-minute video. However, there’s no doubt that this is one happy cat!

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

Here are three cat films, each of which purports to be the first video ever of a cat. But only the third one seems to have precedence.

First, an old silent film from 1906, colorized, fixed up and, most important, showing a CAT. Reader Jon says the short film is “a good way to modernize history (and show cats haven’t changed much over the years).”  This isn’t the earliest cat video, though; the two below it were made earlier.

The YouTube information (I didn’t alter caps or anhything):

We have learned so far that this film is “Le déjeuner des Minet” made in 1905, and released in 1906. This is a french movie, and many viewer lipread french words.

What we don’t know yet : The name of the director. The name of the young girl, and her grandmother,

Old film restoration with the following workflow : – Cleaning dust and scratches, degraining, stabilizing, sharpening, auto-levels and auto-white balance with AVISynth – Upscaled and Colorized using neural network to 4k – Frame interpolation up to 60 fps

And one from 1899 by Louis Lumière. It also claims to be the first cat video, but apparently it’s not.

This early silent film is the first cat video to be made in 1899 featuring a young girl feeding a rather energetic cat. The film was directed by Louis Lumière.

In fact, the REAL earliest video of a cat is this one released in 1894 by Thomas Edison Studios of two boxing cats.  I don’t like it because of the pugnacious, fighting moggies.  But the YouTube notes say this:

This film is the product of Thomas Edison’s (yes, that Thomas Edison!) Manufacturing Company. Why did the brilliant men – namely producer, W.K.L. Dickson – who worked for Thomas Edison feel that they needed to use this new technology to show the world “boxing cats” is a question that has boggled the minds of film historians for over 100 years.

 

h/t: Ginger K., Jon

Yes, I know that Harvard University has one big graduation for all undergraduates and grad students (I went to it when I got my Ph.D. in 1978; Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave the commencement address in a famous speech that called out the West for its “spiritual degeneration”).  At that time, there was but one “identity” ceremony that included everyone. E pluribus unum!  (One small exception: people who got their Ph.D.’s in different fields had separate degree-granting ceremonies.)

I’m not sure when this changed, but now Harvard has many different graduation ceremonies for different identity groups. And, of course, they are organized by the DEI office. Here’s this year’s panoply of “identity ceremonies” listed by the conservative National Review:

Harvard University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging will once again host “affinity celebrations” at its 2024 commencement, according to documents obtained by National Review.

Harvard plans to hold a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration” — which refers to LGBT students — a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” The university will also hold a central commencement ceremony for students of all backgrounds.

. . . . The only publicly available mention of affinity celebrations on any Harvard website is published on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ page. The note does not mention the specific events or groups recognized, simply describing them as “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from marginalized and underrepresented communities.”

“Desi-American” means people whose ancestry is Pacific Islander, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani or other Asians, identity groups that may not be so fond of each other! Is there any oppressed group missing here? The “First Generation-Low Income Celebration” puzzles me, as the two features don’t necessarily go together, and of course immediately upon leaving the ceremony the graduates have abandoned that identity.

There was one notable group missing at Harvard last year, and you can guess which one it was. That’s right—the Jews!  But now, facing a federal Title VI civil rights investigation for a campus climate of antisemitism, and the fracas around the “Jewish genocide” hearing in Congress that in the end brought down Harvard and Penn’s Presidents, the school decided it had better do something to effect some climate change, though not in the way that the antisemitic Greta Thunberg would favor.

Frankly, I think these separate graduations are ludicrous and, in the end, purely performative. Do they move society forward? No.  Are they divisive? Probably, in that they continue the obsessive academic focus on identity.  “Identity politics” isn’t inherently bad—after all, it was the impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. But these days, fostered and promoted by DEI offices, it has gone way too far, making someone’s identity, based on features they can’t control, the most important aspect of their persona. This is why Steve Pinker, who’s at Harvard and laid out in the Boston Globe a five-point plan for fixing Harvard that includes this recommendation:

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

It is, as I said, Harvard’s DEI office that creates these identity-based graduations, reinforcing the malign atmosphere Steve describes in his first paragraph. Am I happy that Harvard, under the gun for antisemitism, now includes a Jewish ceremony? No, of course not: it’s disgusting—pandering to both Jews and DEI in general. It is, after all, DEI that, by fostering a climate that sees Jews as white oppressor colonialists, fosters antisemitism.

This conclusion isn’t rocket science. One Jewish student is quoted in the National Review about the issue:

For some, like Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum — who spoke about the situation on the ground at his school during a House Education and Workforce Committee roundtable in late February — the addition of a separate celebration for Jewish students simply perpetuates the underlying dynamics driving antisemitism at Harvard.

“Rather than acknowledge the harmful ways in which Harvard DEI has contributed to campus antisemitism, the university further marginalizes individuals into groups of race, ethnicity, and religion,” Kestenbaum told National Review. “Harvard DEI is simply out of control.”

One way to stop this, as Steve suggests, is simply to disempower DEI.  Perhaps colleges can keep on staff a few individuals to whom one can bring complaints of bigotry, but there should be none of the training, propaganda, and divisivenesss that DEI sows on campus.  Even at the “free speech” University of Chicago, our climate is permeated by DEI, which sends me announcements of events on a nearly daily basis.

I have about three or four days’ worth of readers’ wildlife photos, but am going to dole them out every other day or so in the hopes that readers will step up and contribute. We shall, of course, have John Avise’s Sunday bird photos tomorrow, but I implore readers with good photos to sent them in.  We have never been so low before, and it’s worrisome. On the other hand, perhaps people don’t care if this feature remains, and in that case, I’ll let it taper off to the occasional post.

Truth be told, the world is quite depressing these days, with at least two wars in which one side is moral and the other immoral, the threat of Trump’s re-election looming, and, to top it all off, the Sun is going away on Monday. As le chien noir is here, posting may be light for a while

Please discuss what you want today: the wars, predictions about November’s election, or whatever.

Quillette has a published a “case study” showing how one transgender female athlete can wreak substantial damage not just on one woman, or on one sport, but on a ton of women and in five sports (basketball, rowing, volleyball, tae kwon do, and track).

I won’t belabor this, for I’ve already written a lot about the inherent athletic advantage of being male, most of which remain in place (sometimes to a lesser degree if there’s medical intervention) when a male identifies and lives as a woman. And the advantages don’t appear to abate with time, either. A related problem, besides unfair athletic advantage of transwomen in women’s sports, is injury to women by the stronger natal males (transwomen), also documented in the Quillette article whose headline is below.

It’s worth looking at this, and also at the Daily Mail article on the same athlete, if only to see the photos and videos, which tell the tale alone.

Click to read:

The venue is the KIPP Academy in Lynn, Massachusetts, and the school’s trans athlete is bearded, 6-foot-tall Lazuli Clark.  There’s no mention of whether he’s had hormone therapy or surgery, but I believe this is based solely on Clark’s self-identification since doctors aren’t mentioned.

Some quotes involving the different sports:

Basketball:

Thanks in large part to The Independent Council on Women’s Sport, an American-based advocacy group, almost 9-million people have seen the infamous video clip of Clark injuring a female opponent during a February 8 high-school basketball game. Clark, a student at KIPP Academy in Lynn, MA, also reportedly hurt two other girls during that same game. Following the third injury, the coach of the opposing team, Collegiate Charter of Lowell, MA, chose to forfeit the game rather than risk losing more players.

Here’s the video; note how Clark towers over the other girls and drags one to the ground as he shoots. Enlarge the video to see it:

Trans-identified male player for Kipp Academy in MA injured 3 girls before half time causing Lowell Collegiate Charter School to forfeit.

A man hitting a woman used to be called domestic abuse. Now it's called brave.

Who watches this & actually thinks this is "compassionate,… pic.twitter.com/ZLlqYH6iAs

— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) February 19, 2024

Three girls hurt in one game by this muscular beanpole! But, after negative publicity, KIPP Academy forfeited its last game and pulled itself out of the playoff bracket.

Volleyball:

Basketball isn’t Clark’s only sporting pursuit. By my count, Clark has opted into female categories in at least four separate sports. . .

These include volleyball, a sport in which the high-school senior was named a Commonwealth Atlantic Conference “all-star.” According to KIPP Academy Lynn statistics, Clark scored more kills during the 2023-24 volleyball season (171) than the rest of the team (131) combined. (A kill is defined as “an attack by a player that is not returnable by the receiving player on the opposing team and leads directly to a point or loss of rally.”) Clark also led the team in aces and blocked shots, and was tied for the team lead in total sets played, at 68. That makes 68 sets during which one of Clark’s female teammates was warming the bench while this biologically male athlete was racking up kills during KIPP’s 22-game schedule.

Track:

On May 30, 2023, Clark competed—as a female—in Lynn, MA’s All-City Track Championship, setting the all-time meet record (for females) in the 400-meter hurdles and shot put. Clark’s average shot-put distance of 41 feet, 2 inches was more than six feet longer than any female participant achieved at the 2023 state championship in the corresponding division. In both track categories, Clark’s female competitors were bumped down in the rankings as a result. That would include the female athletes who deserved to take first place in hurdles and shot put, but who instead had to console themselves with second.

A six-foot addition to a 35-foot shotput record clearly shows that something mre than female athletic ability is involved!

Rowing:

USRowing, which allows self-identified women, born as males, to compete as women, allowed Clark to join a private female rowing club (schools can’t afford their own rowing teams). As per USRowing’s policy transgender women, with all their male plumbing, are allowed to use the women’s locker room.

Recently, Quillette received a leaked copy of an October 12, 2022 letter sent to the United States Rowing Association (commonly known as USRowing), the sport’s national governing body, in which 15 parents of elite female Massachusetts-resident rowers detailed their concerns about Clark.

In an interview with Quillette, one of the signatories reported that Clark joined the female rowing club in 2021, after placing poorly (“near the bottom,” by this parent’s account) with the club’s corresponding male team. Clark reportedly didn’t bother to shave or otherwise maintain the outward aesthetic pretenses of female gender identification, and even continued to wear the male club’s uniform.

In one documented 2022 incident, it is alleged, Clark walked into the girls’ changing room, spotted a female rower who was topless, and made a lewd comment about her breasts (“Oooh, titties”). As a result, documents reviewed by Quillette indicate, Clark was reported by team officials to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a congressionally mandated body dedicated to “ending sexual, physical, and emotional abuse on behalf of athletes everywhere.” After SafeSport took action in late 2022, Clark never rowed for the club again—in either gender category. (Efforts to contact Clark or adult members of Clark’s family about these allegations, as well as other events described in this article, were unsuccessful.)

It’s no surprise, then, that Clark’s prowess in rowing against natal women hasn’t been documented.  The Daily Fail reports that Clark is also competing in tae kwon do.

Why is this allowed to continue—at the expense of women’s safety, women’s self-esteem, and women’s enthusiasm for sport?  We already know why: it’s gender activism, which has, largely by guilt tripping and employing the mantra “trans women are women”, allowed natal men, sometimes without medical treatment, to simply say they’re women (yes, they may identify as women, but that’s irrelevant to the issue). This policy has largely been supported by the Biden administration.

Quillette gives at least two reasons more: fear on the part of the female athletes and “activist talking points”.

From the letter from the parents of female rowers:

 The October 12, 2022 letter to USRowing reads, in part, as follows:

Our daughters have stayed quiet because they are afraid. We tried to speak up for them, and we were shut down. We tried to speak to leadership at all levels. [But] name-calling and the threat of mental health is being used as emotional blackmail to keep us all quiet while women are harmed and devalued…Our daughters also faced a locker room situation where they were uncomfortable…They stopped changing in the locker room and began to hide away. These young girls should never have been put through being told they had to face a male body everyday as they undressed…It was a constant thought, a constant threat to submit and a constant awareness. Yet they dared not say anything (except privately to their parents). The rowing team also required the male athlete to room with them on trips. The girls spoke to us about quitting rowing because of the intimidation of being forced to be in a hotel room alone with a male.

There’s also a pervasive fear on the part of women athletes of being called a “transphobe.”

Finally, activist talking points:

A second reason such farces are tolerated is that male athletes who invade female athletic spaces have become experts at reciting the same activist talking points that USRowing and other sports organizations have used to gaslight concerned parents. A common rhetorical strategy here is to suggest that any expression of concern for the integrity of female sports categories (or the emotional well-being of girls) serves to channel a form of conservative political extremism, which in turn nullifies the very “existence” of trans-identified individuals.

A 2023 media profile of Clark, for instance, has the high school senior lamenting (in the words of a The74 reporter) “how difficult it can be to focus on school when some policymakers are passing laws against her identity.” According to Clark,

going to school is the least of people’s concerns at this point for a lot of people. There are days where I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I have to worry about my [Advanced Placement] U.S. history project, and yesterday another state basically made it so that I can never exist in that state.’ And it’s like, how’s anyone supposed to think about anything at all when there’s all of that going on?

I hardly need add, since I’ve said this many times before, that I don’t think transmales or transfemales should be the subject of bigotry, incivility, or unequal treatment—except when the unequal treatment involves things like rape counseling, sports, or incarceration. In all other respects, equality.  I am not a transphobe, nor do I think trans people should be “erased”.  But it seems to me that when the familiar mantra comes into conflict with fundamental fairness of separate women’s sports (or jails), it has to give way.

The whole issue is summed up in this cover of the British Journal of Sports Medicine from last May, which is reproduced the Quillette article.  I couldn’t believe it was real, but then found it in a tweet by an author of one of that issue’s articles (there’s also an article on transgender participation in sport), and then checked the cover of the issue in our library. Yes, it’s real. If I’m not mistaken, this shows the dangers of transwomen participating in rugby. (If that huge player is really a natal women, I retract what I said!):

h/t: Mike

Well, here we are ninety years after the Nazis began persecuting Jews in Germany, and I guess the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is feeling guilty for having completely ignored that persecution until the war was nearly over (1944). No matter that none of the editors of the journal back then are still active, much less alive: they still feel that a long apology is in order.

I guess I don’t mind their late mea culpa (it’s five pages long), and I’m not even sure a medical journal should take political stands, but in this case the Nazis affected the practice of medicine in Germany. For one thing, they fired more than 3,000 Jewish doctors, and, of course, later sent them to the camps. And the Nazi doctors were, of course, often complicit in medical outrages, like the euthanasia of the mentally ill and the gruesome and torturous experiments on inmates in concentration camps.  One could, I suppose, make a Kalven-like case that the Nazis were indeed hurting the practice of medicine (though in a different country), and so their crimes fall under the ambit of NEJM.

And so the NEJM editors, recognizing that other journals, like the Journal of the American Medical Association and Science, did call out Nazi atrocities, are trying to catch up. Unfortunately, they coopt the language of DEI to explain the journal’s ignoring of Nazi atrocities.

Here’s how the journal begins its admission of ignorance, willful or otherwise. I’ve put links to key articles they reference that are on the Internet rather than their footnotes:

Hitler was first specifically mentioned in the Journal in 1935, in an article by Michael M. Davis, a noted American health expert and reformer, and his collaborator Gertrud Kroeger, a leading German nurse. Yet between this article and 1944, when Nazi war crimes were first explicitly acknowledged in an editorial, the Journal remained all but silent regarding the deeply antisemitic and racist motives of Nazi science and medicine and the threat to the “ideals” of civilization. . . .

Articles on Germany or Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s are overwhelmingly about the compulsory and oversubscribed sickness insurance system, “socialized medicine,” and “quackery,” not the persecution and mass extermination of Jews. In fact, when it did address Nazi “medical” practices, the Journal enthusiastically praised German forced sterilization and the restrictive alcohol policies of the Hitler Youth.

Finally, the Nazi Reckoning after 14 years:

But when the Allied powers liberated the concentration camps, it became clear, as the so-called Doctors’ Trial (1946–1947) categorically demonstrated, that the medical profession in Germany embraced Nazism’s antisemitic and eugenic ideology8 and was deeply complicit in the implementation of mass extermination. The crimes of the Nazi state could no longer be ignored. The first Journal article explicitly damning Nazi medical atrocities is a 1949 article by Leo Alexander, a Viennese-born American neuropsychiatrist, who gathered evidence for the trial of the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg.More articles would be published from the 1960s onward, as scholars started documenting the atrocities committed by medical doctors, and especially after the Declaration of Helsinki of 1964, which established a number of ethical principles regarding human experimentation.12

The journal admits that it was an “outlier” in this respect, but then goes into excruciating and tedious detail into the one article it wrote in 1935 by Davis and Kroeger—an analysis of German “socialized medicine”. Click on screenshot below to get the pdf. Be warned, it’s a snoozer, even though it approves of socialized medicine.  I’m not sure why NEJM even mention this article save that it was attacked two weeks after publication in a letter to the editor, whose author, Joseph Muller, claimed that the Davis and Kroeger piece was propagandistic and “unworthy to appear in our periodical”.

The criticism:

Davis and Kroeger’s article did not go unchallenged. In a letter to the editor published 2 weeks later, Joseph Muller, a dermatologist and an active member of the Massachusetts Medical Society (which owned and still owns the Journal), complained about the Journal using Davis and Kroeger’s article “as a propaganda organ for half cooked world improvers.”21 The article, he claimed, was “neither medical nor scientific, but contains plenty of propaganda and is therefore unworthy to appear in our periodical. It is remarkable by omission of facts rather than by its statements.” Moreover, he wrote, the omission “that more than three thousand medical men were deprived of their means of supporting themselves should open the eyes of the American medical profession to one great danger of State Medicine.” Though Muller showed sympathy for the Jewish doctors, however, the real crux of his critique was not Nazi genocidal atrocities but — remarkably — the danger that socialized medicine could hold sway over the profession, a long-held concern among American physicians about “state medicine.”

As we see below, first author Davis answered Mueller’s criticism in a very brief response that basically swept away Nazi atrocities (Kroeger didn’t answer; the journal said she was a Nazi sympathizer). Its heart is this:

The deplorable repressive policy of the Hitler government in respect to Jewish physicians had no bearing on the main point which the article was intended to bring out, namely, that the organized medical profession of Germany has, by the actions described in the article, been placed in a more responsible position than ever before with respect to the medical services under German health insurance.

In other words, “who cares about the Jews, we were talking about medical insurance”.

Well, what we have is medical history, and of course it wasn’t just doctors who ignored what the Nazi regime is doing. Many people had no idea about the camps, though ignorance of the persecution of the Jews should have been evident to any thinking person.  But the apologia could have occupied but a single page, saying just what I said above.  Sadly, the piece goes on and on, and finally drags in DEI-like elements in trying to explain the exchange of letters above as well as the journal’s failure to cover the medical atrocities of the Nazi regime (bolding is mine):

Davis’s brief response to Muller’s attack is important in that it reveals what have come to be understood as critical elements of structural racism: unconscious bias, denial, and compartmentalization. In his rejoinder, Davis tried to bring some clarification to his omission by denying the relevance to his argument of discrimination against and persecution of Jews.  , , For Davis, the expansion of medical power was thus more important than the fact that this gain in power came at the expense of thousands of Jewish physicians. Moreover, it did not matter to Davis that the doctor whom he described as the “guardian of the health interest” of the German people had to be “Aryan” to be able to practice.1 As we now know, however, this reliance on the benevolent and altruistic physician to act in accordance with the Hippocratic Oath was insufficient to prevent the atrocities committed by physicians in the Nazi death camps.

And later, there’s this, called “moral blindness”:

And beyond Davis, how do we account for the virtual silence of the Journal about these issues over the ensuing decade? Part of the answer lies in denial, compartmentalization, and rationalization, all of which depend on structural and institutional racism — deep historical, often unrecognized, bias and discrimination that serve the status quo.

Well, we don’t know whether Davis’s (or the NEJM’s biases) were unconscious, and is it really news that many Americans didn’t like Jews in the 1930s and 1940s? Those were the years of the popular antisemitic radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, and of the equally popular antisemitism of Charles Lindbergh, American Hero. And yes, there was structural and institutional racism, most familiar to academics as the “Jewish quotas” in many universities instituted in the 1920s, and lasting for at least three decades.

This history is well known and well documented, save for the possibility of “unconscious” bias, a dubious concept that remains controversial. Regardless, I find it somewhat bizarre that the NEJM feels the need to apologize so many years afterwards, when during WWII it was simply following the American Zeitgeist that preferred to ignore the plight of European Jews. And equally bizarre is that it coopts the language of DEI to implicate structural and institutional racism, which of course was simply the racism put in place by Hitler and many Germans after they whipped up sentiments against the Jews. Is anything accomplished by using modern concepts that are arguable (“structural racism” and “unconscious bias” as a cause of inequities) rather than what’s really at issue here: the fact that not many people cared about the Jews during WWII?  I’m just glad they didn’t mention “the inequities affecting Jewish doctors due to structural racism and unconscious bias.”

I have about two days’ worth of photos left before this feature goes kaput, so please send in your photos! Thanks.

Today we have the second installment of photos from the Galápagos from reader Ephraim Heller (the first part, the “non-birds,” is here). There will be one more installment of bird photos. Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Following up on my non-bird Galapagos photos, below are the Galapagos bird photos.

A flightless cormorant (Nannopterum harrisi) playing with a tiger snake eel (Myrichthys maculosus) before eating it. The Galapagos cormorants have lost their ability to fly but use their small wings for agile swimming. Per Wikipedia:

The flightless cormorant is the largest extant member of its family, 89–100 cm (35–39.5 in) in length and weighing 2.5–5.0 kg (5.5

This unique cormorant is endemic to the Galapagos Islands, where it has a very restricted range. It is found on just two islands; Fernandina, and the northern and western coasts of Isabela. Distribution associates with the seasonal upwelling of the eastward flowing Equatorial Undercurrent (or Cromwell Current) which provides cold nutrient rich water to these western islands of the archipelago. The population has undergone severe fluctuations; in 1983 an El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event resulted in a 50% reduction of the population to just 400 individuals. The population recovered quickly, however, and was estimated to number 900 individuals by 1999:

American oystercatcher (Haematopus palliatus). I have often seen these in California:

Galapagos mockingbird (Mimus parvulus). The Galápagos mockingbird is one of four mockingbird species endemic to the Galápagos Islands. These four are all closely related, and DNA evidence shows they likely all descended from an ancestor species which reached the islands in a single colonization event. There are six subspecies, each endemic to a particular island or islands:

Galapagos dove (Zenaida galapagoensis). A common endemic bird:

Blue-footed booby (Sula nebouxii). It turns out that blue feet are sexy (per Wikipedia):

The blue color of the blue-footed booby’s webbed feet comes from structures of aligned collagens in the skin modified by carotenoid pigments obtained from its diet of fresh fish. The collagens are arranged in a manner that makes the skin appear blue. The underlying color is a “flat, purplish blue”. That color is modified by carotenoids to aquamarine in healthy birds. Carotenoids also act as antioxidants and stimulants for the blue-footed booby’s immune function, suggesting that carotenoid pigmentation is an indicator of an individual’s immunological state. Blue feet also indicate the current health condition of a booby. Boobies that were experimentally food-deprived for 48 hours experienced a decrease in foot brightness due to a reduction in the amount of lipids and lipoproteins that are used to absorb and transport carotenoids. Thus, the feet are rapid and honest indicators of a booby’s current level of nourishment. As blue feet are signals that reliably indicate the immunological and health condition of a booby, coloration is favored through sexual selection.

The brightness of the feet decreases with age, so females tend to mate with younger males with brighter feet, which have higher fertility and greater ability to provide paternal care than older males. In a cross-fostering experiment, foot color reflects paternal contribution to raising chicks; chicks raised by foster fathers with brighter feet grew faster than chicks raised by foster males with duller feet. Females continuously evaluate their partners’ condition based on foot color. In one experiment, males whose partners had laid a first egg in the nest had their feet dulled by makeup. The female partners laid smaller second eggs a few days later. As duller feet usually indicate a decrease in health and possibly genetic quality, it is adaptive for these females to decrease their investment in the second egg. The smaller second eggs contained less yolk concentration, which could influence embryo development, hatching success, and subsequent chick growth and survival. In addition, they contained less yolk androgens. As androgen plays an important role in chick survival, the experiment suggested female blue-footed boobies use the attractiveness and perceived genetic quality of their mates to determine how much resources they should allocate to their eggs. This supports the differential allocation theory, which predicts that parents care more for their offspring when paired with attractive mates.

Frigatebird (Fregatidae). These birds are fascinating and first introduced me to the wonderfully descriptive term kleptoparasite (which I now use in political discussions). Per Wikipedia: Able to soar for weeks on wind currents, frigatebirds spend most of the day in flight hunting for food, and roost on trees or cliffs at night. Their main prey are fish and squid, caught when chased to the water surface by large predators such as tuna. Frigatebirds are referred to as kleptoparasites as they occasionally rob other seabirds for food, and are known to snatch seabird chicks from the nest. Seasonally monogamous, frigatebirds nest colonially. A rough nest is constructed in low trees or on the ground on remote islands. A single egg is laid each breeding season. The duration of parental care is among the longest of any bird species; frigatebirds are only able to breed every other year.

Galapgagos hawk (Buteo galapagoensis). Sadly, there are believed to be only around 150 mating pairs in existence today:

Swallow-tailed gull (Creagrus furcatus) harrassing a galapagos hawk who dared enter its territory:

Red-billed tropicbird (Phaethon aethereus). The males’ tails are about twice its body length. I think these are beautifully elegant birds in flight. They cannot stand and is not proficient at walking, and require an unobstructed takeoff to fly from land:

You’re not going to get away from Jewish stuff for a while because, as someone posted on Facebook, “The more you hate us, the Jewisher we get.”  Well, reader Debra Coplan sent me the first video below of “The Shvesters” (Yiddish for “The Sisters”), who aren’t real sisters but sing acapella in a jazz-infused Yiddish.  There’s a short collection of their songs on Instagram. Debra said this:

I just love the Yiddish singing of the Shvester Sisters. The song below is sad but so beautiful.  They sing old Yiddish songs my grandmother sang so it brings lovely memories.  But even without my memories, these songs have so much feeling.

When I added that most of my Jewish relatives live around Pittsburgh, Debra added, “Mention that my grandmother Rose sang Yiddish on WAMO Radio Station in Pittsburgh. She  also was the singer on WAMO for the Manischewitz Chicken Soup ad.”

And again, this is music new to me that I actually like. But of course I’m genetically predisposed to like it! Here are two of the 38 songs on their site, and I haven’t heard them all.

This first one is sad and not jazzed up; the description is above:

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The Jewish Journal has an article about the Sisters, whose real names are Polina Fradkin and Chava Levi. An excerpt:

“We want to create, and to bring back Yiddish Jazz” says Chava, as we are wrapping up our conversation. “It has definitely been lacking. When I listen to contemporary Yiddish music, I can’t help but think ‘oh what I wish I could change to make it feel more like you want to dance to it.’” The Shvesters do not just make us want to move our feet to Yiddish; their music makes us long for Yiddish. In an age when social media and fast-moving content flushes out connection to culture and to our ancestors, we all crave an opportunity to be back, at nine years old, in the kitchen at Pesach. It warms our hearts, it links us to our loved ones, and it inspires us to keep being Jewish. “We’re taking something that is dying to be back into the mainstream,” says Polina, “and bringing it into the light in a new, sophisticated, and exciting way.” 

Something jazzier, with some scatting:

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One more:

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h/t: Debra

Years ago I read this statement by George Orwell in his collected essays, and from time to time, especially when I suffer a reversal, I think about the second sentence.

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.  A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

It’s the opening two sentences of Orwell’s 1944 essay “Benefits of Clergy: Some notes on Salvador Dali“.

Now Orwell wasn’t in the habit of making enigmatic statements, and I can see how he would view his own life as a “series of defeats”. His early work was rejected repeatedly, he was often attacked, often cheated on his wife, admitted that he treated her badly, and finally was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that killed him. On the other hand, he found success after publishing Animal Farm and then Nineteen Eighty-Four, and made a decent living as a writer and editor until he died at age 46.

So while I agree with Orwell that autobiographies can’t really be trusted, I’m not sure why he thinks that every life feels like “a series of defeats”. It doesn’t feel like that to me, though it may do so on my deathbed.  So, after all these years, I’ll ask readers to tell me what they think Orwell meant by that. Interpretations below, please!

**********

Oh, and don’t forget that Hitchens wrote a superb book on the man, Why Orwell Matters, and you can hear a precis of the book in this hourlong podcast in which Hitchens is interviewed by Russ Boberts about the book.  You can hear Hitchens’s repeated throat clearing; this podcast was made 10 months before Hitchens was diagnosed with stage 4 laryngeal cancer.

Orwell (his real name, of course, was Eric Blair) is one of my favorite writers, and you could do worse than read his Collected Essays (there are four volumes). Here’s the photo used for his press card:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Orwell_press_photo.jpg#/media

Jonathan Turley is a prominent attorney and professor of law at George Washington University Law School. He also writes a popular legal blog that often deals with free speech. His latest piece, with the headline below, deals with a question that’s occupied us quite a bit: what limitations, if any, should colleges put on freedom of speech?

I’ve been a hard-liner on this issue, insisting that colleges and universities should hew strictly to the First Amendment as interpreted by the courts, which of course means that you can pretty much say what you want unless it constitutes defamation, instigates immediate and predictable violent harm, creates harassment in the workplace, and so on.

But I have found another exception to the First Amendment for speech emitted on campus. And that is an exception widely adopted by universities, including the University of Chicago: the “time, place, and manner” exception, which, in fact, seems to be a legally recognized restriction of the First Amendment. Wikipedia characterizes it like this:

. . . . “The crucial question is whether the manner of expression is basically incompatible with the normal activity of a particular place at a particular time. . . “The [F]irst [A]mendment does not guarantee the right to communicate one’s views at all times and places or in any manner that may be desired. A state may therefore impose reasonable restrictions on the time, place or manner of constitutionally protected speech occurring in a public forum.”

At the University of Chicago we have time and place restrictions (students can’t protest in an academic building or if it disturbs classes), and there are supposed to be restrictions on manner, too. The most notable of those is the prohibition against hecklers shouting down or deplatforming speakers. This in fact is the violation we talked about Tuesday, when I reported that members of Students for Justice in Palestine had been tapped (not even slapped) on the wrist by a disciplinary committee for deplatorming (shouting down with megaphones) a demonstration by Jewish students last October. While such behavior may be legal in public parks and other such places, universities are allowed to prohibit this kind of “heckler’s veto.” After all, the purpose of a university is to teach and learn, and you don’t learn anything from a speaker if their speech cannot be heard because of hecklers. (I believe Mill mentions this in “On Liberty”.)

This brings us to Turley’s column (click headline below to read it), which recounts an incident of heckling at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

It so happens that a speaker was lecturing at Tulane in “an event to foster diversity of ideas and entrepreneurship for New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week.”  It also happens that that speaker was interrupted by—you guessed it—a speaker shouting pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli slogans (wrong time, wrong place, irrelevant speech).  And it so happens that, sitting in the audience, was a Tulane professor of national repute, Walter Isaacson, former President of CNN, and then of the Aspen Institute, and of course author of several best-sellers, including biographies of Steve Jobs and Leonardo (the latter my favorite of his works). Isaacson (a secular Jew, I think, though that doesn’t matter) decided to remove the heckler from the room by pushing them (it’s a transgender student using that pronoun) out the door. You can see it the video by clicking on the picture below, which takes you to an Instagram post. The second link in that Instagram post shows the video.

Turley gives the rest of the tale:

Isaacson, who is the Leonard Lauder Professor of American History and Values in the history department, can be shown gently moving MacDonald out of the seats. However, at the door, there appeared more of a brief scuffle at the last moment before the two went out of the frame for a split second. Isaacson is then shown returning immediately. There does not appear to be more than shoving on the video to move MacDonald out of the event.

In its Instagram post, SDS claimed that MacDonald (who identifies as a “them” as a transgender student) was injured: “Isaacson, an audience member, grabbed Rory and cursed at them, battering them and leaving them with bruises on their arms and scratches on their back.”

On local media, MacDonald is shown displaying slight scratch marks.

SDS and other groups have condemned Isaacson.

They have in fact called for Isaacson to resign.

The student shows the damage, which is light but still actionable, I think:

More from Turley:

Technically, shoving can be assault under both criminal and tort law. Certainly leaving scratch marks can qualify as evidence of assault. However, the situation is more complex than some faculty member spontaneously assaulting a student. Any removal of a disruptive protester will involve some firm handling or shoving. Indeed, when a subject resists, this can become a matter of self-defense for security as force is increased. As a subject resists, security is allowed to protect itself with a commensurate level of force.

If security can physically remove a protester (including shoving an individual from a room), the question is whether an audience member can do so. A professor has no special legal status to conduct security or exclude individuals from a public event. What is clear is that this is a function best left to university security. The problem is that security often does not enforce rules against disruptive behavior.

MacDonald was disrupting the event and Isaacson was seeking to remove him. In moving to the door, there does not appear to be anything more than firmly shoving MacDonald. In the final second, there appears to be a more forceful push in the hallway as Isaacson goes back inside. Isaacson can claim that he was protecting himself by shoving away MacDonald at that last minute. He is seen speaking to the student before firmly leading him to the door. Again, the university is investigating. There is no report of a criminal complaint.

If the university is investigating this matter, it should also address why a faculty member felt compelled to perform security at the event. We have seen universities routinely fail to expel protesters interrupting classes and events.

Universities can turn these protests into a type of “heckler’s veto” where speeches are cancelled in advance or terminated suddenly due to the disruption of protesters. The issue is not engaging in protest against such speakers, but to enter events for the purpose of preventing others from hearing such speakers. Universities create forums for the discussion of a diversity of opinions. Entering a classroom or event to prevent others from speaking is barring free speech.

There are two questions here:  did Isaacson commit assault, causing actual physical harm beyond just a threat? And, of course, where was security? Turley raises both questions, the first above and the second here:

Tulane clearly failed to protect this event and that led to this “self help” action by Isaacson. If he went too far off camera, there is also a question of why he had to act at all rather than campus security removing such disruptive protesters. This will continue until university administrators have the courage to suspend or expel students denying others the right to listen and speak at events.

But for my own school, this fracas raises a third question: what are schools going to do about this heckling, which clearly violates any free-speech regulations on campus?

Absent enforcement of school rules on such disruptions, there is little hope for the open exchange of ideas and a diversity of opinions on campus. It can unleash a type of tit-for-tat pattern of retaliation as speakers are prevented from speaking on controversial subjects. Our campuses then become little more than screaming matches. The rules of most schools properly draw the line between protests and disruptions. Everyone is allowed to be heard. However, if you enter to disrupt it, you are disrupting free speech.

In such cases, security must be either on the spot or be readily available to remove hecklers, allowing the speaker to be heard. This is exactly NOT what the University of Chicago did when SJP disrupted the Jewish speakers, who had permission to give speeches on the quad. The deans on call simply stood by and did nothing, and when asked to do something, they said they were powerless. The University cops also stood by, and said they could do nothing without the permission of the deans. (This is the same answer the cops gave me when I watched SJP and UCUP illegally blockade the administration building last fall. “We need permission from the administration to take action.” Of course no action was taken, and when I tried to call the administration, nobody answered.)  This is an embarrassment to the University, and I trust they’ll inform security and the deans on call to stop deplatforming and heckling. And I hope the administrators in charge of the deans on call don’t sit on their hands when a violation occurs..

As for Isaacson, who looked royally ticked off, I think they could file battery charges against him that would stick.  Even if he acted as “mock security,” it seems to me that what he did was illegal.  Whether he actually gets charged is another matter.  But morally he was in the right, and I applaud him.

Today ecologist Susan Harrison returns with an attempt to find Spring. Her comments are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Looking for early spring in southern Oregon

In late March, signs of spring were evident at the Denman Wildlife Area and adjacent Table Rocks near Medford, Oregon.  This wildlife area is a floodplain on the south side of the Rogue River; the Upper and Lower Table Rocks are basalt mesas just across the river, each with a hiking trail to the top.

Denman Wildlife Area (foreground) and Upper Table Rock (background):

Wildflowers were strikingly abundant for so early in the season, hinting at the prospect of a splendid spring.    In amongst the flowers and the Oregon Oaks (Quercus garryana), you can also see a profusion of red-leaved Poison Oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) in most of these pictures.

Shooting star (Primula hendersonii), a classic harbinger of spring:

Henderson’s fawn lily (Erythronium hendersonii), an endemic of this area:

Grand hound’s tongue (Adelinia grandis):

Grass widows (Olsynium douglasii):

Scarlet fritillary (Fritillaria recurva):

Nuttall’s larkspur (Delphinium nuttallianum):

Migratory songbirds had yet to arrive and some overwintering waterfowl were still hanging around.   However, a few of the resident songbirds had begun to sing and set up territories, including the kinglet and towhee below.

Ring-necked Ducks (Aythya collaris):

Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Corthylio calendula):

Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus):

Acorn Woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus), always a reliable resident:

California Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma californica), an even more reliable resident:

View to Mt. McLoughlin from the top of Upper Table Rock:

I presume you want the good news first. Sadly, it comes not from the University of Chicago but from Vanderbilt, now headed (as Chancellor) by our ex-provost Daniel Diermeier. As reported by the Nashville Tenneseean, last week more than two dozen students decided to hold a sit-in in Vandy’s administration building protesting—what else?—the University’s so-called complicity with Israel in its war with Hamas.

The students began protesting Tuesday morning after an amendment to the Vanderbilt Student Government Constitution, which would prevent student government funds from going to certain businesses that support Israel, was removed by administration officials from a student ballot in late March.

. . . .More than two dozen students entered Kirkland Hall, an administration building which houses Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier’s office, to hold a sit-in around 9 a.m. Tuesday, along with over 30 more students who sat on the steps outside.

Students at the protest — both inside and out — shouted chants asking for Diermeier to allow students to vote on the amendment that was removed from the ballot by administration.

Students entered the administration building around 9 a.m., and a second, larger group gathered in front of the building.

Those inside the building stayed for around 22 hours before being escorted out by Vanderbilt University Police.

The students outside protested for hours, with numbers fluctuating as students rotated in and out of class. A number of students stayed outside protesting until the students inside the building emerged.

After letting the students stay in the building for all of 22 hours (a generous dispensation!), Vanderbilt began removing them, taking names and arresting some while giving others suspensions.

Three students who sat in the chancellor’s office were arrested for assault and bodily injury to another, according to a statement from Vanderbilt University, though online jail records do not currently list any charges.

A fourth student was charged with vandalism after breaking a window on Kirkland Hall Tuesday night.

All four students have been released.

In addition to arrests, students confirmed that interim suspensions were issued to all demonstrators who entered the building.

Below is a video of the three students who were arrested for assault and causing bodily injury, pushing and shoving the poor guy who was opening the door and then trying to close it before The Entitled rushed in en masse.  From the campus to the administration office, Vandy will be free!

Seriously, this kind of assault is unconscionable.  Of course verbal protest that doesn’t violate university rules or block buildings, much less injure an employee, is fine. That’s freedom of speech, and as you’ll see below, Chancellor Diermeier took the Chicago Principles of Free Expression (and also the Kalven Principles of Institutional Neutrality) south with him when he migrated.

This was not a kneejerk reaction by the administration, which tried to persuade the demonstrators to leave for nearly an entire day. But, unlike the timorous administration of my school, there will be serious consequences for the students, including suspension (which will go on their records), and the arrested students will likely not have their charges dropped.

Below, after the first tweet in which the Entitled Students lecture a black Vanderbilt cop on why he should be on their side, you’ll see a tweet showing the letters Diermeier wrote to the parents of Vandy students as well as to the University community itself (there are three pages total). They are tempered letters but also strong and principled ones, asserting that free speech does not allow disruption of speech. That’s something that many colleges don’t seem to have learned.

I think Chancellor Deimeier, who frequently has stated a university’s role is to “foster debate, not end it,” handled this well. Far better than other universities have done in similar circumstances.

Letter to the community just sent, below. (I have a son there, who fwiw was… pic.twitter.com/e3yksOswMa

— stevemur (@stevemur) March 27, 2024

An excerpt from Diermeier’s letter to the Vandy community:

Now the best news: Chancellor Diermeier wrote an eloquent defense of Vandy’s principles, and an explanation of the University’s actions, for the Wall Street Journal. It hasn’t been archived as far as I can see, so try clicking on the screenshot below.

Because it’s not archived, I’ll give a longish excerpt:

Vanderbilt has worked hard to nurture a culture of free expression built on three pillars. The first is a determination to provide an open forum: opportunities for dialogue and debate. The second is the practice of institutional neutrality, by which university leaders refrain from publicly taking political positions to avoid indirectly stifling free thought and expression among students and faculty. Last and most distinctive is a commitment to civil discourse, the practice of respectful argument rooted in facts, which our undergraduates agree to uphold when they sign a student-authored community creed before taking their first classes.

These commitments were tested for about 24 hours starting March 26. Vanderbilt, like many universities, is home to a group of students who support the international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. The BDS effort encourages economic and political pressure aimed at ending Israel’s current policies toward Palestinians, which organizers say are oppressive, immoral and in some cases illegal. The movement calls for economic and cultural boycotts, financial divestment and government sanctions.

. . .Some students supporting BDS declared their opposition to Vanderbilt’s institutional neutrality, calling it a cop-out, or worse. They advocated for a reversal of course on a campus referendum that would have required student government funds to follow BDS restrictions, which the university had disallowed because following those restrictions would put Vanderbilt in violation of Tennessee law. The student government isn’t legally separate from the university, and student-government funds are university funds. The law requires the university to certify each year that it isn’t involved in any boycotts of Israel, which the state defines broadly. Failing to make the certification, or acting contrary to it, would put large state contracts for the university at risk. Implementing the BDS restrictions with university funds also potentially conflicts with federal laws governing boycotts of countries friendly to the U.S.

Like all Vanderbilt students, those supporting BDS are free to speak out and demonstrate on our campus—subject, like all student groups and as at all universities, to reasonable limits on the time, place and manner of their protests.

On Tuesday, 27 students transgressed those limits when they forced their way into a closed administrative building, injuring a community-service officer in the process. Students pushed staff members and screamed profanities. Our staff took a graduated approach to de-escalating the situation, including several attempts to discuss the issues with the student group and encourage them to take a different course of action. Over 20 hours, the students were consistently informed that they were violating university policies and warned that they were subject to suspension for doing so.

Early the next morning, the Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County Magistrate’s Office charged three students with assault. One student protesting outside the building was charged with vandalism after cracking a window. The remaining 25 students left the building voluntarily. The administration suspended all of those students on an interim basis and will all go through a rigorous accountability process to determine further disciplinary action.

Critics have claimed that Vanderbilt has abandoned its long-held commitment to free expression. They are wrong. Vanderbilt supports, teaches and defends free expression—but to do so, we must safeguard the environment for it. Students can advocate BDS. That is freedom of expression. But they can’t disrupt university operations during classes, in libraries or on construction sites. The university won’t adopt BDS principles. That’s institutional neutrality. As a community, we should always remember to treat each other with respect and rely on the force of the better argument. That’s civil discourse.

Teaching students the importance of upholding rules for free expression doesn’t squelch their right to voice their opinion—it protects it.

In these difficult times, each university will be tested. And each university will follow its own path. Our approach is clear: We clearly state the principles and rules that support our mission as a university. Then we enforce them.

That last paragraph is magnificent. And yes, the University of Chicago was tested, too, and also had—or so I thought—a clear approach, one identical to Vanderbilt’s. The difference is in the last sentence. Vanderbilt enforces their principles; we don’t. (See my post from yesterday.)

I’m not sure whether Diermeier is Jewish, but he certainly fits the criteria for being a mensch.

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Now the bad news: In the meantime, the administration of the elite Smith College are acting very un-Deiermeierish, allowing the students to occupy College Hall, the administration building, for over a week. The administration, according to this Inside Higher Ed piece by Johanna Alonso, is sitting with its thumb up its fundament trying to figure out what to do with the Occupiers.

The protestors, are, of course, asking Smith to divest from Israel. (Sitter-inners are always big fans of Palestine.) They appear to be largely (surprise!) members of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The administration has already said that divestment will “not likely be considered unless ‘materially different information is brought forward’,”, so they’ve evinced some moxie, but they need to boot those protestors back onto campus.

Click to read.

An excerpt:

In the latest face-off between students and administrators over the war in Gaza, students at Smith College have been occupying the main administrative building on campus for almost a week, demanding the institution divest from weapons manufacturers that supply military machinery to Israel. The protesters say they will not leave College Hall until the institution commits to divestment, according to statements on the social media pages of the college’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, which is spearheading the demonstration.

Approximately 50 students are participating in the protest, SJP members said on social media; photos show that students have brought pillows, air mattresses, large amounts of food and other items into the building. A photo showed a Palestinian flag bearing the words “Smith divest now” flying above College Hall, where the American flag is typically displayed.

No arrests or student conduct charges have been made, although students “are allegedly in violation of several elements of the Student Code of Conduct including unauthorized entry or use of a building, abuse of property, and disruption of college activities,” Carolyn McDaniel, Smith’s director of media relations, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

This is how sit-ins disrupt the functioning of a college:

According to McDaniel, the protest has had an impact on students’ abilities to access certain offices located inside College Hall, including Student Financial Services, the Office of Disability Services and the Title IX office.

The occupation, she wrote, has made it difficult for “those with pressing needs to get the help they deserve. We are aware, for example, of a family who drove a considerable distance to discuss FAFSA assistance from financial services and they weren’t sure how to proceed upon learning that the office was inaccessible. We were able to help them in other ways, but it caused this family needless concern.”

Now there’s a dilemma for progressives: Title IX and disability services versus SJP. (SJP is winning.)

The articles notes that there are a lot of Smithereens who agree with the protest, but not everyone:

However, others have expressed dismay over the occupation. According to one anonymous email purportedly from a Smith student to Inside Higher Ed, the institution “has become a terrifying place with absolutely no consequence for breaking the law.”

“The college refuses to do anything to hold them accountable, and now the front doorstep of what’s supposed to be a brilliant college for smart women looks like a tent city of anti-Semitic drum circlers,” the author wrote.

Well, someone has a sense of humor! But it appears that a climate of antisemitism is infecting Smith, as it is some other schools.

The sit-in also comes after several antisemitic incidents occurred at Smith earlier in March. Swastikas were found on crosswalks and in two cases mezuzahs, religious symbols that some Jewish people affix to their doorframes, were ripped down near campus, the Boston Globe reported last month.

I would advise Smith’s president, Sarah Willie-Le Breton, to follow Diermeier’s lead—if she has the moxie.

h/t: Ginger K.

In today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “clearly,” each member of the Divine Duo calls the other one out for untrue beliefs. It’s a miracle that they’re able to share a Guinness, much less live together (and sleep together):