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Dina Rubina is a prominent Russian Israeli Jew who writes in Russian. Wikipedia gives this precis:

Rubina is one of the most prominent Russian-language Israeli writers. Her books have been translated into 30 languages. Her major themes are Jewish and Israeli history, migration, nomadism, neo-indigeneity, messianism, metaphysics, theatre, autobiography and the interplay between the Israeli and Russian Jewish cultures and languages.

This letter from Rubina comes from a site I don’t know, Truth of the Middle East (click on screenshot). It shows how Rubina staved off cancelation (for being Jewish) by canceling her appearance first. Click to read:

First, the intro:

Not long ago the Pushkin House in London together with the University of London invited the famous Israeli writer Dina Rubina to hold a meeting.
The topic was to be literary – a discussion of the writer’s books.
 Some time ago, Dina received a letter from the moderator of the meeting:

Then the email came that smells strongly like an impending cancelation:

“Good afternoon, Dina
The Pushkin House advertised our upcoming discussion on social media and immediately received critical messages regarding your position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They would like to understand your position on this issue before reacting in any way.
Could you formulate your position and send it to me as soon as possible?”
Natalia! “

That letter is an arrant insult. Rubina was going to discuss her books, and her political stand on the war has no bearing on that. Even if it did, she had already been invited.  But the Pushkin House and the University of London are spineless, and surely wanted some groveling letter from Rubina that smacked of “both side-ism.” But that’s stupid given that she is an Israeli, a fact that, again, has no bearing on her book talk.

But Rubina has spine, and I put her response below. Instead of being canceled, she canceled her own talk and rebuked Pushkin House. I put her whole letter below because you should read it, because it’s “open”, and because she says exactly what needed to be said in response to Natlia’s insulting communication.

AN OPEN LETTER

from Dina Rubina

Dear Natalia!

    You have written beautifully about my novels; I am very sorry for the time you have wasted. But it seems we’ll have to cancel our meeting. The University of Warsaw and the University of Torun have just cancelled lectures by the remarkable Israeli Russian-speaking writer Yakov Shechter on the life of Jews in Galicia in the 17th and 19th centuries – “to avoid aggravating the situation”. I suspected that this would also happen to me, because now the academic environment is the main nursery of the most disgusting and rabid anti-Semitism, hiding behind the so-called “criticism of Israel”. I was expecting something like this, and even sat down three times to write you a letter on the subject… but I decided to wait, and so I have waited.

That’s what I want to say to all those who expect from me a quick and obsequious account of my position on my beloved country, which now (and always) lives in a circle of ardent enemies who seek its destruction; on my country, which is now waging a just patriotic war against a violent, ruthless, deceitful and sophisticated enemy:

The last time in my life I apologised in the headmaster’s office, in the ninth grade. Since then, I have done what I think is right, listening only to my conscience and expressing only my understanding of the world order and human laws of justice.

And so on.

I’m really sorry, Natalia, for your efforts and the hope that you could “cook something with me” – something that everyone will like.

Therefore, I ask you personally to send my reply to all those who are interested:

On Saturday 7 October, the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the ruthless, well-trained, carefully prepared and perfectly equipped with Iranian weapons Hamas terrorist regime ruling the Gaza enclave (which Israel left some 20 years ago) attacked dozens of peaceful kibbutzim and simultaneously pelted the territory of my country with tens of thousands of rockets. Atrocities that even the Bible cannot describe, atrocities and horrors that make the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah pale in comparison (captured, by the way, by the frontal and chest cameras of the murderers themselves and boastfully sent by them in real time to the Internet), can shock any normal person. For several hours, thousands of gleeful, blood-drunk animals raped women, children and men, shot their victims in the crotch and in the head, cut off women’s breasts and played football with them, cut babies out of the bellies of pregnant women and immediately beheaded them, tied up small children and burned them. There were so many charred and completely burnt bodies that for many weeks the pathologists could not cope with the enormous burden of identifying individuals.

   My friend, who worked in a New York hospital waiting room for 20 years and then spent another 15 years in Israel identifying remains, was one of the first to arrive in the burned and blood-soaked kibbutzim with a group of rescuers and medics… She still can’t sleep. A medic used to cutting up bodies – she fainted from what she saw and then vomited all the way back to the car. What these people have seen is beyond words.

    Together with the Hamas fighters, the “civilian population” rushed into the holes in the fence, joined the pogroms on an unprecedented scale, robbed, killed and dragged whatever they could get their hands on into Gaza. Among these “peaceful Palestinians” were 450 members of the UN’s UNRWA scum. Everyone was there, and judging by the stormy total joy of the population (also captured in these inconvenient times by hundreds of mobile cameras) – there were a lot of people – Hamas supports and approves, at least before the real fighting starts, of almost the entire population of Gaza… The main problem: our residents were dragged into the beast’s lair, more than two hundred of them, including women, children, the elderly and non-essential foreign workers. About a hundred of them are now rotting and dying in the Hamas dungeons. Needless to say, these harassed victims are of little concern to the “academic community”.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I am not writing this to make anyone sympathise with the tragedy of my people.

For all these years, when the world community has literally poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this piece of land (the Gaza Strip) – and the annual budget of the UNRWA organisation alone is a BILLION dollars! – All these years, Hamas has used this money to build an empire of the most complex underground tunnel system, to stockpile weapons, to teach primary school children how to dismantle and reassemble a Kalashnikov assault rifle, to print textbooks in which the hatred of Israel defies description, in which even the maths problems go like this: “There were ten Jews, Shahid killed four, how many are left?” – with every word calling for the murder of Jews.

And now that Israel, shocked at last by the monstrous crime of these bastards, is waging a war to destroy the Hamas terrorists, who have prepared this war so carefully, planting thousands of shells in all the hospitals, schools, kindergartens… – here the academic world of the whole world has risen up, worried about the “genocide of the Palestinian people”, based, of course, on data provided by… who? That’s right, by the same Hamas, by the same UNRWA… The academic community, which was not concerned about the massacres in Syria, the massacre in Somalia, the mockery of the Uighurs or the millions of Kurds persecuted for decades by the Turkish regime – this very concerned public, wearing “Arafat” around their necks, the trademark of the murderers, rallies under the banners “Free Palestine from the river to the sea! – which means the total destruction of Israel (yes, many of these “academics”, as surveys show, have no idea where this river is, what it is called, where some borders are…). – Now this very public asks me to “take a clear position on this issue”.

Are you serious?! Are you serious?!!

You see, I’m a writer by profession. All my life, for more than fifty years, I have been folding words. My novels have been translated into 40 languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Chinese, Esperanto… and many others.

Now, with great pleasure, without using too many expressions, I sincerely and with all the strength of my soul send all the brainless “intellectuals” interested in my position go to ass. In fact, very soon you will all be there without me”.

Dina Rubina

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

It’s their loss.

Notice that she says there were 450 UNRWA members at the October 7 massacre. I knew that there were 13 who had been fired, but this higher figure may well be accurate, though I can’t confirm it yet. There are 13,000 UNRWA staff in Gaza, so if it was 450, that would be 3.5% of the entire staff, all present at the butchery.

And I wonder how many Palestinian writers or Arab writers would be asked to “clarify” their position before they gave a book talk.

Pamela Paul’s new column in the NYT (click on screenshot below or find the piece archived here) is about “mission creep” in American universities: the drift away from teaching, learning, and doing research to
promulgating social justice. As we’ve discussed so often, there are dangers inherent in this transformation, and some of them are occurring now, including Republican attempts to control universities as well as a decline in public respect for universities among Republicans, Democrats and folks among all ages and socioeconomic groups.

The biggest problem, of course, is the ideological slant that universities are taking, nearly all tilting left with some having more than 80% of the faculty describing themselves as liberal (e.g., Harvard). That in itself is a problem as students don’t get exposed to a panoply of views, but it’s worse because those on the Left—particularly the so-called progressive Left—can’t restrain themselves from making “official” university pronouncements on political, ideological, and moral issues, issues that themselves are academically debatable and whose imprimatur by the university as “official views” chills speech. If a University issues an official statement that there should be a ceasefire in Gaza, what untenured faculty member or student dares buck this position?

To keep free speech going without this kind of “chill”, the University of Chicago was the first to adopt and implement a policy of institutional neutrality, so that no University official or department can make such pronouncements. This principle, which went into effect in 1967, is called the Kalven Report, and you can read it here.

Kalven has worked pretty well here. Departments that couldn’t restrain themselves from taking stands on issues from war to abortion to shootings have had their statements taken down, and the University has issued virtually nothing about the Hamas/Israel war (see here for our anodyne acknowledgment, which basically says “there’s a war on and here’s where to go for help”). The only exceptions we have are for issues, like DACA, which can affect the University’s mission directly.

But so far only a handful of schools, like Vanderbilt and UNC Chapel Hill, have adopted institutional neutrality, though others like Williams and Harvard are contemplating it. But since institutional neutrality is essential in propping up a free speech policy, this reluctance to adopt Kalven is distressing, especially given that the Chicago Principles of Free Expression—the First-Amendment-like policy of free speech—have been adopted by over 100 schools. My conclusion: it’s easy to pass policies on free speech (which, as we see from Harvard’s case, have been implemented haphazardly), but it’s hard to make academics stop proclaiming the views they like as the “values of our school.” (Of course Kalven and all of us think academics have the right to say whatever they want as private citizens.)

And so to the piece; again, click to read.

Here’s Paul’s bit on why universities should shut up about taking official stands on issue that don’t bear on their mission. Sadly, she doesn’t mention the Kalven Report, which I think reflects a lack of historical perspective. But the rest is fine:

Right now, the university’s message is often the opposite. Well before the tumultuous summer of 2020, a focus on social justice permeated campuses in everything from residential housing to college reading lists.

“All of this activity would be fine — indeed, it would be fantastic — if it built in multiple perspectives,” noted Jonathan Zimmerman, author of “Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” in a 2019 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “For the most part, though, it doesn’t.”

Instead, many universities have aligned themselves politically with their most activist students. “Top universities depend on billions of dollars of public funding, in the form of research grants and loan assistance,” The Economist editorialized last week. “The steady leftward drift of their administrations has imperiled this.”

One of the starkest examples of this politicization is the raft of position statements coming from university leadership. These public statements, and the fiery battles and protests behind them, take sides on what are broadly considered to be the nation’s most sensitive and polarized subjects, whether it’s the Dobbs ruling or DACA for young immigrants, the Israel-Hamas war or Black Lives Matter.

At last month’s conference [a meeting at Stanford on civil discourse], Diego Zambrano, a professor at Stanford Law School, made the downsides of such statements clear. What, he asked, are the benefits of a university taking a position? If it’s to make the students feel good, he said, those feelings are fleeting, and perhaps not even the university’s job. If it’s to change the outcome of political events, even the most self-regarding institutions don’t imagine they will have any impact on a war halfway across the planet. The benefits, he argued, were nonexistent.

Indeed! Such statements are purely attempts to flaunt virtue and have no effect on social policy. Do you think that any statement by a university or school on the war in Gaza will have the slightest effect on the war itself? Yet such statements are being made everywhere, including from city councils and secondary school boards. Even the city of Chicago issued a call for a cease-fire. I’m sure Israel and Hamas are paying attention!

Paul continues:

As for the cons, Zambrano continued, issuing statements tends to fuel the most intemperate speech while chilling moderate and dissenting voices. In a world constantly riled up over politics, the task of formally opining on issues would be endless. Moreover, such statements force a university to simplify complex issues. They ask university administrators, who are not hired for their moral compasses, to address in a single email thorny subjects that scholars at their own institutions spend years studying. (Some university presidents, such as Michael Schill of Northwestern, have rightly balked.) Inevitably, staking any position weakens the public’s perception of the university as independent.

The temptation for universities to take a moral stand, especially in response to overheated campus sentiment, is understandable. But it’s a trap. When universities make it their mission to do the “right” thing politically, they’re effectively telling large parts of their communities — and the polarized country they’re in partnership with — they’re wrong.

When universities become overtly political, and tilt too far toward one end of the spectrum, they’re denying students and faculty the kind of open-ended inquiry and knowledge-seeking that has long been the basis of American higher education’s success. They’re putting its future at risk.

If you want schools to be Truth Universities and not Social Justice Universities (do see Jon Haidt’s excellent lecture on this bifurcation), then the cons far outweigh the pros when it comes to taking stands.  Paul’s last three paragraphs are succinct, clear, and correct. To universities and departments who are itching to take political stands that don’t affect their school’s mission, PLEASE SHUT UP.  Members of university communities have plenty of venues, like “X”, Facebook, or websites like this, to express their own private opinions.

After I saw that Paul had left out the Kalven Principles, I posted a comment after her piece—the first time I’ve ever commented in the NYT. Here it is, with one comma that shouldn’t be there:

Thank Ceiling Cat that several readers sent in wildlife photos, so we’re good to go for a bit over a week, I think. But remember, I always need more. If you’re a newbie, read the “how to send me photos” page on the left sidebar and please try to conform to the format.

Today Jim Blilie has returned with some varied b&w photos. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I recently joined some Facebook groups dedicated to black and white photography, which I did a lot of in my youth (pre-digital days).  I spent years scanning my negatives, slides, and, recently completed, my Dad’s slides and negatives.  (In 2023 I scanned 4918 of my Dad’s negatives.)

Inspired by these FB groups:  These are all my photos:  Black and white images that I like.  Some are scans of Kodachrome slides or are native digital images (color) that I converted to black and white images.  Most have only global adjustments (overall exposure, contrast, etc.) but some have “burns” and “dodges” to produce the visualized the final image.  I follow Ansel Adams’ Zone System method, both when I used film and paper prints and now in digital.  Many of these images will display Adams’ influence (I hope!). These reach way back in my photography.  I got my first camera (Pentax K-1000) in 1978.

First:  1981, Aspen leaf with rain droplets, northern Minnesota.  Scanned Tri-X Pan film. For this one I remember the exposure information: Pentax M 135mm f/3.5 lens with extension tubes, f/32, 30 seconds:

Next, two more from 1981.  Reflections in Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park and Mount Robson and Berg Lake (taken with a 1950 Rolleiflex, 6cm film; yes, I humped a Rolleiflex and a tripod up to Berg Lake!).  Both scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is an image from Amboseli National Park in Kenya in 1992:  Elephants under rain clouds.  Scanned Kodachrome 64:

Next is an image of the foot bridge:  Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor in Paris:

Next is an image of Mount Whitney taken from near Lone Pine, California, February 2023. This is the classic view of the peak from the east.

Next is another image taken in February 2023:  The Visitor building and lawn of Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, California:

Next is an image of the very upper Aosta Valley in Italy, just across Mont Blanc from Chamonix. This photo shows the Mont Blanc massif from the Italian side.  (Lumix 7-14mm f/4.0 lens):

Next is an image I call The Shape of the Land.  A photo (2023) of the Palouse region landscape in the southeastern Washington state, near where our son Jamie attends Washington State University.  The Palouse is characterized by these sinuous rolling hills of Loess soil.  This area grows an immense amount of wheat:

Finally, two photos taken on this last New Years’ Eve, 31-Dec-2023, near Hood River, Oregon, very close to our home in southern Washington.  We had brilliant clear skies above a strong inversion layer, which provided dramatic clouds through which we ascended on our hike:

Equipment:

1950 Rolleiflex 6cm camera  inherited from my Dad; Schneider 75mm f/3.5 lens
Pentax K-1000, ME Super, and LX cameras
Various Pentax M series and A series lenses
Pentax K-5 digital camera and various Pentax D lenses
Olympus OM-D E-M5 mirrorless M4/3 camera and various Olympus and Lumix lenses
Epson V500 Perfection scanner and its software
Lightroom 5 photo software

Big Rocket Launch this morning: a test of the SpaceX Starship. It will launch from Texas, test the firing of two boosters and the payload door, and then (fingers crossed) a splashdown planned in the Indian Ocean. The flight time will be one hour and 4 minutes, and this time the rockets, though designed to be recovered, apparently won’t be recovered.

Set your alarm for 8 a.m. if you’re on the East Coast, 7 a.m. Central or corresponding times in other places. But the livestream begins half an hour before those times. You can watch the prep and launch either site given below.

This site gives information about the vehicle and launch, and also links to the SpaceX video.

From Jon and Bat, we hear of a SpaceX launch this morning.

This from Bat:

According SpaceX and news outlets, the big launch is on for a 110 minute window commencing at 0700 central time Thursday morning.  Launch is from SpaceX launch complex in Texas. The rocket is over 400 ft tall.  She’s a big ‘un!  Live Coverage begins at SpaceX website 30 minutes before scheduled launch so that would be 0630 Central Time.

This is the big rocket that Elon Musk is developing for big Moon mission payloads and on to Mars. He claims that they are using an “engineering approach”:  test often and learn from failure: you really don’t want failure but when you get it, you use it to improve the vehicle and its control.

A video of the launch should be at the site below (click to go there, and then click on “watch”; there’s another launch video site below):

Here’s the official announcement:

The third flight test of Starship is targeted to launch Thursday, March 14. The 110-minute test window opens at 7:00 a.m. CT.

You can watch the live launch webcast at SpaceX.com/launches or on X.com/SpaceX starting approximately 30 minutes ahead of liftoff.

The third flight test aims to build on what we’ve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship’s payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage’s coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship. It will also fly a new trajectory, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This new flight path enables us to attempt new techniques like in-space engine burns while maximizing public safety.

This rapid iterative development approach has been the basis for all of SpaceX’s major innovative advancements, including Falcon, Dragon, and Starlink. Recursive improvement is essential as we work to build a fully reusable transportation system capable of carrying both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, help humanity return to the Moon, and ultimately travel to Mars and beyond.

Excitement guaranteed!

Here’s a YouTube site:

On March 8, I wrote a critique of this article, which appeared in American Scientist (click sceenshot to read):

When I wrote my piece, I had grown weary of people making the same tired old arguments against the sex binary, arguments like saying that sex isn’t binary because male orangutans come in two forms (“flanged” and “unflanged”) while female orangs come in only one. That sentence is self refuting, of course, for the authors explicitly refer to two forms of MALE oranguatan. How do the authors know that they’re males, for crying out loud? The same goes for the authors going after the sex binary by noting the long clitorises of female hyenas and the gestation of young by male seahorses. Note that both of those sentences include either “male” or “female”, presupposing that these sexes exist and scuppering the four authors’ own argument!

I got splenetic and wrote this in my post:

Really? Do I have to rebut the same arguments about the definition of biological sex again?  Well, here in American Scientist is a group of two anthropologists, one anatomist, and a gender-and-sexuality-studies professor, all telling us that there is no clear definition of sex, using the same tired old arguments to rebut the gamete-based sex binary. And once again, Agustín Fuentes from Princeton appears among this group of ideologues who say that the definition of the sexes depends not on gametes, but on a lot of stuff, depending what your question is.  Their object, of course, is to reassure those who don’t identify as “male” or “female” that they are not erased by biology.

But you more or less have to keep rebutting this rubbish (as Byrne calls it below) because each new generation of students needs to be educated about how biologists define sex.  The reason that people say sex is a spectrum, of course, is ideological, not scientific: it’s because they want nature to correspond to their view of people’s self-image: today, some peopole can think that they’re varying mixes of male and female (one notion of “gender”). Ergo, nature must be that way, too. I call this the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”:  what we see as “good” in humans must also be seen in nature.

You can read my piece if you want, but better to read MIT philosopher and gender expert Alex Byrne‘s new takedown of the Clancy et al. paper at the Substack site “Reality’s Last Stand.” The subtitle below pulls no punches: the paper is indeed rubbish.

A few excerpts (indented). Byrne begins by giving the authors a bouquet of roses:

The essay is well-worth critical examination, not least because it efficiently packs so much confusion into such a short space.

Another reason for examining it is the pedigree of the authors—Kate Clancy, Agustín Fuentes, Caroline VanSickle, and Catherine Clune-Taylor. Clancy is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton, and Clune-Taylor is an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at that university; VanSickle is an associate professor of anatomy at Des Moines. Clancy’s Ph.D. is from Yale, Fuentes’ is from UC Berkeley, and VanSickles’ is from Michigan. Clune-Taylor is the sole humanist: she has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Alberta, with Judith Butler as her external examiner. In short, the authors are not ill-educated crackpots or dogmatic activists, but top-drawer scholars. Their opinions matter.

But then come then brickbats. Unfortunately, as with me, Byrne thinks the arguments of Clancy et al. are misguided and thus injurious to science. It’s a long piece, worth reading in its entirety, so I’ll just give two quotes. The first is the common misconception that intersex people, who are only 1 in 5600 of all H. sapiens, are members of a third sex:

In any case, what reason do Clancy et al. give for thinking that the number of sexes is at least three? The argument is in this passage:

[D]ifferent [“sex-defining”] traits also do not always line up in a person’s body. For example, a human can be born with XY chromosomes and a vagina, or have ovaries while producing lots of testosterone. These variations, collectively known as intersex, may be less common, but they remain a consistent and expected part of human biology.

So the idea that there are only two sexes…[has] plenty of evidence [against it].

However, this reasoning is fallacious. The premise is that some (“intersex”) people do not have enough of the “sex-defining” traits to be either male or female. The conclusion is that there are more than two sexes. The conclusion only follows if we add an extra premise, that these intersex people are not just neither male nor female, but another sex. And Clancy et al. do nothing to show that intersex people are another sex.

What’s more, it is quite implausible that any of them are another sex. Whatever the sexes are, they are reproductive categories. People with the variations noted by Clancy et al. are either infertile, for example those with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) (“XY chromosomes and a vagina”), or else fertile in the usual manner, for example many with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) and XX chromosomes (“ovaries while producing lots of testosterone,” as Clancy et al. imprecisely put it). One study reported normal pregnancy rates among XX CAH individuals. Unsurprisingly, the medical literature classifies these people as female. Unlike those with CAIS and CAH, people who belonged to a genuine “third sex” would make their own special contribution to reproduction.

Here we have a philosopher who knows his biology, and this can make clear and piercing arguments.  (See below to see Byrne’s new book on sex and gender.)  And here’s Byrne on their view that sex is “culturally constructed”:

The problem here is that “Sex is culturally constructed” (as Clancy et al. apparently understand “cultural construction”) is almost trivially true, and not denied by anyone. If “X is culturally constructed” means something like “Ideas of X and theories of X change between times and places,” then almost anything which has preoccupied humans will be culturally constructed. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are culturally constructed: the ancients thought they revolved around the Earth and represented different gods. Dinosaurs are culturally constructed: our ideas of them are constantly changing, and are influenced by politics as well as new scientific discoveries. Likewise, sex is culturally constructed: Aristotle thought that in reproduction male semen produces a new embryo from female menstrual blood, as “a bed comes into being from the carpenter and the wood.” We now have a different theory.

Naturally one must distinguish the claim that dinosaurs are changing (they used to be covered only in scales, now they have feathers) from the claim that our ideas of dinosaurs are changing (we used to think that dinosaurs only have scales, now we think they have feathers). It would be fallacious to move from the premise that dinosaurs are culturally constructed (in Clancy et al.’s sense) to the conclusion that dinosaurs themselves have changed, or that there are no “static, universal truths” about dinosaurs. It would be equally fallacious to move from the premise that sex is culturally constructed to the claim that there are no “static, universal truths” about sex. (One such truth, for example, is that there is two sexes.) Nonetheless, Clancy et al. seem to commit exactly this fallacy, in denying (as they put it) that “sex is…a static, universal truth.”

To pile falsity on top of fallacy, when Clancy et al. give an example of how our ideas about sex have changed, their choice could hardly be more misleading.

I believe I mentioned something like this before, but only in passing and not nearly as clearly as does Byrne.

He finishes with a “J’Accuse” moment:

How could four accomplished and qualified professors produce such—not to mince words—unadulterated rubbish?

There are many social incentives these days for denouncing the sex binary, and academics—even those at the finest universities—are no more resistant to their pressure than anyone else. However, unlike those outside the ivory tower, academics have a powerful arsenal of carefully curated sources and learned jargon, as well as credentials and authority. They may deploy their weapons in the service of—as they see it—equity and inclusion for all.

It would be “bad science,” Clancy et al. write at the end, to “ignore and exclude” “individuals who are part of nature.” In this case, though, Clancy et al.’s firepower is directed at established facts, and the collateral damage may well include those people they most want to help.

There are, of course, words for people who retrieve and dispose of garbage: garbage collectors. But I know of know words for those who dispense garbage.

On a happier note, Alex has a new book on sex and gender out, and I have it on order. Early word is that it’s really good. Click below to get it from Amazon:

Now I know nothing about the Scarborough gas project in Western Australia except what I learned from the two sites below, the first from journalist James MacPherson’s Substack site and the second, which corroborates his report but is more extensive, from Australia’s Financial Review. You can access the sites by clicking on the screenshots (the Financial Review article is also archived here).

According to the site above, the gas project will cost $16 billion (Australian $) and “will power 8.5 million homes for the next 30 years”.  The project had already been approved by the government and the company was cleared to begin construction. Then two days before that began, the company was hit with a lawsuit that forced a delay. The bizarre thing about the lawsuit, as recounted below, is that is was by an indigenous woman who claimed that the project would disturb supernatural whales that told fish what to do.  Read below for more:

From Patrick’s article (bolding is mine):

Jessica Border, a young lawyer at the Environmental Defenders Office in Perth, said in an emergency court filing in September that her client, Indigenous leader Raelene Cooper, was a custodian of the Whale Dreaming, an Aboriginal story sung or chanted and known as a songline.

The Whale Dreaming states that Burrup Peninsula whales connect places, people and animals to each other, creating migratory patterns for animals and telling them when to eat and reproduce, according to the filing. It contains an “energy line” that passes through Woodside’s gas titles.

“The whale creates a path for the other animals like ‘grading a road’,” she wrote. “Songlines are essential to the survival of human beings and the ngurra or Mother Earth.”

A lawyer for the gas company, in a response filed in court, said: “Until the filing of Ms Border’s affidavit, Woodside had not previously been aware of the asserted existence of the Whale Dreaming within Murujuga [an area offshore the peninsula] or of the applicant’s carriage of a Whale songline.”

Note that according to both reports, the company had already consulted extensively with indigenous Australians before beginning this project, but had never heard of “spirit whales” before. In a decision given below, Judge Craig Colvin, stopped the gas project, at least temporarily. (The first source argues that the “greeniess” are using this myth to stop the project entirely). You can see judge Colvin’s decision at the link below, but here’s a summary of it from Aaron Patrick’s report (bolding is mine):

 

“The term ‘environment’ is defined to encompass the social and cultural features of ecosystems and of locations, places and areas,” he wrote in the judgment.

The use of songlines to fight resources projects is a tactic used by the Environmental Defenders Office [EDO], a Sydney-based not-for-profit company and relentless opponent of resources industries.

One of the EDO’s favourite courts is the Federal Court, which has shown more interest in songlines than any other. Some 20 judgments over the past decade have acknowledged the existence of songlines.

Justice Colvin, who ruled against Woodside, accepted Ms Cooper believed in whale spirits. “The evidence explains the cultural significance of the whales, turtles and dugongs in the sea at that place and of songlines, including the Whale Dreaming,” he wrote.

However, I can’t find the sentence in bold above in Colvin’s judgment, and its absence is puzzling. If you can find it, let me know. As far as I can see from a quick reading of the judgment, Colvin argued that there wasn’t sufficient consultation with indigenous people, including Ms. Cooper, who was “required to be consulted”, although there had been extensive consultation from other indigenous people.

If Cooper’s claim about spirit whales is indeed what she said, then the court is relying on mythology to stop a project that seems to have been environmentally vetted and approved.  Cooper, of course, is relying on a delusion, but if environmentalists are supporting her to stop the pipeline, then they are dissimulating—giving credence to a ludicrous “songline” about fish-controlling whales to get the project stopped.  For all I know, perhaps the project is a danger to the environment. But that doesn’t mean opponents must bring in religious mythology when considering its value.

And there are, as the article points out, dangers in using myths in court:

No High Court decisions cite songlines, according to legal databases. Legal academia has not embraced them either. One of the few journal articles on the topic, The Australian ‘songlines’: Some glosses for recognition, was lead written in 2017 by a country NSW academic, Gary Lilienthal, who has appointments with universities in India and Ethiopia.

“The pre-eminent authority on colonial land title and its relationship to Aboriginal title is me,” Professor Lilienthal said on Wednesday. “If you look back at the ancient laws around the world, including Talmudic law, most of them are transmitted by song.”

Among mainstream lawyers there are concerns that manipulating Indigenous mythology to stop resources projects could backfire, by alienating other Australians, as it did in last month’s Santos case.

What is the Santos case? An explanation:

The decision, by judge Craig Colvin, has become of greater significance since one of his judicial colleagues, Natalie Charlesworth, dismissed a similar challenge to a gas project being built in the Northern Territory by Santos, a decision that is forcing land rights lawyers and activists around the country to assess how they use Indigenous fables to protect Aboriginal communities.

Justice Charlesworth found an expert from the University of Western Australia falsely told Tiwi islanders songlines were used to stop construction of a Woodside pipeline.

These myths shouldn’t be part of court cases. While they’re of cultural significance, this ruling seems to imply that there is some “reality” to them as well—a reality significant enough to warrant stopping an energy project.  Just as there is no place for mythology alongside empirical reality in science (viz. the kerfuffle over Mātauranga Māori in New Zealand), there is no place for mythology in this case.”

It all comes from regarding indigenous people as “sacred victims,” giving their word extra credibility that would not be conferred on other people. Yes, cultural desires must sometimes be considered, even if there’s no evidence for them, but this is not such a case,. As Richard Feynman said about the Challenger disaster, “”For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

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

Here’s part of the judge’s decision referring to Ms. Cooper (again, see the whole thing here..)

1    Two subsidiaries of Woodside Energy Group Ltd (together, Woodside) plan to undertake a seismic survey in waters off the coast of the Pilbara region in Western Australia. To do so, they must have obtained approval from the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) of an environment plan. On 31 July 2023, they obtained approval for a plan subject to conditions. Relevantly for present purposes, the conditions require Woodside to undertake further consultation with representatives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bodies prior to the commencement of the seismic survey.

2    Ms Raelene Cooper is a Mardudhunera lore woman, elder and a traditional custodian of Murujuga. Ms Cooper was a person who, under the terms of the conditions, was required to be consulted. Ms Cooper has commenced proceedings in this Court seeking judicial review on the basis that NOPSEMA did not have statutory power to make the decision to approve the environment plan for the proposed seismic survey (Ground 1). In the alternative, Ms Cooper claims that Woodside has not complied with the conditions requiring Woodside to consult with her and others and that she has standing to seek a permanent injunction restraining Woodside from undertaking the seismic survey (Ground 2).

3    The Court has granted an interlocutory injunction restraining Woodside from undertaking any activity described in the environment plan pending the urgent determination of three preliminary issues, namely:

(1)    whether NOPSEMA had statutory power to make the decision to accept the environment plan where it was not reasonably satisfied that the consultation required by reg 11A of the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage (Environment) Regulations 2009 (Cth) had been carried out, and so was not reasonably satisfied of the criteria in reg 10A(g)(i) and reg 10A(g)(ii);

(2)    whether, if (1) is established, it would be open, as a matter of law, to refuse the relief sought on any discretionary basis identified by Woodside; and

(3)    whether Ms Cooper has standing to seek relief in relation to Ground 2 of her application.

 

h/t: Don

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “toughie,” the boys get all balled up trying to figure out whether and how they could disprove God’s existence.  They get philosophically balled up, but you know in the end what they want to believe. 

Once again I importune my faithful reader/photographers to send in their wildlife photos. Thanks!

Today we have some birds from one of my future destinations: South Africa. The photographer is Billy Terre Blanche, his notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

As your readers know by now I am keen birder,  and South & Southern Africa is the ideal place to enjoy this past-time (obsession!}.

Many of the below pictures were taken at the Rietvlei Nature Reserve, a charming small reserve located right on the edge of Pretoria, within 5km of my house. As you can see, I decided to concentrate on the smaller members of the bird family.

African Stonechat – Male (Saxicola torquatus):

African Yellow Warbler (Iduna natalensis):

Capped Wheatear (Oenanthe pileata):

Cuckoo=Finch (Anomalospiza imberbis).  The Cuckoo Finch is a brood parasite, with a wide variety of hosts including Cisticolas, Prinias and Bishops. This is the male, which looks nothing like its potential host, but the female is very similar in appearance to the females of the hosts species mentioned above:

Half-collared Kingfisher (Alcedo semitorquata):

Levaillant’s Cisticola (Cisticola tinniens):

Little Sparrowhawk (Accipiter minullus):

Malachite Kingfisher (Alcedo cristata):

Pearl-spotted Owlet (Glaucidium perlatum). A very small owl, on average only about 19cm (7.5 inches) in size, and unlike most other owls it is often  seen during the day:

Pin-tailed Whydah (Vidua macroura).  This bird is displaying its extravagant breeding plumage, only seen during the summer months, while in winter it turns into a plain brown bird. See also the Shaft-tailed Whydah below:

Red-billed Oxpecker (Buphagus erythrorhynchus):

Rufous-naped Lark (Mirafra africana):

Shaft-tailed Whydah (Vidua regia):

White-fronted Bee-eater (Merops bullockoides):

Here’s actor Benedict Cumberbatch reading one of the last letters of imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, whose sudden death on February 16 is still a mystery. This letter was written about a month before that. It’s only five minutes long, so have a listen.

Last month Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, Alexei Navalny, paid the ultimate price for his beliefs, dying in a West Siberian prison after years of relentless campaigning against corruption and a near-fatal poisoning. By the time of his death, Navalny had been imprisoned for more than two years, during which time he wrote to his supporters and the wider world through letters shared on his social media accounts. This is one of the last messages he wrote.

The letter answers a question Navalny got frequently: “Why did you come back?” (He returned to Russia from Germany, facing certain arrest, after he was poisoned by Russia while in Russia.) The short answer: “If I didn’t stick to my convictions, I’d have no credibility.” What those principles are you can hear in the reading.

There are few men as brave as Navalny.  I suppose one could compare him to a soldier ordered to undertake a mission resulting in certain death, like the attacks on the Ottomans at Gallipoli. But there’s a big difference: Navalny wasn’t under orders, and voluntarily returned to Russia, knowing what he’d face.

 

h/t: Jez

Each year my cinemaphilic nephew Steven gives his nominations for the best achievements in motion picture production, all vying for the coveted “Gold Steve” awards.  They appear on his website Truth at 24, and if you click below you can see the whole list of nominees. There’s not much overlap with the Oscar nominees. The title comes from one of the nominated movies below (“Fallen Leaves”):

Here’s Steven’s introduction to the nominees (the awards will come “sometime in April”), written with his characteristic modesty:

Presenting…the 2023 Golden Steve Awards.

Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics. Impervious to bribery, immune to ballyhoo, unswayed by sentiment, and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might be termed in all accuracy “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 200 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. First, some caveats:

1) Owing to a lifelong suspicion of prime numbers, each category comprises six nominees, not five.

2) A film can be nominated in only one of the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Best Non-Fiction Film, Best Foreign Language Film. Placement is determined by the Board of Governors. Said film remains eligible in all other fields.

3) This list is in no way connected with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a fact that should be apparent from its acumen. Please look elsewhere for Oscar analysis.

I’ll present the nominees in the most followed categories, but be aware that there are more on the site. Also, Steven has excellent taste in movies, so it would behoove you to pay attention to the list.

Best Picture

Afire
All of Us Strangers
Anatomy of a Fall
Killers of the Flower Moon
May December
Trenque Lauquen

Best Director

Laura Citarella, Trenque Lauquen
Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers
Todd Haynes, May December
Christian Petzold, Afire
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall

Best Actor

Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Benoit Magimel, Pacifiction
Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Franz Rogowski, Passages
Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers
Michael Thomas, Rimini

Best Actress

Jodie Comer, The End We Start From
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall
Natalie Portman, May December
Emma Stone, Poor Things
Teyana Taylor, A Thousand and One

Best Supporting Actor

Jamie Bell, All of Us Strangers
Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry
Charles Melton, May December
Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers
Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things

Best Supporting Actress

Penelope Cruz, Ferrari
Merve Dizdar, About Dry Grasses
Claire Foy, All of Us Strangers
Anne Hathaway, Eileen
Rachel McAdams, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Best Non-Fiction Film

Apolonia, Apolonia (Lea Glob)
Beyond Utopia (Madeleine Gavin)
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman)
Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado)
Our Body (Claire Simon)
To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja)

Best Foreign Language Film

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Afire (Christian Petzold)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki)
Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)

Hari Sridhar, a Fellow of the Konrad Lorenz Institute, has, with others, launched a new site called Reflections on Papers Past.  Here’s the site’s aim (read more at the link):

Reflections on Papers Past is a collection of back-stories and recollections about famous scientific papers in ecology, evolution, behaviour and conservation.
The personal back-story of this project can be found here.

Allen Orr and I were honored to have one of our papers included in this pantheon (see below), which is on the site as a long interview I did with Hari a while back.

The site’s blurb and links on the front page are below:

Reflections on Papers Past is a collection of back-stories and recollections about famous scientific papers in Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour and Conservation based on interviews with their authors. To find out more about the project click here.

Full interviews with authors about the making of their papers and the papers’ fates after publication

INTERVIEWS

Thematic collections of quotes showcasing human stories behind scientific papers

QUOTES

Scientific papers annotated with author back-stories and reflections

ANNOTATED PAPERS

A library of photos and other visuals connected to the back-stories of scientific papers

VISUAL ARCHIVE

If you’re an organismal biologist, you might scan the list of papers (divided by field) and get the skinny on them.

I’d completely forgotten about my interview, as it took place over three years ago. It concerns what is probably my most-cited paper, Coyne and Orr 1989, which was called “Patterns of speciation in Drosophila“, appeared in Evolution, and can be found here (the pdf is here). It was an attempt, which met with some success, to figure out how species form in this genus of flies by looking at the reproductive barriers between pairs of species and correlating the strength of those barriers with the estimated divergence time taken from molecular differences.  (There was an update with new data in 1997.) This could give us an idea of how fast genetic barriers form between populations, and which barriers evolve fastest.

As I said, I believe this is my most-cited paper, but my most cited scientific publication is surely going to be the book Speciation, also written with my student Allen Orr, a terrific scion and great collaborator (he’s now a professor at the University of Rochester.)  I’m only guessing about citations here because I no longer check them.

At any rate, if you click below, you’ll see Hari’s interview with me. It’s long and may not be of interest to non-scientists.

A couple of pictures from yore of Allen and me.  The first one is when we enacted a mock squabble in Bellagio, Italy (2001), where we both received Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships to plan and start writing the book Speciation. But yes, there were disagreements, though not as violent as this.  The book came out in 2009 and I am prouder of it than any other piece of science I produced (I can’t speak for Allen).

Relaxing on Lake Como. Fellows stay at the Villa Serbelloni, a mansion now owned by the Rockefeller Foundation and open to tourists only for guided tours. (George Clooney’s mansion is nearby.)  The Foundation affords artists and scholars a month of freedom (and luxury) to work without interruption, save the lovely breakfasts and dinners and breaks for drinks. (You specify your lunch on a checklist filled out at breakfast, and they bring it to your door to enjoy while working or roaming the extensive and beautiful gardens.) Allen and I got a LOT done in that month. Our partners got to come to Italy, too, and we dedicated Speciation to them (they had projects to do as well.)

The Foundation also had two rowboats:

An aquatic jaunt during lunch. Allen shows the way, though of course he’s looking backwards

One more picture of Orr and me, taken at the Evolution meetings in Portland, Oregon in 2001. He was the outgoing President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, and I was the incoming President. This was before Portland became woke and went down the drain:

Here’s how I translate two phrases that we hear quite a bit these days about the Hamas/Israel war. The phrases are on the left, and how I hear them is on the right.

“Calls for Permanent ceasefire” = “Calls for Hamas to win the war”*

“Calls for Israel to leave Rafah alone” = “Calls for Hamas to win the war”*

*As per one of the comments below, it could also be translated as “Calls for the State of Israel to stop existing.”

A few days ago none other than President Biden issued the second mantra, saying this in his State of the Union message:

President Biden likes to say that no President has been a better friend to Israel, but of late he doesn’t sound like it. He beat up Israel’s leaders in his State of the Union speech, criticized its war strategy in Gaza with regularity, and on the weekend called Israel’s plans to clear Hamas from its last stronghold in the city of Rafah a “red line” that Israel shouldn’t cross.

“It is a red line, but I am never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical. So there is no red line I am going to cut off all weapons, so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them,” Mr. Biden said on MSNBC. “But there’s red lines that if he crosses,” without finishing his train of thought, before adding “you cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead.”

The clear intimation is that if Israel goes into Rafah (a necessity to destroy Hamas), the U.S. will still support Israel, but only to the extent that we supply rockets to keep the Iron Dome going.  See the second mantra above.

********

As Richard Dawkins says, “Discuss.”  Think of it as an essay topic.

A high-up worker in the pharma industry sent me a video from last month  showing biologist Bret Weinstein apparently denying to Joe Rogan that AIDS is cause by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). (That claim starts about three minutes in, but watch the whole video below.)

Apparently Weinstein subscribes to Rogan’s “competing hypothesis” that AIDS is simply group of symptoms caused not by a virus, but by taking “party drugs” (3:53). Weinstein finds that explanation “surprisingly compelling.”  He also suggests darkly that Nobel laureate Kary Mullis—also an HIV denialist—died “strangely” (there were conspiracy theories about Mullis’s death).  Then the video stops, but you can hear the whole 3½-hour episode here.

The first several minutes of the video below, which you’ll have to scroll back to see, show Weinstein expressing doubt that a virus also causes Covid-19.

You may remember that Weinstein and his partner, biologist Heather Heying, touted the antiparasitic drug ivermectin as a treatment and preventive for the “syndrome” known as Covid-19, even though there was no evidence that the drug was effective (see also here).  In other words, Weinstein seems fond of heterodox and discredited causes of and treatments for diseases: he’s a medical conspiracy theorist.

The pharma guy who wrote me said this:

I don’t mean to obsess about BW, but after the Evergreen debacle and getting a modicum of credibility, he went crazy about COVID and the efficacy of ivermectin so much so that Sam Harris ripped him for conspiratorial thinking and now they’re enemies.  I was livid because people like him were giving horrible medical advice to the public as a biologist-who-claims-to-be-an-authority and may have really harmed people who were listening to his claptrap.  3 weeks ago, he was on Joe Rogan’s show (which I don’t watch but saw a link) wherein he’s now giving airtime to the ‘AIDS is not caused by HIV’ conspiracy theory.

As a member of Pharma industry who watched colleagues like myself craft thousands of molecules to become specific drugs tailored to fit and inhibit the active sites of HIV protease, reverse transcriptase, integrase, and to antagonize HIV binding to the chemokine receptor CCR5 that the virus uses to enter T-cells, I know for a fact that these drugs prevent AIDS by stopping HIV viral replication and entry.  All were approved in Phase 3 with data and are used in various combinations to make drugs like the Quad pill that have suppressed HIV to undetectable levels, allowing HIV-infected individuals to lead pretty normal lives.  Ergo, AIDS IS caused by HIV!  QED.

There were then some words not suitable for a family-friendly site, but among them were the claims that Weinstein is “a conspicuous troll who is hurting people.”

VICE News has a summary of Weinstein’s appearance on Rogan and on their shared and bogus theory of AIDS. An excerpt:

Weinstein’s “evidence,” he made clear, is partially drawn from reading about this theory as outlined by Robert F. Kennedy in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, published in 2021. (One review of the book noted that Kennedy managed to misrepresent numerous scientific studies he cites, which does not make a strong case for its scientific rigor; nor does the fact that it was written by Robert F. Kennedy.)

“I came to understand later, after I looked at what Luke Montagnier had said and I read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci, was that actually the argument against HIV being causal was a lot higher quality than I had understood, right?” Weinstein told Rogan. “That it being a real virus, a fellow traveler of a disease that was chemically triggered, that is at least a highly plausible hypothesis. And with Anthony Fauci playing his role, that was inconvenient for what he was trying to accomplish.”

. . .The conversation generated substantial outcry from scientists and public health researchers on Twitter; David Gorski, an oncologist who frequently writes about the anti-vaccine world and pseudoscience, identified the conversation as an example of “crank magnetism,” writing, “Once you go down the rabbit hole of pseudoscience, quackery, and conspiracy theories in one area (e.g., #COVID19), it is nearly inevitable that you will embrace fractal wrongness in the form of multiple kinds of pseudoscience (e.g., antivax, AIDS denial, etc.).”

And this is, of course, indisputably part of a larger pattern. Rogan and Weinstein regularly repeat discredited scientific ideas, mainly around their promotion of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID and Rogan’s constant promotion of anti-vaccine ideas. The AIDS conversation makes clear that COVID denialists are branching out, using their forms of pseudo-inquiry to draw other bad ideas back into the public discussion.

And from Wikipedia:

Appearing on a Joe Rogan podcast in February 2024, Weinstein erroneously stated that some people with AIDS were not infected with HIV and that he found the idea that AIDS was caused by a gay lifestyle, rather than the HIV virus, “surprisingly compelling”. The American Foundation for AIDS Research reacted to the podcast, saying “It is disappointing to see platforms being used to spout old, baseless theories about HIV. … The fact is that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), untreated, causes AIDS. … Mr. Rogan and Mr. Weinstein do their listeners a disservice in disseminating false information …”.

As for Weinstein’s implication that Karry Mullis’s death may have involved his “maverick” view that HIV didn’t cause AIDs (shades of Karen Silkwood!), Michael Shermer responded on February 16 with a tweet:

Dear @bretweinstein
On @JoeRogan you suggested that there was something mysterious about Kary Mullis’s death, and that since he was critical of Anthony Fauci you hinted that perhaps there was something nefarious about his death.

I knew Kary, and I am still in touch with his wife…

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) February 16, 2024

I’m especially distressed by this kind of quackery, which in the end can cost lives, by a man who started out in my own field, evolutionary biology.  Now, having left Evergreen State far behind him, Weinstein appears to be trying to make a name for himself by being medically heterodox. It’s fine to question untested theories, but the evidence is now very, very strong that HIV causes AIDs and that Covid-19 is caused by a coronavirus.

People often say that “pseudoscience” isn’t that harmful. After all, what’s the danger in reading the astrology column or tarot cards? But that’s just the thin edge of the wedge that opens up medical pseudoscience like that given above. And that can kill people.

We are in serious trouble, folks. I have about three days’ worth of readers’ wildlife photos left, and that feature (like “Caturday felids”, which has a dearth of readers) is in danger of becoming extinct. Please send in your good wildlife photos.

Today we feature ecologist Susan Harrison with some lovely tropical animals and one landscape photo.  Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Costa Rica Miscellany

Here’s the third and last batch of photos from a February 2024 trip to Southwestern Costa Rica, during which I visited a wildlife-rich field station on the Rio Sorpresa (Surprise River) and saw many colorful birds, both there and in the nearby Corcovado National Park and the towns of Golfito and Puerto Jimenez.  Today’s photos mostly feature smaller and/or more subtly colored creatures from this trip.

Basilisk (Basiliscus basiliscus), also known as the Jesus Christ Lizard for its skill of dashing across water surfaces:

JAC: I’ve added this National Geographic video of a basilisk running on water:

Bright-rumped Attila (Attila spadiceus), whose distinctive song (“quit it, quit it, QUIT IT – aaaaah!”) is heard much more often than the bird is seen:

Panamanian White-faced Capuchin (Cebus imitator) looking angsty:

Charming Hummingbird (Polyerata decora):

Cocoa Woodcreeper (Xiphorhynchus susurrans):

Great Kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus), screaming its loud squeaky calls straight at me:

Green Iguana (Iguana iguana), a yard-long reptilian lawn mower:

Grey-capped Flycatcher (Myiozetetes granadensis) on Purple Mombin tree (Spondias purpurea):

Grey-capped Flycatcher on branch with Snakefern (Microgramma) epiphyte:

Common Pauraque (Nyctidromus albicollis), a member of the nightjar family, making its weird sounds:

Scarlet-rumped Tanager (Ramphocelus passerinii), which looks to me like a Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) turned sideways:

Northern Tamandua (Tamandua mexicana), a large placid anteater seen in Corcovado National Park:

Variegated Squirrel (Sciurus variegatoides):

Yellow-green Vireo (Vireo flavoviridis):

One of the many waterfalls on the Surprise River:

Scarlett Johansson showed up on Saturday Night Live to play Senator Katie Britt, who gave the cringeworthy In-the-Kitchen Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union address. Johansson’s was a great performance (her resemblance to Britt in both appearance and behavior are remarkable), and I’ll show you how great by putting the real Britt video at the bottom. First, Scarlett, whom I could find only on Twitter aka “X”:

From CNN:

Scarlett Johansson – otherwise known as Mrs. Colin Jost – made a cameo appearance during the show’s cold open, playing Alabama Sen. Katie Britt in her much-talked about GOP rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday.

With one hand firmly raised, Johansson dressed as Britt called out Biden’s “performative” qualities (while fervently denying any performance of her own), delivering her remarks from her kitchen.

”You see, I’m not just a mother,” Johansson said. “I’m a wife, a mother, and the craziest b—h in the Target parking lot.”

The end of the skit saw a well-placed spoof of Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning racial satire “Get Out,” when Johansson took out a teacup and stirred it, causing Kenan Thompson to freeze with a tear falling down his face.

From Simon:

Sen. Katie Britt delivers the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union Address pic.twitter.com/x7mDzO1sWP

— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) March 10, 2024

Here’s Britt’s real response, about 20 minutes long, starting at 1:18. Brit later admitted that she had no basis for accusing Biden for fostering sex-trafficking across the border.

This article from Tablet describes “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers“, and while I have a few quibbles with it (or rather, alternative but not-so-plausible interpretations), the author’s take seems pretty much on the mark. Abraham Wyner simply gives the daily and cumulative death-toll accounts of Palestinians taken from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry between October 26 and November 10 of last year, and subjects them to graphical and statistical analyses.

The conclusion is that somebody is making these figures up.  They aren’t necessarily inaccurate, but the article makes a strong case that there’s some serious fiddling going on. And the fiddling seems to be, of course, in the direction that Hamas wants.

I’ve put the figures Wyner uses below the fold of this post so you can see them (or analyze them) for yourself. As the author notes, “The data used in the article can be found here, with thanks to Salo Aizenberg who helped check and correct these numbers.”

Click on the link to read.

The data are the daily totals of “women”, “children”, and “men” (men are “implied”, which probably means that Wyner got “men” by subtracting children and women from the “daily totals”). Also given are the cumulative totals in the third column and the daily totals in the last column.

When you look at the data or the analysis, remember three things:

1. “Children” are defined by Hamas as “people under 18 years old”, which of course could include male terrorists
2. “Men” include terrorists as well as any civilians killed, and there is no separation, so estimates of terrorists death tolls vary between Hamas and the IDF, with the latter estimating that up to half of deaths of men could be terrorists
3. A personal note: I find it ironic that Hamas can count the deaths to a person but also say they don’t have any idea of how many hostages they have, or how many are alive.

On to the statistics. I’ll put Wyner’s main findings in bold (my wording), and his own text is indented, while mine is flush left.

The cumulative totals are too regular. If you look at the cumulate death totals over the period, they seem to go up at a very even and smooth rate, as if the daily totals were confected to create that rate. Here’s the graph:

(From author): The graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the period. Data aggregated by the author and provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based on Gaza MoH figures.

Cumulative totals will always look smoother than the daily totals, so this may be a bit deceptive to the eye. However, Wyner also deals with the daily totals, which are simply too similar to each other to imply any kind of irregular daily death toll, which one would expect in a war like this.  As he says of the above:

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.

The figures for “children” and “women” should be correlated on a daily basis, but aren’t.  Here’s what Wyner says before he shows the lack of correlation:

Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R² ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R² to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R² is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. . .

This seems reasonable to me, although if a large number of “children” are really terrorists fighting the IDF and are not with women, this could weaken the correlation. But given Hamas’s repeated showing of small children in its propaganda, one would indeed expect a pretty strong correlation. In fact, the probability of getting this value of R² (actually, the proportion of the variation in daily women killed explained by the number of men killed) is a high 0.647, which means that if there was no association, you would get an R² this large almost 65% of the time. To be significant the probability should be less than 0.05: less than a 5% probability that the observation association would have happened by chance alone.

(From author): The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated to the number of women reported. The R² is .017 and the relationship is statistically and substantively insignificant.

There is a strong negative correlation between the number of men killed and the number of women killed.  The daily data plotted over time shows that this is a very strong relationship: the more women killed on a given day, the fewer men killed on that day.  Below is the plot and what the author says about it.

The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

The correlation between the daily men and daily women death count is absurdly strong and negative (p-value < .0001).

The figure is indeed strongly negative, and isn’t due to just one or two outliers. The  R value itself (the Pearson correlation coefficient) is a huge -0.914 and what we would call “highly significant”, with a probability that a correlation this large have occurred by chance being less than one in ten thousand. It’s clearly a meaningful relationship.

Is there a genuine explanation for this, one suggesting that the numbers are not made up? I could think of only one: on some days men are being targeted, as in military operations, while on other days both sexes are targeted, as if Israel is bombing both sexes willy-nilly. But that doesn’t make sense, either—not unless the men and women are in separate locations (when a lot of women are killed on a given day, almost no men are killed). Look at the data below the fold, for example: on October 30 no women were reported killed but 171 men were killed.  That could happen only if on that day Israel was targeting only men, which would mean they were going after terrorists. But that’s not Hamas’s interpretation, of course.

Conversely, on the next day 6 men were reported killed and 125 women.  Was the IDF targeting women? None of this makes sense.

There are other anomalies in the data. Here’s one:

. . . . the death count reported on Oct. 29 contradicts the numbers reported on the 28th, insofar as they imply that 26 men came back to life. This can happen because of misattribution or just reporting error.

Indeed, as on October 29 there were 2619 deaths in the cumulative total of men (implied), but on the day before, October 28, there were more: 2645! Take a look at the chart below the fold.

One more anomaly:

There are a few other days where the numbers of men are reported to be near 0. If these were just reporting errors, then on those days where the death count for men appears to be in error, the women’s count should be typical, at least on average. But it turns out that on the three days when the men’s count is near zero, suggesting an error, the women’s count is high. In fact, the three highest daily women casualty count occurs on those three days.

Here’s how the author explains the data:

Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

After deciding that we can’t get any numbers other than these, and adding that we can’t differentiate civilians from soldiers, or accidental deaths caused by misfired Gazan rockets, Wyner leave us with this conclusion:

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.

People tend to forget this ratio, which is stunningly low for fighting a war in close quarters against an enemy that uses human shields. (The link to “historical standards” goes to PBS and an AP report, so it isn’t exactly from Hamas).  Besides showing us that we can’t trust Hamas’s figures, which nevertheless are touted in all the media, it also shows that there is no indication that the Israelis are trying to wipe out the Palestinian people; that is, there is no genocide going on.

But it would be nice, if newer figures were available, to see if these anomalies are still there. This article is from March 6, so it’s pretty new.

Click “continue reading” to see the data

The data used in the analysis (click to enlarge):

 

As people continue to fight an uphill battle for free speech in the U.S.—at least on college campuses—various Anglophone countries are busy confecting new hate speech laws.  These include but are not limited to blasphemy laws, a subset of restrictions that prohibits dissing religion. Wikipedia gives useful worldwide surveys of blasphemy laws as well as hate speech laws, divided up by country. You’d be surprised at how many Western countries have both kinds of laws, though often they’re not enforced.  But the new ones might well be, and I’m especially concerned about Britain, which seems to be on a binge of arresting or threatening people for speech that would be legal in America.

In a new article at The Free Press (click below to read), Rupa Subramanya summarizes new hate speech legislation in Britain, Canada, and Ireland, and has a few words about the Biden administration’s attempt to cub certain forms of speech that adhere to the First Amendment.

I’ll summarize what Subramanya says by country. Her text is indented, and anything flush left is mine.

CANADA

Take Canada. Civil liberties groups north of the border are warning a new bill put forward by Justin Trudeau’s government will introduce “draconian penalties” that risk chilling free speech. How draconian? The law would allow authorities to place a Canadian citizen under house arrest if that person is suspected to commit a future hate crime—even if they have not already done so. The legislation also increases the maximum penalty for advocating genocide from five years to life.

These punishments depend on a hazy definition of hate that Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, executive director and general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has warned could blur the line between “political activism, passionate debate, and offensive speech.”

A life sentence for advocating genocide?!  (Note that the CBC below says that a life sentence in Canada is actually 25 years.) But advocating genocide is not even illegal in the U.S., so long as your speech is not inciting imminent and predictable violence. I could stand in downtown Chicago and cry “Gas the Jews” without violating any laws. Or give a speech on it, though of course nobody would invite me to do that save perhaps the SJP.  And that’s okay, because so long as you’re not intending to incite violence, your arguments could help opponents sharpen theirs, and at the least “out” you as a hateful bigot. Remember, free speech frees you from the legal consequences of your speech but not the social consequences. And of course you can be fired from some jobs for such expressions.

The first link above, from the CBC, verifies this, and says that “regular” hate crimes could carry a sentence of up to five years. It also shows how nebulous the proposed definition of “hate” and “hate speech” are these:

The bill proposes increasing the maximum punishment for advocating genocide to life imprisonment, and allowing sentences of up to five years in prison for other hate propaganda offences.

. . .[Hatred] will be newly defined as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification” that is “stronger than disdain or dislike.”

The bill also says that a statement that “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends” would not meet the bar to be considered promoting or inciting hatred.

The second bit—about what hate speech is not—is okay as it covers nearly all debatable issues, but basing true hate speech on interpreting an emotion is problematic.

Again from the CBC:

Jewish advocacy groups have welcomed the proposed changes, citing a sharp rise in antisemitism since the Israel-Hamas war began last fall.

In unveiling the potential life sentence for advocating genocide, [Justice Minister] Virani said he heard through consultation with stakeholders that the penalty should be increased.

Well, I’m a (secular) Jew, and I don’t welcome those changes. All they do is drive people who favor genocide underground, so though the proposed law may deter the expression of those sentiments, it won’t quash the sentiments themselves. Again, unless those calls actually lead to a genocide, or to immediate, intended, and predictable violence, both of which are unlikely, they should be legal.

IRELAND

In Ireland, the government is pressing ahead with controversial new restrictions of online speech that, if passed, would be among the most stringent in the Western world.

The proposed legislation would criminalize the act of  “inciting hatred” against individuals or groups based on specified “protected characteristics” like race, nationality, religion, and sexual orientation. The definition of incitement is so broad as to include “recklessly encouraging” other people to hate or cause harm “because of your views” or opinions. In other words, intent doesn’t matter. Nor would it matter if you actually posted the “reckless” content. Merely being in possession of that content—say, in a text message, or in a meme stored on your iPhone—could land you a fine of as much as €5,000 ($5,422) or up to 12 months in prison, or both.

As with Canada’s proposed law, the Irish legislation rests on a murky definition of hate. But Ireland’s Justice Minister Helen McEntee sees this lack of clarity as a strength. “On the strong advice of the Office of the Attorney General, we have not sought to limit the definition of the widely understood concept of ‘hatred’ beyond its ordinary and everyday meaning,” she explained. “I am advised that defining it further at this juncture could risk prosecutions collapsing and victims being denied justice.”

The law (see the link) also says you can go to jail for condoning, denying, or trivializing genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. You don’t even have to promulgate this stuff: just denying it or trivializing it can send you to the slammer.

A murky definition of hate is a bug, not a feature, and is intolerable, for ite depends on “the everyday meaning of hate”, which varies among people. Further, “recklessly encouraging other people to hate” is ridiculous; an infringement on even talking to people without any clear consequences. What’s worse is that if you have “hate speech” stored somewhere but not shared, you can still go to jail.

BRITAIN

In Britain, existing online harm legislation means that tweeting “transwomen are men” can lead to a knock on the door from the cops. Now the governing Conservative Party is under pressure to adopt a broad definition of Islamophobia as a “type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

Other parties have adopted this definition, and free-speech advocates in Britain worry that it is only a matter of time until a Labour-run government codifies the definition into legislation. To do so, they argue, would mean the introduction of a de facto blasphemy law in Britain.

There’s already a widely-used definition of “antisemitism” that can lead to punishment if it’s expressed in universities, and it’s this one:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

While such expressions are legal in the U.S., and in schools that adhere to the First Amendment, note that it refers to hatred of Jews, not of Judaism. The British government’s definition of Islamophobia refers to criticism of “Muslimness or perceived Muslimness,” which could be construed as a blasphemy law criticizing Islam.  In other words, the Charlie Hebdo or Jyllands-Posten cartoons could violate the law. But neither the expression of antisemitism nor either construal of Islamophobia (hatred of Islam or of Muslims) should be illegal.  They are legal in America, and I don’t believe our speech laws are a whit more divisive than they are in Britain, which seems to be undergoing a paroxysm of division.

As for the statement “transwomen are men” being illegal, that’s palpably ridiculous. It is in fact biologically accurate, and you shouldn’t be penalized for saying something that’s scientifically correct. The regulation is meant to buttress a gender-activist ideology to force society to give full rights to trans people as members of their assumed rather than their natal and defined sex. While nearly all rights for trans people should certainly be the same as for non-trans people, there are some exceptions—exceptions involve rape counseling, sports participation, and incarceration.

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I won’t go into the details about America and the Biden Administration’s failed attempt to get speech restrictions about matters affecting homeland security, but this sentence distressed me:

A worrying number of Americans appear to be sympathetic to [MSNBC legal analyst Barbara] McQuade’s argument. A 2023 Pew survey found that just 42 percent of voters agreed that “freedom of information should be protected, even if it means false information can be published.”

Well of course publication of some false information is already prohibited under the First Amendment, including false advertising and stuff that’s defamatory, but a lot depends here on what the public perceives as “publishable false information”. I think the American courts have already settled this pretty well, so I’m curious how many people even know the already-existing rules.

Please send in your photos. I got a new batch, so we have about three days’ worth of photos before this feature goes belly-up. Thanks!

Today being Sunday, we have some nice Australian bird photos from John Avise. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Australian Birds, Part 1 

This week’s post begins a mini-series on birds that I photographed on a business trip to Queensland, Australia in 2006.   I had just purchased my very first camera, so this was my initial foray into avian photography, and I had not yet begun to learn the subtleties of lighting, the importance of background and avian posture, or the art of bird stalking.  Also, it rained quite a bit during this nonetheless enjoyable expedition.

Australian Brush-turkey (Alectura lathami):

Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen):

Australian Pelican (Pelecanus conspicillatus):

Australian Pelican, flying:

Australian White Ibis (Threskiornis moluccus):

Bar-shouldered Dove (Geopelia humeralis):

Black-faced Cuckooshrike (Coracina novaehollandiae):

Blue-winged Kookaburra (Dacelo leachii):

Brolga (Grus rubicunda):

Brown Gerygone (Gerygone mouki):

I’ve just finished watching the movie “Rustin“, which came out last year.  Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was most famous for organizing the March on Washington in 1963, the event at which Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Over 250,000 people showed up, and the force of their presence, and of MLK’s speech, was arguably the pivotal event leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And he influenced Martin Luther King’s approach to civil rights activism, particularly by emphasizing nonviolence. But despite Rustin’s influence, how many people remember him?

They will if they see this wonderful movie, which recounts not Rustin’s whole life, but the short period of a few months over which he organized the March. Played by Colman Domingo in a bravura performance, Rustin was marginalized by the movement largely because he was a former Communist and had been arrested and served time for homosexuality—”sex perversion,” as it was called in those days. His homosexuality figures largely in this movie, threatening at times to derail the March, but King, with whom he had a fraught relationship, defended Rustin publicly and got the event back on the rails.

Domingo’s performance has earned him an Oscar nomination this year for Best Actor (awards yet to come), and the film nabbed a critics’ rating of 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a viewers’ rating of 85%.  Although it starts a bit slowly, it quickly gains momentum and culminates with King’s famous speech given as Rustin stands by with smiles and tears. By that point I was in tears, too. At the end, Rustin, taught to see anybody who helped their people as a worthy person, appropriates a garbageman’s sack and starts cleaning up the grounds around the Lincoln Memorial

Wikipedia notes that “Rustin” was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground, and it’s a worthy effort. It’s definitely a film worth seeing, and also carries lessons today about how a combination of peaceful behavior, a righteous cause, and civil disobedience can move mountains. I remember those times, but they seem to have vanished.

Here’s the trailer for the movie:

If you watch the film, you’ll surely want to learn more about Rustin, and, fortunately, you can do that by reading  Coleman Hughes’s new article in The Free Press by clicking below:

An excerpt:

When I was an undergraduate at Columbia University during the turbulent years of the Trump administration, there was a racial controversy on campus almost weekly, with some students claiming they experienced white supremacy “every day.” Yet as a black student myself, I detected almost no racism at all. In my search to explain this gulf between rhetoric and reality, I looked back at texts from the civil rights era and found, in the essays and letters of Bayard Rustin—texts I had never encountered on any syllabus—a prescient analysis of everything going on around me.

Rustin, who was born in 1912 and died in 1987, was a key ally of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

. . . . Rustin himself was a discovery; a courageous activist, organizer, writer, and descendant of slaves who had been arrested and beaten for refusing to sit at the back of a Jim Crow bus in 1942, when he was 30 years old—a full 13 years before Rosa Parks made history by doing the same. A Quaker and conscientious objector, it was Rustin who introduced Martin Luther King to Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance and persuaded King, his close friend and confidant, to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, though Rustin omitted the word Christian in his original plan.

Six years later, Rustin organized the landmark March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin had put it together in a matter of months and created “the blueprint for the modern American mass political rally.”

How was it possible for a figure so central to the civil rights movement—who had not only envisioned but helped bring about a world in which black Americans demanded and achieved full citizenship—to wind up, in the words of his biographer John D’Emilio, “a man without a home in history”? By any objective measure, Rustin belongs in the pantheon of great Americans every schoolchild should know. And yet, as D’Emilio put it in his biography, Lost Prophet, “Rustin hardly appears at all in the voluminous literature produced about the 1960s.”

The short answer is that Rustin lived as an openly gay man at a time when every state in the U.S. outlawed homosexuality. His civil rights colleagues could imagine the end of legalized white supremacy but could not envision a world in which Rustin could live as a gay man without fear of arrest. The long answer has something to do with those prophetic essays.

You can read about his “prophetic essays” and ideas in the rest of the article—views that are especially salient during today’s “racial reckoning.” Read the article (Hughes is, of course, a “heterodox” black man) and see the movie.

From Bored Panda (click on screenshot below) we get the story of Shrek, a messed-up cat that was rescued. Click on the screenshot to read:

Some excerpts:

An adorable and gentle cat named Shrek was found in a feral cat colony, but he didn’t really belong there, since he was bullied by other cats. Because of that, Shrek was malnourished and was covered in scars from catfights. But besides that, the poor guy was partially blind, with goopy, bagged eyes that resulted from a condition called entropion.

His story began when Emily Shields, the founder of Whiskers N Wishes Sanctuary in Marana, Arizona, took him in. Because of his weird look that resembled the ogre character from the animated movie, he was given the name Shrek.

Shrek’s story started at Whiskers N Wishes Sanctuary whose founder, Emily Shields, took him in from a cat colony where the poor guy was bullied by other cats

. . .After all of Shrek’s health issues were treated, he was adopted by a couple from New York, and now Shrek lives a comfortable house cat life.

Besides not getting enough food, Shrek also had entropion, which made it hard for him to see.

At first he looked like this (photo from Wishesrescue Instagram page):

“Shrek was living in a colony of cats near an airport in Tucson, but he was an outsider and was being bullied. He was found by Courtney of Poets Square Cats, which has over 1 million followers on TikTok. I was sitting in a movie theater – watching Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken with my kids – and Courtney texted asking if we had room for a friendly tom cat who was being bullied,” explained Emily.

Emily also described the condition he was in: “Shrek looked really rough. He wasn’t eating enough because of the other cats, and his eyes were pretty goopy and gross. Like many male street cats, he is FIV positive. He looked like a mess.”

Shrek had to get several surgeries due to his condition. Emily explained what was desperately needed and why

“Shrek had entropion, which is where the eyelids grow inwards and the eyelashes are stabbing into the eyeballs themselves. It’s painful and obviously made it hard for him to see. He was neutered and given his shots, then he ended up needing to have his eye surgery and dental surgery as well,” wrote Emily.

Here’s Shrek after surgery (photo form wishesrescue Instagram page):

In the end, Shrek had a happy ending and could leave his previous misfortunes in the past.

“Shrek was adopted by a wonderful couple in New York City, who run his various social media accounts. He is much loved and living an amazing life for a former Arizona street cat. His new dad flew to Phoenix, drove to Tucson, picked Shrek up, drove back, and flew back to New York all in one day to get Shrek home!” shared Emily lastly.

I have tremendous respect for those who take in sick and messed-up cats, giving them a nice, comfortable life with plenty of food and vet care.

Image: shrek.in.the.city

Photo from the shrek.in.the.city Instagram page:

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And, submitted for your approval, two videos. First, a bunch of cats doing funny stuff (7½ minutes). My favorites are “pool cat” at 1:11, yowling cats at 1:20, flehmen cat at 2:29, drinking cat at 2:55, banana-peel cat at 4:00, bath cat at 4:15 (what’s with that?), costumed cat at 6:16, “kissed cat” at 7:07, and cat mess at 7:20.

 

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And 4½ minutes of scaredy cats.  My favorites: cat scared by cucumber at 10 seconds in (I still don’t know if this is a real thing), sneezy cat at 0:19, bag cat at 1:04, lizard-encountering cat at 1:10, and toaster cat at 3:09,   But I don’t think people should deliberately be scaring their cats, as many do in this video.

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Lagniappe: I’ve told the story of Mrs. Chippy before, but reader Nigel sent a new link and visited her monument in Wellington, New Zealand (I can’t believe I missed it when I was there!) as well as his own photo taken in January:

I’m a regular reader of your blog and appreciate your robust defence of science as I know it. Keep up the good work. Knowing your interest in cats and NZ you may be interested in Mrs Chippy even if unlikely that you don’t know already.  Taken last week when I was there. This is the grave of Harry McNish, knowb as “Chippy” since he was the carpenter on Shackleton’s ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antaractic Expedition from 1914-1917. He eventually moved to New Zealand and died there in 1940. On his grave is a statue of his beloved cat Mrs. Chippy, who was shot when the men abandoned the sinking ship. Cat-loving visitors have left pebbles on the grave in the shape of a heart.

The tale of Mrs. Chippy in the cemetery:

h/t: Ginger K,