Why Evolution is True Feed

From the Washington Monthly we hear of a brand-new book published by the prestigious American Psychiatric Association (APA), a book dealing with (and all gung ho for) “gender-affirming” care. You know what that is: it’s the care that goes to a child with gender dysphoria, taking him or her directly to a therapist or doctor who affirms the child’s feelings of being born in the “wrong” body, then to prescribing puberty blockers and other hormones, and, then if the patient wants it, to excision of body parts: operations on genitalia and removal of breasts, along with hormone treatment that eliminates a patient’s ability to have an orgasm.

Click below see the book on Amazon. It’s $58 and, as you see below it, the 18 ratings on Amazon so far aren’t very laudatory. But according to Amazon it came out only on January 7, and the gender activists haven’t yet weighed in. But they will after they read psychiatrist Sally Satel‘s critical take.

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Why such poor reviews? Perhaps, as Sally notes in her description of the book in Washington Monthly, because it’s written by gender-affirming advocates and is woefully short on warnings about possible dangers of this kind of medical and psychiatric care. Nor does it appear to offer any alternative care that doesn’t wind up with hormone therapy.

Click to read:

Although the book is published by the APA, it doesn’t constitute “official APA guidance.” But here’s psychiatrist Sally Satel’s take (excerpts indented, bolding is mine):

Last fall, the APA’s publishing arm issued a textbook called Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care. Described in accompanying promotional material as an “indispensable” resource, the book is written for mental health and primary care clinicians. The publisher, American Psychiatric Association Publishing, APPI, hails it as “the first textbook in the field to provide an affirming, intersectional, and evidence-informed approach to caring for transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-expansive (TNG) people.”

The “affirming, intersectional” textbook is not official APA guidance. Still, APA Publishing describes it as “rigorous” and “an expert view from fields that include psychiatry, psychology, social work, nursing, pharmacy, public health, law, business, community activism, and more. And because each of the 26 chapters features at least one TNG author, wisdom gleaned from lived experience bolsters the professional perspective provided throughout the book.” One would hope that “lived experience” might enhance the scholarship, but that is not the case here.

Affirming care for children with gender dysphoria, a condition that, according to the APA, refers to individuals who suffer from “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender [at birth],” is a major subject of the book. Unfortunately, though billed as a compendium of “best practices,” Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, instead of providing even-handed analyses of the controversies within a still-evolving topic of great clinical and social importance regarding the science of treating gender dysphoric youth, the volume approaches it as a settled matter when it is not.

The textbook’s treatment philosophy is that if a child or teen desires transitional steps, then the physicians should proceed, taking the patient’s request on its face. According to the authors, “Clinicians should … always allow patients autonomy in their care.” The authors further advocate for puberty blockers (chemicals that suppress the natural hormonal development and the appearance of secondary sexual traits) and then cross-sex hormones (estrogen or testosterone) to produce the physical characteristics aligned with the patient’s gender identity.

When it comes to gender-affirming surgery (which, for natal girls, can entail the removal of breasts, uterus, and ovaries, as well as penile construction; and for natal boys, involves the genital removal and the creation of a vaginal canal), patients first require a psychiatric evaluation before surgical consultation. In this evaluation, the authors say that “the [mental health] clinician should never place barriers to surgery, only identify those that exist and assist with overcoming them.” (Emphasis added.) While the final decision to operate ultimately lies with the surgeon, who is tasked with obtaining informed consent from the patient and guardian, a psychiatric greenlight is also necessary. Surely, there are times when a yellow or red light is appropriate. It’s telling that a book of 420 pages only mentions guardians once and in the context of saying that guardians and parents (who get five mentions) should not be part of decisions concerning their transitioning kids’ medical data. Parents are referenced only in the context of being unsupportive to their children’s desire to transition.

Satel has other beef. The book doesn’t cover the fate of youths who aren’t given this kind of care, many of whom become gay or no longer gender-dysphoric without affirmative treatments; the book doesn’t cover those who de-transition or reverse the process when it’s going on before medical treatment (“desisters”); the book doesn’t describe alternative treatments in which therapists don’t automatically buy into the patient’s wishes and narratives; and, most important, and, most important, the book doesn’t warn of the potential dangers of some of the medical treatments—dangers recognized by other Western countries.

First is the need for more objective care:

As a practicing psychiatrist, I would expect this volume to probe how to conduct productive interviews with all patients, especially children and young teens, who consider themselves candidates for a gender-affirming approach. After all, this is a book from the American Psychiatric Association’s publishing arm. As such, it should advise clinicians to examine, over many sessions, patients’ experiences and developmental struggles (such as emerging sexuality and identity formation), to learn about their home lives and social worlds, as well as to treat them for the frequent co-occurring issues, such as depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, which sometimes manifest as gender dysphoria in youth.

This would seem to be at the heart of any responsible psychiatric assessment of whether chemical intervention (which can be irreversible) and procedures as life-altering as “confirmation surgery” should be recommended. However, oddly, such foundational steps are ignored.

Here’s Satel on the lack of discussion of the dangers of affirmative therapy (again, we’re talking about young people who may not be mature enough to make such important decisions). To me, this almost verges on academic malpractice:

Finally, a reader gets no sense that gender-affirming care is the subject of vigorous international scientific debate. Remarkably, the textbook does not mention that in 2020, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service commissioned a comprehensive review of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and concluded that “the available evidence was not deemed strong enough to form the basis of a policy position” on their use.  Similarly, in 2022, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare suspended hormone therapy for minors except in very rare cases and limited mastectomies to research settings. Likewise, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board now defines all medical and surgical interventions for youth as “experimental treatment,” and the French National Academy of Medicine advises caution in pediatric gender transition.

Regardless of the authors’ personal views, a textbook that is advertised as “rigorous—and timely” as well as “informative” should, at the very least, acknowledge, and ideally explore, the tension between the European and American approaches and elucidate the concerns raised by European medical authorities.

Why the lacunae? As Satel notes, every chapter has at least one likely gender-activist author (“TNG”), and this has resulted in the sorry situation where the APA gives its imprimatur to treatment that might be dangerous or, at best, ineffective. Do note, however, that Satel also opposes state-imposed bans or limits on treatment for adults.

Gender activism is one thing, but when it comes with the imprimatur of the APA and without mention of either alternative therapies nor warnings about the dangers of medical care that have been recognized by other countries, that activism is irresponsible.

The worst thing one can say about this book is that it’s probably going to be highly recommended by ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio.

Every day rockets are fired from southern Lebanon into northern Israel by the terrorist group Hezbollah, funded by (of course) Iran with the purpose of destroying Israel.  (Israel only strikes back when Hezbollah does this, but never initiates firing.) Sometimes the Western press reports on this near constant rain of missiles, but often it doesn’t.

I haven’t, for example, seen much news about the Hezbollah rocket that actually hit an Israeli hospital last Thursday, but, thank Ceiling Cat, it didn’t explode.  However, the Hezbollah missile rain is near constant, for the group is located right up to the border between Lebanon and Israel. If Israel had fired such a rocket at Palestine, targeting only civilians in a hospital, the world would have been outraged.

Another thing that few people know, but should, is that the United Nations has a substantial force of “peacekeeping” troops in Lebanon—thousands of them—tasked with preventing terrorists from coming close to the Israeli border, and ensuring peace in the country.  But they don’t do their job, and nobody forces them to, as the troops are afraid of Hezbollah and the United Nations is cowardly and hypocritical. Hezbollah is located right up to the of Israel, and UN troops just observe and cower as the rockets are fired.

The troops are members of UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, originally established in 1978 to ensure Israel withdrew from Lebanon after a battle, and to buttress the elected Lebanese government—a parliamentary democracy— in running the country, as well as restoring security and peace in general. Later, in 2006, a UN resolution dictated that any terrorists were not to operate from south of the Litani River (in red below), which is about ten miles north of the border with Israel.

Unfortunately, the UN has failed. There is no peace and security in Lebanon. Hezbollah has become the de facto government of Lebanon: no ministers or President can be chosen without Hezbollah’s approval, and for the past two years there’s been no President of the country because Hezbollah hasn’t found one to its liking. Despite UN restrictions, Hezbollah operates south of the Litani River, where UN troops are supposed to be the only armed force, and fires rockets from that area.

Did I mention that the U.S. helps fund UNIFIL?

Why isn’t there an outcry about this egregious violation of a UN mandate? You already know, of course: it’s okay to violate a UN mandate if the violation is bad for Israel. (Look at UNRWA!)

The article below (click headline to read), which is short, gives you ten facts YOU NEED TO KNOW about UNIFIL, and yes, you do need to know these things. It’s from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit think tank. If you doubt the claims, check them yourself.

I’ll quote just the first five facts, plus the last one on US funding, so you can see how the UN is operating in Lebanon. But it’s useful to read the whole short piece.

1. UNIFIL was established in 1978 to end war, restore peace and security

On March 11, 1978, Lebanese-based terrorists massacred 38 Israeli civilians near Tel Aviv, including more than a dozen children. Three days later, Israel invaded Lebanon to push terrorist groups away from Israel’s northern border. In response, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) called for Israel to withdraw and established UNIFIL on March 19, 1978, “for the purpose of confirming the withdrawal of Israeli forces, restoring international peace and security and assisting the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area.” Following the arrival of UNIFIL forces four days later, Israeli forces withdrew from hard-won positions in Lebanon.

2. Despite UNIFIL’s presence, Hezbollah’s military infrastructure dominates southern Lebanon

UNIFIL’s failure to counter Hezbollah has enabled an extraordinary military buildup by the Iran-backed group, including its accumulation of an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles. Israel assesses that Iran has helped Hezbollah establish facilities in Lebanon to convert rockets and missiles to precision-guided munitions potentially capable of penetrating Israeli defenses and striking significant, high-value targets throughout Israel. In October 2009, a large explosion occurred at a house containing a Hezbollah weapons cache south of the Litani River. Hezbollah immediately closed the area to UNIFIL and the LAF and, using large trucks, began transferring salvaged weapons to another location. The incident demonstrated UNIFIL’s basic acceptance of Hezbollah’s dominance in southern Lebanon.

3. UNSC Resolution 1701 expanded UNIFIL after a 2006 Hezbollah kidnapping triggered war (BOLDING WITHIN PARAGRAPHS BELOW IS MINE)

On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah operatives ambushed an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) patrol along the Israel-Lebanon border, killing eight soldiers and kidnapping two others. Israel responded with precision air strikes on Hezbollah assets, prompting the launch over the next month of some 4,000 Katyusha rockets targeting northern Israeli cities. At least 157 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed during the 34-day war, with nearly 400,000 driven from their homes for the duration. An estimated 1,000 Lebanese were killed, including an unknown number of Hezbollah terrorists. Passed in August 2006, UNSC Resolution 1701 ended the hostilities, expanded UNIFIL, required Lebanon to assert its sovereignty in the south, forbade the rearming of terrorist groups, and required the “unconditional release” of the kidnapped soldiers — whose bodies Hezbollah only returned as part of a 2008 prisoner exchange with Israel.

4. UNIFIL’s mandate requires southern Lebanon up to the Litani River be exclusively peaceful

UN Security Council Resolution 1701 expanded UNIFIL’s mandate to have its peacekeeping force “accompany and support the Lebanese Armed Forces” as they deploy in the area between the Blue Line — the informal border with Israel — and the Litani River. The resolution charged UNIFIL with helping the LAF to establish “an area free of any armed personnel, assets, and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL.” UNIFIL is to ensure that its area of operations “is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind” and that the peacekeeping force “resist[s] attempts by forceful means to prevent it from discharging its duties.” However, despite the United Nations having strengthened and expanded its contingent of peacekeepers in Lebanon, Hezbollah is now the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor, with much of its arsenal concentrated in UNIFIL’s area of operations.

5. Hezbollah has repeatedly fired into Israel from UNIFIL’s area of operations

Since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, an estimated 100,000 residents of northern Israel have had to evacuate their homes due to the threat from Lebanon. On December 7, a guided missile attack from south Lebanon killed an Israeli civilian, one of 11 Hezbollah attacks that day, prompting Israeli threats of harsh retaliation if attacks continue. On December 9, 2023, Hezbollah launched several rockets at Israel, including one that originated 20 meters from a UNIFIL compound. UNIFIL acknowledges and condemns Hezbollah activity but does little else. As of January 9, 2024, 12 IDF soldiers and five Israeli civilians have been killed, and over 150 other Israelis injured, in hundreds of anti-tank missile, mortar, and drone attacks. Without naming Hezbollah, in late November, UNIFIL’s head of mission expressed his “deep concern” about the situation and “the potential for wider and more intensive hostilities.” Thus, Israel remains on the precipice of a two-front war in which it will have to confront not just Hamas but also a better-armed adversary on its northern border.

The only reason Hezbollah hasn’t crossed the border to attack Israel is because it knows that it wouldn’t win; Israel has the capability to pursue a two-front war.

. . . . . 10. The U.S. contributes substantial sums to sustain UNIFIL – with insufficient return on investment

The United States contributes annually to UNIFIL’s budget even as the peacekeeping body fails to fulfill its mission. In 2023, Congress appropriated $143 million to UNIFIL, accounting for over one-quarter of the peacekeeping body’s approximately $510 million budget. Since the war in 2006, Washington has spent more than $2.5 billion to support UNIFIL. The United States has likewise invested a similar amount in the LAF since 2006, a portion of which is intended to facilitate cooperation between the LAF and UNIFIL in southern Lebanon. Neither the LAF nor UNIFIL lacks the funding or manpower necessary to carry out its responsibilities. The problem is a lack of will.

The U.S. recently announced that its contributions to UNRWA are suspended for what may be a very long time, looking to funnel aid to Palestine through other organizations (17 other countries have also withdrawn funding). It should do the same with UNIFIL. The US should not be supporting UN organizations that foster terrorism or fail to stop it when that is their mission.

I missed putting up John Avise’s bird photos yeterday as I was suffering from the effects of insomnia, which seems to have returned. However, we’ll have John’s photos today: a continuation of his series on South African birds.  John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

South Africa Birds, Part 8 

This is the penultimate batch of photos in my mini-series of posts on birds that I photographed in South Africa during an extended seminar trip in 2007.  The intent of this series has been to introduce readers to some of the avifauna in this part of the world, and also to help prime Jerry for his upcoming trip to South Africa.

Red-eyed Dove (Streptopelia semitorquata):

Red-faced Cisticola (Cisticola erythrops):

Red-faced Mousebird (Urocolius indicus):

Red-headed Finch (Amadina erythrocephala):

Red-knobbed Coot (Fulica cristata):

Saddle-billed Stork (Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis):

Southern Black Tit (Parus niger):

Southern Ground Hornbill (Bucorvus leadbeateri):

Southern Masked Weaver, female (Ploceus velatus):

Southern Red-billed Hornbill (Tockus rufirostris):

Southern Yellow-billed Hornbill (Tockus leucomelas):

Southern Yellow-billed Hornbill flying:

Speckled Mousebird (Colius striatus):

Speckled Pigeon (Columba guinea):

Karoo Prinia (Prinia maculosa):

Streaky-headed Seed-eater (Crithagra gularis):

Here, from NASA, is the path of the total eclipse that will take place on Monday, April 8, so you have about six weeks to prepare. (You did know there would be an eclipse, right?) And that means making sure you’re in a place you can see it AND that you have special dark eclipse-viewing glasses. I was excited to see that it’s coming near Chicago, though I should really go to Indianapolis, where I lived as a child.

Below is a map from the NASA site giving all the details you need to know, including the path of totality and when totality is reached. You can download the map in larger format here (see “download” at the lower right of the map on the page) or watch the video at bottom, which goes over the path of totality.  My favorite part of such an eclipse, besides the darkness at noon, is that the birds go nuts and start singing because they think it’s twilight.

From NASA:

The Monday, April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse will cross North America, passing over Mexico, the United States, and Canada. The total solar eclipse will begin over the South Pacific Ocean. Weather permitting, the first location in continental North America that will experience totality is Mexico’s Pacific coast at around 11:07 a.m. PDT.

The total solar eclipse will be visible along a narrow track stretching from Texas to Maine on April 8, 2024. A partial eclipse will be visible throughout all 48 contiguous U.S. states.
Want to download this map and view other versions? Visit NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The path of the eclipse continues from Mexico, entering the United States in Texas, and traveling through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Small parts of Tennessee and Michigan will also experience the total solar eclipse. The eclipse will enter Canada in Southern Ontario, and continue through Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton. The eclipse will exit continental North America on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland, Canada, at 5:16 p.m. NDT.

The site also has a table about when the eclipse starts and ends in major cities in the U.S.

I first became acquainted with Dara Horn when I read her book  People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.  Although it’s not a masterpiece, it’s very good and well worth reading. Her thesis— derived from editors who always asked her to write about dead Jews like Anne Frank, but never about living ones—is that people are willing to show respect for Jews, but only if they’re gone. (This of course resonates with the feeling of people about the Israelis killed on October 7 as contrasted with the feeling of many towards living Israelis.)

In a long article in the recent Atlantic, Horn writes broadly about the demonization of Jews on college campuses, and the title gives the topic. Her answer to the title question, though, is something I hadn’t thought about: Jews are simply accused of whatever is the most prominent moral failing in the Zeigeist, and right now that is “oppression”.”whiteness,” and “settler colonialism”.

Read by clicking on the headline, or you can find the article archived here:

Horn begins by discussing the fracas in the House hearing when three college presidents said the wrong thing. As I’ve emphasized, and Horn agrees, saying that calls for genocide of the Jews is indeed free speech so long as it doesn’t violate the provisions of the First Amendment limiting speech (e.g., if it’s liable to cause predictable and imminent violence, to produce a biased workplace, etc.). Where those colleges had erred wasn’t to enforce the First Amendment when it came to Jewocide, but their failure to enforce free speech in all other matters; e.g., they were hypocritical. Horn was also on the advisory committee convened by Harvard to recommend fixes for campus antisemitism (like many Jewish students, including ours, those at Harvard have been intimidated by vocal and aggressive pro-Palestinian students). And yes, genocidal calls like “Intifada revolution!” or “from the river to the sea yadda yadda” are also legal speech under the First Amendment, but violation of campus rules associated with such speech, like blocking buildings or vandalism, is not legal speech. This is a distinction that my own school has yet to make.

Horn on the nature of the problem:

Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.

The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with fuck jews. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.

As I’ve said, what I found most interesting about the piece is Horn’s thesis, which sounds reasonable, that antisemitism is always around, but shapeshifts, glomming onto the Evil Trope du Jour:

The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.

In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider “Judaism.” This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider “Jewish,” this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.

Today the trope is Social Justice, and so we’re accused of being oppressors, and white colonial ones to boot (Jews who are of Middle Eastern origin are, in what is almost a a hilarious term, called “white adjacent”). The constant shifting of why they’re guilty forces Jews to constantly prove that they are not guilty. No other group, I think, has to do that. Here’s one particularly odious scene described by Horn after she wrote an op-ed for the NYT about the October 7 massacres:

Shortly after the op-ed was published, I was invited to watch video footage of the October 7 attacks that the Israeli army had compiled from security cameras, online videos, and Hamas terrorists’ GoPro cameras. This grim footage was assembled specifically for the purpose of fighting back against denial. But even this horrifying and humiliating evidence, documented largely by the perpetrators themselves, apparently isn’t enough to prove that Jewish experiences are real. At a screening of the footage in Los Angeles, someone in the audience shouted, “Show the rapes!”\

The attackers themselves provided footage of a woman’s naked, mutilated corpse and of a teenager with blood-soaked pants being dragged by her hair out of a truck. Since then, it has become clear that Hamas used rape and sexual torture systematically against Israeli women. Israeli first responders and forensic scientists have found corpses of women and girls with vaginal bleeding and broken pelvises. Teenage sisters were found murdered in their bedroom, one shot in the head with her pants pulled down, covered in semen; one woman was found with nails and other objects in her genitalia, while others were found to have been shot through their vaginas. Eyewitness testimony has included details about a woman who was passed among many men, murdered while one of them was still raping her; at one point, her severed breast was tossed in the air. It’s a detail familiar from the 1941 Baghdad pogrom, just as slicing a fetus out of a pregnant Jewish woman’s body is a tactic Hamas unknowingly replicated from the Khmelnytskyi pogroms of 1648 Ukraine. Et cetera, et cetera. But who would believe it? “Show the rapes!”

That’s pretty ghoulish, and can’t even be seen as purely salacious unless the shouter was a total pervert. No, it is at least a call to see evidence, although there was already plenty of evidence that yes, women were reaped on October 7—and in previous pogroms as well.

One note: Horn pins some of the blame for the antisemitism of intellectuals on DEI. (Remember, we’re trying to understand not just the particular form of modern antisemitism, but why academics are antisemitic in the first place. If it’s connected to DEI, then it can be seen as piggybacking on social justice, which Leftist academics regard as the paragon of virtue.)

One confounding fact in this onslaught of the world’s oldest hatred is that American society should have been ready to handle it. Many public and private institutions have invested enormously in recent years in attempts to defang bigotry; ours is an era in which even sneaker companies feel obliged to publicly denounce hate. But diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have proved to be no match for anti-Semitism, for a clear reason: the durable idea of anti-Semitism as justice.

DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.

This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews’ bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don’t experience bigotry because they are “white,” itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don’t experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white). The contention that Jews are immune to bigotry because they are “rich,” an idea even more fraught and also often false (about 20 percent of Jews in New York City, for instance, live in poverty or near-poverty), is equally nonsensical. No one claims that gay men or Indian Americans never experience bigotry because of those groups’ statistically higher incomes. The idea that money erases bigotry apparently applies only to Jews. Again and again, the ostensible reasons for not addressing anti-Semitism in DEI initiatives quickly reveal themselves to be founded on ancient, rarely examined assumptions about Jews as invulnerable villains.

Yep, one more thing to blame on DEI.  And indeed, the Jewish students at my own university are beleaguered by the feeling that they’re surrounded by antisemitism, something I learned from a Zoom discussion las week with a dean and a campus rabbi.  If this antisemitism is indeed on campus, as it must be for these complaints to be true, then where does it come from? From all the demonstrations, poster, and sidewalk chalkings of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the consortium of students called “UChicago United for Palestine.” And especially from the abysmal failure of the University to punish these groups when they violate University regulations. Our Jewish students are fully aware of this failure of punishment, which of course simply heartens the pro-Palestinian activists to engage in further illegal activities, leading to more intimidation.  They have promised to continue demonstrating illegally.

If anybody from the administration is reading this, be aware of the situation and of the consequences, which include reduced contributions by Jewish donors and falling enrollment of Jewish students:

Amazingly, Jewish students, whose numbers have dramatically declined at Harvard in recent years for reasons no one seems able to explain, did not respond to all this with their own hate-speech campaigns. Instead, both before and after October 7, Harvard Hillel’s students have reached out to their peers among Harvard’s anti-Israel activists—asking not for a cease-and-desist, but for a dialogue, or even just a cup of coffee. Let’s get to know each other, they offered. The anti-Israel activists refused to engage. Jewish students tried again; they were rebuffed again. And again. This was hardly surprising. For some anti-Israel activists, even merely talking to “Zionists” (a label applied to the 80 percent of American Jews who regard Israel as an essential or important part of their Jewish identity) counts as “normalization”—that is, treating Jews as if they were normal humans, rather than embodiments of evil.

The decline in Jewish students is a general trend: read the Inside Higher Ed article “Jewish student enrollment is down at many Ivies.” And it’s gone down a lot at places like Harvard and Columbia in the last few years.

Besides the waning of students and donations, there’s always the possibility that students could bring a Title VI lawsuit against a university for allowing a climate of bigotry to exist. This has happened at Columbia University and now, notably, at Harvard, where I’m told the students have a pretty good case.  Here’s some evidence cited by Horn:

The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university (classes, teachers, libraries, dining halls, public spaces, shared student experiences) was directly compromised. Compromised, that is, unless they agreed—or at least agreed to pretend, as many Jewish students who are neither religious nor Israeli now silently do—that there was nothing wrong with wallpapering America’s premier university with demonization of Jews. Coercing that silent agreement was the goal, and it was achieved not through arguments or evidence, but through the most laughably idiotic heckler’s veto: screaming at, chasing away, freezing out, or spitting on anyone who dared disagree with supporting the most successful Jew-killers since the Nazis. This left the great minds of Harvard debating the finer points of free speech for hecklers, instead of wondering why their campus was populated by hecklers. The question of why Harvard’s hecklers were heckling in favor of Hamas’s barbarism was too disturbing to consider, and so public discussions ignored it completely.

This heckling was not unrelated to the education that Harvard itself provided. Classes existed at Harvard, it turned out, that were premised on anti-Semitic lies. A course at the school of public health called “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health” looked at case studies from South Africa, the United States, and Israel; its premise—not a topic of discussion, but the premise on which the course was built—was that Israel is a settler-colonialist state. (A Jewish student who wrote to the professor questioning what they saw as the ideological slant of the readings was told that it was “insulting” to suggest that the course had an agenda.) The “Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights” proudly announced that it “utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement”—meaning, one might reasonably assume, the “decolonizing” of Israel through the removal of its 7 million Jews. (The program is a partnership between Harvard and Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution where an Israeli journalist was expelled from an event in 2014 just because she was Israeli and Jewish.)

An astonishing number of pop-up lectures, panels, and events at Harvard both before and after October 7 were centered on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza—a worthy topic addressed with almost no mention of Hamas, even though Hamas has ruled Gaza for 17 years. Nor was there much mention of the fact that Hamas was founded in connection with the global Muslim Brotherhood, or of its comically wealthy sponsors in the Persian Gulf. Students had many opportunities to learn about Palestinian suffering from oppression by evil Jews, but far fewer opportunities to learn, for instance, about Hamas’s success in co-opting foreign aid and crushing dissent, or the intifada that students hoped to globalize. Outside of their engagements at Harvard, some guest speakers publicly endorsed extreme anti-Semitic lies, including the straight-up blood libel that Israelis are harvesting Palestinians’ organs or that the Israeli military uses Palestinian children for weapons testing. One could hardly blame students for repeating their educators’ claims.

If you want to see the Harvard lawsuit, click below:

And so we see a combination of factors that lead campuses to become antisemitic: a latent form of antisemitism activated by DEI, the wokeness that sees Jews as settler-colonialists, and an ignorance of history that allows people to buy into historical inaccuracies about the history of Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. But of course the point of such an analysis is not to philosophize about antisemitism but to change it. And here’s Horn’s solution, at least for Harvard:

It is fairly obvious what Harvard and other universities would need to do to turn this tide. None of it involves banning slogans or curtailing free speech. Instead it involves things like enforcing existing codes of conduct regarding harassment; protecting classroom buildings, libraries, and dining halls as zones free from advocacy campaigns (similar to rules for polling places); tracking and rejecting funding from entities supporting federally designated terror groups (a topic raised in recent congressional testimony regarding numerous American universities); gut-renovating diversity bureaucracies to address their obvious failure to tackle anti-Semitism; investigating and exposing the academic limitations of courses and programs premised on anti-Semitic lies; and expanding opportunities for students to understand Israeli and Jewish history and to engage with ideas and with one another. There are many ways to advocate for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence that honor the dignity and legitimacy of both indigenous groups and the need to build a shared future. The restoration of such a model of civil discourse, which has been decimated by heckling and harassment, would be a boon to all of higher education.

Will this happen at Harvard? I’m hopeful. Will it happen at the University of Chicago? I’m not so hopeful since administrators are loath to even admit there’s a problem, much less take action to curb illegal conduct.  Perhaps things will calm down after Israel wins the war, but given the pervasiveness of antisemitism and hatred of Israel, I’m not so sure.

Bob Woolley of Asheville, NC, sent photos he took of a biological marvel: a ray in a nearby aquarium that’s pregnant although it didn’t mate! He sent the paragraph below:

“Charlotte” is a round ray in an aquarium in Hendersonville, NC, who was recently found to be pregnant by parthenogenesis—the first documented case for her species. See this site.   Hendersonville is the next city south of Asheville, where I live, so yesterday I drove down there to see her. They seem to be taking very good care of her, with a clean, well-aerated tank–and they’re even preparing a special tank for her babies when they’re born. I thought you might like to feature some photos of this very special girl. You can easily see her “baby bump”; she’s not nearly as flat as most of her kind. In fact, that’s what prompted her human staff to do an ultrasound to see what was going on.

The Associated Press also has the story:

Charlotte, a rust-colored stingray the size of a serving platter, has spent much of her life gliding around the confines of a storefront aquarium in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains.

She’s 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) from her natural habitat under the waves off southern California. And she hasn’t shared a tank of water with a male of her species in at least eight years.

And yet nature has found a way, the aquarium’s owner said: The stingray is pregnant with as many as four pups and could give birth in the next two weeks.

“Here’s our girl saying, ’Hey, Happy Valentine’s Day! Let’s have some pups!” said Brenda Ramer, executive director of the Aquarium and Shark Lab on Main Street in downtown Hendersonville.

An expert on the stingrays said it would have been impossible for Charlotte to have mated with one of the five small sharks that share her tank, despite news reports suggesting that was the case after Ramer joked about a possible interspecies hookup.

. . . .Its biggest lesson now is on the process of parthenogenesis: a type of asexual reproduction in which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs, meaning there is no genetic contribution by a male.

The mostly rare phenomenon can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not mammals. Documented examples have included California condors, Komodo dragons and yellow-bellied water snakes.

Kady Lyons, a research scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta who is not involved with the North Carolina aquarium, said Charlotte’s pregnancy is the only documented example she’s aware of for this species, round stingrays.

The pregnancy (yes, it’s developing babies in there, not just eggs), probably resulted from fusion of two of the four cells produced by meiosis, or gamete production. Usually only one of the four cells becomes an egg, which then fuses with a male’s sperm to produce the zygote. But if one of the four cells fuses with another, it’s possible to get an embryo that’s diploid, having the normal two sets of chromosomes,. all from mom.  Since different chromosomes assort into the four cells during meiosis, the offspring will not be clones of the mother, or of each other.  And this phenomenon has been seen in other sharks, skates and rays, but not this species.

I think they should name the offspring variants of “Jesus” or “Christ” since they were produced without copulation.

Go here to read more about the round stingray (Urobatis halleri), which is in the class Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish) along with the sharks, skates, and other rays.  Now here are Bob’s photos:

Note that Charlotte isn’t flat (they’re about the size of a dinner plate), but has a big lump towards her rear: the sign of a pregnancy.

I pay about $60 a year to belong to the “wholesale store” Costco, though I’m sure I don’t recoup any money on the membership fee, as most of the products are designed for large families: 24-pack rolls of toilet paper, huge containers of ice cream, and so on.  But I keep my membership because there are certain items that are either really good or loss leaders, and occasionally I get a hankering for some.

That happened this morning after I’d talked to a friend who was singing the paeans of Costco’s “Chocolate Tuxedo Mousse Cake,” which she buys all the time for special occasions. It ain’t cheap for Costco ($16.99 for a 43-ounce cake), but it’s made with great care, tastes fantastic (or so I’ve heard), and is a BIG cake (You can read some sterling reviews here and here.) The product details are all ye need to know:

• Tuxedo Chocolate Mousse Cake
• Chocolate cake
• White chocolate mousse
• Chocolate mousse
• Brownie chunks
• Chocolate ganache
• Topped with chocolate decorations

So I treated myself. Here’s a photo before I cut myself a (small) slice:

My small slice, which was filling even though I can eat a LOT of dessert. It was fantastic, with all the differently flavored layers and textures melding perfectly. This is an ideal cake to buy for someone’s birthday, because it would take an expert baker hours to make it, and, as you can see above, it’s gorgeous.  But of course you have to be a member of Costco.

A laudatory video about the cake:

And, of course, you can’t visit Costco without taking advantage of their special hot dog/drink deal: for only $1.50, you get a footlong Hebrew National hot dog (i.e., all beef and good) with a condiment bar, plus a large cup of soda that you can refill as often as you want. They lose money on this, but it’s one of their famous loss leaders. It is in fact so famous that “Costco hot dog” has its own Wikipedia page, which describes the deal as having a “cult following”.  A photo from Wikipedia:

By bob walker from London, UK .

And another great loss leader, and one I bought today: a famous semi-organic Costco pre-roasted chicken, which is huge and costs only $4.99, a price that’s been stable for years. I can get at least four meals out of this puppy. HOWEVER, there have been reports that some chickens have a chemical flavor due to additives, and some other reports of illness. I haven’t noticed that, but I’ll be watching this one closely.

 

I’m sure we have some Costco mavens in the audience, so please add a comment about what you like or don’t like.  There are entire websites devoted to what to buy and what to avoid there, but I haven’t perused them.

Chicken tonight, along with spinach, rice, and a half bottle of fine Australian viognier from Yalumba.

From the NYT, we hear about how feral cats invaded a Chilean prison and then (as one expects) the prisoners became ailurophiles. Click below to read, or find it archived here.

Excerpts:

Some say they were first brought in to take out the rats. Others contend they wandered in on their own.

What everyone can agree on — including those who have lived or worked at Chile’s largest prison the longest — is that the cats were here first.

For decades, they have walked along the prison’s high walls, sunbathed on the metal roof and skittered between cells crowded with 10 men each. To prison officials, they were a peculiarity of sorts, and mostly ignored. The cats kept multiplying into the hundreds.

Then prison officials realized something else: The feline residents were not only good for the rat problem. They were also good for the inmates.

“They’re our companions,” said Carlos Nuñez, a balding prisoner showing off a 2-year-old tabby he named Feita, or Ugly, from behind prison bars. While caring for multiple cats during his 14-year sentence for home burglary, he said he discovered their special essence, compared with, say, a cellmate or even a dog.

YES! “Even a d*g”!!!!

(from the NYT) A cat joining a card game with inmates in a lower-security section of the prison. Credit: Cristobal Olivares for The New York Times

“A cat makes you worry about it, feed it, take care of it, give it special attention,” he said. “When we were outside and free, we never did this. We discovered it in here.”

Known simply as “the Pen,” the 180-year-old main penitentiary in Santiago, Chile’s capital, has long been known as a place where men live in cages and cats roam free. What is now more clearly understood is the positive effect of the prison’s roughly 300 cats on the 5,600 human residents.

The felines’ presence “has changed the inmates’ mood, has regulated their behavior and has strengthened their sense of responsibility with their duties, especially caring for animals,” said the prison’s warden, Col. Helen Leal González, who has two cats of her own at home, Reina and Dante, and a collection of cat figurines on her desk.

“Prisons are hostile places,” she added in her office, wearing a tight bun, billy club and combat boots. “So of course, when you see there’s an animal giving affection and generating these positive feelings, it logically causes a change in behavior, a change in mindset.”

Prisoners informally adopt the cats, work together to care for them, share their food and beds and, in some cases, have built them little houses. In return, the cats provide something invaluable in a lockup notorious for overcrowding and squalid conditions: love, affection and acceptance.

“Sometimes you’ll be depressed and it’s like she senses that you’re a bit down,” said Reinaldo Rodriguez, 48, who is scheduled to be imprisoned until 2031 on a firearms conviction. “She comes and glues herself to you. She’ll touch her face to yours.

(from the NYT): Carlos Nuñez, an inmate, with a cat he named Feita, or Ugly. Credit: Cristobal Olivares for The New York Times

Formal programs to connect prisoners and animals became more common in the late 1970s, and after consistently positive results, they have expanded across the world, including to Japan, the Netherlands and Brazil.

They have become particularly popular in the United States. In Arizona, prisoners train wild horses to patrol the U.S. border with Mexico. In Minnesota and Michigan, prisoners train dogs for the blind and deaf. And in Massachusetts, prisoners help care for wounded or sick wildlife, like hawks, coyotes and raccoons.

Connecting inmates and dogs has repeatedly been shown to lead to “a decrease in recidivism, improved empathy, improved social skills and a safer and more positive relationship between inmates and prison officials,” said Beatriz Villafaina-Domínguez, a researcher in Spain who reviewed 20 separate studies of such programs.

Dogs have been the most common animal used by prisons, followed by horses, and in most programs, animals are brought to the inmates, or vice versa. In Chile, however, the inmates developed an organic connection to the stray cats who live alongside them.

Chileans know best!

The program’s success has been partly thanks to the inmates, Ms. Sandoval said. The prisoners collect cats that need care and bring them to the volunteers.

On a recent day, four women lugged cat carriers into the prison grounds, on the hunt for a number of felines, including Lucky, Aquila, Dropón and her six new kittens, and Mr. Nuñez’s cat, Ugly.

The courtyard was chaotic, packed for an inmate soccer match, but prisoners politely made way for the women.

Quickly, men cradling cats in tattooed arms came bounding down stairs along the courtyard, handing animals through prison bars to the volunteers. In one stop, Denys Carmona Rojas, 57, a prisoner serving eight years on gun charges, doted on a litter of kittens in a box. He said he had helped raise many kittens in his cell, recounting one case in which he fed special milk to a litter after the mother died during birth.

From the NYT.  There is more at the site.

(from the NYT): Verónica Basterrica, center, leads Felinnos Foundation, an animal-welfare group that in recent years has helped care for the cats in the prison. Credit:Cristobal Olivares for The New York Times

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From CNN, a short tail of a Thai farmer who plants rice at different times in a field so that the growing shoots, which change color, create the image of a sleeping cat hugging a fish. Click to read:

A sleeping cat hugs a fish in a picture seen from the air, picked out in sprouting rainbow seedlings in a rice field in Thailand to illustrate a traditional proverb about abundance.

Farmer Tanyapong Jaikham and a team of workers planted the seedlings at various spots in the field in the northern province of Chiang Rai to depict cartoon cats, hoping to lure tourists and cat lovers.

“We’re expecting tens of thousands to come and see the art in the rice fields,” he said.

The process relies on GPS coordinates to position the seedlings as designated in an initial artist’s sketch, he said, with the plants changing tint as they grow.

R“It’s crucial to position them accurately, and the rice will gradually change shades over time,” he added, until in the final harvest stage, the rice straw yields the portrait of Cooper, the cat on which it was modeled.

Viewing towers are being built in the surrounding area to give visitors a glimpse of the artwork, which is based on a Thai saying, “There is fish in the water and rice in the fields.”

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And here’s a 9.5-minute video of the Way Things Should be: cats cooperating to defeat predatory d*gs (TRIGGER WARNING: Scratching and biting of d*gs! What I don’t understand why the photographer, in the second clip, didn’t help the blind man and his guide dog. People would prefer to film violence than stop it.  Fortunately, it looks as if no dogs were hurt.

Notice the cats’ bushy tails.

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Lagniappe: A heartwarming video of a disheveled and sick stray kitten saved and turned into a lovely housecat.

h/t: Susan, Debra

Today, courtesy of reader Michele Miller, we have our first photographs of vegetables. I’ll let her describe them. Her words are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I am not a professional photographer but I have a groups of photos that may be of interest. They are not technically wildlife but I have photos of the harvests I gathered daily (or every few days depending on month) from my little backyard garden from late April-October 2023; while not that impressive one by one, in aggregate they  illustrate the amount of food one can produce pretty easily (I’m a lazy gardener, weeds have a happy home in my plot) and organically at home. I live only an hour north of NYC but I am lucky to have a neighbor who has cows (minis) and thus plenty of organic fertilizer. I don’t use pesticides as I am also a bird/bee advocate. Some examples, also with some of the meals I made from the harvests:

On November 20, 2022, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a “Memorandum for Heads of Federal Departments and Agencies” designed to guide those agencies in interacting with indigenous people of the U.S. as well as in meldiong their “indigenous knowledge” with modern science in useful scientific and practical endeavors. There’s a long draft proposal (see below) as well as a shorter description of the origin and aims of the project here.

Having read the 46-page draft proposal as well as the ancillary documents, I’ll give my impressions of the project in this post.  My general take is that the document is far more concerned with bringing indigenous people into scientific endeavors than it is with improving projects by incorporating indigenous knowledge. Further, it seems more concerned with helping indigenous people’s lives (growing crops, getting better healthcare) than with ferreting out their knowledge. The latter is still a worthy endeavor: Lord knows that Native Americans have been treated horribly by “colonists”, and this project can be seen as a form of reparations. But let us not pretend that the main aim of the project are the ones the government gave below:

• Understanding Indigenous Knowledge
• Growing and maintaining the mutually beneficial relationships with Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples needed to appropriately include Indigenous Knowledge
• Considering, including, and applying Indigenous Knowledge in Federal research, policies, management, and decision making

Of all of these, the second is the one that occupies the most space in the paper: how to collaborate with indigenous people and, especially, how to interact with them in a polite and non-offensive manner.  But the aim isn’t really “mutually beneficial” in the sense that modern scientific projects will be enhanced by collaboration with Tribal Nations. Rather, the project is a way of drawing Native Americans into empirical research, even though the number of projects seems limited and the use of “indigenous knowledge” (always ill defined) unclear. I prefer to think of this as a huge DEI project, one designed to achieve some kind of equity in scientific research, but one that’s better than the usual DEI projects because it aims to actually improve the lives of Native Americans. If it does that by masquerading as a way to achieve “knowledge equity”, however, at least we must know of the masquerade, because the presumed equivalence of “indigenous knowledge” with “scientific knowledge” is a growing trope, and we need to understand it. Undue respect for “indigenous ways of knowledge” has substantially degraded science education in New Zealand, and we shouldn’t let that happen here.

Click below to see (or download) the big fat memo:

First, what is indigenous knowledge? Here are two definitions, based largely on the OED, that I gave in a recent post:

knowledge: “The apprehension of fact or truth with the mind; clear and certain perception of fact or truth; the state or condition of knowing fact or truth.” I interpret this to mean “the public acceptance of facts”, so that “knowledge” becomes an apprehension, as Steve Gould argued, that would be held by any person who is not perverse.

way of knowing: A system or group of procedures used to produce knowledge. (This is my definition since it’s not in the OED.)

These don’t comport exactly with the BA’s definitions (below), but the sense is the same: knowledge is the widespread apprehension of what is true. It is the way that knowledge is produced thatdiffers between scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge.  The latter includes sources that some may see as numinous or nonscientific, such as “spiritual” and “cultural grounding”, as well as “lessons passed from generation to generation”. In this way North American indigenous knowledge resembles New Zealand’s indigenous knowledge, or “Mātauranga Māori.” It is a mixture of real empirical observation with myth, legend, and cultural practices.

Here are two definitions of indigenous knowledge given by the Biden administration, the first from the big document and the second from a related page:

Note in part A the connection between “knowledge” and “social, spiritual, and natural systems”.  Ideally, knowledge should be free from such considerations, or it isn’t really knowledge in the scientific or empirical sense.

And this government page:

Indigenous Knowledge is a body of observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices, and beliefs developed by Tribes and Indigenous Peoples through interaction and experience with the environment. The Biden-Harris Administration has formally recognized Indigenous Knowledge as one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contributes to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States and our collective understanding of the natural world.

Henceforth we’ll use the abbreviation “BA” for “Biden Administration,” “IK” for indigenous knowledge, and “SK” for scientific knowledge (the stuff that science accepts today as provisional truth).  One important difference between IK and SK is that the latter can be kept secret if the tribes with that knowledge so wish it. So, on p. 31 of the document, and elsewhere, you can find this:

Funded by the National Science Foundation, ELOKA responds to twin imperatives: The Federal mandate to make data collected with Federal dollars public and broadly accessible, and the right of Tribes and Indigenous Peoples to control their own knowledge.

This means that if Native Americans wish to keep their indigenous knowledge to themselves rather than making it public, they have the right to do so. If that’s the case, it violates the ethos of science, which is to make all knowledge (at least knowledge resulting in publication) available to everyone.  Knowledge kept private isn’t really “knowledge,” as it can’t be tested by others to see if it’s true.  Leaving that aside, let’s move on.

The report is divided into several parts, but the two main ones are parts 2-6 (pp. 4-21), which lay out ways to interact with Native Americans when collaborating with them on projects using IK, and Appendix A, “Examples of indigenous knowledge application and collaboration between the federal government and tribes and indigenous peoples,” which occupies pages 22-33. (There are a few more appendices with references and the like.) It’s this second part that most interests me, but I’ll say a few words about the first bit.

Part I not only explicitly brings up the historically abysmal treatment of Native Americans, but also blames science for part of this. All of it is to the end of how to deal with Native Americans, and I have little objection to most of it:

Acknowledge Historical Context and Past Injustice. Understanding the different experiences of Tribal and Indigenous Peoples is critical for Agencies to work with them and engage effectively with Indigenous Knowledge. Agencies should acknowledge the history of the department or agency they represent, and the Federal Government broadly, when working with Tribes and Indigenous Peoples. Recognizing past injustice, while upholding Tribal treaty and reserved rights, and respecting Tribal and Indigenous communities, cultures, and values will assist Agencies in developing collaborative processes that are more equitable and inclusive of Indigenous Peoples and their knowledge systems. The genocide and ethnocide of Indigenous Peoples in the United States is well documented.39 Historically, Federal policies have resulted in the separation (both physically and intellectually). of Indigenous Peoples from the places they are connected to, severing relationships with lands, waters, and social systems, which are all critical elements of Indigenous Knowledge. 40 These policies systematically served to assimilate and displace Native people and eradicate Native cultures.41

Historically, Federal policies have resulted in the separation (both physically and intellectually) of Indigenous Peoples from the places they are connected to, severing relationships with lands, waters, and social systems, which are all critical elements of Indigenous Knowledge. These policies systematically served to assimilate and displace Native people and eradicate Native cultures.

But then we get to the inevitable criticisms of “science” as being oppressive:

. . . At times, Western science has been used as a tool to oppress Tribal Nations and Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples in the United States have experienced significant unethical health research abuses, including the use of genetic data and health records without their knowledge or consent.

I wouldn’t say that “Western science’—again, a term I abhor since science has become worldwide—oppressed Tribal Nations, but rather unethical or uncaring scientists did. It’s not a dictum of “science” to “use data from people without their consent” .  This is a way of doing down science itself as an oppressor—something we see in New Zealand as well. But here’s one more example of how to collaborate with Native Americans

Include Indigenous Knowledge into Federal Decision Making and Research. Agencies should obtain consent from Tribal Nations and Indigenous Peoples prior to including Indigenous Knowledge in Federal policy, research, or decision making. After securing consent to access Indigenous Knowledge, Agencies should ensure that Indigenous Knowledge is appropriately included in the Federal action. Inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge in Federal decision making and research starts with the recognition that Indigenous practices and methodologies underlie Indigenous Knowledge. Accordingly, Indigenous Knowledge should guide metrics and evaluation; Agencies do not need to judge, validate, or evaluate Indigenous Knowledge using other forms of knowledge in order to include Indigenous Knowledge in Federal policy, research, or decision making.

I’m not sure I agree with the last two sentences, but then again I’m not sure what they mean. If they mean that indigenous knowledge should not be tested against modern scientific knowledge, I disagree.

Here’s a note about the co-equality of Indigenous and modern science (bolding is mine):

When [Federal] funding is awarded, especially through competitive grant processes, Agencies should ensure that the methods, people, and grant assessment process are not biased against proposals that include Indigenous Knowledge. To guard against such biases, Agencies can ensure that Indigenous Knowledge holders are included in funding allocation decisions, and can ensure that merit-based funding decisions involve scoring rubrics that value Indigenous Knowledge on par with other forms of evidence and methods of inquiry. Agencies should also develop evaluation criteria that includes Indigenous methodologies and approaches to ensure that Indigenous Knowledge is not inappropriately disadvantaged in the review process.

I would say that valuing indigenous knowledge in comparison to scientific knowledge would depend on how that indigenous knowledge is generated. If it’s through tradition and word of mouth, for example, you might cast a cold eye on it.  To ensure that indigenous knowledge is comparable to modern scientific knowledge, of course, it has to be judged by the standards of modern scientific knowledge, not by the standards of indigenous knowledge.

Part II deals with specific projects that are said to involve indigenous knowledge, and the document gives a fair number of examples. The problem is that with many of these examples, it’s not clear either what the relevant indigenous knowledge is or how it’s supposed to be used. Here’s one example of that:

ACHP Advances Indigenous Knowledge in Policy on Burial Sites, Human Remains, and Funerary Objects The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) strives to ensure Agencies implement their work in harmony with the National Historic Preservation Act. The ACHP is incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into its updated Policy Statement on Burial Sites, Human Remains, and Funerary Objects82 to elevate consideration of Indigenous Knowledge in Federal historic preservation decisions. Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into the policy statement will help Indigenous People elevate their concerns during the Section 106 process, which requires Agencies to consider the effects of projects they carry out, approve, or fund, on historic properties throughout the country.

Elizabeth Weiss has emphasized that this is problematic in two ways. First, it is really indigenous claims that are taken as knowledge. If a skull or a funerary object is found on land once occupied by a given tribe, it’s taken for granted that the remains and funerary objects revert to that tribe. No DNA analysis is necessary, though it should be when possible. Second, this section has been expanded to mean that all Native American objects found must be given custodial care under the direction of Native Americans who claim them, regardless of the strength of their claim. If an object is deemed “sacred” or “powerful,” it might be taken off exhibit completely, or given back to a tribe. This is bowing not to indigenous knowledge but to indigenous religion, since such objects are deemed “sacred”.

But there are examples where indigenous knowledge can contribute to conservation. I’ll just give two.

Sweetgrass Shared Governance in Acadia National Park

In Acadia National Park, the National Park Service is working with citizens of Wabanaki Tribes—the Aroostook Band of Mi’kmaq, the Houlton Band of Maliseets (Wolastogiyik), the Passamaquoddy (Peskotomuhkati) Tribe at Sipayik, the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Indian Township, and the Penobscot Indian Nation—on shared governance and research on sweetgrass harvesting.80 Wabanaki people have harvested sweetgrass for generations. Research in Acadia, guided by Indigenous methodologies, reinforces what Wabanaki people have always known: that harvesting sweetgrass through a Wabanaki philosophy enhances sweetgrass abundance. Wabanaki knowledge, and the gatherers who generate this knowledge, are leading National Park Service research and management strategies that will enable restoration of Wabanaki harvesting within Acadia National Park.

Here the knowledge of harvesting and cultivating sweetgrass is likely to be useful for keeping this plant going. What I object to here is how “Wabanaki philosophy enhances sweetgrass abundance.” And what the philosophy might be is, of course, not given. To see if it really works, you’d have to test it—but with modern science.

One more example before I pass on. Eulachon is a kind of smelt:

Tribal-led Research and Conservation of Eulachon

Coastal Indian Tribes, including the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, have fished and traded for eulachon (Thaleichthys pacificus) in tributaries of the Columbia River since time immemorial. NOAA and the Cowlitz Indian Tribe— who initiated the project—applied Tribal oral histories to reconstruct historic distributions of the eulachon.96 The Cowlitz Tribal oral histories aided in identifying key spawning habitat, timing of eulachon runs, and run differences between tributaries, and directly informed NOAA’s decision to list a population segment as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.97 The project facilitated joint efforts to identify and protect critical habitat, increase abundance of the species, and promote species recovery.

Here we have some indigenous knowledge that, in combination with scientific conservation, may indeed allow assessments that can help with species conservation. There are a few other examples like this, but also others where the relevant “knowledge”  isn’t specified. Here it’s clear: knowledge about habitats, timing, and subjective judgments of species numbers. Sadly, even this kind of knowledge is missing from most of the examples given.

Overall, I have to say that I wasn’t much impressed with this document. I can’t disagree that indigenous knowledge, which is invariably practical knowledge about foods or plants useful to Native Americans, can be useful—mostly for Native Americans themselves but sometimes for overall conservation. But the article doesn’t make a persuasive case that “indigenous knowledge” is either coequal to modern scientific knowledge or constitutes a “different way of knowing”. To paraphrase Mike Aus, “There is knowing and there is not knowing, and that’s all there is in this world.”  Of course we have to realize that many claims of indigenous knowledge (like the provenance of found human remains) should be tested using modern scientific knowledge as well.

The reason I highlight this is simply to acquaint you with the nature of this program, since if you’re American you’re paying for it. Also, the “indigenous knowledge is sacred” trope has hopped the pond from New Zealand to here and is now invading America piggybacking on wokeness, ergo it must be carefully and critically inspected. Knowledge can’t be immune from modern scientific scrutiny simply because it comes from indigenous people—always people who lack much of the modern toolkit of modern science (hypothesis testing, publication, pervasive doubt, replication, and so on).

In my view implementing this project as a better-than-usual DEI endeavor—a way to bring indigenous people into modern science—is better done in the long run simply by giving Native Americans the opportunities to study, engage in, and ultimately practice modern science as professionals. I know we’re a long way from that, but this is the solution for all problems of equity. In this case, “indigenous knowledge” automatically becomes fused with modern science. But of course if you want to do something now, this bloated document doesn’t convince me that the BA program is a great one.

My audiobook publisher is running a special deal until March 15: my audio book Faith versus Fact: The Incompatibility Between Science and Religion, for a pittance: $4.25. It’s not available on Amazon, so I’d say this is a good deal.  To get it, click on the icon below, and, if you don’t want to buy into a continuing deal, click the blue “get discount” button and then check out.  If you click the orange button, you’ll buy into a continuing series and will keep getting other books.

The blurb:

In his provocative new book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion-including faith, dogma, and revelation-leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.

Coyne is responding to a national climate in which over half of Americans don’t believe in evolution (and congressmen deny global warming), and warns that religious prejudices and strictures in politics, education, medicine, and social policy are on the rise. Extending the bestselling works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he demolishes the claims of religion to provide verifiable ‘truth’ by subjecting those claims to the same tests we use to establish truth in science.

Coyne irrefutably demonstrates the grave harm-to individuals and to our planet-in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in.

Look at it this way: it’s cheaper than a Starbuck’s latte. And, as with all my books, if you send them to me with a postpaid return envelope, I’ll autograph them and even draw a cat inside.

The only people seriously suggesting that the Israel/Hamas war can be peaceably resolved by the existence of two states—Israel and a new Palestinian state— are so desperate for a solution that they’ll suggest one that’s completely impractical. (I would say “dumb”, but I’m trying to be kind here.) But Israel is out for victory this time, and won’t let the U.S., or anyone else, impose a cease-fire—which is the same thing as asking Israel to surrender.

I used to favor the two-state solution on this site, but realize now that it simply won’t work, and for a number of reasons. First, almost no Israeli would countenance it. Such a state would presumably include Gaza, not ruled by Hamas, and the entire West Bank, from which rockets and terror attacks could easily be launched over most of Israel. Nobody has suggested a credible leadership for such a state, but it can’t be either Hamas or the corrupt and terror-promoting Palestinian authority. Nor would Netanyahu, who, though despised, is not stupid, accept this solution.

And the Palestinians don’t want this solution, either. What they want is the elimination of Israel, which could occur by the totally off-the-table “one-state” solution. As the Tablet article below notes, and something that all sentient people know well, the Palestinians have, time after time, rejected the offer of their own state.  Now it is too late. If such a state is ever to arise, it will, I think, take at least two generations—the time it takes for Palestinian children to stop learning in school to kill Jews and become martyrs.

The complete ignorance in which people suggest that a two-state solution will end the enmity between Jews and Muslims makes me almost laugh. And yet most of the West, including Biden and his administration, are trying to force this solution on Israel.

The best argument against this “solution” I’ve read appears in the new Tablet, and it’s by Israeli historian, author, and teacher Gadi Taub.  From Wikipedia:

[Taub] is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Communications at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Taub is also an internationally recognized voice in the discourse on Zionism and illiberalism.

If you want to be up on discourse about the war, this is something that you must read. Click on the headline to do so:

Some quotes (indented). First, the Israeli view, including the depredations of UNRWA, which must be abolished:

By now most of us in Israel understand this dreadful math. If there was still a substantial minority among us who clung to the two-state promise against the evidence of the Second Intifada and everything that followed, that minority has shrunk considerably since Oct. 7.

We now know exactly what our would-be neighbors have in mind for us. We see that a majority of Palestinians support Hamas and are well pleased by its massacres. Most of us therefore believe that turning Judea and Samaria into another Hamastan to satisfy those who see the massacre as an inspiration and its perpetrators as role models would be suicidal. Who in their right mind would inflict the ensuing bloodshed on their partners, children, friends, and parents? If one is determined to feel overwhelming sympathy for one of the many stateless peoples of the world, why not start with the Kurds, or the Catalans, or the Basques, or the Rohingya, or the Baluchis, or any of one of dozens of subnational groups—none of whom seem likely to attain their longed-for goals of statehood anytime soon. After all, it took nearly 2,000 years for the Jews to succeed in refounding their state. If the Palestinians are determined to kill us on the road to replacing us, then presumably they can wait, too.

. . .To be sure, the two-state solution was a noble dream. But it turns out it always was just that—a dream. What enabled those who clung to it long enough to continue sleepwalking through the wrecks of exploding buses, the bodies of slain civilians, the constant wild calls for violence against us, the massive efforts to build terror infrastructures under our noses and on our borders, was our own tendency to imagine Palestinians in our own image. For all the fashionable talk of diversity, we too find it hard to imagine a people that is not like ourselves. Knowing our own striving for self-determination, we assumed that the Palestinians, too, want above all to be masters of their own fate in their own sovereign state.

But that is not what they want. The huge amount of international aid Palestinians have received since 1948 was never used for nation-building. It wasn’t used for building houses and roads or for planting orange groves. It was harnessed to one overarching cause: the destruction of the Jewish state. This is what the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) does: subsidize and shield Palestinian terror infrastructure. This is what the PA does with its pay-for-slay salaries—underwritten by the U.S.—to the families of terrorists. And this is what Hamas was able to do as a result of the billions invested in Gaza: It bought weapons, trained terrorists, and built a sprawling network of terror tunnels—and not one bomb shelter for civilians.

What kind of chowderhead would think that the PA would be a credible peace partner given that it still espouses terrorism and, in fact, pays off those terrorists who kill Jews—the more Jews you kill, the more pay you get? (If you’re incarcerated, your family gets the dosh.) Granted, Netanyahu is not a credible partner to confect such a solution, but given the feelings of Israelis and the terroristic bent and sympathy for Hamas of many Palestinians, the whole idea is a nonstarter no matter who’s in charge of Israel. Further, the “right of return”—invariably something that Palestinians demand in a settlement—is both risible and unprecedented:

As Einat Wilf and Adi Schwarz demonstrate in their bestselling book The War of Return, the Palestinian national movement has built its ethos and identity around the so-called “right of return” of the Palestinian “refugees”—by which they mean the destruction of Israel through the resettlement of the Palestinian diaspora, the so-called refugees that UNRWA numbers at 5.9 million, within Israel’s borders. But there’s no such thing as the right of return: First, it is not an internationally recognized right; second, if implemented it would not be a return, since almost all of those who demand it have never been to Israel themselves. And finally, of those who fled or were expelled from the land of Israel in 1948, only an estimated 30,000 are still alive today.

No other group of people on Earth is considered to be refugees decades after so many of its members have resettled as passport-holding citizens of other countries. No other group has its refugee status conferred automatically on its offspring. And no group of actual refugees is excluded from the purview of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), entrusted instead to the care of a special agency, UNRWA, whose mandate is to perpetuate the problem rather than solve it. UNRWA cultivates Palestinian hopes for a “free” Palestine “from the river to the sea,” allows for weapons to be stored inside its facilities and schools, and for a Hamas intelligence and communications center to be built under its headquarters, indoctrinates children to glorify terrorists—whom it also employs—and disseminates wild antisemitism, while still steering clear of what it should have been doing all along: resettling those who were, or still are, actual refugees.

What the centrality of the “right of return” to the Palestinian ethos means, of course, is that Palestinian identity itself is structured as a rejection of the two-state solution, and denies the legitimacy of any form of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land of Israel.

The Palestionian rejection of “two states”:

There never was a Palestinian leadership ready to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state. That is a constant fact of life in the conflict. The Arab side has rejected any and all partition plans starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, and all the way through the various American mediation plans and Israeli offers, and those offered by Israeli leaders, including the Camp David 2000 offer, in which Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to the partition of Jerusalem, and the further concessions offered later by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. All have crashed on the nonnegotiable demand for the right of return. Even Salam Fayyad, the technocrat former Palestinian prime minister, a figurehead with no popular support at home but beloved by Western peace processors—and who’s receiving renewed attention in administration-friendly media—insisted on the right of return in an article he wrote mere days after the Oct. 7 pogrom.

Luckily, the Palestinians were never patient enough to even temporarily put a stop to terrorism or defer their demand for return until they could muster better-organized forces. It seems that the cult of death and the worship of martyrs make for an addiction to terror, and a need for violent venting. If you bring your children from kindergarten to stage plays where they pretend to kill Jews, you cannot also tell them to hold back forever on acting them out once they’ve grown up. The tree of Palestinian identity, it seems, must be constantly watered with the blood of Jews to sustain it through the many sacrifices required for a nonproductive life of permanent victimhood.

And the Biden Delusion:

The Biden administration, as well as the mainstream American media, may be seduced by Israel’s Bibi-hating press into believing that it’s Netanyahu who stands in the way of an agreement establishing a Palestinian state. But it is not Netanyahu who is the obstacle on the Israeli side. It is the vast majority of Israelis, who may or may not vote for Netanyahu but will certainly never again vote for anyone who admits to favoring a two-state solution. The allegedly moderate Benny Gantz retains his high polling numbers only because he avoids any talk of two states. He knows that if he mentioned the two-state solution, he’d sink in the polls faster than he can say “Palestinian state.”

But if the Biden team can be forgiven for misunderstanding the Israeli mood, it cannot be forgiven for imagining it can make Palestinian recalcitrance and violent intentions disappear by papering over their national ethos with fake Western jargon. There is no such thing as a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, because there is no one who wants to “revitalize” it in such a way as to make it conform to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s sales pitch. Even for a group of progressive wishful-thinkers, this silly coinage is a new low in the language of political narcissism.

Israel is a strong country, but it is also a small country surrounded by enemies. It is important for Israel to mark the difference between embracing folly and being polite. It is time that Israel and her leaders be more vocal about the folly of America’s misguided Middle East policy. We can afford to continue limping along with the burdens of the occupation for another generation or two, by which point many unforeseen things will have come to pass that may make a solution either more or less obvious. But we will not live that long if we are once again seduced by the two-state siren song.

Frankly, I’m tired of the U.S. trying to tell Israel how to run the war and, more recently, how to lose the war. Granted, the U.S. can withhold ammunition and money from Israel, but they are now voting on a bill to give it (and Ukraine) a lot of dosh. In the end, only those who don’t know the mood and situation of the Israeli people—and are familiar with the failed history of attempts to confect a two-state solution—could now think that such a solution is viable.

The latest delusional aspiration (in the Times of Israel). Click to read:

This is to cheer me up as much as the audience, as all the news today is dire.

I present yet another version of what I think is the best rock song of all time (not including the second slow part): “Layla” by Eric Clapton. (Jim Gordon, who died in prison, wrote that piano coda.) This version was presented at the Royal Albert Hall 33 years ago (!), and Slowhand is all decked out in a tux (sans cravat). He also has a cigarette burning on the fretboard. But it’s a great version, backed by an orchestra.

There are many reasons why I love this song, even though I think that, as a group, the Beatles were the best. The opening riff is both original and unmistakable, the real-life tale behind the song is heartbreaking, the words are comprehensible and tell the story, and the solo (here at 2:19) shows Clapton at his best.

The article below, by the President of Princeton, just appeared in the Atlantic.  (Christopher Eisgruber has been Princeton’s President for 11 years.)  The title clearly implies that college diversity (and the implication is “racial diversity”) is not at all in conflict with excellence.

This is a message that, of course, the Progressive Left wants to hear, but when I read the article, I found it deeply misleading. It turns out that excellence at Princeton has not been maintained by admitting more racial minorities, but by allowing certain barred classes, like Asians, Jews, and the impecunious, into the school.  As far as the evidence goes for racial groups, yes, there is a tradeoff between excellence and diversity, and we know that for several reasons that I’ll mention below. One that we know well that colleges are omitting indices of merit, like SAT and ACT scores, as ways to increase equity, for racial minorities (save Asians) don’t do as well as whites (including Jews, which are seen as “white adjacent”).

This does not mean that colleges shouldn’t strive for more racial diversity, but I think they shouldn’t do it by substantially lowering the merit bar of admissions. There are other ways, like casting a wider net among prospective students, or, for equally qualified students, give the edge to minorities. But to imply that there’s no tradeoff between academic excellence and ethnic diversity (not including, of course, Jews and Asians, known to be overachievers) is to purvey a lie. But it is of course a lie in the service of “progressivism”.

It’s hard to imagine how the Atlantic could accept an article whose arguments are explained by the conflation of causation with correlation, as well as with cherry-picked examples or recent trends in grade inflation and selectivity. But let’s look at the argument.

You can click on the headline below, or find it archived here.

First, many American colleges either implicitly or explicitly have eliminated standardized tests (or made them optional) as criteria for admission, and yet, as I’ve written several times (e.g., here and here), SAT scores correlate better than anything else, including high school grade-point averages) with academic success in college. The reason they have done away with the tests, or made them optional, is to increase racial diversity, concentrating on blacks and Hispanics, who do worse on these tests.  Increasingly, medical schools are also ditching the once-required MCAT admissions tests for the same reasons, and Graduate Record Examinations, or GREs for graduate schools, are being deep-sixed for the same reasons.

But of course this isn’t mentioned by Eisgruber, nor the fact that Princeton itself did away with required SAT and ACT tests; apparently they’re now optional in the school’s “holistic admissions” process. And, as I’ve posted before, making them optional, or omitting them, actually hurts diversity! But misguided colleges don’t seem to realize that.

But here are the four main arguments Eisgruber giv; I’ve characterized them and put them in bold. First, though, his thesis:

A noxious and surprisingly commonplace myth has taken hold in recent years, alleging that elite universities have pursued diversity at the expense of scholarly excellence. Much the reverse is true: Efforts to grow and embrace diversity at America’s great research universities have made them better than ever. If you want excellence, you need to find, attract, and support talent from every sector of society, not just from privileged groups and social classes.

He’s right about how to achieve excellence—finding talent where you can—but this is not the same thing as saying that there’s no tradeoff between excellence and (ethnic) diversity and that you must reduce merit-based admissions if you want to increase diveristy. What the above says is that the more widely you look around, the more likely you are to find talented people. But again, that’s not people will read this article. Now, on to Eisgruber’s arguments:

He points to a few examples of ethnic minorities at Princeton who have been successful.

Not surprisingly, the first example is a Chinese-American, Fei-Fei Li.  But Asians, like Jews, are overachievers for what I think are largely cultural reasons, and that’s why Ivy League schools used to have Jewish quotas and why Harvard, until recently, had “Asian-American” quotas.

He then names one black person, one poor person, and one white but economically deprived person (Mark Milley) who became successes after attending Princeton.  Again, this proves nothing, for Eisgruber is making a general statement, and picking out one example from each of three minority groups proves nothing.

Princeton is academically better than it was in the middle of the last century because it began admitting public-school students and women.

But again, this proves nothing other than widening the pool of applicants that might contain meritorious students will allow more of those students to enrich Princeton. Once you begin at least considering public-school students and women, you suddenly have a whole large group of people from which to pluck the talented. But again, this says nothing about Eisgruber’s implied thesis: that admitting more minority students in general will not reduce “excellence” (presumably construed, though not defined, as graduation rates, grades in college, and success after college).

. . . Princeton’s history is illustrative, not because it is special but because—in this respect, at least—it isn’t. At the beginning of the 20th century, Princeton had a reputation as “the finest country club in America”—a place where privileged young men loafed rather than studied. When asked early in his Princeton presidency about the number of students there, Woodrow Wilson reportedly quipped, “about 10 percent.” Half a century later, when the university began admitting public-high-school graduates in significant numbers, it sought to reassure alumni that the newcomers would not displace more privileged but marginally qualified children. The Alumni Council published a booklet declaring that Princeton would admit any alumni child likely to graduate. As evidence, it boasted that the sons of Princetonians were overrepresented not only in the bottom quartile of the class but among those who flunked out. The Alumni Council’s brochure spoke about Princeton’s sons because, of course, the university did not admit women to the undergraduate program until 1969, thereby turning away roughly half the world’s excellence. That was only one of many unfair and discriminatory distinctions that American universities embraced at the expense of excellence.

Eisgruber also maintains that concerted efforts to obtain black students didn’t occur until the 1960s, but of course he doesn’t tell us how they fare at Princeton relative to Asian, white, or Jewish students (I guess the latter are counted as “white”). He also notes that Princeton had Jewish quoteas untyil the 1950s:

People who accuse universities of “social engineering” today seem to forget the social engineering that they did in the past—social engineering that was designed to protect class privilege rather than disrupt it. At Princeton and other Ivy League universities, anti-Semitic quotas persisted into the 1950s. Asian and Asian American students, who now form such an impressive part of the student body at Princeton and its peers, were virtually absent.

So now that there’s more “diversity” of Jewish and Asian-American students at Princeton, and the classes are doing better, does that prove that diversity is compatible with excellence? I don’t think that’s what Eisgruber means in his title. As New York Magazine says, and Harvard admitted, accepting Asians only by merit would result in “too many Asians”:

Harvard itself found in a 2013 internal study that, if it admitted applicants solely on the basis of academic merit, its share of Asian American students would explode from 19 percent to 43 percent.

No, no, we mustn’t have that! This is why, of course, Harvard discriminated against Asians by lowering their “personality scores,” and this is what the Supreme Court found when it banned race-based admissions. And, of course, blacks and Hispanics with the same indices of merit as Asians or whites are admitted much more often via affirmative action.  Again, this shows the conflict between merit and ethnic diversity.

Opening up admissions to poorer students increased excellence. 

With help from charitable endowments funded by grateful alumni and friends, Princeton and other leading research universities have also dismantled financial barriers that in the past discouraged brilliant students from attending. Contrary to what readers might infer from the endless stream of articles about debt-ridden college grads who become baristas, America’s elite research universities now offer financial-aid packages that make them among the country’s most affordable colleges. At Princeton, the percentage of students on aid has risen from about 40 percent in 2000 to 67 percent in the most recent entering class, covering low-, middle-, and even some upper-middle-income students. The average scholarship exceeds the tuition price.

The elimination of barriers to entry coincided with two other changes: students’ increased willingness to travel for an outstanding education and improved informational tools that colleges could use to assess the quality of students (and vice versa). The result, as documented by the Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby in 2009, is that student bodies at America’s best colleges and universities are significantly stronger academically in the 21st century than they were in the 1980s or ’90s. By 2007, she reports, America’s leading colleges were “up against the ceiling of selectivity” defined in terms of academic credentials, not acceptance rate: Further improvements to the quality of the student body would be so refined as to be invisible.

Again, all that’s happening here is the advent of “need-blind admissions,” which we practice at the University of Chicago. If you don’t prevent impecunious students from attending Princeton—I was one of those, by the way; I couldn’t apply to Princeton, my first-choice school, because my family couldn’t afford it—then of course you increase the chances of finding students with good grades and high SAT scores.

Finally, over time, the degree of “excellence” of Princeton students has increased. This correlates, says Eisgruber, with an increase in diversity. 

Princeton’s internal data show striking changes consistent with Hoxby’s more general findings.  Princeton’s undergraduate-admission office has long assigned academic ratings to all applicants based on their scholarly accomplishments in high school, with 1 being the strongest and 5 being the weakest. In the late 1980s, Academic 1s made up less than 10 percent of the university’s applicant pool and less than 20 percent of our matriculated class. Indeed, if you plucked a student at random from the Princeton University student body in 1990, the student was as likely to be an Academic 4 as an Academic 1 (but unlikely to be either: Academic 2s and 3s made up half the class).

 

In recent years, by contrast, Academic 1s have constituted roughly 30 percent of the applicant pool and about 50 percent of the matriculated class. Princeton’s academic excellence has increased substantially across every segment of its undergraduate population.

Here we have the classic example of confusing correlation with causation. And there’s a double causation: standards for admissions have increased overall, which has raised the “rank” of admitted students, and the grade-point averages of students in college (presumably one index of “academic excellence” of Princeton students) has ballooned due to grade inflation.  At the same time, Princeton increased its ethnic diversity.  This is no evidence that the latter caused the former.

So there we have it, a pastiche of misguided or erroneous arguments, made by a guy who is a President of an academic powerhouse, to “prove” that you needn’t sacrifice academic merit for diversity. It’s all wrong, and it’s embarrassing—embarrassing for both the Atlantic and the hapless Eisgruber.

So how do we test whether diversity really is compatible with excellence?  There are two ways, and I’ve already mentioned them both:

1. See if lowering the bar for merit of admissions (i.e., eliminating SAT scores) affects academic excellence and achievement. We already know it does because of the correlation of SAT scores and other standardized tests with academic achievement.  If Eisgruber were right, why are schools like Princeton getting rid of mandatory test scores, or making them optional? There’s only one reason, and it shows that Eisgruber’s thesis is wrong.
2. Follow students of black or Hispanic ethnicity through college and see if their achievement (or post-college success) is negatively correlated with their minority status. I believe this is also the case, though I don’t have the data at hand. (I believe this is true for medical schools as well.) But if it is the case, it shows that there is a tradeoff between merit and diversity.  That is surely the case, and it’s one of the Great Lies of Wokism.

All the evidence I know of goes against Eisgruber’s contention. Why didn’t the Atlantic editors point out these simple problems? Because, of course, Eisgruber’s flawed conclusion happens to comport with the dominant narrative of “progressive” liberalism.

Two final points. I’m saying nothing about genetics or inherent abilities here, for I think that differences in achievement between racial/ethnic groups is cultural. (The genetic data simply aren’t in.) All I’m saying is that, given differences in qualifications and achievement among groups, Eisgruber’s thesis is wrong.

Second, I’m not saying that colleges should give merit 100% priority over diversity. That is a judgment call about whether, as Jon Haidt puts it, you want “Social Justice University” or “Truth-Finding University.”  But Haidt also notes that you can’t have both, and in this abysmal piece of analysis, Eisgruber takes issue with that. I have always said that I prefer some form of affirmative action, and I stick by that, but I’m not pretending that substantial increases in equity can be achieved without lowering overall “excellence.” There are other ways, though they’re slower. One of them is giving children from different groups equal opportunity at the outset. American doesn’t seem to have the dosh or the will to do that, but that’s what it will ultimately take to comport merit with diversity.

The death of George Floyd, and his presumed murder by Derek Chauvin with the complicity of several Minneapolis policemen, was an iconic moment in today’s race relations, the most important event leading to the “racial reckoning” of the last few years.  In late December of last year, I posted a movie, “The Fall of Minneapolis” (watch it here), and, after watching it and the included bodycam videos from cops that weren’t allowed into Chauvin’s trial, concluded that there was substantial doubt that Floyd had been murdered murdered, or that Chauvin had intended to do him in.

On December 28, after watching the film, I wrote this:

A few weeks ago I discussed the movie “The fall of Minneapolis”, which you can watch free here. The movie maintains that George Floyd was not murdered by racist cops, but died after he was arrested due to a combination of stress, use of dangerous drugs, and heart and lung problems. Here’s how I summarized the movie at the time:

1. Floyd was not murdered by the police: he had serious heart problems, hypertension, artherosclerosis, COVID, and was high on near-lethal doses of fentanyl and methamphetamine during his arrest. He was also complaining about not being able to breathe well before he was brought to the ground by the police. Difficulty in breathing could easily be explained by both his heath condition and ingestion of serious drugs.
2. The official autopsy found drugs in Floyd’s system, confirms the health problems mentioned above, and found no evidence from examining his neck that he died from asphyxiation.
3. The [police] bodycam videos were not allowed to be shown to jurors by the judge. They show that Floyd might have been restrained simply by having a knee on his shoulder, not on his neck. This method of restraint, called “MRT” (maximal restraint technique) is taught to all Minneapolis police recruits as a way to subdue resisting suspects. (There is no doubt from the bodycam videos that Floyd insistently resisted arrest and fought the officers.)
4. The judge did not allow mention or a photo of MRT in the Minneapolis police manual to be shown to the jury. Further, the police captain, lying, denied that MRT was taught to all police officers.
5. The police called for medical assistance within minutes of Floyd having a medical emergency when he was on the ground. They also tried to resuscitate him via CPR. This is inconsistent with the narrative that the officers were trying to kill Floyd.
6. The judge, mayor, city council and police hierarchy all “conspired” to convict Chauvin and the other officers, buttressing into an official narrative that was likely wrong.

Earlier I put up a discussion between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, both of whom had watched the film and were not only impressed with it but agreed with my take that the “Chauvin murdered Floyd” scenario was likely a distortion. (See also this post by Loury.) It was after this discussion that the movie went public and I watched it.

Now, in the video below, Loury backtracks in his opinion, and several readers have called this backtracking to my attention (including some uncivil ones who basically accused me of being credulous and daring me to post what’s below). But of course if I put out my opinion, and it’s shown to be subsantially weaker than I thought, of course I’m going to post the countervailing arguments.

First, excerpts from Loury’s new Substack post, “We were too quick to praise ‘The Fall of Minneapolis“.  It’s accompanied by a short video (below) which will later be posted in full. When that happens, and the critic, Radley Balko, publishes all of his three-part critique, I’ll weigh in myself. For the time being, let’s withhold any judgment that Floyd was or wasn’t murdered by Derek Chauvin with complicity of other cops. Let’s wait for the evidence. But do watch the film; the links is above.

From Loury:

John and I helped bring a lot of attention to the The Fall of Minneapolis, a documentary by Liz Collin and JC Chaix which argues that Derek Chauvin is not responsible for the death of George Floyd and that Chauvin’s trial was tainted by perjury and manipulation of evidence. We discussed the film on one episode and brought the filmmakers on for a second episode. John and I both came away convinced that Derek Chauvin hadn’t gotten a fair trial and that he may well be innocent. But a couple weeks ago, the journalist Radley Balko published part one of what he says will be a three-part series debunking The Fall of Minneapolis. It was an unsettling read, one that I found so convincing that it’s led me to question my own earlier support of the film.

It was not wrong to call attention to the documentary, nor was it wrong to talk to the filmmakers. But I do wish I had not been so eager to accept their conclusions. I’ve spent years decrying the outsized reaction to the death of George Floyd, the riots and the antiractist mania that followed, and the superficial moralism of progressives who claim to find white supremacy at the root of even the most minuscule social infractions. When I saw a documentary that claimed to locate real, empirical corruption at the heart of the George Floyd case itself, I was primed to believe it.

I’ve had to take stock of my reasons for going all-in on The Fall of Minneapolis without subjecting it to scrutiny befitting the magnitude of its claims. Certainly I was ready to accept those claims, but at some level, did I want to accept them as well? I cannot be certain that my desire to strengthen my argument against George Floyd’s canonization did not neutralize the skepticism that should kick in whenever a shocking claim is made, no matter its ideological implications. The documentary’s counter-narrative fit neatly with my own, which should have moved me to seek further verification rather than accepting it at face value.

As you’ll see in this week’s clip, John doesn’t think we erred all that egregiously. But I do. I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true. I think I’ve succeeded in that where Balko’s critique is concerned, but only to the end of correcting an earlier failure. I sometimes describe myself as “heterodox.” That means looking on all orthodoxies with a critical eye, including the personal orthodoxies we develop over time. Without self-reflection and introspection, heterodoxy risks becoming orthodoxy by another name, a shallow rebrand that betrays its own purpose. As John is fond of saying, that won’t do. I may have fallen short this time. But, as I’m fond of saying, God’s not finished with me yet.

And a bit from the first installment of Balko’s debunking of the film. I’ll read all three parts and weigh in then. But again, realize that the film might have been edited to buttress an ideologue position: Floyd wasn’t murdered. Here’s Balko’s main conclusion in part one:

The documentary makes a lot of outlandish claims, but I want to focus mostly on the two that I’ve seen most often. These are also the two claims that [Coleman] Hughes spends most of his piece promoting.

The first claim is that when Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s back and neck for nine minutes, it could not have been criminal assault because the Minneapolis Police Department has trained its officers — including Chauvin — to use that very technique.

The second claim is that Floyd’s official autopsy found that he died of a heart attack brought on by cardiovascular disease and drug use. Therefore, Chauvin could not have been responsible for Floyd’s death.

Both of these claims are false. The first claim is not only incorrect, the documentary engages in deceptive editing and convenient omissions to push it. In other words, the documentary is lying. The second claim is also incorrect, but the explanation is a bit more complicated.

The new (and truncated) 14-minute discussion between Loury and McWhorter is below.  Both agree that the filmmakers were “dishonest in their depiction” of how Chauvin restrained Floyd. McWhorter asseverates that he and Loury were nevertheless within their rights to call attention to the original documentary, for to ignore it simply because the filmmakers were conservatives would be a mistake. The question was whether these filmmaker/conservatives were not honest actors. McWhorter, while not as convinced as is Loury that the documentary was dishonest and misleading, welcomes the controversy and, like me, will wait until the to-and-fro is over before issuing a conclusion. (Loury seems more worried about being thought of as “too credulous” and for having confirmation bias because he was too woke to be objective.)  I suspect that the two filmmakers will themselves issue a critique of Balko’s critique.

To be fair, Balko is expert in investigating police issues, so I don’t feel as guilty as does Loury for taking the film’s assertions at face value.  But this is how the truth comes out: evidence is presented on both sides, even if one or both sides are ideologically motivated, and then one can try to adjudicate the evidence without being tained by one’s own ideology.

My stand is closer to McWhorter’s. I assumed the filmmakers were working in good faith, and I didn’t have the expertise to judge all the claims. If those claims are shown to be bogus, I’ll retract at least some of my conclusions I gave above. For now, it’s appropriate to withhold judgment on the conclusion that Chauvin, in doing a “neck restraint” of Floyd, was acting according to Minneapolis police instructions, in which case Floyd was the victim of either homicide or murder. I still think people need to watch the film to see what the officers were dealing with: an uncooperative, doped-up individual who resisted following police orders and was taken to the ground because of that. But what follows after Floyd was on the ground is the major issue.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “cynical”, has a sociological bent, coming with the link below:

Professor Al to you, sonny. Comic inspired by the 1st 9 minutes of this video.

“Cynicism is basically an evolutionary heuristic to save people from having to think.”  I believe the paper is this one from 2018, which you can download for free.

Today we have part 2 of Robert Lang’s seven-part series of his trip to Antarctica in a small boat (part 1 is here). And today the PENGUINS make their appearance, including two videos. Robert’s captions are indented, and you can click the photos to enlarge them.

Antarctica Part 2: Gentoo Penguins

We saw three types of penguins along the Antarctic Peninsula: Adélies (Pygoscelis adeliae), Chinstraps (Pygoscelis antarcticus), and Gentoos (Pygoscelis papua). The most common were Gentoos, which will be the topic of this collection.

All three are so-called “brush-tailed” penguins, with short, stiff tails that they use like the third leg of a stool when standing and use like a rudder when swimming. Gentoos are distinguished by their orange bill and white patches just above the eyes:

Their colonies are cacophonous, as pairs call with a gurgling “haw-hee-haw” call that, when massed, sounds like a herd of donkeys:

They also have long orange toes, that look to me like a bundle of black-tipped carrots.

Although we often saw them nesting near the shore, we also saw rookeries hundreds of feet up the cliffs. Hard to imagine having to climb up and down every time they go out for food or return to the nest:

To get to and from their rookeries, they follow well-trammeled pathways across snow and rocks. In the snowfields, their paths get beaten down into troughs, which are colored by their guano, pink from the diet of krill:

While their waddles on land are almost comical, once in the water, they are graceful and agile. Here’s a group of them “porpoising,” leaping out of the water as they travel:

And to get a sense of their speed under (and over) water, here’s a short video of a group feeding near our two zodiacs:

They are devoted parents. The parents alternate tending the egg(s) and feeding. Here’s one sitting on its egg while it tends the pebbles that make up the nest. If you turn up the sound, you can hear their calls:

Here’s a gentoo feeding its chick:

And one feeding two chicks:

A close-up of a chick. Note the fringed tongue:

Gentoos come ashore to molt and molt all at once. Not many people know (*) that when a gentoo molts its head like this, it takes about 3 weeks to grow a new one:

(*) “Not many people know” because of course that’s not true. (They do molt their feathers over the course of a few weeks.) They also have very flexible necks, as that photo shows.

One of the islands we visited, Deception Island, is an active volcano and had steam vents along the shore. They made for some eerie photos and videos: “Gentoos in the Mist,” as we visited these gentle not-quite-giants:

Next: More penguins: Adélies and Chinstraps!

Lucy Aharish is the first Arab Muslim television presenter on mainstream Israeli t.v.  Here’s a video, highly touted on the Free Press site, in which Bari Weiss interviews Aharish for an hour: “This Muslim Israeli woman is the hope of the Middle East“.

I’m not sure what the title means by “hope of the Middle East,” unless it buttresses Aharish’s claim that Muslims who commit or even approve of terrorism are not “real Muslims”, and thus there is hope for peace and comity between Israelis and “real” Muslims in Palestine.

A bit about Aharish from Wikipedia:

As of 2018, Aharish serves as a news anchor for Reshet 13. She was previously a morning anchor on a current-affairs show for its predecessor Channel 2, a presenter of the Evening Edition for i24NEWS, a news presenter and reporter for Channel 10, a co-host for Radio 99, a late-night co-host for Channel 1, as well as a co-host for Kan 11.

The interview has its ups and downs, but I think it’s worth watching for two reasons. First, it shows how even Israeli Arabs are subject to racism (Aharish tells several stories, including her failure to get paid for a speaking engagement simply because of her religion and ethnicity).  But she also claims that Israel is not an “apartheid” state, citing those Israeli Arab Muslims who have risen to high places (both of her sisters have good jobs, and of course Israeli Arabs do occupy high places, including the Knesset and the Supreme Court). So apparently Aharish believes that although there’s residual racism in Israel, it doesn’t affect Israeli Muslims’ opportunities or life prospects. (I’m not quite sure how, if there’s racism, it can NOT play out in differential treatment!) But it’s certainly true that Israel is a ton less racist than Palestine or other Arab countries—places where Jews often can’t even live, much less rise to decent positions.

At many points Aharish is moved to tears, especially when saying things like, “Hamas murdered in the sense of compassion in me, the humanity in me.” She argues that after the October 7 attacks she had lost empathy for the Palestinians, but now is realizing that  “Israel cannot afford to lose its humanity” and emphasizes the need to make the next generation of inhabitants of Gaza and West Bank become neighbors to the extent that they could forge a peace with Israel.

As I said, I find the most dubious claim to be Aharish’s insistence that terrorists, as well as those Arab Muslims in Palestine and other Arab countries who sympathize with terrorists, are not genuine Muslims. She argues that this extremism “is not Islam.  This is not being a Muslim. This is being a monster.” But the polls taken in Palestine and other Arab countries show the contrary: a huge proportion of inhabitants, if not most of them, approved of the October 7 massacre and don’t want Israel to exist. And, of course, Sam Harris has argued that this form of extremism is really inherent in Islam. All you have to do is to read the Qur’an to see its emphasis on killing apostates, infidels and Jews. To be sure, the Bible is pretty genocidal, too, but the difference is that Christianity has now largely been stripped of its homicidal dicta while Islam has not.

It is, I think, a debatable matter of whether most Muslims fall into Aharish’s definition of “extremists.” Sometimes it sounds as if she’s making a virtue of necessity.

But, as I said, this is worth listening to. For a shorter take on her views, also showing her emotionality (a good thing, one rarely seen in an anchorperson), see this CNN video.

Here’s the intro to the interview at the Free Press.

Lucy Aharish is one of the most prominent television broadcasters in Israel. But that’s not the thing that makes her exceptional. The thing that makes Lucy stand out is that she is the first Arab Muslim news presenter on mainstream, Hebrew-language Israeli television.

Born and raised in a small Jewish town in Israel’s Negev desert as one of the only Arab Muslim families there, Lucy often says that she sees herself as sitting on a fence. By that she doesn’t mean she’s unwilling to take a side—as you’ll see, she is a woman of strong convictions, bravery, and moral backbone. What she means is that she has a unique lens through which to view the divisions in Israeli society, the complexity of the country’s national identity, and the Middle East more generally.

That complexity was on display in 2018 when Lucy’s marriage to a Jewish Israeli actor (Tsahi Halevi of Fauda fame) sparked a nasty backlash from the country’s religious far-right.

Lucy has long been a vocal critic of those peripheral far-right voices—the ones who are inclined to oppose her marriage. She’s also long been critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But she is equally critical of her fellow Arab Israelis, particularly of Arab violence and of the Arab leadership that she says condones it.

An Arab. A proud Israeli. A Muslim married to a Jew. In short, Lucy Aharish is an iconoclast.

I sat down with Lucy recently in Tel Aviv. We talked about the October 7 massacre and its impact on the country and her family—her husband put on his uniform and headed to the south within hours of Hamas’s invasion of the country. Left alone with her son, she contemplated “hiding him in the washing machine,” should terrorists arrive at her doorstep.

And the video:

Remember “Woke Kindergarten”, a lesson plan for teachers to use in instructing propagandizing students in Hayward, California (see posts here and here)?  The program was designed by an extreme “progressive” named Akiea “Ki” Gross, who was given $250,000 in taxpayer money by the school.  And, lo and behold, performance in English and math actually dropped after the wokeness was sprayed on the students. (To see how completely bonkers this program is, go here or to the program’s website here.)  All power to the little people! Sadly, the program appears to be designed for black students and the students are 80% Hispanic.

After an article was published in the San Francisco Chronicle describing the program, there was a huge backlash from people who, properly, thought it was bonkers.  So what did the school district do? Did they drop the program? There’s no indication of that. Instead, they did what defies common sense:  they put one of the teachers who criticized the program in the article on leave (with pay) for unknown violations. They are actually defending Woke Kindergarten when they should be defunding it. I suspect, however, that we’ll see no more of the program. It’s simply too stupid, woke, and embarrassing.

At any rate, the Chronicle has a new article (click headline below, or find it archived here), discussing the firing and giving the school’s defense.

First, though, this is how the teacher critic was quoted in the first Chronicle article:

 Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.

Craven-Neeley, who is white and a self-described “gay moderate,” said he wasn’t trying to be difficult when he asked for clarification about disrupting whiteness. “What does that mean?” he said, adding that such questions got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”

And from the new piece, his punishment for such heresy:

The East Bay teacher who publicly questioned spending $250,000 on an anti-racist teaching training program was placed on administrative leave Thursday, days after he shared his concerns over Woke Kindergarten in the Chronicle. Hayward Unified School District teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said district officials summoned him to a video conference Thursday afternoon and instructed him to turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary until further notice.

 

They did not give any specifics as to why he was placed on paid leave, other than to say it was over “allegations of unprofessional conduct,” Craven-Neeley said.

District officials declined to comment on his status or any allegations, saying it was a personnel matter.

A defense of Woke Kindergarten from the original article:

District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

Defenses in the second article. Yep, they refuse to say that adopting it was a bad move:

District officials declined to comment on their social media posts, given Gross was paid using taxpayer-funded federal dollars.

“We cannot comment on her personal political or social views,” Bazeley said.

Some teachers have defended the Woke Kindergarten program, saying that after years of low test scores and academic intervention, they believed in a fresh approach. The training was selected by the school community, with parents and teachers involved in the decision.

“We need to try something else,” said Christina Aguilera, a bilingual kindergarten teacher. “If we just focus on academics, it’s not working. There is no one magic pill that will raise test scores.

“I’m really proud of Glassbrook to have the guts to say this is what our students need,” Aguilera said. “We didn’t just do what everybody expected us to do, and I’m really proud of that.”

Sixth-grade teacher Michele Mason said the Woke Kindergarten training sessions “have been a positive experience” for most of the staff, humanizing the students’ experiences and giving them a voice in their own education.

These are clearly teachers who want to keep their jobs.  Finally, a bit about how Craven-Neeley was treated by his colleagues:

The Wednesday staff meeting, however, was tense, Craven-Neeley said, as he tried to explain that before going to the Chronicle, he approached school and district staff as well as the school board to raise questions about the program and the expense, with no response.

“There was so much anger toward me,” he said. “I was explaining my point of view. They were talking over me.”

. . . . Craven-Neeley said the meeting grew tense about an hour in, when another teacher stood up, pointed a finger in his face and said, “ ‘You are a danger to the school or the community,’ and then she walked out of the room.”

Not long after, a district administrator asked him to leave the meeting.

“I was shocked. This is my school. I didn’t do anything inappropriate,” he said. “I left. I was very shaky.”

Another Glassbrook teacher, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions at the school, confirmed that a staff member put a hand in Craven-Neeley’s face and called him a disgrace and a threat to the school.

Craven-Neeley then had a video meeting with school officials and was told he’d be placed on paid leave pending an “investigation”. The university also “denied the district’s actions were related to Craven-Neeley’s participation in the story or his complaints about the program. The district spokesperson added, ‘We would not put any employee on leave as any sort of retaliation or squelch anyone’s free speech rights,” [Michael Bazeley] said’.”

Well that sounds like a flat-out lie to me. What Craven-Neeley said to the Chronicle was indeed free speech, and there’s no other indication of anything else for which he’d be punished.  All I can say is that it looks as if Woke Kindergarten affected the teachers (if not the students). They’re all censorious and defensive!

Remember the “woke wonderings” that were part of the program? Here’s one:

The answer, of course, is “not much!”

At midnight last night, FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) put up its list of the “10 Worst Censors of 2024”.

Part of the intro:

Each year, FIRE names and shames the worst-of-the-worst silencers, bowdlerizers, and steamrollers of free speech.

This year, we’ve included five free speech villains whose chilling misdeeds happened off of  college campuses. Thelist belowincludes people guilty of many forms of censorship  including raiding a small-town newspaper, punishing a middle schooler for wearing eye black at a football game, canceling students and professors for their views on the Israel-Hamas war, and retroactively censoring famous authors without their consent. The 13th annual Lifetime Censorship Award went to Harvard University, a university as censorial as it is famous.

Previous lists were limited to campuses, but no longer: off-campus censors were also in the running.  The list below is in no particular order, and there’s a longer explanation of each ranking at the website given at the top.

I was particularly interested in the Razzies given to the California Community Colleges (for requiring faculty to pledge allegiance to DEI) and Texas A&M (a state school) for its pattern of firing, deplatforming, and censorship.

• Muirlands Middle School disciplined a student for wearing eye black to a school football game, calling it “blackface”. The student is now suing.
• The Marion County Police Dept. raided a small town newspaper because the paper had dirt on a political ally, and the paper’s owner died the next day.
• Mayo Clinic College of Medical Science punished Prof. Michael Joyner for speaking to the press on COVID-19 and sports performance.
• Book censors & bowlderizers: Legislators across the country drafted a number of vague, overbroad policies to remove or limit access to books they believe are inappropriate. Book publishers edited out so-called “problematic content” from the works of authors like Roald Dahl and R.L. Stine in new editions through “sensitivity reading.”
• San Francisco State University students accosted former Olympic swimmer Riley Gaines after a speech about female sports and an admin disciplined a professor for showing a depiction of Muhammed in a class about the history of the Islamic world.
• Hypocritical college admins enjoyed a censorship frenzy after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. USC admins banned Prof. Strauss from the classroom for his anti-Hamas views, while Brandeis admins “unrecognized” a student group due to pro-Hamas comments made by the national org. This turmoil was exacerbated by the hypocritical testimony of Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and Sally Kornbluth — presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT, respectively — at the “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism” hearing by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
• FIRE sued California Community Colleges  and other admins after CCC imposed draconian regulations forcing more-than-54,000 professors to teach and promote politicized conceptions of DEI.
• The Texas A&M University system landed in hot water due to censorship controversies involving the hiring of former New York Times editor Kathleen McElroy and Prof. Joy Alonzo’s criticism of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler also earned a lawsuit from FIRE and several students when he banned an on-campus charity drag show.
• FIRE sued NY state officials over a law urging online platforms to “stop the spread of hateful content” related to the Israel-Hamas war. After FIRE won an injunction against the law,  New York ignored the court’s order, sending investigation letters to FIRE’s client Rumble and other social media networks demanding that they disclose their policies for removing speech related to the conflict. Also in 2023, FIRE weighed in on New York’s censorial crusade against the National Rifle Association.
• Florida state officials derecognized Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, expanded the Stop WOKE Act, and banned drag.

Last but not least, Harvard University will receive FIRE’s sixth Lifetime Censorship Award, reserved for those colleges that deserve special recognition for their commitment to censorship. The school earned the award for landing at the bottom of FIRE’s annual free speech rankings, threatening the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit, driving out lecturer Carole Hooven for arguing that biological sex is real, and rescinding a fellowship for form

I wanted to show you why Harvard got the lowest ranking; and the ranking was assigned well before Claudine Gay and the Presidents of MIT and Penn were excoriated for their testimony before a House committee:

Harvard University came in dead last on this year’s College Free Speech Rankings — achieving a worst-ever score. When asked about Harvard’s abysmal ranking during her congressional testimony in December, then-Harvard President Claudine Gay said she didn’t think the ranking was “an accurate representation” of Harvard’s respect for free speech. But all one needs to do to understand Harvard’s disrespect for free speech is look at its record of censorship.

Only a few weeks before Gay’s testimony, Harvard hired self-advertised “media assassins” to threaten the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit and “immense” damages if the paper published a story alleging Gay plagiarized some of her scholarship. So much for placing “a high priority on freedom of speech” — or freedom of the press for that matter. Gay resigned on Jan. 2, after more than 40 allegations of plagiarism came to light.

Long before Harvard threatened news outlets with litigation for their reporting, it punished faculty and students for their speech. School administrators drove out lecturer Carole Hooven for arguing that biological sex is real. It rescinded a fellowship for former Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth over his purported “anti-Israel bias.” It effectively fired an economics professor for an op-ed he published in India. It canceled a professor’s course on policing following student uproar. It fired professor Ronald Sullivan from his deanship after students protested his role on Harvey Weinstein’s criminal defense team. It bizarrely demanded students take down a Nicki Minaj flag because the community could find it “offensive.” And the list goes on.

Even outside speakers invited to campus aren’t safe from Harvard’s censorial glare. In 2022, feminist philosopher Devin Buckley was disinvited from an English department colloquium because of her views on sex and gender. Her talk was supposed to be on the separate topic of British romanticism.

Harvard students clearly feel the chill. Students report low administrative support for free speech and low comfort expressing ideas, placing the school near the bottom of FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings in both individual categories. Unfortunately, Harvard students themselves may also contribute to the problem. If the efforts to oust Sullivan and cancel the policing class aren’t evidence enough, an alarming 30% of Harvard students think using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable in at least some circumstances.

For its long track record of censorship, Harvard is receiving FIRE’s Lifetime Censorship Award. It joins Georgetown University, Yale University, Syracuse University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and DePaul University in receiving this “honor.” It’s past time Harvard truly commits to its ostensible truth-seeking mission and the principles of free speech and academic freedom that make it possible. But that may be wishful thinking, the triumph of hope over experience.

The new President of Harvard hasn’t yet been chosen, but I suspect it will have to be another black woman lest Harvard be criticized for, well, Sarah Haider talks about this in her nice new analysis of DEI, including a tweet:

This is why there were numerous calls to replace Claudine Gay with another black woman. The honor was bestowed on Black Womanhood, the political category, not on the black woman herself. This illustrates one important sense in which modern tokenism is unlike its predecessor: far from being objected to as a sign of contempt and condescension, tokenism today is demanded by activists.

The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman.

— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) January 2, 2024

Hill is a professor of CUNY and a “television personality”.