Science

“When a regime turns off the Internet during mass killings, and at the same time the leaders of the same regime [use] the privilege of freedom of speech on social media to mislead the rest of the world, it is not about restoring order. It is about destroying the evidence.”  —from Masih’s speech below

In a comment this morning, Norman Gilinsky linked to the speech below given to the UN Security Council by anti-Iranian-regime activist Masih Alinejad. Norman called it amazing, forceful, unrelenting, and powerful. As a huge fan of Masih, I of course had to listen to it, and yes, it’s forceful, passionate, and ineffably sad given the UN’s inaction. I’ve put it below for your edification: it’s 15½ minutes long.

So far the UN hasn’t issued any statements criticizing the behavior of the Iranian regime in massacring thousands of protestors.

Masih calls out the UN for failing to respond to the massacres, sending a message to Iran that what it’s doing is pretty much okay. She argues that “it will get much worse if the world does not take serious action”, and that all Iranians are united in calling for the freeing of Iran from the present regime. (This is in sharp contrast with the UN’s repeated criticisms of Israel during the war with Gaza, apparently sending the message that massacres are okay with the UN so long as they don’t involve Jews)

Masih probably knows more about what’s going on in the streets of Iran than anybody else, as she has lines of communication with the protestors that others don’t have. (Iranians are using Starlink satellite phones.)

A representative of Iran was among the listeners, but I wonder if any of them really took to heart what Masih says. Particularly moving is her description of some of the young protestors who were killed, which she does to personalize and drive home the regime’s brutality, and she breaks down in tears at 11:35, unable to give more names of the slaughtered.

What is she asking the UN to do? She’s not explicit, but something to stop the killing—perhaps to stop treating Iran as a “legitimate government”.  The UN of course cannot do that, though it can help.  I hope that after hearing the list of murders and murderers, the listeners absorb the same lesson George Patton imparted to his soldiers from his real speech of June 5, 1944 (not the movie speech):

“When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt from your face and you realize that it’s not dirt, it’s the blood and guts of what was once your best friend, you’ll know what to do.”

Young protostars populate the cloudy regions in the Orion Molecular Cloud complex in these images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Three of the telescope's new images are part of a scientific effort to understand the gaseous, dusty envelopes around protostars. Scientists know that these young stars have powerful stellar winds and jets that carve caverns and bubbles out of the surrounding gas, but they have unanswered questions about that process.

I’m not sure that the readers here, though savvier than those on most Internet sites, fully realize how dire the free-speech situation is in Europe. Germany, France, and, especially the UK are rife with “hate speech” laws that would not be be passed in the U.S. because they violate the First Amendment.  And yet there are still calls in America to limit free speech.  One example includes those people who argue that we should ban statements like “Globalize the intifada” because, somewhere down the line, such statements may contribute to someone’s harming of Jews.  But of course all hate speech is of that nature: it may, by demonizing a group or even questioning their principles, lead some loon to go after people (it’s usually minorities at issue, but no group is immune, nor is any religion).

In the post below on his site The Eternally Radical Idea, Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), calls attention to the growing suppression of speech in Europe, giving lots of examples. He does this to warn Americans that we cannot allow ourselves go down that route, and to remind us why “hate speech” banned in Europe should never be banned in America.

I remind you that Lukianoff is a liberal and an atheist, so when he defends the promulgation of religious and conservative ideas that most of us find odious, he’s only adhering to the First Amendment. FIRE, because it promotes free speech, is sometimes demonized by blockheads as a “right-wing organization”. It’s far from it. Promoting freedom of speech is a liberal, humanistic, and democratic idea.

The article is long, but I recommend reading it (it’s free if you click on the link below) to buttress your commitment to free speech and to learn how Europe is convincing itself to punish people who wouldn’t be punished in America. I’ll give extensive quotes in case you’re too busy to read. (But if that’s the situation, you need to chill!)

Lukianoff begins by giving kudos to Kristen Waggoner, president of the conservative religious group Alliance Defending Freedom. Despite their political differences, Waggoner and Lukianoff share a commitment to free speech, and Waggoner won (as did Lukianoff last year) the Richard D. McLellan Prize for Advancing Free Speech and Expression.  Although Lukianoff and Waggoner differ on many isssues, her acceptance speech apparently prompted Greg to write this article.

In what follows, my own headings and comments are flush left, while quotes from the article (or other sources) are indented.

Why America should not crack down on ‘hate speech” and maintain our present construal of free speech

Here’s the thing: censors always think their motives are pure. From inquisitors to commissars to modern “hate speech” units, they all believe they’re preventing some existential harm. That has never made it okay to strip people of their basic rights, and it doesn’t change the fact that this is precisely what they’re doing.

In the United States, we (still) recognize that. In the EU and the UK, they increasingly do not. And that’s more dangerous to how we treat speech in the US than the abuses that happen in places like China or Iran, because we aren’t likely to turn into China or Iran. But we may turn into the UK, or Germany, or Finland, where they purport to maintain their belief in free expression but have rationalized it into a corner where it can do very little good. So while we’re never shocked at horrifying censorship in China or Russia, we should continue to be shocked by the retreat from liberalism that we’re seeing in the Anglosphere and in Europe. We also need to be vocal in opposing it, because it really could happen here.

If the forces arrayed on the left have their way, we will look a lot more like the UK. And if the forces on the right have their way, we will look a lot more like Hungary. Either way, we won’t be recognizably American.

. . . .Equal citizens in a free society have a right to:

• Object to immigration policy.
• Quote their religious texts on sexuality.
• Say “there are two sexes.”
• Insult a rapist or abuser in a private text or message without becoming the one the state prosecutes.
• Quote the Bible.

If you can be arrested, prosecuted, fined, or professionally shattered for any of that, you are not living under free speech in the sense the First Amendment enshrines.

The Supreme Court has a blunt way of putting this: Speech on matters of public concern is “at the heart of the First Amendment’s protection,” because speech about public affairs is “the essence of self-government.” In other words, we don’t protect speech because it’s polite. We protect it because we are supposed to be citizens — voters — whose judgments matter. And voters can’t do their job if the state trains them to speak in euphemism, or only in whispers, or not at all.

And if we, in the United States, start to lose faith in that — if we decide that the European model is more “civilized,” that being spared offensive opinions is more important than retaining equal rights — then the strongest bulwark for free expression left in the world will have fallen.

A decent way to measure whether you’re actually free is to ask what you’re allowed to say about the subjects that matter most: rape, child rape scandals, violent crime, immigration policy, religious doctrine, war, and even basic claims about sex and the human body. If you have to watch your language on questions that cut to the very heart — because the wrong phrasing can bring the police, a prosecutor, or a professional tribunal — then you’re not a free and equal citizen in the ordinary sense. You’re a subject being managed.

And, once again (we can’t hear this too often), we learn why free speech was instituted by the Founders:

Here’s another radical idea: you are an equal citizen, not a subject. You get to hear ideas, weigh evidence, change your mind, or not, without the government protecting you from other people’s thoughts. If your rights end where someone’s feelings begin, you don’t have free speech of any kind. China is just as willing to let you say things that don’t offend anyone; it’s just more honest about whose feelings are really determining when the cops show up at your door.

Probably the most important point to make here is that, if you have even one example of someone being arrested, getting a visit from the cops, or being charged for taking an unpopular position on one of the biggest political hot-button issues in a society — immigration, crime, religious fundamentalism, religious expression — they will not trust what they hear in the media, or even what they hear in society, as being genuine or authentic.

This leads to a genuine epistemic crisis, where people cannot tell what their countrymen honestly think, or what the world actually looks like in terms of public opinion and perception — and that is a disaster. People in control, or at the top of society, can be such fools in thinking that if they could just better control the opinions people express, popular opinion will go right along assuming the preferred ruling class’ position is correct. But that relies on a model in which people are even stupider than ruling class people often assume they are.

What happens instead is people conclude that no one is saying what they really think, and that the media, politicians, and even their fellow citizens cannot be counted on to show what they really think — because if there’s even the slightest risk of being arrested or punished for it, who would?

That’s what a chilling effect is, and it is poison to any society — particularly a democratic one, or at least nominally democratic one.

Lukianoff concludes that Europe, with its bans on hate speech, is going down the wrong road, for those bans chill you from speaking up, and, by quashing what we know about other people’s views, put democracy in a vise.  I agree. The examples that he gives are telling.

What’s happening in Europe.

Professor and philosopher Peter Singer talks about the “expanding circle”: the way moral concern spreads over time to include more groups — slaves, women, racial minorities, LGBTQ people, and so on. That’s real, and often good.

But there’s a dark twist. In much of Europe and the UK, we’ve now used that expanding circle logic to shrink the circle of free speech. We say, “To show compassion for vulnerable groups, we must criminalize speech that offends them. It’s not really censorship if we do it to protect people.”

From the UK:

If you want to see what speech policing looks like in a country that still considers itself a liberal democracy, look at the UK.

Between the Communications Act of 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, British police have broad power to arrest people for messages that are “grossly offensive,” “annoying,” or likely to cause “distress” or “anxiety.” Recent statistics show more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 for online speech — over 30 people a day. (For a sense of scope, If the US were to arrest people at the same rate per capita, it would be 60,000 a year.)

Behind that number are real people in real handcuffs.

A 51-year-old army veteran named Darren Brady shared a meme that arranged pride flags into a swastika to make a heavy-handed point about authoritarian tendencies in parts of the LGBT movement. Hampshire Police turned up at his house, arrested him, and, in a bodycam clip, an officer calmly explains that someone has “been caused … anxiety” by his post, and that’s why he’s being taken away. He was offered a “hate awareness” course in lieu of prosecution — ideological homework as punishment. Only after national outrage did the police back down and scrap the course.

Catholic commentator Caroline Farrow was making dinner for her kids when Surrey officers came through her front door in 2022, arrested her on suspicion of “malicious communications” and harassment over a feud with a trans activist, and seized phones and laptops — including her children’s devices. She was taken into custody, questioned for hours, then released without charge.

Here’s one of the most surreal cases I’ve seen: a 34-year-old mother of four, Elizabeth Kinney, who says she was beaten badly enough by a man to require hospital treatment. In private text messages to a friend afterwards, she called him a “faggot.” The friend reported her, and prosecutors charged her under the Malicious Communications Act. She pled guilty and was convicted of a homophobic offense, receiving an enhanced community order, unpaid work, and rehabilitation days. As of the last reporting, no one had been charged for the assault.

Note that being able to call someone a “faggot” is legal in America, yet also outs the person who says it.  One could argue, I suppose, that letting people use names like that could, in the future, promote violence against gays. But that’s not a good enough reason to prevent this kind of name-calling, odious as it is.  Lukianoff also argues against the tendency in the UK to “avoid recording or analyzing ethnicity in organized child-abuse cases,” for such recording could presumably promote demonisation of ethnic groups.  But he claims this is misguided, since suppressing that information not only fails to deter predators in a group, but conveys information that could be essential to the safety of young girls. Frankly, I don’t see why recording ethnicity (which also occurs in the U.S.) should be formally or informally banned, as it’s useful not only for “grooming gangs”, but for compiling statistics important to society. I believe John McWhorter recently discussed how Americans tend to drastically overestimate the number of African-American shot by white police officers. One example:

This media fixation on identity politics, alongside pre-existing misperceptions, ultimately skews the public’s sense of reality. The number of unarmed black men killed by police in the Washington Post’s own database in 2019 was between 13 and, using a very broad definition of “unarmed”, 27. Yet nearly half of “very liberal” Americans think the number is between 1,000 and 10,000. There were over twice as many unarmed whites killed by police as blacks but, as John McWhorter, author of the new book Woke Racism notes, this never makes the news because it doesn’t fit the narrative of white racial violence against African-Americans.

By withholding information from the public so as note to pollute a favored narrative, the press promotes misinformation that exacerbates racial tensions.

From Germany:

Germany, because it may have learned some of the wrong lessons from its history, has long had strict speech laws — among them, bans on Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial. But the logic has spread.

In Berlin, police raided the apartment of American novelist and political satirist C.J. Hopkins in November, seizing his computer and interrogating him on suspicion of spreading pro-Nazi propaganda. The basis for the accusation was a book critical of COVID-19 policies, its cover using a swastika-and-facemask image as political satire.

That’s it. That’s the “Nazi material.” Never mind that its use is to make an unflattering comparison between modern health policy and national socialism. Nobody who can read is going to look at the book cover and say, “Well, I was just in favor of mandatory masking, but now that I see this book cover, maybe death camps are a good idea.” Hopkins had already been prosecuted in 2023 for tweeting the image of the book cover.

Another case that deserves more international attention involves a group of nine young men who gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in Hamburg. They were convicted but because they were underage, all but one avoided jail time. Later, a woman in Hamburg sent furious WhatsApp messages to one of the perpetrators, calling him things like a “disgusting rapist pig.” The convicted rapist complained and the woman who sent the messages was prosecuted for insult and defamation, convicted, and ordered to spend a weekend in jail.

Yet another German case: politician Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, from the right-wing AfD, posted about gang rapes involving Afghan men and suggested that welcoming more Afghan refugees risked more such crimes. She referenced real statistics about Afghan suspects. Courts convicted her of Volksverhetzung, “incitement to hatred,” and an appeals court upheld the conviction, saying her post violated the “human dignity” of Afghans by presenting them as dangerous sex criminals.

From Finland (!):

Kristen’s speech in November started with a case from Finland, and once you know the facts, it’s hard to shake.

Päivi Räsänen is not some anonymous troll. She’s a physician, a mother, a grandmother, a long-serving member of Parliament, and a former interior minister. She’s also a conservative Lutheran.

In 2019, she posted a tweet criticizing her church leadership for officially supporting Helsinki Pride. Attached was a photo of Romans 1:24-27 — the standard “traditionalist” passage condemning same-sex relations. Years before, in 2004, she had written a short church pamphlet explaining the Lutheran view of sex and marriage. She also did a radio debate along the same lines.

For that, Finland’s Prosecutor General charged her with “agitation against a minority group” — essentially “hate speech” — under a section of the criminal code that sits next to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola was charged too, for publishing her pamphlet.

Police interrogated Räsänen for hours about her beliefs. Prosecutors pored over her pamphlet and sermons line by line, asking which parts of the Bible she intends to believe. She faced the possibility of fines and a criminal record.

She won. In 2022, a district court acquitted her unanimously. In 2023, the Court of Appeal acquitted her unanimously again.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t, but before we finish, I want to point out that being visited by police and interrogated, even if you’re not convicted are jailed, are still things that will chill your speech.  Räsänen’s ordeal, in fact, continues:

Instead, prosecutors appealed again. In 2025, the Supreme Court of Finland agreed to hear the case. The state is still arguing that quoting Romans 1 and defending historic Christian doctrine about sexuality can be a criminal offense.

Switzerland (!):

It is not an especially controversial idea that sex can be usually determined by examining skeletal remains, even if there are exceptions. Not so in Switzerland, where Emanuel Brünisholz, a musical instrument repairman, was sentenced to ten days in jail for an anti-trans Facebook comment. In a 2022 reply to a member of the Swiss National Council (sort of their House of Representatives), Brünisholz wrote: “If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.”

Brünisholz was arrested in 2023 and convicted in December 2024, where he was fined 500 Swiss francs. After exhausting his appeals, he refused to pay on principle, announcing in September of 2025 that he would be serving his alternative punishment — ten days in jail — last month.

I’ve discussed the Swiss case before. If you have a whole skeleton, biological sex can be determined with 96%-98% accuracy, which falls to 90% if you have a skull with lower jaw. The diagnosis is not complete, of course, but if you look at skeletons 200 years old, the guy is pretty much right—the exceptions whose sex can’t be determined are rare. Note as well that there were no drug or surgical interventions back then that would modify skeletons, and even today this is something that should be investigated only in trans people, as LGBQ people undergo no modification of their bones.

The point is that jailing somebody for saying this is heinous, even if the guy were wrong about bones. (I’m not dealing with the “mental illness” comment, which, though odious, should not be illegal.) Because if he were wrong about skeltons, the proper remedy is counterspeech and criticism, not fines and jail time.

Wikipedia gives a long list of other countries with hate-speech laws—laws that can get you prosecuted, fined, or jailed for criticizing religion, ethnicity, gender identity, and even class.  Note that the “United States” entry says this:

The United States does not have hate speech laws, because the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.There are categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment, such as speech that calls for imminent violence upon a person or group.

Let’s keep it that way.

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Humans pay enormous attention to lips during conversation, and robots have struggled badly to keep up. A new robot developed at Columbia Engineering learned realistic lip movements by watching its own reflection and studying human videos online. This allowed it to speak and sing with synchronized facial motion, without being explicitly programmed. Researchers believe this breakthrough could help robots finally cross the uncanny valley.

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Well, folks, we’re plumb out of readers’ contributions, and it makes me weep bitterly that we get so few contributions.  If you have good photos, you know what to do.

Fortunately, I am able to plunder the photos of Scott Ritchie from Cairns, Australia, whose Facebook page is here. (Thanks to Scott for his kind permission to repost.) I’m adding the second installment of Scott’s favorite photos of 2025; his first installment is here. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are some of my favourite pics from 2025. It was a big year, with trips to Florida, Costa Rica, Western Australia and Victoria/NSW. And I had a publication in Australia Birdlife showcasing the lovely Rainbow Bee-eaters at a local cemetery https://www.calameo.com/read/004107895fe9d41dc697d…. I hope you enjoy them.  Have a happy New Year all!

 

Latin America is a home of hummingbirds. Hear a Green-breasted Mango [Anthracothorax prevostii] feeds on a torch ginger. I just love the bright colors that do remind me of a mango:

Another lovely hummer, the fiery throated hummingbird [Panterpe insignis]:

Not all hummingbirds are colorful. But I just love the pose of this Long-billed Hermit [Phaethornis longirostris] as it came in to feed the torch ginger:

Costa Rica has many colorful songbirds. People think tanagers and warblers. This bird is a Golden-browed Chlorophonia [Chlorophonia callophrys],  You gotta love bird names:

This Ornate Hawk-eagle [Spizaetus ornatus] caused quite a stir among the twitchers at our lodge. You can see why, it’s quite an amazing bird:

Another truly magnificent bird was the King Vulture [Sarcoramphus papa], coming into land and feed on your corpse:

Back to far north Queensland. I got this Gray Plover [Pluvialis squatarola] in flight as he shook himself off after a refreshing bath: [JAC: Do enlarge this one!]

Double-eyed Fig-parrots [Cyclopsitta diophthalma] are one of my favorite birds. And green ants are one of my most despised insects. I think the fig parrot would agree:

Here’s a stampede of Chestnut-breasted Mannikins [Lonchura castaneothorax]. I call this a WTF moment, as a bird in the middle got caught a bit off guard:

A Great Egret [Ardea alba], enjoying a prawn for breakie. Cairns Esplanade:

We get many shorebirds to the Cairns Esplanade foreshore in our summer. Before they head back to Russia, China, Japan, even Alaska, they color up into their breeding plumage, and hope to attract a mate. These two Bar-tailed Godwits [Limosa lapponica] are coloring up very nicely:

“Will you play ball with me?” Nordmann’s Greenshank [Tringa guttifer], a.k.a. Nordy, is a very rare bird that has visited Cairns for six years running. He’s the only one of his kind here. I often wonder if he’s a bit lonely:

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Additive Manufacturing, more commonly known as 3D printing, will be an absolutely critical technology for any long-term settlement on another world. Its ability to take a generic input, such as plastic strips or metal powder, and turn it into any shape of tool an astronaut will need is an absolute game changer. But the chemistry behind these technologies is complicated, and their applications are extremely varied, ranging from creating bricks for settlements to plastics for everything from cups to toothbrush holders. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Zane Mebruer and Wan Shou of the University of Arkansas, explores one specific aspect of a particularly important type of 3D printing, and realized that they could save millions of dollars on Mars missions by simply using the planet’s atmosphere to help print metal parts.

SpaceX Crew-11 splashed down safely in the Pacific after more than five months in orbit aboard the International Space Station. The four astronauts completed over 140 experiments and traveled nearly 71 million miles around Earth. NASA brought the crew home earlier than planned due to a medical concern, with officials confirming the affected crew member is stable. The mission underscores how quickly today’s space programs can adapt while keeping astronauts safe.

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