Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
It’s my day off, but I have to post at least one piece of news. This comes from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, which is a pro-Israel organization whose reporting seems pretty accurate (there is lots of documentation, for example, in the article below). And that article, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot, is a longish summary of what happened in the last two months with encampments, arrests, punishments, capitulations, and so on.
If you’re interested in the campus protests, you’ll want to read the whole thing, but I’ll just post one excerpt about the concessions that universities made to protestors. Some are serious, others performative, but all were made to stop encampments and protestors. Maybe I’m a grumpy old man, but I would stop illegal disruptions, like encampments, in their tracks using sanctions, and would be very loath to “bargain” with protestors who enacted illegal disruptions. (If protests are legal and student “demands” worth considering, it’s another matter. But institutional neutrality, at least a Chicago, would prohibit almost any concessions for protestors, as it did indeed.)
The excerpt:
At Northwestern University concessions included a promise to reveal its investments and to establish an investment advisory board with student participation which will advise trustees, student involvement in assessing university vendors, as well as two professorships and five scholarships for Palestinians, and a ‘Middle Eastern and North African’ residential unit.
Brown University promised protestors that after a student presentation divestment would be voted on by trustees. The students identified a number of aerospace and defense companies they alleged were complicit in “grave human rights violations” including Northrup Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics.
At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee administrators agreed to permit anti-Israel students to present the case for divestment to trustees, called the situation a “plausible genocide,” condemned destruction in Gaza, and demanded a ceasefire. The chancellor later apologized for weighing in on “deeply complex geopolitical and historical issues.”
The University of Washington agreed to demands from the “United Front for Palestinian Liberation” including student representation on a divestment committee, free tuition for 20 Gazan students, a faculty committee to examine academic boycotts, and a “Center for Scholarship of Palestine.”
Within the University of California system the Berkeley administration agreed to a divestment task force and the chancellor called for a ‘permanent ceasefire.’ The Riverside administration agreed to similar terms and also terminated a variety of overseas programs including in Israel, which had been the target of long term pressure.
Goldsmiths College agreed to student demands after a five week occupation, including scholarships for Palestinian students, a review of investment policy, and renaming a theater in honor of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
Trinity University announced “divestment from equity investments in Israeli companies that have activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and appear on the UN Blacklist in this regard.” It will also bring in Gazan students and faculty and review student exchange programs. The decision came after protestors blockaded the exhibit of the Book of Kells which earns the school some €350,000 a week during the summer.
Union Theological Seminary announced that it would “identify all investments, both domestic and global, that support and profit from the present killing of innocent civilians in Palestine” in order to “withdraw support from companies profiting from the war.”
The New School for Social Research agreed to hold a divestment vote in June “from industries implicated in military and police violence in Gaza and the West Bank, and all global militarized conflict such as companies or subsidiaries involved in weapons manufacturing, military supplies and equipment, military communication, and public surveillance technology.”
Bard College announced an agreement with protestors that included disclosure of investments, strengthening ties with a branch campus in East Jerusalem, and “support of appropriate challenges — political, social, and legal— to Executive Order 157,” banning investments in institutions or companies that boycott Israel.
The most extreme example of concessions to students came at Sonoma State University where the president, Mike Lee, agreed to fully divest from Israel, permit an SJP ‘advisory council’ to oversee the agreement with protestors, introduce ’Palestine’ and a ‘Palestine Studies’ program, and to ban all Israel programs. Cal State administrators, however, quickly accused Lee of “insubordination” and forced his retraction and then retirement. Acting President Nathan Evans then met with protestors after they disrupted commencement.
Many of these colleges, in their concessionary pronouncements, violated any principle of institutional neutrality. These violations include terminating programs to Israel, calling for “permanent ceasefire,” and declaring that they’d divest. Preferential admission of students from Gaza is surely illegal under Title IV (see below), as is preferential hiring of scholars from Gaza, a Title VI violation involving employment discrimination.
My view is that when the dust settles after graduation, the protesters will have accomplished very little with their demands, and certainly will not have done anything to influence the war. The problem is that the Gaza issue will remain alive for some time, even after Israel destroys Hamas, and so the whole thing is likely to start up again in the fall, turning colleges once more into Social Justice Factories instead of places of learning.
The most significant and real Israel boycotts have emerged in the Netherlands. Ghent University [JAC: Not in the Netherlands!] severed ties with three Israeli research institutions on the grounds they are “problematic according to the Ghent University human rights test” while Leiden University has put exchange programs with Israeli universities on hold and “will assess all our current ties with Israeli institutions and joint research projects.” The university also stated it will also not admit Israeli students from Tel Aviv University or Hebrew University “until after an evaluation.”
And the summary of just this section (the whole article is much longer):
Overall the universities appear to have provided a mixture of performative and real concessions. Some appear to be simply delaying tactics, postponing confrontations until the fall semester. Funding Gazan students and creating ‘Palestine studies’ centers, however, guarantees future campus radicalization by introducing anti-Israel extremists. The privileged admission of Palestinian students also appears to be in violation of Title IV of the Higher Education Act while the creation of residential and Muslim-only spaces reinforces campus identity politics.
Observers also note that most institutions invest in index funds rather than individual stocks, making removal of specific companies difficult or impossible. Nor is it assured that even individual institutions with less complex finances could divest. William College’s decision not to divest and not to embrace ‘environmental, social, and governance’ (ESG) guidelines was specifically explained as a function of the inherent practical and moral difficulty involved. State anti-BDS laws also complicate divestment.
Now from Cole and Marmalade we have a very rare “Unicorn Cat”. Click to read (see also Cheezburger.com and reddit)
The latest rare unicorn cat, a cat that almost doesn’t look real, is capturing lots of hearts online. Is this cat for real? Or is it an AI image? Who can tell anymore? It’s rapidly getting harder to say what’s artificial intelligence versus authentic these days. We see people believing in fakes so much, so it’s (unfortunately) a legitimate question in 2024.
However, this unicorn’s human promises he’s very much real, supplying more images.
Meet Bruce, a kitty so unusual that his mama has had to tell folks on Reddit, “He is real.”
According to the post, Bruce is a Minuet, a cross between a Persian and a Munchkin with shorter legs. But if so, he’s unlike any cat we’ve seen.
As you can see, Bruce appears to be Tuxie on his face but with the palest silvery blue eyes. That alone is unusual as most tuxedo adults will have a pale greenish or yellow eye color. Unfortunately, it suggests Bruce might be the result of the breeder’s efforts to produce cats with the “Dominant Blue Eye” trait.
. . . . Considering that it looks like Bruce is a combination of two cats, this unicorn kitty may be a genetic chimera. These cats, like the famous Venus, the two-faced cat, may have different eye colors and appear as two felines split right down the middle to make one animal!
Put very simply, a chimera has at least two different sets of DNA after the fusion of fertilized eggs or zygotes. They can sometimes be both male and female at once, leading people to speculate about Bruce’s gender, which could factually be ambiguous and nonbinary. Since the kitty seems to show the tortie or calico color (almost always female), it’s an added level of oddity that the name suggests he’s fully male too. It’s even rarer!
Whatever the case, Bruce is adorable and lovable and behaves like any cat being handled at the vet. Thus, we must acknowledge that the colors, however pretty or rare, don’t really matter at all.
But they do matter because these colors get the cat a lot of attention! Still, why don’t they say something about the secondary sexual characteristic of the cat? Does it have male or female genitals, for one thing?
From Meowingtons.com we hear about cats that once delivered mail in Belgium. Bad idea! Click to read:
An excerpt:
Once upon a time in the Belgian town of Liège, the postal system was taken over, briefly, by cats.
, , , But as intelligent and skilled as cats are, we know that even our feline friends have their limitations. Which is why when a city in 1870s Belgium decided to use cats to deliver mail, a system that relies on a timeline that doesn’t exactly suit the ideal 17-hour sleep schedule of a cay … well, it should come as no surprise that it was relatively short-lived.
Nevertheless, in the 1870s, the city of Liège, Belgium hired a grand 37 cats to deliver mail. Messages were to be tied around the cats’ necks in waterproof bags to prevent any damage to the letters. The idea was to allow the citizens of Liège and surrounding villages to easily communicate with each other.
“Unless the criminal class of dogs undertakes to waylay and rob the mail-cats, the messages will be delivered with rapidity and safety,” The New York Times reported. One particularly dedicated feline delivered his letter safe and sound in less than five hours! However, the other felines took up to a day to deliver mail to their own homes, preferring a leisurely stroll and maybe a saucer of milk along the way.
Sadly, there are no photos of this horrible idea, but the BBC does have a section on Post Office Cats in its “working cats” post (more later). Excerpts:
In 1868 three cats were formally employed as mousers at the Money Order Office in London. They were “paid” a wage of one shilling a week – which went towards their upkeep – and were given a six-month probationary period.
They obviously did their job efficiently as in 1873 they were awarded an increase of 6d a week. The official use of cats soon spread to other post offices.
According to the Postal Museum, the most popular cat of all was Tibs. Born in November 1950, at his biggest he weighed 23lbs (10.4kg) and lived in the Post Office headquarters’ refreshment club in the basement of the building in central London. During his 14 years’ service he kept the building rodent-free.
Wikipedia has an article on “Tibs the Great” with a photo and more information:
Tibs worked at Post Office Headquarters in London for 14 years, and was officially employed and paid 2s 6d per week. He worked in the basement. He was cared for by Alf Talbut, cleaner at the church of St. Martin’s Le Grand, who had also owned his mother, Minnie.[4] During his 14 years, Tibs kept the Post Office headquarters completely free of mice.[1]
In 1952, there was “public outrage” that the cats had not had a pay rise since 1873, and the next year there was a question in the House of Commons, asking the Assistant Postmaster-General, David Gammans, “when the allowance payable for the maintenance of cats in his department was last raised?”[1]
Tibs died in December 1964; he had been suffering from oral cancer. He received obituaries in several newspapers. By the time of his death he had grown to 23 lb (10 kg) in weight, probably due to living in one of the staff dining rooms, rather than from eating rats.
. . . The last cat employed at Post Office headquarters was Blackie, who died in 1984, which coincided with cloth sacks being replaced with rodent-resistant plastic sacks.[2]
Here’s Tibs’s obituary printed in the Post Office Magazine:
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Also from Cole and Marmalade: Karma for an animal abuser (click to read):
Being cruel to animals or other people always comes back to bite the person doing the abuse. But so often, it seems Karma has extreme patience, and justice is not swift enough for our liking.
Well, for a couple of people who were abusive to animals, the trouble that came for them is all they may ever be remembered for. Over 75 years later, their stories are remembered as anecdotes shared all over the world.
It’s amazing to think that this story from 1949 in France is still circulating around the world today. It’s all about the swift justice that came after a man named Henri Villette tried to drown a kitten. Who could have sympathy for what became of him?
Here are some news stories, with one in French:
Today, people remember Villette only as a sort of fable that tells a moral. Most versions are attributed to the Associated Press and appeared in newspapers in the United States, like the Gettysburg Times and the Ironwood Daily Globe from Michigan and the Des Moines Tribune from Iowa in 1949. The Daily Mirrorin Sydney, Australia also shared the story as well as the Singapore Free Press.
More:
The story also appeared in TIME magazine, dating to October 3, 1949, with more interesting details.
“Cool and confident in his superior strength and wisdom one day last week, Henri Villette, a 67-year-old barrelmaker of Alencon, clapped an unwanted kitten into a musette bag and set out for the Sarthe River to drown it. On the river’s bank he slipped and fell. The kitten crawled to safety. Henri’s drowned body was found later by local firemen,” the story states.
There’s also a story of an abused d*g who was thrown into a well by an odious man, but the d*g lived seven months in the well, eating corpses thrown down by other people, before it was rescued. Here it is, but brush up on your French!
Here’s the story from Atlas Obscura, complete with a reprint of the paper, signed by both human and cat authors:
Jack H. Hetherington was a professor of physics at Michigan State University in 1975, when he finished what would become an influential and often-cited physics paper. The academic writing, entitled Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He, was an in-depth exploration of atomic behavior at different temperatures. It would have flown over the heads of most lay people, not to mention cats.
He was all set to send it to Physical Review Letters, which today describes itself as “the world’s premier physics letter journal.” However, before he dispatched it, Hetherington gave the paper to a colleague to get one last set of eyes on the piece. This is when he ran into a strange problem. Hetherington had used the royal “we” throughout the paper. As his colleague pointed out, Physical Review Letters generally only published papers using plural pronouns and adjectives like “we” and “our” if the paper had multiple authors.
. . .Hetherington wrote that after giving the issue “an evening’s thought,” he decided the paper was so good that it required rapid publishing. Unwilling to go back and replace the plural voice in the document, he did the next best thing and just added a second author: his Siamese cat, Chester. Of course just listing “Chester” as a co-author probably wouldn’t fly, so he invented the name F.D.C. Willard. The “F.D.C.” stood for “Felix Domesticus, Chester.” Willard had been the name of Chester’s father.
Portraying F.D.C. Willard as one of his colleagues at Michigan State, Hetherington submitted his paper, and it was published in issue 35 of Physical Review Letters.
Voilà!:
(from Atlas Obscura): The signed version of the paper. (Photo: More Random Walks in Science/Google Books)
Today we have part 2 of ecologist Susan Harrison‘s visit to the Dry Tortugas, with today’s photos comprising seabirds. Susan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Part 1 is here, and I’ll add the two paragraphs of her introduction below.
Dry Tortugas seabird colonies
Introduction to last part:
The Dry Tortugas are the westernmost of the Florida Keys, lying just over 100 miles from the mainland. These tiny sandy islands, or cays, are uninhabited by people but essential to bird life. They support breeding colonies of some unusual seabirds, and they are the North American landfall for many spring-migrating songbirds.
Dry Tortugas National Park was created to protect these birds, and human visitors can go to only one island: Garden Cay, which supports Fort Jefferson, a huge crumbling installation begun in 1846 and abandoned in 1906. The fort saw use as a Civil War prison, a quarantine, and a coaling station, but its war-worn look is an illusion. Somehow the engineers of the day did not realize that iron fittings exposed to salt water would expand and tear apart its brick walls.
And today’s post:
In an earlier post I showed the migratory birds that use the low sandy islands (cays) of the Dry Tortugas chain as a stopover en route to North America. Today’s post shows another set of birds that rely on the Dry Tortugas: several species of tropical pelagic seabirds that spend most of their lives at sea, and nest on the cays where there are no predatory mammals.
In April, Magnificent Frigatebirds (Fregata magnificens) circled constantly above the fort. Females have white chests, males are dark with red throat pouches, and juveniles have white heads.
Magnificent Frigatebirds:
The Magnificent Frigatebird breeding colony lies on some tiny islands next to Garden Cay. Their nesting trees were damaged by recent hurricanes.
Frigatebird colony:
Frigatebird carrying nest material:
Thousands of Sooty Terns (Onychoprion fuscatus) and Brown Noddies (Anous stolidus) nest on the sandy flats next to the fort, together with a few of their rarer cousins, the Bridled Tern (Onchyoprion anaethetus) and Black Noddy (Anous minutus). A few miles away, a very small cay supports a colony of Brown Boobies (Sula leucogaster) and Masked Boobies (Sula dactylatra).
Welcome to CaturSaturday, shabbos for Jewish cats: June 1, 2024, and we’ve reached June at last. It’s Graduation Day at the University of Chicago, and National Bubbly Day, celebrating sparkling wine. Just avoid the cheap, sweet stuff. Here’s a 7-minute video about how French champagne is made:
As America began to absorb on Friday the conviction of Donald J. Trump, a first for a U.S. president, he criticized the criminal case and attacked the judge who oversaw his trial.
Mr. Trump, in a rambling and misleading 33-minute speech, derided the trial as “rigged” and made numerous false statements about what had taken place in court. His remarks came after he was found guilty on Thursday of all 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign.
Mr. Trump, who said he would appeal the verdict, continued to attack people who testified against him in the seven-week trial, specifically his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, the star witness for the prosecution. He also admitted that he had gotten “very upset” with his lawyers.
He called the judge, Juan M. Merchan, the “devil.”
. . . At Trump Tower on Friday, Mr. Trump reprised his usual campaign attacks on immigrants and made numerous false representations about U.S. border policies under President Biden. He falsely claimed that American children couldn’t play Little League Baseball games anymore because undocumented immigrants were setting up too many tents.
Well, I’ll venture to predict (though I won’t be able to prove it) that Trump’s conviction will hurt his election chances in November. He is a convicted felon, and among the undecided voters that could make a difference. Plus he’s a bull-goose looney.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia announced Friday that he has changed his party registration to independent, fueling speculation he could run for office again in November after announcing his retirement last year.
“My commitment to do everything I can to bring our country together has led me to register as an independent with no party affiliation,” Manchin wrote on X.
Manchin did not immediately say anything about his political plans. But the move allows him to possibly reconsider his plan to not seek reelection — or to run for governor, a job he previously held.
Aug. 1 is the deadline for independent candidates to file for office in West Virginia. Manchin was facing a Saturday deadline to register as an independent and still have a chance to file as an independent candidate this election.
The centrist senator announced in November 2023 that he would not run for another term, handing Republicans a likely pickup seat in solidly red West Virginia. The GOP nominee for the seat is the state’s governor, Jim Justice.
. . .For months, Manchin flirted with running for president as an independent or third-party candidate, worrying Democrats who anticipated a close rematch between President Biden and former president Donald Trump. But Manchin announced in February that he would “not be involved in a presidential run” this year.
Speculation has picked up in recent weeks that Manchin may be mulling a return to the governor’s office, though he reportedly said this week he would not enter the race. He said he is supporting the Democratic nominee, Steve Williams.
If Manchin decides to run for Senate again, he could have a fighting chance in a race that otherwise favors the GOP. CNN reported in March that Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has talked with Manchin about running for reelection as an independent. At the time, Manchin said he did not expect to do so.
In fact, the guy is so much of a renegade that we don’t know what he’s going to do. All we can guess is that he’s going to run for something.
As the fighting continues, the debate in Israel over the necessary next steps is becoming more intense. The issue has not set the ruling coalition against all or part of the public. Rather, the divisions bisect the government and have split the three-man war cabinet consisting of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant and Chief of the General Staff Benny Ganz. The matter of who wins this debate, along with the issue of western pressure on Israel, are likely to determine the outcome of the war.
Former Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, an observer in the war cabinet who is closely aligned with Gantz, was, according to Israel’s Channel 12 News channel, reported to have told the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee last week that Israel should pause its Rafah operation in order to conclude an agreement for the release of the 128 Israeli hostages remaining in Hamas captivity.
While Eizenkot clarified in his statement that Israel would be able to recommence the fighting at a later date, this seems to be at odds with reality. The position of the Gaza Hamas leadership throughout has been that a hostage deal was possible only if Israel were to agree to a long-term cessation of the war. So if Israel really wishes to go down the route of prioritising the release of hostages, the cost is almost certainly an admission of defeat in the eight month-long military campaign in Gaza. Defeat in this context means the cessation of hostilities without the destruction of the Hamas ruling authority in Gaza.
. . .Among those in Israel who seek an early end of the war and a central emphasis on getting hostages released, this reality is accepted, rather than blurred. Thus Zehava Golan, a former leader of the left wing Meretz party, stated the matter plainly in a column in the Haaretz newspaper on Wednesday: ‘We need to bring back the hostages via a deal now, establish a state commission of inquiry to look into the events of 7 October and the conduct of this war, and stop the war itself,’ she wrote.
On the other side, Netanyahu and his allies reject the Hamas demand for an end to the war, seeing this (accurately) as representing surrender to the Islamist movement. Netanyahu, however, in a fudge of his own, was reported to have indignantly rejected the notion that he and those around him were refusing to give the team negotiating on the issue of the hostages a mandate that could lead to a successful agreement. But given that Hamas is clearly and openly demanding the end of the war as a price for agreement, it follows logically that any negotiating mandate that clearly rejects any such outcome does in fact then undermine the chance for a successful agreement on the hostages.
The reason for both Netanyahu and Eizenkot’s obfuscations is that the Israeli mainstream debate is not yet able to openly confront the horrific nature of the strategic position into which the Hamas leadership has placed it. Namely that it must either concede defeat to the Gaza Islamists, or follow a path that may well seal the fate of the 128 remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza.
This is a horrible dilemma; you lose the hostages or risk losing your country. What should the war cabinet do? They’ll probably continue going after Rafah and leave the hostages as a secondary consideration, for Netanyahu runs the war cabinet and a majority of Israelis want the IDF to persist in Rafah. The cold-hearted calculus might say that if you let Hamas persist in power and rescue all the hostages (Remember that we don’t know how many are still alive, and Hamas won’t say), in the long run more Israelis will die from terrorism than lives will be saved by recouping the hostages. But it’s still a horrible thing to do—making a calculus of lives. But this is an existential war for Israel, and those of us who pay attention now have to force ourselves to just sit back and try to disengage. After all, there’s little we can do.
*As always, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly summary of the news, called this week “The Trial of the Century of the Week“. Actually, I’ll steal four this week so I can slip in the loon Candace Owens:
→ What Chinese propaganda? A new poll of young people by the firm Blueprint finds that a huge percentage of them think America is basically hell. Specifically, they see it as “a dying empire led by bad people.” Also: they need a ride to lacrosse practice. Some 51 percent agreed that the U.S. political system “doesn’t work for people like me,” and 64 percent supported the idea that “America is in decline.” Only 26 percent think it matters who wins the next election. Now, I’m not going to say this can be traced back entirely to the fact that the youth have hooked their eyes to a Chinese propaganda machine, but it does raise the question. Like, I’m not happy about our presidential choices either, but I do think things are different if one or the other is chosen. Does that make me a patriot?
→ Candace Owens going full crazy: Our favorite right-wing influencer is not antisemitic but is just obsessed with the Jews, specifically tracking how various evil acts and empires in history can all be traced to Jewish influence. This is the vibe these days: “I will grant you that Stalin’s ancestry is still hotly debated. My Georgian friend tells me that his real name ‘Djugashivilli’ literally translates into ‘child of Judah’ and that everyone in Georgia knows he was Jewish but that is hearsay and hardly admissible as a fact. What we do know for a fact is that Stalin spoke Yiddish and his three wives were all Jews.” Hmm. Candace’s rantings—to her more than 5 million followers on Twitter/X alone—continue. [See this refutation of Owen’s tweet “the vibe”.]
Here are a few tweets I found by Candace Owens (click to go to tweet). She has 5.1 MILLION followers.
→ The polling problem is Biden, not Dems: Democratic Senate candidates in swing states are doing great, according to a new poll from the quite reliable Cook Political Report. While Biden is projected to lose to Trump in the noted states, the Dems’ Senate candidates are doing extremely well. Many are differentiating themselves from the Biden administration on unpopular-for-Dems issues like the border, in that they’re arguing they don’t want a fully open border. They’re playing up their pro-choice bona fides and displaying their youth and virility through confident, youthful exhibitions like cheering in jerseys at a soccer game. Makes you wonder: If Biden had stepped aside for another candidate, would Trump be in the lead right now? The poll results image is best on desktop, unfortunately for my cell phone readers:
→ Campus update: Harvard’s Students for Justice in Palestine group called for an escalation of “intifada,” which historically means attacks on Jews: “Escalate protests to an open intifada in every capital and city.” Columbia’s chapter of the same influential club explained: “Supporting a 2 state solution is an inherently zionist position as zionism means that you believe in Israel’s right to exist.” And Harvard’s commencement speaker, journalist Maria A. Ressa, defended herself against allegations of antisemitism with more antisemitism in her speech: “I was. . . called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.” Well, that clears that one up.
And then all of a sudden, Harvard decided to slow down on weighing in. They’re out of the condemnation game, they say, mostly, at least right now, maybe not forever.
*In the latest Weekly Dish, “The consistency of their genius,” Andrew Sullivan leaves the Trump conviction to one side and analyzes two pop-culture phenomena that he admires, the musical group The Pet Shop boys and the television show “South Park.”
In fact, I want to celebrate what still rocks my world: the staggeringly consistent, supremely intelligent, and self-assured genius of two unique duos still powering forward in two different worlds: South Park and Pet Shop Boys.
That those brand names are more recognizable than their creators — Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe — tells you something of what they have in common: a commitment to their own unique creativity, rather than their fame, and the discipline and grit to explore it for decades. Anti-celebrities, in their time but never of it, perfectionist but unafraid of failure, these two duos are proof, it seems to me, that a democratic culture, even one as decadent as ours, can still spawn excellence and intelligence, spanning high and low, and generating what I can only call joy.
South Park is going into its 27th season. And it has rarely been better. (I simply can’t believe so many people I meet say they haven’t watched in years. You’ve been missing out!) The new special on obesity — a deft masterclass of social commentary — has a brutal takedown of suburban white women jonesing for doses of Ozempic like meth-heads; a definitive — and musical! — digression into the insanity of the American healthcare system; pure, character-driven humor in a figure like Randy Marsh — a far subtler parody of the average American male than Homer Simpson; and, of course, Eric Cartman — the “big-boned” fat-ass kid whose capacity for pure evil was first truly captured in the epic “Scott Tenorman Must Die.”
You can read books on Ozempic, scan op-eds, absorb TikToks, and even listen to the Dishcast! — but nothing out there captures every single possible social and medical and psychological wrinkle of this new drug than this hour of crude cartoons. Yes, there are fart jokes. There are always fart jokes. But fart jokes amid a sophisticated and deeply informed parody of insurance companies? Or, in other episodes, toilet humor guiding us through the cowardice of Disney, the dopey vanity of Kanye, the wokification of Hollywood, the exploitation of black college athletes, the evil of cable companies, the hollowness of hate-crime laws, the creepiness of Christian rock, or the money-making behind legal weed? Only South Park pulls this off. Only South Park gets away with all of it.
It’s a 1990s high-low formula at root, sophisticated cultural and political knowingness married to crude cartoons, silly accents, m’kay, and a talking Christmas turd, Mr Hankey. Generationally, it really marked a moment when merging these two worlds seemed the most creative option — not an abandonment of seriousness, but the attachment of a humane levity to it. South Park can be brutal, but it is never cruel. Unless you’re Barbra Streisand or Bono. And virtually every character (even Eric) is redeemable. Except Meghan Markle.
I don’t get cable t.v., not because I can’t afford it pecuniarily but because I can’t afford it timewise or mentally: there are too many books to read. But when I read a paean like the one above, it does make me sad that I don’t watch the show. The episodes I’ve seen I have liked, but isnt that true of a lot of television shows. I can afford to get hooked on new shows when there are places to see and books to read. (This, of course, is just my subjective preferences and I don’t fault anyone who stays glued to the t.v. Wait a minute: yes I do. I don’t fault people who are selective in what t.v. they watch.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is down by the Vistula River, having walkies with Malgorzata and Andrzej:
Masih Alinejad, who escaped from Iran to Europe and ran freely on the streets of London, made the following comment under the photo he shared on social media: “A God who is ashamed of my hair cannot be my God”
İran’dan Avrupa’ya kaçıp Londra sokaklarda özgürce koşan Masih Alinejad, sosyal medyada paylaştığı fotoğrafın altına şu yorumu yaptı:
From Luana. The free speech that was affirmed was that of the National Rifle Association, and though I dislike them intensely, I also think that their free speech rights must be preserved regardless of how odious they are. From CBS News:
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of the National Rifle Association in a dispute over whether its free speech rights were violated when the top financial regulator for New York state pushed banks and insurance companies to sever ties with the gun rights group.
The court said in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor that the NRA “plausibly alleged” that the New York regulator violated the First Amendment by coercing regulated entities to end their business relationships with the NRA in order to “punish or suppress” the group’s pro-gun rights advocacy.
“The critical takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries,” Sotomayor wrote.
This morning, the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed a foundational First Amendment principle: “A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf.”
Here’s the last video of the day, as well as the last live performance of Otis Redding, who died with his band in a plane crash the day after this video was recorded on December 9, 1967. He was only 26. This song, along with “Dock of the Bay”, are Redding’s best recordings, but “Dock of the Bay” was largely written by him, while this song, “Try a Little Tenderness“, recorded on the Stax label, was actually written by three white men in 1932. And it was recorded by, among others, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. (Redding’s released recording, from 1966, is here.)
NPR’s “Fresh Air” did a documentary on Stax Records that’s still up, and well worth listening to (it’s only 46 minutes long and has tons of music, including some good stuff from Booker T., who, with the M.G.s, backed Redding on the recorded version of “Tenderness”.). Since Redding recorded for Stax, I revisited this song and found this live version. If you listen to the recordings by Crosby or Sinatra, you’ll see that Redding’s soul version is infinitely better. The difference between the performance below and the earlier versions shows you the very essence of soul music.
And you can also get an inkling of Redding’s talent—talent cut off way too early.
(“Dock of the Bay,” by the way, was released posthumously, and became the first Top 100 pop single to top the charts after the performer’s death.)
Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades, here’s Otis Redding, giving James Brown a run for his money as “the hardest-working man in show business.”
Here’s another good talk, though not as good as the preceding one. But it does get better in the last third.
‘Yes, Douglas Murray is a conservative, and yes, the Manhattan Institute is a generally conservative think tank, but Murray is eloquent also sensible on many issues, including the war and (in this case), the courage of Israelis, and it’s worth listening to his 24-minute acceptance speech from May 6, when he was given the Alexander Hamilton Award from the Manhattan Institute for his “unwavering defense of Western values.” I hate to have to qualify things this way, but yes, I disagree with Murray on several issues, the main one being his consistent opposition to widespread immigration into Britain. (I’m sure many of you will agree with him, though.)
In some ways, including his memory and his eloquence, Murray resembles Hitchens. (When he makes a crack about “Queers for Palestine,” remember that Murray is gay.)
I’m tired today, and also have work to do, so it may turn out that all of my posts have videos in them. Graduation is tomorrow, and I plan to be around to see if it goes smoothly (disruption is threatened).
Bari Weiss is often demonized, but I think her critics are largely mistaken. She’s a centrist, but leans Left; and those who criticize her for being a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” (which seems to me to consist largely of people who think for themselves) or for being some kind of right-winger, is simply misguided. In the 16-minute TED talk below, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A moderated by Chris Anderson (the head of TED) Weiss extols what she sees as the highest of virtues: courage.
She begins by laying out a litany of her beliefs, which are quite good (save for one note that we’re all “created in the image of god”), comporting with good liberalism, though some of them might be controversial (she thinks Covid came from a lab, that hiring should be based on merit rather than on “immutable characteristics”, promotes standardized testing, etc.) As she says (the transcript is here):
The point in all of this is that I am really boring, or at least I thought I was.
I am, or at least until a few seconds ago in historical time,
I used to be considered a standard-issue liberal.
And yet somehow, in our most intellectual and prestigious spaces, many of the ideas I just outlined and others like them, have become provocative or controversial,
which is really a polite way of saying unwelcome, beyond the pale. Even bigoted or racist
How?
How did these relatively boring views come to be seen as off-limits? And how did that happen, at least it seems to me, in the span of under a few years?
She then takes on the “progressives,” and finally gives what she sees as the reason for our “culture in crisis”:
My theory is that the reason we have a culture in crisis is because of the cowardice of people that know better. It is because the weakness of the silent, or rather the self-silencing majority.
So why have we been silent?
Simple. Because it’s easier.
Because speaking up is hard, it is embarrassing, it makes you vulnerable. It exposes you as someone who is not chill, as someone who cares a lot, as someone who makes judgments, as someone who discerns between right and wrong, between better and worse.
Among the courageous people she mentions are Natan Sharansky, Masih Alinejad, John Fetterman, Salman Rushdie, Roland Fryer, Alexei Navalny, Coleman Hughes, Jimmy Lai, and others. You will have your own list of Courageous People. Mine also includes J. K. Rowling, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and, among those no longer living but who inhabited the 20th century, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, James Meredith, Ruby Bridges, and many figures of the American Civil Rights movement who gave their lives pursuing the cause (Medgar Evers, Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney). These people made considerable sacrifice to promote positive change; their activism was not performative. (Yes, Rowling remains wealthy, but she didn’t have to stand up for women in the way she did, and that led to considerable erosion of her reputation.)
Weiss’s ending is lovely, and is followed by a standing ovation.
The freest people in the history of the world seem to have lost the hunger for liberty.
Or maybe it’s really the will to defend it. And when they tell me this, it puts me in mind of my hero, Natan Sharansky, who spent a decade in the Soviet gulag before getting his freedom. He is the single bravest person that I have ever met in my life. And a few years ago, one afternoon in Jerusalem, I asked him a simple question. “Nathan,” I asked him, “is it possible to teach courage?”
And he smiled in his impish way and said, “No.
All you can do is show people how good it feels to be free.”
My comment on that ending: does seeing the benefits of freedom really make people more courageous? Or was Sharansky merely extolling the benefits of what you can get from courage?
Reader Robert Lang, physicist and origami master, has contributed two batches of photos, and I’ll show one today. (I just missed being able to get on a cruise to the Arctic, featuring Richard Dawkins and with several of my friends like Robert, so I’m bummed.) At any rate, Robert’s words are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them,
Wildflowers 1/2
Springtime in Southern California is when the hills come alive with life. We have had two good years of winter rains but the first few months of 2024 were coolish. In April, we began to see warm afternoons, and this brought out a burst of wildflower blooms from many species.
It didn’t get a lot of press, but on May 2, Joe Biden announced the expansion of the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument—it now begins about 20 feet from my studio window and I can walk out my back door to get onto a network of trails. The trails range from deep, forested canyons to thickets of mountainside chapparal and rocky exposed ridges; one of my favorite afternoon routes goes through all three terrains, which offers a wide variety of wildflowers at peak season. Most of the pictures in this collection and the next were taken (with an iPhone, so the quality varies) during a single 3-hour ramble.
A note on IDs: I am even less expert in wildflowers than I am in animal life, so I am relying on iNaturalist for most of these IDs. Corrections and clarifications welcome!
Baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii) has tiny flowers and because of its low growth is easily overlooked, but I find them lovely:
Blue blossom ceanothus (Ceanothus thyrsiflorus) is a common shrub of the chapparal. On the day I hiked, the northwest side of Millard Canyon was covered in its lavender blooms:
Chaparral whitethorn (Ceanothus leucodermis) is another species of Ceanothus with similar flowers as blueblossom but is easily distinguishable by its pale branches and vicious long thorns; at higher elevations, it’s one of the dominant shrubs of the chaparral and its thickets are impenetrable (unless you’re willing to spill some blood):
Canterbury bells (Phacelia minor) is often findable along the edges of trails; its deep purple blooms, about 2–3 cm long and similar length, are distinctive with their bell-shaped base:
Clearwater cryptantha (Cryptantha intermedia) is another easily overlooked flower with tiny (~1 cm) blooms and low growth form:
Crofton weed (Ageratina adenophora) is well named as a “weed;” it is an invasive plant that chokes many small streams in canyon bottoms. Every few years a flash flood will clear out the lot, making the stream hikeable for several months, but then the invaders come crowding in again:
This plant had the tiniest flowers, only about 0.5 cm across. iNaturalist only narrows it down to tribe Cynoglosseae, in family Boraginaceae (which makes it a relative of Clearwater cryptantha); any further ID would be most welcome:
iNat identifies this as a Delphinium, but doesn’t narrow down the species:
Gum rock-rose (Cistus ladanifer) is an import from the Mediterranean region, which can be found in areas that were once developed (e.g., the Echo Peak ruins and along the Mount Lowe Roadway above Altadena). The big, showy flowers come in two forms: plain white, which somewhat resemble those of the native Matillija poppy (Romneya coulteri), but they can be distinguished by checking the petals: four petals for poppies, fivefold symmetry for the rock-rose:
More commonly, though, the Gum rock-rose flowers are decorated with maroon dots, which makes the ID unmistakable:
