A farewell to ducks

November 14, 2020 – 2:00 pm

I still have videos and photos of ducks to post over the winter, but our strategy of cutting down and then terminating the feeding has worked: all the invading ducks have left the pond, and all left healthy and plump. I hope that Honey, who left about two weeks ago, is doing well and on her way to warmer climes. The pond is bereft of waterfowl now.

Here are some farewell duck pictures, and photos of Botany Pond in fall.

A week ago, before the ducks left, we had about two dozen ducks or more, and we frequently observed them on “Duck Alert”: they’d all go quiet, stop eating, quack a bit, and leave the water for the bank, most looking in one direction. I don’t know why they did this: one would suppose a predator or intruder was around—but we never saw anything. They are sensitive creatures, alert to any alteration in their environment. So, without being able to give a cause, here’s a video of a duck alert that occurred on November 1.

As fall proceeds, the leaves the big gingko by the pond start turning yellow,  while a few ducks paddle idly in the water:

The water reflected the leaves above:

. . . and the colors of fall rimmed the pond:

Feeding was cut down to once a day, then once every other day, then bupkes. Here’s a feeding of cracked corn on the bank. The ducks surrounded the pile like feathery petals on a flower:

I especially love hens because they produce ducklings, and have a hard life incubating and tending the young. And yet they are such good moms! Here are some moms-to-be come Spring:

Finally we were down to a handful of drakes and hens. And then there were none.

One of the few hens remaining before they all left (this isn’t Honey, though at first I thought it was):

And resplendent drakes in breeding color:


It was quite a season! Designing a trampoline for Honey and her brood, along with new duck fences, duck signs, and duckling ramps (big kudos to U of C Facilities): helping Honey lead her brood to the Pond; seeing Dorothy produce a brood and Honey and Dorothy battle over them, with Honey winning, nabbing a total of 17 ducklings (all fledged); Dorothy re-nesting and producing a second brood of seven of her very own (of which six fledged); kids trying to steal turtles; a woman trying to dump domestic ducks into the pond; me having to rescue a brood of seven (rehabbed) and then two singletons dumped in the pond (rehabbed); and Team Duck having to deal with (and feed) up to sixty pensioner ducks in a late-season invasion.

It was a stressful duck season, but we lost almost no babies, and, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Thanks to the faithful members of Team Duck who helped us fledge a crop of 23 babies this year. And cross your fingers that Honey will return next Spring!

Photo by Jean Greenberg

 

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in ducks | Comments (8)

ACLU staff attorney calls for censorship of Abigail Shrier’s book on gender dysphoria

November 14, 2020 – 12:15 pm

What’s happened to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a crying shame. And I say this even though I volunteered for them, have been a member on and off, and was the recipient of their largesse when, for no fee, they represented me and four other defendants in a class-action suit about illegal drafting in New York. I went to the ACLU, and their lawyers took the case, arguing successfully in Federal court that we were drafted illegally as conscientious objectors. This freed a couple of thousand men from forced civilian service. I’ve always been deeply grateful for the ACLU’s help.

Although the ACLU is still doing a lot of good legal work defending genuine civil liberties, they’re also getting woke in a way that, to me, deeply compromises their integrity. I’ve done a fair number of posts calling out their dubious stands over the last few years; these include posts bearing these titles (click to see them):

The ACLU backs off defending free speech in favor of promoting social justice

New improved standards proposed for adjudicating sexual misconduct in college; ACLU opposes them for “inappropriately favoring the accused”

The ACLU defends the right of biological men to compete in women’s sports

ACLU continues defending the right of medically untreated men who claim they’re women to compete in women’s sports

ACLU joins lawsuit allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports

What’s especially worrying is the ACLU’s backing off on free speech (the subject of today’s short post); its pushback against one good thing that the Trump administration did: making the Title IX proceedings adjudicating sexual misconduct fairer; and the organization’s big push to defend the “right” of medically untreated biological males to participate in women’s sports. Now of course the ACLU should be defending transgender rights, for every person, regardless of gender status, should enjoy equal rights under the law, and discrimination on the basis of gender is largely illegal. And they’ve done a good job of that (see below).

But the ACLU has also gone a bit off the rails on the transgender issue, arguing that even biological men who haven’t undergone hormone therapy should be allowed to compete in sports against biological women.  As I reported a while back, the ACLU defended two Connecticut people who were born male, identify as female, and, without any hormone therapy or surgery, decided to compete against biological women in track and field. In fact they did compete, and did very well, for Connecticut law mandates that self-identification as a woman is all you need to compete in women’s sports. The ACLU buys into the argument that you’re a woman simply if you claim to be a woman.

But the organization shouldn’t be defending something so manifestly unfair. They’re also making a big push to defend transgender athletes without reservation, despite the notoriously slippery issues involved in defining “men” and “women” for transgender athletes. The standards for competing, as in the Olympics, are subject to much dispute. The ACLU’s view is apparently that a claim itself is all that’s needed to deem you a man or a woman.

And now, to my great sorrow, an ACLU staff lawyer and champion of transgender rights, Chase Strangio, has come out full bore in favor of censorship.  I’m referring to his demanding, as shown in the tweets below, censorship of a book we discussed yesterday: Abigail Shrier’s treatise on gender dysphoria in adolescent and teenage girls, Irreversible Damage.

Although Strangio’s tweets are “protected”, I assume that the two below, reproduced by “Wokal Distance”, are accurate. In the second, he blatantly advocates censorship of Irreversible Damage, “stopping the circulation of the book and these ideas.” How else can that be interpreted as censorship? And “stopping ideas” should not be the business of the ACLU, which has always defended the First Amendment. They should be defending the right of Shrier to publish her book and circulate her ideas, not fight against them. This shows how low the ACLU, at least in the person of Strangio, has fallen. An organization dedicated to defending civil liberties is calling for their suspension when they offend people.

Now Strangio has done great stuff in areas that do comport with the ACLU’s mission. Wikipedia describes two cases:

In October 2019, Strangio was one of the lawyers representing Aimee Stephens, a trans woman who was fired from her job at a funeral home, in the U.S. Supreme Court case R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Strangio and his team won that case, with the conservative Supreme Court ruling 6-3 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected transgender people from employment discrimination. (The plaintiff was a transgender woman fired from a funeral home.)

Strangio was also on the team that won a similar landmark case.

In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 6–3 in favor of Gerald Bostock, a gay man terminated from his job due to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, in Bostock v. Clayton County. Strangio was one of the lawyers on the case. The case ruled that it is illegal to discriminate in employment on the basis of transgender identity or sexual orientation.

But Stangio’s tweet above isn’t even a case of his deciding between two conflicting rights. There is a right to promulgate your ideas; there is no “right” for the transgender community to be protected from criticism about gender dysphoria and medical intervention in adolescent girls.

Strangio is favoring censorship, pure and simple, and a watering down of First Amendment rights: “stopping circulation of this book.” Is Shrier’s argument so injurious to transgender people, and to society in general, that it cannot be read or heard? I don’t think so.

Remember that the ACLU defended the rights of the American Nazi Party to march through Skokie, Illinois: a Jewish community. Surely that’s more hurtful than Shrier’s book, for the Nazis call for the deportation and death of Jews, while Shrier is merely telling society to examine the cause of an epidemic of gender dyphoria in young girls.  The “unwavering commitment to principle” that the ACLU itself touts in the Skokie case is apparently not shared by Strangio.

Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU is damaging its mission by buying into wokeness, and nobody is reining in either of these once-great organizations.  It’s a huge shame.

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in civil rights, First Amendment, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, law, sex and gender issues | Comments (9)

Caturday felids: Awesome cat mural; cat goes missing on adventure, returns home with note, parrots tormenting cats

November 14, 2020 – 10:30 am

From BizarreArt we have an article called “Street Artist Paints Mind-Bending Illusion of a Sphynx Cat On an Old Gas Tank.” And mind-bending it is:

This 33 year old talent from Marseille, France transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary with his 3D art. You’ll likely stop and stare in awe, should you come across one of his artworks, and his most recent work of a giant Sphynx cat crouching in the middle of a field will blow you away!

The hairless Sphynx cat, in spite of its name, is not from Egypt but was developed in Canada from a hairless male kitten born in 1966 through selective breeding. Blanco’s Sphynx cat however, was created through a very different process.

Blanco chose an old gas tank as the canvas to create his giant 3D optical illusion of the Sphynx, crouching in the foliage, ready to pounce on some unseen prey in the field. The green gas tank completely disappeared, blending in with the surroundings.

I like the way the mural blends into the landscape.

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

The Dodo has a story of a cat in Thailand that went on a walkabout (click on screenshot):

The unnamed cat went missing for three days, but then returned with a note around his neck:

 

According to the article, here’s some of what it said (from from News18):

The cat was photographed sitting at a distance from the owner’s home after returning from its three-day sojourn. When the owner went near the cat, he noticed a new collar and the hanging “debt” note.

It was written in the Thai language which when translated, read, “Your cat kept eyeing the mackerels at my stall, so I gave him three.” The kind shop owner who treated the animal identified herself as “Aunty May at alley no. 2.”

Pictures of the cat were shared on Facebook and they went viral. The caption of the post read, “Lost 3 days, returned with debt. Pretty face, right?”

Now, one might assume the mackerel handoff was some act of charity. But apparently not.

The fish vendor went on to write their contact info down, too — presumably so that the cat’s owner could pay off the debt.

There’s no telling if the fact that the cat has been running up a tab while out and about has caused his owner to clamp down on his freedom to roam, but one thing is clear: Adventures, especially of the culinary sort, are always easier when someone else is footing the bill.

Here’s the note and “contract”. I’m sure we have at least one reader who can read Thai, and if that’s you, please put the translation in the comments. I’m curious about the “contract”.

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

And here’s a 4-minute video of parrots tormenting cats (no cat was injured in the making of this video). The birds love those tails! My favorites are the brazen bastard in the first clip and the kitten/parrot encounters at 1:21 NS 2:42. I have to say that these cats are pretty chill; they’ll take a lot of torment before reacting.

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in Caturday felids | Comments (5)

Andrew Sullivan: There are bad people on both sides

November 14, 2020 – 9:30 am

Now that Trump has lost, but fails to admit it, Andrew Sullivan is surveying the wreckage of America, worried that Trump may try to throw the election into the House of Representatives. That dire scenario was described by Bart Gellman in the November Atlantic, and could—just conceivably—result in a legal victory for Trump.

I’m not as worried about that as is Sullivan. The press describes Trump’s aides as quietly nudging him towards the door, and although Republican politicians are loath to affirm Biden’s victory, I also believe they will start speaking up as the weeks pass and Trump still hasn’t conceded. But even if this doesn’t take place, Sullivan still presents a post-mortem in his Weekly Dish column below (click on screenshot).

First, Sullivan cites two sets of facts that seem accurate but also disturbing:

And yet a poll found that 70 percent of Republicans — with no credible evidence at all — believe that the election was rigged. House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy, not exactly a fringe character, baldly told Fox News: “President Trump won this election. So everyone who is listening, do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” Ten Republican state attorneys general have joined in the attempt to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying its election results. Senator Roy Blunt declared: “The president wasn’t defeated by huge numbers, in fact he may not have been defeated at all.”

Well, 70% of Republicans still means less than half the country (unless some deluded Democrats think the election was rigged), but even 35% is a figure way, way too high. Still, as Sullivan says, “we are left for two months with an urgent crisis of legitimacy — and for years ahead, an incoming president Biden who will be deemed the beneficiary of massive fraud by a significant chunk of the country. ”

And there’s this, also casting a bad light on Republicans:

. . . . the damage this past week has already inflicted on basic democratic norms is incalculable. More foreign leaders have accepted Biden’s victory than Republican officials. Think about that for a bit.

So be it. Along with Sullivan, I see Trump’s actions as self-centered and carrying the threat of doing incalculable damage to American democracy.

Although nobody can compare Trump’s current behavior with that of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama after Trump’s 2016 victory (Clinton swiftly conceded and Obama facilitated a smooth transition), Sullivan, who sees himself as a conciliatory middle-of-the-roader, doesn’t find the Democrats innocent of the current mess:

Didn’t the Democrats do this first to Trump four years ago? Isn’t payback ok? Sure, many Dems did say that Trump won in 2016 because of Russia, with no solid proof of anything. Yes, Rachel Maddow is a disgrace. And, yes, some accused him of being an illegitimate president because of it, and because of his popular vote deficit. None of this was defensible rhetoric. And it’s a sign that our political culture has not just decayed on the right.

And he continues, arguing, perhaps justifiably, that the increasing wokeness associated with the Left, has also helped erode the strength of American democracy:

I’ve referred to this process of accelerating illegitimacy before as a Weimar dynamic. By Weimar, I don’t mean a direct parallel to the 1920s and early 30s in Germany. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that nightmare. I mean rather a democracy where the center is always much weaker than the extremes on both sides, where democratic procedures lose legitimacy with the public at large with each election cycle, where street violence supplements debate with the connivance of elites, where propaganda replaces information, and where all the energy is destructive.

I mean a conservatism that keeps surrendering to right-radicalism, because it no longer believes in the liberal project writ large. I mean a liberalism so lacking in conviction that it is  incapable of standing up to the woke left. I mean a media where outlets are incapable of housing a variety of opinions — because radicalized readers and activist journalists believe an open debate is a form of harm and oppression. I mean a left bent on packing courts, abolishing the filibuster, targeting religious freedom, and embracing direct race discrimination as payback for the injuries of the past. I mean a right indifferent to democratic norms, convinced that no Democratic president can be legitimate, consumed with conspiracy theories, and paranoid in a way only Americans can muster.

Much as I bridle at criticism of the more moderate Left as cowardly and censorious, there’s some truth in what Sullivan says. What, for example, is responsible for a Trump loss on the one hand, but a general Republican set of victories for Congressional seats and in state governments? Could it be an America thoroughly sick of Trump’s derangement but suspicious of a more extreme Left? If Democrats don’t win both contested seats in Georgia, the Senate will remain Republican and we’re in for at least two years of a stalemate, with Biden governing by executive order.  And I still worry about the possibility that both Biden and Harris will cave in to the Woke, which would damage the future of the Democratic Party.

Perhaps both Sullivan and I should be celebrating rather than neurosing. But the Republicans are behaving even worse about the election than I expected, and come January they will still be with us, enraged by Trump’s loss. The Woke are still with us, too, and, despite several readers’ predictions, I don’t think they’re going away when Biden enters the White House. Wokeness is by now a self-sustaining phenomenon, driven by the Left’s fear of being called racist, pushed by the media, and barreling to hell for lack of a clear brake on wokeness.

And, I suppose, I’m worried about Trump hanging around as a bellwether of Republican ideology. Could he run again in four years? I don’t think so, but he could, god forbid, become a Senior Republican Statesman with considerable influence. And so Sullivan ends not with a bang, but (god forbid again), a prayer. After all, both he and Biden are Catholics:

And [Trump] is not going away. Far from it. If he leaves office voluntarily, it will be to launch a movement founded around that very Weimar of constructs: a corrupt elite that stabbed the American people in the back in 2020, and robbed them of their votes. He will demand total Republican obstruction to anything Biden or the Democrats propose — because they are usurpers and crooks — and ensure his base remains permanently inflamed with anger and resentment. He will sabotage as much of our system as he can. And by pledging immediately to run in 2024, he will control the GOP as totally in the future as he has in the past.

The 2020 election did not resolve this crisis of legitimacy. It found two Americas, very evenly divided, and at war with one another. And in the days since it ended, it has become clearer and clearer not only that this house is divided, but that Trump would be more than happy to see it fall.

An older, frailer man — perhaps the last man standing in our political culture with deep affection for a less polarized past — has been tasked to hold our democracy together, even as the culture keeps tearing it apart. Pray for him.

“Pray for him”? Is this a metaphor for “send good thoughts and wishes” to Biden? Well, those won’t help, either. What we can do is support Biden politically, and go into the streets, which I swear I’ll do, if Trump tries to hold onto the Presidency.

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in Andrew Sullivan, politics, Trumpiana | Comments (49)

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 14, 2020 – 8:00 am

Send in your good wildlife photos, please. We haven’t missed a day for lack of photos ever, as I recall, and I don’t want to start now.

Today we have bird photos from reader Bob Fritz, whose captions are indented.

Cormorant bird photos from La Jolla, California.  The birds congregate in large numbers along the rocks and cliffs.  There are also some sea lions on the rocks.

The Double-crested Cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus) gets its name from the plumage found on breeding adults.
These two were having some kind of dispute which caught the attention of the surrounding birds.
Cormorants do not have a lot of oil in their feathers and therefore must spread their wings in the sun to dry them out.
They are quick in the air, and it took me many attempts to capture one in flight.  Before digital photography I would have used a lot of rolls of film to get this shot!
Sometimes these birds can appear almost prehistoric.
During breeding season the Brandt’s Cormorant (Phalacrocorax penicillatus) has a blue pouch. The eyes are incredible!

Nesting Brandt’s Cormorants.

We watched this one display courtship behavior without success – no mate arrived.  Hopefully the efforts were eventually rewarded!
By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in birds, mammals, photography, readers' wildlife videos | Comments (9)

Saturday: Hili dialogue

November 14, 2020 – 6:30 am

Greet the Sabbath and get your shabbas goy in: it’s Saturday, November 14, 2020: both Pickle Appreciation Day and National Guacamole Day. It’s also National American Teddy Bear Day, World Diabetes Day, and Operating Room Nurse Day (a shout-out to those who helped in my recent hernia operation, including shaving my nether parts).

Today the Google Doodle (click on screenshot) goes to an animation celebrating the life of Maria Tallchief (1925-2011), a native American on one side (her father was from the Osage Nation), often considered America’s first star prima ballerina. It was on November 14, 1942, that Tallchief set out for New York City on her voyage to the Big Time. She danced first for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and then, after it was founded, for the New York City Ballet. Google has produced a nice video about her and the making of the Doodle.

News of the Day:

First, the good news. CNN reports an amazing hole in one by John Rahm at the Master’s. Rahm skipped the ball over the water, and it then took a tortuous course into the hole (see video below). When I wondered why he skipped the ball over the water, I found out that this was a practice round, and it’s a tradition to water-skip a ball at hole 16 during practice. (That sort of takes the shine off the achievement.)

Cloned kitten!: A Chinese man, bereft after the death of his cat “Garlic,” paid $35,000 to have a somatic cell from the late cat put into an egg, the egg implanted into a surrogate mother cat, and, mirabile dictu, they produced a seemingly normal kitten that was a genetic clone of Garlic:  (we shall see if it grows up okay). Although this is done fairly regularly with d*gs, it’s not done so often with cats. Meet Garlic 2.0 and its predecessor (there already appear to be some pattern differences):

Photo: Sinogene

In other news, Franco is still dead and Trump still hasn’t conceded the election. The President-Eject addressed reporters yesterday, but spoke mainly about the pandemic and the vaccine. He didn’t mention the election except very briefly (implying that it’s still undecided). And his team just lost two bids for election recounts, one (actually six separate suits) in Pennsylvania and the other in Michigan, where a judge proclaimed that Team Trump’s allegations of election fraud were unevidenced.

Here’s the NYT’s graph of newly reported Covid cases over time;  the 163,402 new cases reported on Thursday set a record.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 244,250, a big increase of about 1,400 from yesterday’s figure. The world death toll is 1,311,047, a big increase of about 10,200 over yesterday’s report.

Stuff that happened on November 14 includes:

The source was of the “Blue Nile”, and comprised three small springs in the Ethiopian town of Gish Abay.

The first American edition will cost you a cool $65,000:

  • 1886 – Friedrich Soennecken first developed the hole puncher, a type of office tool capable of punching small holes in paper.
  • 1889 – Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in 72 days.

Bly’s real name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran; here’s a photo from Wikipedia labeled, “A publicity photograph taken by the New York World newspaper to promote Bly’s around-the-world voyage.”

Bridges’ attending the school, where of course she was met with much hatred and bigotry (and had to be escorted by U.S. Marshals), was the subject of Norman Rockwell’s famous 1964 painting The Problem We All Live With. During his presidency, Obama had the painting hung outside the Oval Office, despite the presence of the n-word on the wall below:

  • 1967 – American physicist Theodore Maiman is given a patent for his ruby laser systems, the world’s first laser.
  • 1995 – A budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress forces the federal government to temporarily close national parks and museums and to run most government offices with skeleton staffs.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1797 – Charles Lyell, Scottish geologist and lawyer (d. 1875)
  • 1840 – Claude Monet, French painter (d. 1926)

Here’s Monet’s “Cat Sleeping on Bed” (1865):

The first Prime Minister of India, Nehru served for 18 years until his death. Here’s a photo of him with his daughter Indira (the first woman Prime Minister of India, later assassinated by her guards), and his grandsons Rajiv (assassinated in a separate incident), and Sanjay (killed in a plane crash).

Banting, who got the prize at 32 with James Macleod for the discovery of insulin, is still the youngest winner in Physiology or Medicine. He’s shown below (right) with his colleague George Best, co-discoverer who was snubbed at Prize time (Banting split his prize money with Best).

  • 1900 – Aaron Copland, American composer, conductor, and educator (d. 1990
  • 1906 – Louise Brooks, American actress and dancer (d. 1985)
  • 1954 – Condoleezza Rice, American political scientist, academic, and politician, 66th United States Secretary of State

Those who bought the farm on November 14 include:

  • 1716 – Gottfried Leibniz, German mathematician and philosopher (b. 1646)
  • 1915 – Booker T. Washington, American educator, essayist and historian (b. 1856)
  • 1997 – Eddie Arcaro, American jockey and sportscaster (b. 1916)
  • 2016 – Gwen Ifill, American television journalist (b. 1955)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili begins her annual cold-weather kvetching. November is a grim month, weatherwise, in Dobrzyn:

Hili: And once again, Autumn has left all this litter.
A: There is nothing to it, we’ll have to rake it all up before Winter.
In Polish:
Hili: I znów jesień naśmieciła.
Ja: Trudno, trzeba to będzie przed zimą zgrabić.

In nearby Włocławek, Mietek, no longer a tiny kitten, muses. The title is “An Autumn Reverie”:

In Polish: Jesienna zaduma

From Stash Krod:

From Gregory James:

From Su:

Just to remind you that Iran still oppresses everyone, but especially women. Sound up to hear the illegal singing.

Via Simon:

From reader Ken who says, “If this courageous whistleblower isn’t proof positive of massive voting fraud, I dunno what is.” Unbelievable!

Tweets from Matthew. First, a lovely flying fox. Don’t you just want to rub its tummy?

Thomas, the ship’s cat, snug in his hammock:

A musical and educational video. Be sure to turn the sound up:

Here’s the channel-billed cuckoo from Australia, Indonesia and New Guinea: the largest brood parasite in the world:

If you enlarge the drawing, you might be able to see the fish swimming to the left. There’s only one.

 

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in Hili Dialogue, Mietek, Mietek monologue | Comments (23)

The greatness of PCC(E)

November 13, 2020 – 2:15 pm

This CNN bulletin gives what’s likely to be the final Electoral College tally for Biden (306 votes) and Trump (232 votes). (Click on the screenshot.)

I’m letting you know because I was the first person to call the election for Biden AND to give the correct final Electoral College vote for Uncle Joe. This was in a post on November 5.  I ask all the readers to avoid false idols like Nate Silver and recognize the prescience and wisdom of your host, who will now celebrate by taking a nap.

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in elections, self promotion | Comments (51)

The erasure of a book that describes problems with adolescent and teenage girls transitioning to males

November 13, 2020 – 12:45 pm

I was amazed to read, in the Qullette article below, this sentence:

Between 2016 and 2017, the number of females seeking gender surgery quadrupled in the United States.

But the reference cited did indeed show this (the actual increase was 3.88-fold), while the number of males seeking gender reassignment surgery was not only absolutely lower, but increased much less (41%) over a year. If you go back further, the rise is even more dramatic (graph below):

Here’s a plot from a paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior showing the number of people referred each year to the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service. It shows the strong rise in referrals of adolescent females compared to males, and some rise in children as well. In the last 7 years it seems to have gone from fewer then 40 to over 1700 in adolescent females—a roughly 43-fold increase! Clearly, some phenomenon is happening that needs an explanation.

 

 

These kinds of surgeries are manifestations of gender dysphoria: the distress caused when one’s felt gender identity conflicts with one’s sex at birth. The rate of this dysphoria in adolescent and teenage women has risen to the extent that it could be considered an epidemic, which is what some people  think it is: a manifestation of cultural influence that drives many young girls to not only identify as males, but to undergo medical treatment to become hormonally and physically more like males. Shrier’s thesis is that many of these woman would have become lesbians, or reversed their desires, had not gender dysphoria constituted a sort of fad, one seen as a heroic syndrome supported by all kinds of medical and psychological professionals.

In the new book below, which has just entered the Amazon top 100 list, Abigal Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal who also has degrees from Columbia and Oxford and a law degree from Yale, is raising the alarm not about adults who are transgender and undergo medical treatment—Shrier’s fine with that—but about adolescent and teenage girls who claim a different gender identity and then are universally “affirmed” by psychologists, sociologists, and doctors, many undergoing transitions before or while they’re in their teens. It’s undeniable that many of these who transitioned later have second thoughts or regrets about the process, but many of the medical procedures, including hormonal treatments, cause irreversible and injurious changes in the body.

You can get the book, which I’m doing, from Amazon, despite their refusal to take paid ads for it (more on that below).  And its popularity, and overall positive customer reviews, come despite the refusal of mainstream media to advertise or even review this book, which seems to me an important one.

 

Shrier, as I said, deals only with gender dysphoria in young girls and teenage girls, and only one form: “Rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD). Her thesis, as laid out in the Quillette article below (click on screenshot), is this:

What I aim to do, as a journalist, is to investigate cultural phenomena, and here was one worth investigating: Between 2016 and 2017, the number of females seeking gender surgery quadrupled in the United States. Thousands of teen girls across the Western world are not only self-diagnosing with a real dysphoric condition they likely do not have; in many cases, they are obtaining hormones and surgeries following the most cursory diagnostic processes. Schoolteachers, therapists, doctors, surgeons, and medical-accreditation organizations are all rubber-stamping these transitions, often out of fear that doing otherwise will be reported as a sign of “transphobia”—despite growing evidence that most young people who present as trans will eventually desist, and so these interventions will do more harm than good.

The notion that this sudden wave of transitioning among teens is a worrying, ideologically driven phenomenon is hardly a fringe view. Indeed, outside of Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and college campuses, it is a view held by a majority of Americans. There is nothing hateful in suggesting that most teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression, or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria. And yet, here we are.

As I said, Shrier has no issue with adults who, after deciding they’re transgender, decide to have surgery and assume the non-birth gender. She’s solely concerned with the young: why is this suddenly happening, who is supporting it among adults, and what harms can it cause?

Because even raising these questions is considered taboo in today’s political climate, there has been a concerted effort to “erase” Shrier’s book—to pretend it never existed by refusing to advertise or review it. It came to public attention largely because Shrier was interviewed by Joe Rogan on his wildly popular podcast. Even Spotify, which hosts those podcasts, called the interview (as well as Rogan and Shrier) transphobic and threatened to walk out. (See the Rogan-show video here; I recommend it as a substitute for the book if you want to hear about the controversy).

I was able to find only one long-form review of Shrier’s book—one by a feminist writing in Feminist Current, who, despite a few quibbles, praises the book highly. Click on the screenshot to read Megan Mackin’s review:

Between Mackin’s and Shrier’s pieces, you can read about all the attempts by the media (and others) to pretend Shrier’s book doesn’t exist. They include these:

  1. Amazon refuses to host paid ads for the book on its site, though it allows paid ads for books praising medical transitions for teenage girls.
  2. The book wasn’t even reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus, two of the most important pre-publication venues for calling attention to books.
  3. As I mentioned, Spotify employees, calling both Rogan and Shrier “transphobes”, threatened to walk out. Fortunately, the Rogan show episode is still up.
  4. The National Association of Science Writers removed Sean Scott from their discussion group because he had said, without having read the book, that it “should hopefully shed some overdue light on a very sensitive, politically charged topic that potentially carries lifelong medical consequences.” Really offensive and transphobic, right?
  5. Parents started a GoFundMe account to support Shrier, but GoFundMe closed the account twice, though they’re happy to host fundraisers for teenage girls who want transition surgery.
  6. As Mackin notes, “Shrier contributes frequently to the Wall Street Journal, and among her degrees is a Juris Doctor from Yale University. She is a skilled writer who offers complex ideas with accessible delivery. It is possible the media would have covered her work had she resorted to obfuscating postmodernist jargon. Shrier has received no reviews from the established liberal press — not from the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Kirkus Review, nor any other mainstream online publications. Amazon, which still sells and thus profits from Irreversible Damage — garnering rave reviews there — has refused to allow sponsored ads to promote the book.

And, finally, this just happened. Someone beefed to Target that they were carrying Shrier’s book, and Target removed it.

Here’s the beefer, who apparently removed the tweet:

And some pushback:

At any rate, despite the lack of media support for Shrier’s bestselling book, she is not casting herself as a victim; in fact, her ending of the Quillette piece is measured and rational, but passionate as well:

I want to be clear about something. I don’t believe that I’ve been harmed by these suppression efforts. I am not entitled to book reviews by any media outlet. I sold plenty of books without Amazon’s “sponsored ads.” Joe Rogan (and Megyn Kelly, who also had me on) have much larger platforms than the outlets that pretended this book doesn’t exist. And while this topic has become a fascination of mine, I am no activist. I will pursue other subjects and write other books.

But there is a victim here—the public. A network of activists and their journalistic enablers have largely succeeded in suppressing a real discussion of the over-diagnosis of gender dysphoria among vulnerable girls. As you read this, there are parents everywhere being lectured to by authority figures about how they have to affirm their daughter’s sudden interest in becoming a boy—no questions asked. From Amazon to I Am Jazz, everyone is telling them that transition is the path to happiness, and those who question this narrative are bigots. So they stare at their shoes and let the conversion therapy take its toll.

This is what censorship looks like in 21st-century America. It isn’t the government sending police to your home. It’s Silicon Valley oligopolists implementing blackouts and appeasing social-justice mobs, while sending disfavored ideas down memory holes. And the forces of censorship are winning. Not only because their efforts to censor leave almost no trace. They are winning because, thus far, most Americans have been content to surrender virtually every liberty in exchange for the luxury of having products delivered to their door. Most would happily submit to the rule of Big Tech, so long as their Netflix isn’t disrupted.

At some point, it will cross each of our minds to question an item on the ever-growing list of unsayables. We will find ourselves smeared, or blocked, or the target of a woke campaign. And we will look for support from those with only a dim recollection of why they once cared about free speech. Those who will note tyranny’s advance with the pitiless smile of a low-level bureaucrat already anticipating the door-delivered Cherry Garcia and hours of uninterrupted streaming: “You brought this on yourself, didn’t you?”

Here’s the end of Mackin’s review, the only thoughtful and longish review I could find anywhere (there are, of course, short reviews on Amazon and GoodReads):

Shrier — not a radical feminist — understands the need for a transfer of feminist ideas, which may encourage other women to take a deeper look. Girls’ lives matter. I give Shrier credit for authoring this necessary book. It is the first to put the many pieces together clearly and accessibly. Read Irreversible Damage and share it with others — it is a brave and daring book that ought to be part of the public discussion.

(Mackin also discusses the many people who profit financially and professionally from affirming, both psychologically and medically, the self-diagnoses of girls as gender dysphoric.)

It’s shameful that a book like Shrier’s is publicly erased by mainstream media and stores like Target because it somehow is seen as “transphobic”.  No matter what your preconceptions are, or what you’ve read about girls transitioning before or as teenagers, this book seems like a must-read. It’s a dereliction of duty that major journalistic outlets haven’t reviewed it and that medical associations so readily affirm medical treatment of gender dysphoria in the young. This is how deeply cowed we have become by wokeness, part of which is the universal glorification of gender dysphoria, whose sufferers are seen as heroes. (That may, in fact, partly account for its rapid spread.) When those sufferers are in their teens, though, society should be moving a lot more carefully than it’s doing now.

All too often our Cancel Culture tries to eliminate discussion of issues that are vital in deciding how we should think and act as social beings. The attempts of many to pretend that this book doesn’t exist, and therefore avoid Shrier’s difficult questions, is a reprehensible example of that culture.

 

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in Cancel Culture, censorship, health, medicine and health, sex and gender issues | Comments (57)

Why are old white men so much worse than young white men?

November 13, 2020 – 9:30 am

When I open the latest issue of our student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, I often get similar feelings as when I read HuffPost: “This rag is way too woke.” It’s especially depressing here because of the big gap between the students’ wokeness and the University’s ideals, which are to promulgate nearly complete free speech and to refrain from the University making any official statement about politics, morality, or ideology beyond those necessary to ensure that the University functions as an equal-opportunity venue for learning and exploring ideas. (See our list of “Foundational Principles”.) Both of these principles are meant to promote free discussion, in hopes that the clash of ideas brings knowledge, awareness, and learning how to learn.

Here’s an example from the Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Protest and Dissent:

In our view, dissent and protest are integral to the life of the University. Dissent and protest should be affirmatively welcomed, not merely tolerated, by the University. Especially in a university community, the absence of dissent and protest—not its presence—is a cause for concern. The passionate expression of non-conforming ideas is 2 both a cause and an effect of the intellectual climate that defines this University in particular. In addition, dissent and protest—and public demonstrations by groups and individuals—play a role in the University’s educational mission: being a member of an educational community that values dissent and protest is, in part, how people develop as citizens of a democracy.

In contrast, many (but by no means all) of our students want repression of “hate speech”, deplatforming of speakers, the right to avoid punishment for disrupting speech, and, of course, defunding and eliminating the campus police. A major editorial in the new Maroon, for instance, bemoans the possibility that after our current President—Robert Zimmer—steps down at the end of this academic year, the committee chosen to select his replacement consists of uniformly wealthy and overwhelmingly white males. (That isn’t true: there are two women, one Hispanic man, and one black man on the committee of 12, in addition to Zimmer himself). The students are afraid that Zimmer’s replacement will be just like him, and want “faculty, staff, students, and community members” to be on the search committee lest the policies of Zimmer (including retaining the campus cops) be continued.  With a committee like that, we’d wind up getting somebody like George “Can I Pee Now?” Bridges, the invertebrate president of The Evergreen State College. In fact, the committee should strive to get someone like Zimmer, as he’s fought hard to keep the University of Chicago a bastion of free speech and unrestricted inquiry (he’s also been hugely successful in the President’s other job: raising money for the University).

It’s not the disparity of age, sex, and color between students and trustees or President that worries me (our Provost, by the way, is an Asian woman)—it’s the disparity between these two groups in what they think a university is for and how it should be run. The students want the purpose of our University to be social engineering, and preparing students to be social engineers; the faculty and administration want the students to learn and learn how to think; to bathe in and ponder rarified ideas. We don’t see the university as a way to inculcate students with certain societal values, but as a way to get them to think about and arrive at their own values.

Contrast the Founding Principles above, for example, with a booklet produced by our Leftier students, the Dis-Orientation Guide for 2020: 59 pages of wokeness that begins by repudiating our principles of free speech as inconsistently applied (they’re not) and rejecting the Kalven Report’s admonition for the University to avoid taking official political stands. In my view, if our President is replaced by pliable, woke, and invertebrate Presidents like those of Evergreen State, Yale, and Smith, the unique aspects of the University of Chicago will be gone. Every class would begin with a land acknowledgment, and the faculty would have to “get in the canoe”. (Do watch that video for a horrifying dose of faculty and administrative self-abasement.)

Zimmer and some of the trustees are, of course Old White Males, a trope that appears in the same issue with an editorial with the customary critique of “core curricula” everywhere:

Placing readings in relation to current world events would not only deepen students’ understanding of content, but it would widen the context under which we could apply it later on. Untangling the pages of dense theory written in the 17th century generally does not do wonders for student engagement—it is when what we read is made relatable that it becomes interesting to us, and it is then that we become motivated to push our reading further.

The solution could be as easy as including more authors of different races and backgrounds: namely, less [sic] old white men.

I’d have some sympathy with this—after all, diverse voices emit diverse ideas and viewpoints—if the core hadn’t already been revamped to be diverse in many ways. Check out some of the courses offered, and I’ve put part of a pdf below.  You can explore more sample courses and sample texts by starting here (the “general education requirement” of 15 courses that constitutes the Core), and clicking around. Check out “Civilization Studies” for a panoply of courses that will appeal to those who want more ethnic and gender diversity. The Core is superb, and is one reason many students come here.

So I absolutely reject the idea that the core, which comprises considerable and diverse courses, is heavily conditioned with too many “old white males.” Of course if you’re interested in Western Civ or Western Literature, you’re going to find it OWM-heavy, for Western civilization developed at a time when women and minorities were shoved to the margin. Come back in 200 years.

But what I don’t understand is why the denigration of OLD white males? Are YOUNG white males better? Shakespeare had already produced some of his finest work by age 40, and I could name many pillars of literature and art, who, even though white, made their contributions when young.  Is the underlying idea that old white males are more conservative than young ones? Well, maybe now, but if you go back a few hundred years, even young white males would be seen through modern eyes as not only conservative, but often bigoted.

What we have here is again a conflict between two ideals of liberalism: diversity and anti-ageism. If it’s racist and sexist to denigrate authors because they’re white and male, then it’s triply pernicious by being ageist and adding that they’re bad because they’re old.

And to those who dismiss white men because they’re old, I have two words in response: Bernie Sanders.

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in college students behaving badly, colleges and universities, education, wokeness | Comments (56)

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 13, 2020 – 8:00 am

Send in your photos, please! That is, if you want this feature to keep going.

Today’s selection is from regular Mark Sturtevant, whose IDs and captions I’ve indented.

I had recently described a visit to an “ichneumon tree”, a dead tree that had several giant ichneumon wasps on it. These are large wasps, and females have a very long ovipositor (described as the longest of any insect) for drilling into wood to parasitize the larva of a ‘horntail’ wasp. The ichneumons would repeatedly come to this tree for several days, and so I made it a high priority to come back as soon as possible for more pictures. Sure enough, on the second visit the wasps were still there, but among them was — a Mysterious Visitor.

To reprise, the first pictures show our two local species of giant ichneumons, both of which were on the tree. First is Megarhyssa macrurus…

… and then the very formal looking Megarhyssa atrata. The slender wasp also in the pictures is one of several male giant ichneumons (possibly M. macrurus) that were presumably hoping to pass on their genes.

Next is where things began to get a little weird. Here is a M. atrata, but note the little wasp in the foreground. At first I gave this no thought.

After some time, I noticed that the little wasp had moved on to one of the M. atrata females! The big ichneumon definitely was annoyed at this, as she wandered restlessly up and down the trunk and uselessly tried to swipe the little pest away. But the little wasp was able to stay upon her by sitting along her midline where it could not be reached. Eventually the giant ichneumon gave up and began to drill into the wood while her rider seemed to watch attentively. This was baffling.

At first, I was thinking the little Mysterious Visitor was a hyperparasite (a parasite of a parasite). Indeed, my perusal online turned up a group of ichneumons in the Xoridinae subfamily that do parasitize ichneumons, while others are parasites of horntails. So that seemed a possibility. But I sent pictures to BugGuide to get expert opinions on the matter. For those who do not know this resource, BG is an informal but enormous online database and picture repository for insects (and other arthropods) of North America. It has various search functions that are very helpful at identifying critters. The reason why I can post pictures of obscure arthropods with ID’s is mostly because of searching through BG. Anyway, upon receipt of my pictures, a crack team of Entomologists leaped into action to study the situation (at least that is what it seemed like). An answer came very quickly: our little mystery wasp was likely from the genus Rhysella – so actually in the same subfamily as the giant ichneumons and not the subfamily I had thought. More specifically, this is a male, and so is presumably very confused about his mating prospects (!) It is known that male wasps are often “twitterpated” by females of the wrong species.

To wrap up, here are some more damselfly pictures. While kayaking on a local lake, I noted that out on the lily pads were these beautiful orange damselflies, and that was something new. A second trip with a camera soon followed, and here is a picture. This is a young female lilypad forktail damselfly (Ischnura kellicotti), a species that spend their entire lives out on lilypads. When she matures, she will develop a pale blue color, while males will turn blue and so resemble a ‘bluet’ damselfly even though they belong to a different group. By the way, taking a heavy camera out on a tippy kayak is extremely dumb. Don’t do it.

The last picture is possibly of a young male ‘familiar’ bluet damselfly (Enallagma civile) that will later turn a lovely cobalt blue as he matures. Nothing remarkable, really, but this is one of the first successful pictures that I had taken with the help of the marvelous Helicon Fb tube, which is an attachment for doing rapid focus bracketing with an ordinary Canon or Nikon dslr camera. Focus bracketing is where one takes a series of pictures at slightly different focal points, and these are later ‘stacked’ with special software to make a single picture with extended focal range. So now I too am a “stacker”. 
 
By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in insects, photography, readers' wildlife videos | Comments (13)