Month: January 2021

Winter ducks

January 31, 2021 • 2:00 pm

I was much relieved when the ducks left the pond after it began icing over, but I’ll be damned if the curséd fowl haven’t returned. They’re not here every day, and I have no idea where they go, but two or three pair seem to drop by every few days. And, softy that I am, when I see them I hie myself down to the pond with two containers: one of “scratch grain” (corn, seeds, and grains), and the other of high-class Mazuri duck chow. They’re always hungry, too, which would make me feel guilty if I didn’t feed them.

First, though, some winter scenes at Botany Pond:

The pond is very placid and quiet after a snowfall. Ice has formed everywhere except at the fresh-water inlet and at the two bubblers that oxygenate the water. There is little open water and no natural food, ergo no ducks:

The students are quite good at making snowmen (snow people?). Here’s a good one; it even has a fishing pole.

Then someone put two ducks on its head: a big one pecking the snowperson’s head and a smaller one on top of that. There are also tiny ducks at the base:

Duck tracks in the snow tell us that waterfowl have been here:

But wait! A pair showed up late this morning!

The hen and drake were familiar to me, as the hen has been here several times. She has a distinctive ribbon of dark coloration going horizontally across her bill. And of course she has her handsome swain. They could be Yuri and Lara (named from “Dr. Zhivago”), but I can’t find my last post asking readers to suggest names.  They got lost of scratch grain:

And duck pellets, which you can see strewn on the snow:

They were hungry; they ate like gangbusters. Here’s a video of the unnamed pair eating pellets (this was from January 26, but you see it’s the same hen):

And they love the scratch grain. Note that the hen in particular (Lara?) has to wash down nearly every bit of the grain with a drink of fresh water. The drake doesn’t need so much water:

Another pair showed up later, but I haven’t photographed them yet. I’ll do so, and feed them again, when I go home.

Isn’t she cute? (You can see the snow is still falling.)

After a huge lunch, the two repaired to one of the small remaining areas of open water. I wish these ducks had flown south, but I guess we’re stuck with them. Lord knows where they go on the days when they’re not here.

Why do backs itch so much?

January 31, 2021 • 12:00 pm

A while back, someone gave me a Chinese backscratcher: a piece of bamboo with a hand carved at the end with slightly separated fingers.  I use it every couple of days when my back works up a good itch, and believe me, it provides substantial relief!  Here’s what mine looks like:

But when I use it I’ve pondered two questions.

A.) Is the relief you get when scratching your back pleasure, or simply the removal of discomfort? (Or are they equivalent?) This same question applies when you finally make it to the restroom after having to hold your bowels or bladder for a long time. I wonder if philosophers have debated this question.

B.) Why do backs itch so much? I have two theories here, which are mine. The first is that they itch no more than do fronts (i.e., your chest), but we’re unconsciously scratching our fronts all the time, while we can’t reach our backs without a special implement. But I don’t notice myself scratching my chest.

The other is that dirt and oils accumulate on your back more than they do on your front, simply because you can’t reach your back so easily in the bath or shower. I don’t have a sponge on a stick or anything like that, and so am forced to wash my back by reaching around with a piece of soap. I’m never sure that does a great job because it’s hard to reach all the places.  If any accumulated back schmutz makes you itch, this could be an explanation.

Maybe there are other theories as well, but these are the only two I’ve thought of.

John McWhorter vs. Ibram X. Kendi on whether American schools are structurally racist

January 31, 2021 • 10:00 am

Truly, I don’t understand why author John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, hasn’t yet been the subject of a social-justice campaign to demonize and erase him. While he’s black, he’s also strongly opposed to what he sees as the “religion” of anti-racism promulgated by people like Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Robin DiAngelo, and McWhorter speaks plainly and passionately. The first piece below is an example of his strong and uncompromising views and language.

I suppose McWhorter is still afloat because his arguments against the more extreme forms of anti-racism, as evinced in the following two pieces, are both clear and hard to refute. He’s fiercely smart and writes really well, and if you come up against him with ammunition consisting solely of offense and outrage, you’re not going to fare well. This week, McWhorter published two pieces worth reading, one on his Substack site and the other at The Atlantic, where he’s a contributing writer.  Ibram X. Kendi struck back at the second piece on Twitter, accusing McWhorter of distortion and confusion. I’ll maintain that Kendi didn’t read McWhorter very carefully.

Both pieces characterize recent anti-racist protests and strikes on campus as examples of “performances”—presumably rituals of the religion that McWhorter says anti-racism has become.

First, here’s a free article at McWhorter’s new Substack site, It Bears Mentioning. Click on the screenshot to read:

This piece recounts the suspension of a law professor, Jason Kilborn, at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Kilborn’s crime was citing the n- and b-words on an exam this way: “n*****” and “b****”. We all know what those redacted symbols stand for, and Kilborn was not using them to incite students, but as examples in an exam question about an employment discrimination case.

Kilborn has used this kind of expurgation on exams for a long time, but, the Zeitgeist being what it is, this year’s outcome was predictable: a group of students got highly offended and protested strongly. Kilborn was suspended from his class as well as from some of his university duties. He’s also now banned from campus because he supposedly poses a physical threat to the students:

One black student claimed that they experienced heart palpitations upon reading the words. During an hours-long Zoom talk with a black student representing the protesters, Kilborn made a flippant remark to the effect that the law school dean may suppose that he is some kind of “homicidal maniac” – upon which the student reported to the dean that Kilborn indeed may be one. Kilborn is no longer teaching the class, is relieved of his administrative duties, and because of the possible physical threat he poses to black students because of the Hyde-like tendency he referred to, he is barred from campus.

McWhorter goes on to say what few would dare to say, even though the point is worth arguing:

But let’s pull the camera back, take a deep breath, and look at something like this pillorying of Kilborn with clear eyes. If a black student is traumatized to such a degree by seeing “n*****” on a piece of paper, then that student needs psychological counseling. We all understand the history and power of the N-word, but we all also understand the simple issue of degree. That student who got heart palpitations needs help, and what the suits at the University of Illinois in Chicago should have done as gently direct this student to the proper services, which the school surely provides, for people who have fallen away from the ability to cope with normal life. . .

. . . To be a modern enlightened American is to have internalized a kind of cognitive shunt or patch upon our processing of cases like this. We are to pretend that until slurs of this kind no longer exist, we must accept it as ordinary and perhaps even healthy for smart young people to fall to pieces at the mere of sight of one even in writing and carefully expurgated. . .

. . .  in all of this, we are taught not to make sense. We are taught to suspend our rational faculties in favor of larger, abstract, and often incoherent imperatives valued as demonstration of our moral fitness. In other words, we are taught to think about race issues religiously.

And has the following interpretation not crossed people’s minds—not just with protests against black racism, but protests against nearly all form of presumed “bigotry” on campus? It’s the overreaction of the offended that is so striking:

Yes, I am taking the students too seriously. As in, I am only pretending to take them seriously at all. As all of us can detect on some level, black students who purport upset of this degree, at passing things that their very equivalents just some years ago never even noticed, are faking it.

They are acting. It is a performance. The issue here is not “black fragility,” which is why there is a question mark after the title of this post. Such students are not fragile; they are histrionic. They are pretending to be hurt.

McWhorter, though, tries to empathize, and in fact he seems angrier at white people who bow to these protests than to the African-Americans who make them:

The formal expression is one of anger and injury, but behind this is a balm, the sense that you are worthy on some level of a cookie or a pat on the head just for getting through your days and weeks. It gives a person a sense of significance. It gives you a sense of significance as a member of a group on a fraught but epic trajectory towards justice. You, in times when civil rights can seem so much less dramatic a thing than it was 50 years ago and before, have a sense of being part of that “Struggle,” as it used to be put. That doesn’t make a person a monster.

It goes on, with McWhorter ending by saying that people who sympathize with people so easily offended should not only refer those people to counseling (that’s incendiary enough!), but, by refusing to call the students out, are themselves being racists:

Protests of this kind test us on how committed we really are to assessing black people according to the content of their character. Normal people don’t fall to pieces when seeing “n*****” on a piece of paper, regardless of their race. The neoracists who have barred Jason Kilborn from campus in pretending this isn’t true are operating upon an assumption that black people are morons. This is a rather fascinating rendition of “antiracism,” and to treat it as “allyship” is nothing less than a cultural sickness.

I doubt that you could get away with writing words like that in a magazine like The Atlantic; they’ll have to be on your own website. But surely hyperfragility—which is not new; remember Haidt and Lukianoff’s 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure? (See my post on it here.) That book advances the thesis that modern parents and educational institutions have instilled three guiding principles in the young: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people.”  It’s a book well worth reading, and explains a lot of the outrage and claimed hyperfragility (indeed, it’s not just claimed, it’s often internalized) among the young.

But I digress. This week’s fracas is between McWhorter’s piece in The Atlantic (below), and Ibram X. Kendi’s response on twitter. Click the screenshot to read:

I can be briefer here, as McWhorter summarizes anti-racism protests that I’ve described many times on this site: protests at Princeton (here and here), Bryn Mawr, New York City’s private Dalton School, and Northwestern University. (There are others that McWhorter doesn’t mention, including Smith College, Harvard, Middlebury College, and, of course, the poster boy for knee-jerk offense, The Evergreen State College.

What the anti-racism protests have in common at these schools is that the students have indicted the institutions for pervasive, ubiquitous and clear “structural racism”, despite the fact that none of the schools are really that way at all. (Neither is the University of Chicago, which hasn’t yet been shaken by nationally-publicized accusations.) Yes, of course some people are racists at these institutions, but one would be hard pressed to find “structural racism”: that is, policies and practices embedded in the institution that predictably lead to discriminatory outcomes. In fact, all of these schools, my own included, are deeply engaged in trying to admit students and faculty of color and to create programs that give support to minority students.

McWhorter is evenhanded on the issue, but will not admit that such schools have a deep problem with racism (and, as far as I can see, he’s right):

As extreme as these documents and actions seem, they would qualify as legitimate if these campuses actually were bastions of social injustice. This is doubtful.

My colleague Conor Friedersdorf has documented that even some of the faculty who signed the Princeton petition were not necessarily united in adherence to its specific demands, or in agreement as to the depths of the university’s depravity. Many wanted, simply, to deliver a nebulous acknowledgment that some anti-racist efforts would be beneficial. Although racism surely exists at Princeton, as it does throughout American society, Princeton is not the utter sinkhole of bigotry and insensitivity that the letter implies. American universities have long been more committed to anti-racism than almost any other institutions. Princeton is where, for example, Woodrow Wilson’s name was recently removed from the name of the School of Public and International Affairs in acknowledgment of his implacably racist beliefs—albeit in response to student pressure.

The issue, as so often, is degree. Most liberals will acknowledge that it is useful and even urgent for institutions such as Princeton to be vigilant against subtle biases in attitudes and procedures. The question is whether, despite this modus operandi having been well established in such places for a few decades now, they remain so infested with entrenched racism that transformational manifestos such as the Princeton letter constitute progress as opposed to manipulation.

Dalton and Princeton in particular have, even before the recent protests began, been examining themselves for racist practices or policies, and have made substantial changes in the last decade. Indeed, all  of those schools have.

You can read McWhorter’s Atlantic piece yourself, but his message, at it was in the Substack piece, is that administrators and rational people must stand up to irrational protests and demands, for there is never any end to them. Demands that are reasonable, of course, should be accommodated, but every list of “demands” that I’ve seen is at least 60% “unreasonable.” The point is that if you cave into unreasonable demands, as Bryn Mawr, Evergreen State, and the Dalton School has (or is set to), the protestors learn that making demands is not just a way to assert power, but to institute both the programmatic and ideological changes they want. As McWhorter concludes,

The writers of manifestos might classify resistance as racist, denialist backlash. But the civil, firm dismissal of irrational demands is, rather, a kind of civic valor. School officials must attend to the fine line between enlightenment and cowardice—for the benefit of not only themselves, but the Black people they see themselves as protecting.

That was too much for Ibram Kendi, who, in a series of nine tweets in this thread, highlights and attack’s McWhorter’s piece. Here you go.

In fact it is Kendi who misrepresents McWhorter. As you see above, McWhorter notes that all these campuses probably have some residual racism; but they’re not festering hotbeds of structural racism where crosses get burned on a regular basis.

Kendi argues, for example, that McWhorter praises a professor who said that student and faculty demands will lead to a “civil war on campus.” Here’s what McWhorter said about that professor.

Thus the model must be classics professor Joshua Katz at Princeton, who last summer took issue with the Princeton letter in a Quillette article, pointing out that the demands would lead to “civil war on campus,” and calling out a Black student association that serially harassed several Black students who disagreed with its philosophy. (Inadvisedly, he referred to the association as a “terrorist” group.) Predictable calls on social media for his dismissal were not successful because his tenure would have made it difficult, but in September, the American Council of Learned Societies withdrew his recent appointment as one of the federation’s two delegates to the Union Académique Internationale, on the basis of the social-media response to his article.

This is not McWhorter agreeing that there will be a civil war at Princeton, but quoting Katz, and even disagreeing with him about calling the black student association terrorists. McWhorter does agree that continual bowing before extreme anti-racist demands will eventually destroy the reputation of colleges (see his piece), but that’s all, and that’s his point. Evergreen State has already gone down the tubes, and I suspect that Smith and Bryn Mawr are circling the drain.

Kendi adds that “white supremacist violence is being fomented” by pieces like McWhorter’s. That’s the same kind of hyperbolic overreaction that we see in the students themselves. Remember that McWhorter is a black man and certainly not a white supremacist. But even so, I defy you to read his piece and point out places where he’s fomenting “white supremacist violence.”

Kendi argues that all the institutions have “widespread and pervasive inequities and injustices,” and that McWhorter overlooks these. Well, as far as the “inequities” are concerned, yes, there are inequalities of outcome (that’s my definition of “inequities”), but those are surely the results of historical injustice that have set back African-American, not of present “structural racism” at these schools. And what are the injustices? I can’t think of any, though I’ve tried. Remember, they have to be “pervasive.”

In a later tweet, Kendi unfairly lumps McWhorter with Trump and “white supremactists” when asserting that bowing to anti-racist demands will destroy or damage universities. But it will surely damage them, just as it’s fatally damaged Evergreen State. Perhaps places like Harvard and Princeton won’t go down completely, for their names are so revered, and the education there is still top notch, but eventually this kind of catering to student demands—and here I mean the unreasonable ones—changes the mission of American universities from allowing students to learn and debate freely into engineering social justice along the lines of critical theory (Critical Race Theory, in fact). Even as I write, curricula are being molded to the tenets of Critical Theory, and that will eventually create a culture of ideological conformity and an output of students not trained to either argue or think for themselves. The universities may endure, but they won’t be the places of learning that have attracted students from throughout the world.

The problem with Kendi is that he thinks one has to accept the whole hog of Critical Race Theory, and if you don’t you’re a racist. And if colleges don’t, they are racist. In response, McWhorter probably thinks that Kendi himself is a racist by adhering to the soft bigotry of low expections and the assumption that minorities are hyperfragile in a way that must to be catered to. Kendi simply can’t grasp McWhorter’s contention that these issues are “matters of degree,” which is true. To Kendi and his minions, you’re either a Kendian antiracist or a racist; there is no in between.

And so the debate continues, and it’s fascinating. The important thing is that it remains a debate (and one in which I’m participating). Many students and faculty, however, would construe McWhorter’s words as “hate speech” and demand that they be censored. And that would end the debate. And that’s what they want when they hedge about “free speech”. The last thing the “free speech, but. . .” crowd wantw to hear is McWhorter’s claim:

The neoracists who have barred Jason Kilborn from campus in pretending this isn’t true are operating upon an assumption that black people are morons. This is a rather fascinating rendition of “antiracism,” and to treat it as “allyship” is nothing less than a cultural sickness.

If anything would be construed by the Offended as “hate speech”, that is it. But it isn’t: it’s a strong claim that McWhorter buttresses with evidence.

And so the debate goes on.

Sunday’s Faux Duck o’ the Week

January 31, 2021 • 8:00 am

John Avise is winding down his series of faux ducks: waterfowl that people think are ducks but aren’t.  Your job is to look at the photos and then guess the species. After trying, go below the fold for the ID, some Faux Duck Facts, and a range map.

Swimming partially submerged:

Adult male:

Adult female:

Juvenile:

Breeding pair tending their stick nest in mangroves:

Female showing flexible neck and turkey-like tail:

Showing the snake-like neck:

Sunbathing:

Yawning and showing the gular pouch:

Swimming with only neck above water:

Head portrait of male:

Another head portrait:

Close-up view of head:

Characteristic flight silhouette:

Click “continue reading” to learn the species and some Fun Faux Duck Facts, as well as to see a range map: Continue reading “Sunday’s Faux Duck o’ the Week” →

Sunday: Hili dialogue

January 31, 2021 • 6:30 am

We had our first big snow last night, and it’s still coming down. I estimate about 7 inches so far, but it may get up to a foot. Here’s a shot on my way to work:

Welcome to Sunday, January 31, 2021. National Hot Chocolate Day (I’m drinking some now, with two shots of espresso and plenty of miniature marshmallows!). It’s also a day for a bad libation and a bad comestible: Brandy Alexander Day and (OMG) Eat Brussel Sprouts Day. On a better note, it’s Scotch Tape Day, celebrating the day in 1930 when 3M began marketing the miracle tape, and Inspire Your Heart with Art Day. Here’s the world’s best painting:

News of the Day:

In a NYT op-ed that attributed the frenzy of school renaming in San Francisco to a pandemic-caused pause in the pursuit of normal activities, Ross Douthat gives a link to a Google spreadsheet giving the committee’s reasons for renaming 44 schools.  He also says this:

After the vote, I spent some time reading the Google spreadsheet helpfully compiled by the renaming effort, which listed the justification for each erasure: for Washington, slave-owning; for Revere, helping to command a doomed Revolutionary War military operation on the Maine coast that nonetheless supposedly contributed to the “colonization” of the Penobscot tribe; for Stevenson, writing a “cringeworthy poem” that includes words like “Eskimo” and “Japanee.” (It may not surprise you that some of these justifications, often pulled from Wikipedia, included significant errors of historical fact.)

Trump’s second impeachment trial is set to begin February 8, presided over by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), now out of the hospital where he was sent for muscle spasms. Why isn’t Chief Justice John Roberts in charge again? Because reasons (as the kids say):

Chief Justice John Roberts oversaw the first Trump impeachment trial, as required by the Constitution. But the law is silent on who presides over the trial of a former president, and the chief justice declined to participate in this one, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who said that Mr. Leahy was next in line for the role as president pro tempore of the Senate.

“Sen. Leahy’s job is a little tougher in that he doesn’t come into it with the basic presumption of impartiality that normally attaches to a judge,” said Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor who is an authority on impeachment. “He’s going to have to strain to appear evenhanded in any circumstance where there is sort of a partisan valence to any decision that he makes.”

But it really doesn’t matter: Trump is not going to be convicted. The trial also looks to be pretty short: a week or less.

Speaking of the trial, CNN reports that all five of the attorneys Trump took on to defend him during the impeachment trial have quit. He is now without legal representation, and with the trial set for about a week from now.  The reason? Well, here’s a possible one:

A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he’s left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard.

An exciting story from HuffPost (not!), using their cringemaking clickbait. Click on screenshot. Isn’t “they got arrested, not antifa” clever? (Not!)

A food writer at the Washington Post published an endearing and mouthwatering essay on the advantages of being a regular at a food emporium or restaurant, especially during the pandemic.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 439,421, an increase of about 2,700 deaths over yesterday’s figure. We are likely to exceed half a million deaths by March. The reported world death toll stands at 2,230,914, an increase of about 12,900 deaths over yesterday’s tota—about 9 deaths per minute.

Stuff that happened on January 31 includes:

  • 1606 – Gunpowder Plot: Four of the conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, are executed for treason by hanging, drawing and quartering, for plotting against Parliament and King James.
  • 1747 – The first venereal diseases clinic opens at London Lock Hospital.
  • 1865 – American Civil War: The United States Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery and submits it to the states for ratification.
  • 1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Robert E. Lee becomes general-in-chief.

After his appointment, Lee was busy creating units of slaves to fight the Union. Oy!

  • 1915 – World War I: Germany is the first to make large-scale use of poison gas in warfare in the Battle of Bolimów against Russia.

As Wikipedia notes, this wasn’t successful: “The Battle of Bolimów was the first attempt by the Germans at a large-scale use of poison gas; the eighteen thousand gas shells they fired proved unsuccessful when the xylyl bromide—a type of tear gas—was blown back at their own lines. The gas caused few, if any, casualties, however, since the cold weather caused it to freeze, rendering it ineffective.”

Here’s Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Lev Kamenev “[motivating] the troops to fight on the Soviet-Polish war. 1 May 1920.”

Here’s Slovik. “Although 21,000 American soldiers were given varying sentences for desertion during World War II, including 49 death sentences, Slovik’s death sentence was the only one that was carried out.” He was 24.

  • 1945 – World War II: About 3,000 inmates from the Stutthof concentration camp are forcibly marched into the Baltic Sea at Palmnicken (now Yantarny, Russia) and executed.
  • 1949 – These Are My Children, the first television daytime soap opera, is broadcast by the NBC station in Chicago.
  • 1950 – President Truman orders the development of thermonuclear weapons.
  • 1971 – Apollo program: Apollo 14: Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell, aboard a Saturn V, lift off for a mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon.

Here’s Shepard on the Moon; as a Mercury astronaut, he was also the first American to travel into space (1961, only ten years before).

  • 2001 – In the Netherlands, a Scottish court convicts Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and acquits another Libyan citizen for their part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
  • 2020 – The United Kingdom‘s membership within the European Union ceases in accordance with Article 50, after 47 years of being a member state.

It’s the first anniversary of Brexit!

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1797 – Franz Schubert, Austrian pianist and composer (d. 1828)
  • 1872 – Zane Grey, American author (d. 1939)
  • 1929 – Rudolf Mössbauer, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2011)
  • 1931 – Ernie Banks, American baseball player and coach (d. 2015)

Known as “Mr. Cub”, Banks played his entire career with the Chicago Cubs, form 1953 to 1971. He was one of the greatest players ever (and voted by fans as the “Best Cub of all Time”), but he never played in a World Series:

  • 1937 – Suzanne Pleshette, American actress (d. 2008)
  • 1947 – Nolan Ryan, American baseball player
  • 1981 – Justin Timberlake, American singer-songwriter, dancer, and actor

Those who hied themselves underground on January 31 include:

  • 1606 – Guy Fawkes, English conspirator, leader of the Gunpowder Plot (b. 1570)
  • 1888 – John Bosco, Italian priest and educator, founded the Salesian Society (b. 1815)
  • 1956 – A. A. Milne, English author, poet, and playwright, created Winnie-the-Pooh (b. 1882)
  • 1969 – Meher Baba, Indian spiritual master (b. 1894)

Here’s Meher Baba with his famous slogan. I have this photo on my wall beside my desk, having put it up in a vain attempt to be happy:

Giant Baba is on the left. Perhaps Meher Baba should have been called “Mini Baba”:

  • 2007 – Molly Ivins, American journalist and author (b. 1944)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is already sick of winter:

Hili: There used to be green grass everywhere.
A: It will return.
Hili: Let it hurry.
In Polish:
Hili: Tu wszędzie była zielona trawa.
Ja: Będzie znowu.
Hili: Niech się pospieszy.

And here’s Szaron, washing his face upside-down:

From Ken, a post that requires a preliminary explanation:

As you make recall, when environmental activist Greta Thunberg was named Time Magazine Person of the Year, a jealous Donald Trump first tweeted that she needed to “work on her Anger Management problem” [random majuscules in original] then later followed up with a sarcastic, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!”

Ms. Thunberg has responded in kind:

A twist on a familiar meme, sent in by Mark:

A true science meme from Ginger K.:

Ricky Gervais loves his kitty, which is a good sign. His name is Pickle.  Here are three tweets showing the moggy, with the first being the official announcement of his name.

The second shows the “scrumble”, a tummy rub (sound up).

And the “skritch”:

Simon sends a wily and lazy cat:

Tweets from Matthew. First, a weird forest of sponges on stalks (second one is a video):

A d*g saves the day!

This takes real skill:

A three-species interaction (see more pictures of the event here):

My guess would be about the age of thirty.

On his new Substack site, John McWhorter previews his upcoming book on antiracism as a religion

January 30, 2021 • 2:15 pm

A while back, when John McWhorter and Glenn Loury were chatting on “The Glenn Show” podcast, McWhorter mentioned that he was writing a book on wokeness and anti-racism as a religion. In fact, he’d already written most of the book. I really look forward to reading it.  But if you want an advance peek, you can subscribe to McWhorter’s new Substack site, “It Bears Mentioning” ($50 per year; click on screenshot below), where he’s just put up what seems to be the book’s preface and the first chapter (or summaries thereof). I am going to show only the preface because it’s a pay site for most posts (i.e., the first one below); but you can read the short bit of the preface here to see if you want to either subscribe or buy the upcoming book.

The second article, on black fragility, is free, and you can get it by clicking here.

Oy! Between Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and John McWhorter—three good writers disillusioned by wokeness—it could run into serious money to subscribe to them all!

Here’s the preface of McWhorter’s book as reproduced in the post above. The title is good. But Chapter 1 (or a summary) is there too, and it’s much longer. If you want to see that, subscribe here.

THE ELECT:

NEORACISTS POSING AS ANTIRACISTS

AND THEIR THREAT TO A PROGRESSIVE AMERICA

PREFACE

I’m not one for long introductions – I like to get to the point. However, before we begin I would like to give the reader a sense of the trajectory of these installments, and what kind of statement they are intended as making.

This book is not a call for people of a certain ideology to open up to the value of an open market of ideas, to understand the value of robust discussion, and to see the folly of defenestrating people for disagreeing with them. My assumption is that the people in question are largely unreachable by arguments of that kind.

Rather, I aim to illuminate where these people are coming from, how their ideology and behavior is quite coherent in itself, and what the rest of us can do to live with grace and honesty, as people concerned with the state of the world, who nevertheless must grapple with obstacles laid in our path by people who see their religion as an ultimate wisdom.

My main aims will be:

  1. to argue that this new ideology is actually a religion in all but name;
  2. to argue that to understand it as a religion is to see coherence in what may seem like a welter of “crazy” or overblown behaviors;
  3. to explore why this religion is so attractive to so many people;
  4. to show that this religion is actively harmful to black people despite being intended as unprecedentedly “antiracist”;
  5. to show that a pragmatic, effective, liberal and even Democratic-friendly agenda for rescuing black America need not be founded on the tenets of this new religion;
  6. to suggest ways to lessen the grip of this new religion on our public culture.

I hope my observations will serve as one of many contributions to our debate over what constitutes “social justice.” Thank you for your subscription. I will release this manuscript in ten segments, and I welcome your feedback.

A body-surfing duck!

January 30, 2021 • 1:15 pm

It’s my titular day off, so I’m leaving work before the big snow hits (Chicago’s expected to get 5 to 9 inches of “heavy wet snow”—more in places). I’ve put my car in the University garage so I won’t have to shovel it out.

But for your delight and entertainment, I append a wonderful video of “Duck” Australia’s famed surfing mallard. It’s a domestic Pekin variety, and I trust the salt water won’t harm him. This was featured by the BBC.

Only two more months till duck season begins again at Botany Pond! Will Honey return for her fifth season of duckling production? Put your guesses below.

h/t: Pyers