Month: January 2021

Why do catnip and silver vine drive moggies crazy? A group of researchers says the plants could protect them against mosquitos

January 22, 2021 • 10:00 am

There’s a new paper in Science Advances by a group of Japanese researchers who investigated the attraction of cats to catnip and silver vine. This involved isolating the compounds that attracts cats, showing that they activate the pleasure centers of cats (duh!), and, most important, proposing and testing an adaptive hypothesis for why cats rub all over catnip (Nepeta cataria, in the mint family) as well as on a related cat-drug plant, silver vine (Actinidia polygama, in a different family).

Their theory, which is theirs, is that the these compounds, which plants have evolved to repel insects (aphids), do a similar job for the cats, but act for them as a mosquito repellant. The paper is below, and free, but let me add that I don’t think their answer, while it might be correct, is strongly convincing—for reasons I’ll discuss.

Click on the screenshot to access the article. You can also get the pdf here, find the full reference is at the bottom, and see a News & Views about the paper in Science, “Why cats are crazy for catnip,” written by Sofial Moutinho, which doesn’t mention any problems with the paper and also omits a fascinating line of speculation.

First, some biogeography and history for cat owners. Catnip, while native to Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, has been planted widely throughout the world, and is the drug of choice for American and European cats. In contrast, silver vine is native to both Japan and China, and in Asia has supplanted catnip as the weed to give your moggy. Some cats who respond to one species won’t respond to the other, and for each species some cats do not show the typical euphoric rubbing and “getting stoned” reaction. In catnip, this is due to genetic variation among cats. More on that later.

With both plants the cat’s  attraction is transitory. If you’ve given nip to your cats, you’ll know that they roll around and get stoned for a few minutes, but then recover and subsequently ignore the weed. This goes along with the authors’ hypothesis below (once you’ve put repellent on your fur, your job is done). Further, the “big cats” like lions, lynx, leopards, and bobcats also show a catnip response, and that has to be incorporated into any hypothesis about adaptation.

Here’s catnip (like mints, it has square stems):

Silver vine:

There’s a bit of history in the paper that drove me to further investigation. The authors say this:

The first reports of the feline behavioral response to silver vine and catnip were described by a Japanese botanist in 1704 and by a British botanist in 1759, respectively. The behavioral response to silver vine has been captured in Japanese culture: An Ukiyo-e (a type of traditional painting) drawn in 1859 depicts a folk story concerning a battle between cats and mice, wherein mice use silver vine as a weapon to intoxicate cats

Well I simply had to find that 1859 painting, but it wasn’t easy. Finally I found it in a tweet by Tom Price. Behold: “Cats Tempted by a Delicious Smell” by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Look at those nefarious samurai mice! 

Here’s a short Science video showing both housecats and big cats attracted to filter paper imbued with the isolated attractant, while d*gs ignore it (part of the experiment).

The experiment consisted of several distinct parts.

Isolation and testing of the attractant compounds. The authors chemically fractionated extracts of catnip and silver vine, isolating various compounds and testing them as cat attractants by putting the compounds on filter paper and comparing whether cats were drawn to the experimental papers versus control papers soaked in hexane. They found that the active ingredient in silver vine, which induced head and face rubbing in domestic and feral housecats, was nepetalactol. The attractant in catnip was a related compound, nepetalactone. These are part of the plants’ defensive systems against insects, especially aphids, so they evolved to protect plants from being chewed and sucked.  Here are the two compounds so you can see their chemical similarity (they’re both part of a family called iridoids):

Here’s a sample photo and graph of the tests (the paper has lots of cool photos).  Fraction 3 has the nepetalactol, of course:

(From paper): (B) An image of behavioral assay using cats to find bioactive fractions in purification steps (see movie S1). (C) Duration of face rubbing and rolling over toward fractions 3 and 4 in four cats.

The authors then synthesized these compounds so they’d have them in pure form for further tests. The tests:

Attraction of the plants to various cat species. As we know, house cats are polymorphic for the catnip and silver vine reactions, and that’s what the authors found with silver vine: only about two-thirds of both lab cats and feral cats were “postitive responders”. Because there was more nepetalactol than nepetalactone in plants, and because the silver vine compound was more potent than the catnip compound, most further tests used nepetalactol and its source plant, silver vine.

When filter paper soaked in this compound was given to captive leopards, jaguars, and lynx, all of them showed the face-rubbing and rolling seen in house cats. Dogs showed no reaction because they are no fun.

Activation of the “pleasure” system by nepetalactol. As the authors note, the μ-opioid system, which includes release of endorphins, “controls rewarding and euphoric effects in humans.”  Sure enough, in house cats the beta-endorphins were significantly elevated in cats after sniffing nepetalactone—but not control papers. And a chemical that blocks the μ-opioid system, naloxone, significantly reduced the rubbing and rolling response. The authors conclude that the μ-opioid system is involved in the response to silver vines. In other words, the cats probably experience pleasure when they sniff the stuff. (Taste, by the way, doesn’t seem to play a role here; it’s all done through the nose.)

Mosquito repelling activity of nepetalactol. The compound was shown to be highly repellent to a local mosquito, Aedes albopictus, consistent with previous reports. The authors have in fact patented a mosquito repellent, something reported in Moutinho’s News & Views summary. It’s interesting to contemplate using a mosquito repellent that also attracts cats—a double benefit!

The authors then hypothesized that when cats rub silver vine on their heads and bodies, it acts to repel mosquitoes. They first tested whether cats actually got nepetalactol on their fur when rubbing impregnated filter papers. Unfortunately, they could not detect the compound on cats who had rubbed. So they did a bio-assay: they rubbed filter paper on the faces of cats who had rubbed against impregnated filter paper, and then tested the papers on other cats. Sure enough, the face-wiped papers showed a significantly higher attraction for the secondary cats than did the controls. The statistical significance was not high, though, with probabilities equal to 0.034 and 0.025—pretty close to the “standard cut off” level of significance, 0.05.

Finally, the crucial experiment: do cats who have had their heads treated with pure nepetalactol actually repel mosquitoes? The researchers rubbed the compound onto cat’s heads, and had a control where the heads were rubbed with solvents. They then anesthetized the cats and stuck their heads into cages containing A. albopictus mosquitoes, seeing how many skeeters landed on the cats’ heads.  They also did the experiment with cats who had rubbed their heads on silver vine leaves.

In both cases the cats who had the compound on their heads showed significantly fewer mosquitoes landing on them than on the control cats (again, the results, while statistically significant, aren’t overwhelmingly so, with p values of 0.033 and 0.019 respectively). The authors conclude that “the characteristic rubbing and rolling response functions to transfer plant chemicals that provide mosquito repellency to cats.”

The upshot—and some issues:

The authors have a strong adaptationist bent in the paper, looking for the adaptive significance of the catnip reaction. And yes, they’ve shown a possible one, but there are lots of gaps in their story.

1.) Does resistance to this once geographically limited species of mosquito (now more widespread after human conveyance) confer higher fitness on the cats?  There’s no evidence for this. The authors hypothesize that other mosquitoes that might be repelled carry diseases like yellow fever, dengue, and Zike viruses, but are these serious diseases of wild cats, including leopards and lynx? And are these other species of mosquitoes repelled by these iridoids? (Don’t forget, they didn’t test catnip, just silver vine, though I suspect they’d get similar results with nepetalactone from catnip.) Remember too that northern cats like lynx also show the response, but do not contract tropical diseases like dengue and yellow fever.

An alternative hypothesis floated by the authors is that cats, when stalking prey, have to remain motionless for long periods, and that might be hard if mosquitoes are biting you. If you’ve rolled on silver vine and catnip, you might be less plagued by mosquitoes, less likely to move, and thus less likely to be detected by prey. As the authors note, “Face rubbing against plant sources of the repellent will help to protect the face and head of the animal, as the mouth, eyelids, ears, and nose of felines have relatively little fur and are therefore easy targets for mosquitoes.” But they haven’t shown that the stalking behavior of treated and untreated cats differs. This would be fairly easy to do—or at least possible—with house cats and tethered rodents (you don’t want to kill the prey, of course).

So while the authors assert “we have uncovered an adaptive benefit of the behavioral response in cats”, they have uncovered a possible adaptive benefit, but haven’t shown any decisive reproductive advantage of cats who roll on silver vine or catnip.

2.) Do the wild cats who show catnip responses, like the ancestor of the housecat, and the jaguar, leopard, and lynx, coexist or coexisted in the past with silver vine or catnip? The fact that the big cats tested show rolling and rubbing implies that they either independently evolved that response or inherited it from a common ancestor. But for the response to be maintained over the millions of years since cat species diverged from that ancestor, a selective advantage should have been there pretty consistently. The authors don’t consider the problem of the geographic coexistence of these cat species, their ancestor, and of the two plants that evoke a response. That at least should have been mentioned.

3.) What about the polymorphism in house cats? Some house cats show the “nip response” to silver vine and catnip, while others don’t. This variation is known to be genetic, at least for catnip. How variable is it in other cats like lynx? And why have house cats lost a lot of their response?

One possible answer is that house cats no longer either coexist with wild catnip or are so domesticated that the proposed advantages of catnip no longer impose a selection pressure on cats. In other words, the variable response of house cats to catnip could be a “vestigial behavior.” We know that traits that were once useful but are no longer so tend to become more variable and even disappear. This variability is seen, for instance, in human wisdom teeth, considered a superfluous feature and also variable among people (some have them, others don’t, and their eruption is variable, which is why they are often pulled.)

And a fascinating topic the authors neglect: What about the adaptive significance of the pleasure response? 

Both the authors and Moutinho in her N&V piece have a strange take on the fact that cats apparently get pleasure from catnip. The authors hypothesize this:

As many felids rely on stealth to stalk and ambush their prey, requiring them to remain cryptic and often unmoving, a repellent that reduces their susceptibility to both the irritation of biting mosquitoes and the diseases that these insect vectors carry is likely to provide a strong selective advantage. Stimulation of the μ-opioid system might further help by providing analgesia to reduce irritation where biting arthropods have not been repelled.

And Moutinho says this:

Most scientists and pet owners assumed the only reason that cats roll around in catnip was for the euphoric experience, Miyazaki says. “Our findings suggest instead that rolling is rather a functional behavior.”

But a “functional behavior” can also go hand in hand with the evolution of “a euphoric experience.” They are not alternative explanations, but complementary ones.

I wish the authors, and Moutinho, had gone down a fascinating byway here: the supposition that cats can evolve to feel pleasure from rubbing on catnip, for feeling pleasure constitutes a powerful impetus for them to rub.” That is, the writers don’t seem to have pondered that the pleasure need not be inherent in the behavior at the very beginning of its evolution, but could have itself evolved to facilitate the behavior.

This resembles the pleasure of the orgasm: it almost certainly evolved as a way to get us to want to copulate, so there’s powerful selective pressure on our pleasure systems to feel fantastic when we copulate. Anything that makes us want to pass on our genes will be selected for, including the great pleasure of orgasms.

Evolution can act not just on behaviors, but on the sensations attendant to them. We like sweets because sugar was good for us in our ancestral habitats, and so our taste system evolved to evoke pleasure when eating sugar. As I always says, “to a vulture, rotten meat probably tastes as good as ice cream sodas do to us.” It’s important to realize that sensations and feelings, good and bad, aren’t necessarily inherent in our physiology and neurology, but are themselves evolved. (Pain receptors, too, alert us to possible danger to our bodies.)

I should add that using plant compounds to repel insects and other arthropods is not a behavior unique to cats. Here are some examples cited by the authors (I love the cigarette-butt example and have written about it before):

There are other examples that nonhuman animals may exploit some chemicals emitted from other species for protection against insect pests: boat-tailed grackles (Quiscalus major) and white-nosed coatis (Nasua narica) rub fruits of Citrus spp. against themselves, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) use sleeping platforms created from specific trees as a source of repellents , house sparrows (Passer domesticus) and house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) living in urban habitats bring cigarette butts to the nest, and capuchin monkeys (Cebus olivaceus) anoint themselves with millipedes (Orthoporus dorsovittatus).

Finally here’s a photo of Jango, whose staff is reader Divy and her husband Ivan, trying to get to the jar of Cosmic Catnip put on the top shelf. Jango is a “positive reactor.”

h/t: Ginger K.

_________________

Uenoyama, R., T. Miyazaki, J. L. Hurst, R. J. Beynon, M. Adachi, T. Murooka, I. Onoda, Y. Miyazawa, R. Katayama, T. Yamashita, S. Kaneko, T. Nishikawa, and M. Miyazaki. 2021. The characteristic response of domestic cats to plant iridoids allows them to gain chemical defense against mosquitoes. Science Advances 7:eabd9135.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 22, 2021 • 8:00 am

Please send me in your good wildlife/street/people photos. Thanks!

Today’s beautiful photos come from Joe Routon, who photographed at a Buddhist monastery. His captions are indented, and click on the photos to enlarge them.

Here are a few photos that I made on a trip to a Buddhist monastery in Myanmar a few years ago. The country has many monasteries and shrines, some of which are the most beautiful in Asia.

A growing number of children have been seeking refuge in monasteries as a result of conflict in Myanmar. Buddhist monks can be ordained as young as 8. Traditional guidelines state that a child must be “old enough to scare away crows.”

The Buddhist monastic school system in Myanmar dates back to the 11th century. All Buddhist boys in Myanmar are expected to spend some time, as little as a few weeks, in a monastery. In addition to reading, math, history, and other secular subjects, they learn the basics of the Buddhist faith and earn merit, a kind of spiritual credit that will benefit them and their families in this and future lives. Schooling in a monastery is the only education that many children in Myanmar ever get, especially rural and poor children. They also receive food, board, and health care.

While most young men remain at the monastery for only a short time before returning to the secular life, some become fully ordained monks. The 500,000 Buddhist monks in Myanmar wear saffron- or rust-colored robes.

Child and adult nuns, who live in convents, shave their heads and wear pink robes.

Monks wash themselves in the monastery pool before meditation.

Monks usually follow the traditional rule from the time of the Buddha and eat only one meal a day, before noon. Eating in silence is a necessity for monks. When you eat, your mouth is used for that purpose, and talking is a distraction and impractical. There is little or no snacking outside meals.

Friday: Hili dialogue

January 22, 2021 • 6:30 am

We’re almost through the “work” week: it’s already Friday, January 22, 2021, and National Southern Food Day, celebrating America’s finest regional cuisine. Here, for example is the archetypal dish: the “meat and three” (served always with sweet tea and usually cornbread). Here we have BBQ, black-eyed peas, collards, and mac-and-cheese (the last is always seen as a “vegetable” in the South), along with a corn muffin and sweet tea (also called the “table wine of the South”).

It’s also National Blonde Brownie Day, Roe vs. Wade Day, celebrating the anniversary of the 1973 decision (see below), and Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day (cats have only one question, and you know what it is).

News of the Day:

Although it’s still tough times, there’s something to smile about: Bernie Sanders’s informal Vermont attire at the Inauguration, which spawned a thousand memes and tweets. You’ll see some of them in the tweets at the bottom.

As the AP reports:

Many people quickly highlighted the 79-year-old independent Vermont senator’s look, and created endless memes, from Wednesday’s inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, which he said was more about keeping warm than fashion.

“You know in Vermont, we dress warm, we know something about the cold, and we’re not so concerned about good fashion, we want to keep warm. And that’s what I did today,” Sanders told CBS on Wednesday.

People were particularly enthralled with Sanders’ mittens, which were made by a Vermont elementary school teacher who has a side business making mittens out of recycled wool.

“I love it that he loves them, and that he wears them,” Jen Ellis, an elementary school teacher, told NECN-TV. “And I’m totally honored that he wore them today.”

Jen Ellis has been flooded with requests for interviews.

Joe Biden has been busy signing 17 executive orders (most of which I like) and overturning unwise decisions of the Trump administration. I won’t reprise his efforts to combat the pandemic, including a federal mask mandate on public transportation (see here), and invoking the Defense Production Act to up the supply of vaccines (something Trump should have done) and  other measures. You can see a summary of his executive orders here.

Over at the New York Times, Ezra Klein has a long piece on what Biden needs to do to avoid a disastrous Democratic defeat (loss of the Senate and perhaps even the House) in two years. He’s worried in particular about the Senate filibuster, which takes 60 people to stop:

President Biden’s agenda will live or die in the Senate. Odds are it will die, killed by the filibuster.

And referring to Biden’s “rescue plan” and bills for D.C. statehood and improved campaign financing regulation, Klein says this:

. . . none of these bills will pass a Senate in which the filibuster forces 60-vote supermajorities on routine legislation. And that clarifies the real question Democrats face.

At the City Journal, the much maligned Heather MacDonald has some words that, just because she’s a critic of the Left, shouldn’t be ignored. She criticizes Biden’s speech for actually being divisive, and foresees the return of Wokeness:

The diversity obsessives in the federal science bureaucracies waited out Donald Trump’s presidency. They will now redouble their efforts to treat a researcher’s race and sex as scientific qualifications in the awarding of federal research grants. Expect to see any mention of merit or excellence denounced as a form of bigotry, a response that the University of California and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, as well as an army of corporate diversity trainers, have already perfected.

The next four years will likely be one long anti-white-privilege struggle session. Any real effort to close racial achievement gaps, such as fighting the “acting white” ethic that prevents many inner-city children from trying hard in school, will be deferred and discredited. Biden is betting that white liberals, at least, will continue hanging their heads in penance for their hereditary crimes and trot off to their latest show trial. Given past behavior, he’s probably right.

What is going on with the impeachment? The House vote is done and dusted, but Nancy Pelosi is holding off on sending it to the Senate, where a trial could begin within a day after its receipt. Mitch “666” McConnell has suggested delaying the Senate trial until February so that Trump’s legal team can have time to prepare. Trump just hired a lawyer from South Carolina to represent him.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 410,336, large increase of about 4,200 deaths over yesterday’s figure. We may past half a million deaths in less than a month. The world death toll stands at 2,102,386, a big increase of about 14,900 deaths over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on January 22 includes:

  • 1901 – Edward VII is proclaimed King after the death of his mother, Queen Victoria.
  • 1905 – Bloody Sunday in Saint Petersburg, beginning of the 1905 revolution.
  • 1924 – Ramsay MacDonald becomes the first Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
  • 1927 – Teddy Wakelam gives the first live radio commentary of a football match, between Arsenal F.C. and Sheffield United at Highbury.
  • 1968 – Apollo 5 lifts off carrying the first Lunar module into space.

Here’s a photo from Wikipedia showing “S67-50927 (November 1967):  Lunar Module-1 being moved into position for mating with Spacecraft Lunar Module Adapter (SLA)-7 in the Kennedy Space Center’s Manned Spacecraft Operations Building.”

  • 1970 – The Boeing 747, the world’s first “jumbo jet”, enters commercial service for launch customer Pan American Airways with its maiden voyage from John F. Kennedy International Airport to London Heathrow Airport.
  • 1973 – In a bout for the world heavyweight boxing championship in Kingston, Jamaica, challenger George Foreman knocks down champion Joe Frazier six times in the first two rounds before the fight is stopped by referee Arthur Mercante.

Here’s a short video showing the full fight. Frazier took a real beating. I’m glad that boxing is no longer popular:

Here’s that commercial; remember it? It was a great one, playing off the year of introduction:

  • 2006 – Evo Morales is inaugurated as President of Bolivia, becoming the country’s first indigenous president.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1552 – Walter Raleigh, English poet, soldier, courtier, and explorer (d. 1618)
  • 1561 – Francis Bacon, English philosopher and politician, Attorney General for England and Wales (d. 1626)
  • 1788 – Lord Byron, English poet and playwright (d. 1824)
  • 1849 – August Strindberg, Swedish novelist, poet, and playwright (d. 1912)
  • 1898 – Sergei Eisenstein, Russian director and screenwriter (d. 1948)
  • 1931 – Sam Cooke, American singer-songwriter (d. 1964)

Cooke was shot to death under mysterious circumstances in a Los Angeles motel. He was only 33.

  • 1938 – Peter Beard, Australian photographer and author (d. 2020)

Beard, the scion of wealth, spent many years in Africa taking photographs that put into books with handwritten annotations. He owned land in Kenya adjacent to where Karen Blixen once lived, and made it his African home.  Here’s one of his pictures:

PETER BEARD (B. 1938) Lion Pride, 1976 unique gelatin silver print, printed c. 1990 signed, dated, titled ‘from Ndutu…Southern Serengeti’ and inscribed in ink (on the recto) image.
  • 1959 – Linda Blair, American actress

Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on January 22 include:

  • 1901 – Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (b. 1819)
  • 1966 – Herbert Marshall, English actor (b. 1890)
  • 1968 – Duke Kahanamoku, American swimmer and water polo player (b. 1890)

With the huge surfboards that were standard at the time, Duke (a five-time Olympic swimming medalist) helped popularize the sport of surfing. Here he is in 1921 with his huge redwood board:

  • 1994 – Telly Savalas, American actor (b. 1924)
  • 2000 – Craig Claiborne, American journalist, author, and critic (b. 1920)
  • 2008 – Heath Ledger, Australian actor and director (b. 1979)
  • 2012 – Joe Paterno, American football player and coach (b. 1926)
  • 2018 – Ursula K. Le Guin, American sci-fi and fantasy novelist (b. 1929)

Le Guin below. I haven’t read any of her works, as I’m not much into science fiction, but I know she has many fans:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is indoors, avoiding the other cats:

Hili: Kulka is upstairs, it’s cold outside, Szaron is at home. I will be sitting in the hallway.
A: As you wish.
In Polish:
Hili: Na górze Kulka, na dworze zimno, w domu Szaron. Posiedzę sobie w korytarzu.
Ja: Jak wolisz.

Little Kulka has just played in the snow, and now wants to come inside (she learned the trick of jumping onto the windowsill from Hili):

Caption: “And Kulka outside the window.”

In Polish: A za oknem Kulka

From Natalie via Harmonia Early Music (see caption), a cat that smiles. It’s the Weird Medieval Cat of the Week:

From Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu, Savoy c. 1475.

From reader Bruce:From Laurie.  He could be Polish, too, as in my experience they eat five meals per day, including a “second breakfast”:

Two tweets from Simon: Titania takes on Biden’s new executive order:

And the Bern talks to the Dude:

Tweets from Matthew. I’ll write about this cool paper tomorrow. There’s more to be learned about house cats!

Now this is a news intro!. From the BBC:

THIS is what the Internet is best at. Bernie in mittens! Somebody should do Bernie on Mount Rushmore. . .

Another (Matthew loves these):

Bernée avec chat:

Remember this place?

This is an excellent one:

Do your own! It really works.

See? I put Bernie atop El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. He climbed it freestyle and in mittens—a first!

The danger of Bidenesque Wokeism

January 21, 2021 • 1:00 pm

It seems churlish to begin worrying about the Biden administration when it’s held sway for only a bit more than a day. I voted for Joe and Kamala and approve of many of their policies. I teared up at the Inauguration and was hugely relieved when the Great Miscreant was helicoptered over the Potomac yesterday. But we still have to call out the new administration if it violates standards we oppose, and, during the flurry of policies to come in the next several months, now is the time to suss out whether Biden really is a centrist, or will cave in to the Woke wing of the Democratic Party.

As I’ve said, one thing I worry about is the exacerbation rather than the diminution of Wokeism under Biden—something that seems very likely to me. (And do I really have to affirm that Trumpism is way worse than Wokeism? You can have Biden without extreme Wokeism, you know, and you don’t need to remain silent just because he’s a Democrat.)

At any rate, when I saw the tweet below from Abigail Shrier, oft-excoriated author of the book Irreversible Damage, a book about too-rapid promulgation of sex-change operations in young children, I got worried.  Is Biden really advocating accepting biological males who claim that they’re women—and haven’t had any medical intervention to transition—into women’s sports, scholarships, and so on? We’ve discussed the sports issue here, as well as Connecticut’s rule that any male who identifies as female can participate in women’s sports without further ado (much less hormonal supplements and/or surgery). The results were predictable: males, with their greater strength and muscle mass, clean up. I don’t think any reader here thinks that “unaltered” biological men who identify as women should, by virtue of that identity alone, be able to join women’s sports teams.

Yet that’s what Shrier says Biden’s executive order does: “eviscerates women’s sports”, as well as women’s scholarships and so on:

You can read the order below, as I did; it’s short (click on the screenshot).

When I initially saw that it seemed to be about Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I thought Shrier must be wrong. Title VII is about employment and workplace discrimination, not discrimination by colleges in scholarships, sports, and so on. Those things are the purview of Title IX. which mandates no sex discrimination in education or activities for educational institutions that get Federal funds.  So why is Shrier so exercised?

It may be because of this statement from the order (my emphasis):

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1.  Policy.  Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love.  Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.  Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes.  People should be able to access healthcare and secure a roof over their heads without being subjected to sex discrimination.  All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.

These principles are reflected in the Constitution, which promises equal protection of the laws.  These principles are also enshrined in our Nation’s anti-discrimination laws, among them Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2000e et seq.).  In Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. ___ (2020), the Supreme Court held that Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination “because of . . . sex” covers discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.  Under Bostock‘s reasoning, laws that prohibit sex discrimination — including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, as amended (20 U.S.C. 1681 et seq.), the Fair Housing Act, as amended (42 U.S.C. 3601 et seq.), and section 412 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended (8 U.S.C. 1522), along with their respective implementing regulations — prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, so long as the laws do not contain sufficient indications to the contrary.

Notice that Biden folds Title IX into Title VIII, and explicitly mentions school sports.  Now I don’t give a rat’s patootie about restrooms (we have unisex restrooms in my department), but locker rooms are a bit more problematic, since some women don’t want a person with male plumbing watching them in the buff. Still, that can be and has been dealt with in various ways. And of course the thrust of Title IX is good: stop discriminating on the basis of sex or gender. But participation in school sports is the rub—and the exception.

If Biden is saying here—and despite Shrier’s claim, it’s not completely clear—that men who identify as women have carte blanche (and legal rights) to enroll in women’s sports teams, then Shrier is right: this has the potential to eviscerate women’s sports.  I won’t go into the biological differences between the sexes that, even with hormone treatment, make this “right” problematic, but I’ll call your attention to this order as a red flag. So far nothing has happened, and Shrier’s feared outcome may require either legislation or intervention of the courts, not an executive order.

There are other Bidenesque red flags as well, but none so worrisome that I need mention them now. I do predict, however, as I did yesterday, that the election of Biden is not the end of Wokeism but an acceleration of it. Those of us who consider ourselves liberals and who voted for Biden because of his decency, his ardent (but ill-fated) desire to reconcile Republicans and Democrats, his center-Leftism, and most of his legislative aims, may be in for a few years of cognitive dissonance. Joe is a decent man, but if you buck the Woke you get called all kinds of names. Joe may be more pliable than we think.

Pay for slay: Western countries help finance odious Palestinian program that pays terrorists who kill civilians

January 21, 2021 • 9:45 am

I’ve written before about the Palestinian Territory’s policy of “Pay for Slay”, one of the most odious policies I know of. The program consists of the Palestinian Authority giving generous payments (often for a lifetime) to those Palestinians who get caught committing terrorism against Israel and are either killed or put in Israeli prisons. (They often justify it as reward for fighting the enemy, but the “enemy” often consists of Israeli citizens, including women and children.

If a Palestinian kills or injures an Israeli in an act of terrorism, or simply commits a non-murderous act like terrorist arson, he or she get a comfortable wage, and, if you get out of prison, a good job and other benefits in Palestine. (The amount you get goes up with the heinous nature of the crime; murder is the most compensated act.)

This is, of course, financing and encouraging terrorism, including the murder of many Israeli civilians. One of those civilians is highlighted in the article below: Dafna Meir, a nurse and a premarital counselor, who had four children and two foster children. For no reason beyond her being Israeli, she was stabbed to death by a 15 year old Palestinian terrorist in 2016, who was jailed in a children’s facility (now transferred to an adult prison). That adolescent, a killer, is now 20, and his monthly wage is $401 for life, along with a one-time “martyr” payment of $1719.  In a few years he’ll be making more than the average Palestinian citizen.

It’s even worse, for many countries, including much of the European Union, finances this “pay for slay” program by giving aid money directly to Palestine. A few countries (including Australia, Norway, and the U.S.) have cut down their contributions to Palestine because of this program, but much of the EU simply gives aid to Palestine that can be used to pay terrorist’s “martyr pensions”. Those pensions constitute  about 7% of the total Palestinian budget: or about $355 million per year (in 2017).

It is unconscionable that Europe finances terrorism this way, and doesn’t seem overly concerned with how the money is used. They could, as the U.S. did during the Trump administration—the Obama administration, unfortunately, helped underwrite Pay for Slay by giving direct aid to Palestine on the order of $300-400 million per year—cut back on the amount of money they give to Palestine, and ensure that all that aid money is used for constructive projects, not terrorism. This is what the U.S. does now, and I hope Biden doesn’t reverse that policy.

Even so, the money that the U.S. gives to Palestine to, say, build schools, still frees up money that the Palestinian government might have used for such projects, making more money available for Pay for Slay.

I emphasize again how immoral it is to finance terrorists to kill civilians like Dafna Meir. This is most likely a war crime.

Click to read the story, and realize that if you’re in a country that gives unrestricted aid to Palestine, your government is underwriting this kind of murder.

Below is a graphs showing how much money you get as an incarcerated Palestinian for committing acts of terrorism against Israel (“regular” crimes like robbery are not rewarded). If you’re killed during your terrorist act, your family gets paid, too.

I’m not sure why terrorists who are Jerusalem and Israeli residents get a bonus, but it’s amazing that Israel allows its own citizens to collect “pay for slay” money. You get the salary for life, even if released, if you serve at least five years in prison as a man or two as a woman. And you don’t have to kill Israelis, either. You can get the dosh if you commit terrorist attacks on anybody visiting Israel, including Americans like U.S. Army veteran Taylor Force, stabbed to death at age 28 by a terrorist while Force was on a visit. Also killed, with their murders getting Palestinian payments, are citizens of the UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, and Russia.

Here’s what you get if you’re jailed for terrorism. Note the supplements if you have a wife and child (70% of those convicted, though, are single). You can even receive the money in prison, put in a bank account, or have it given to your family.

If you die during your attack, your family gets $1560 and a monthly payment of at least $364.

As the graph below shows, the amount you get above the “base payment” increases with time served. The killer of Dafna Meir, having passed his five-year stint, now has his stipend doubled and also gets his stipend for life.  The average salary of a Palestinian worker is $765 a month, or $9180 per year, so after you’re in prison for five years, besides getting free room and board, you’re making more than your average Palestinian. And that doesn’t include the one-time payments or supplements for children and wives. The payments are also higher the more odious the crime. 

Finally, as I noted, released terrorists are given priority for employment. As one source reports:

Once released, prisoners are given priority for employment. Any male ex-prisoner incarcerated for 10 or more years, and female who served five years, is entitled to a position in the PA [Palestinian Authority]. All former prisoners’ social security and pension fees are paid according to the number of years they spent in jail. If their salary is lower than what they received in prison, the PA makes up the difference and, if a prisoner cannot be employed, they are still entitled to a monthly salary, disability payments and death benefits payable to their families (Douglas J. Feith & Sander Gerber, “The Department of Pay-for-Slay,” Commentary, March 15, 2017; Thane Rosenbaum, “Palestinians are rewarding terrorists. The U.S. should stop enabling them,” Washington Post, April 30, 2017).

And get this:

According to the Director of the ‎Commission of Prisoners and Released Prisoners’ Affairs, Qadri Abu Bakr, a prisoner can receive a prisoner’s ‎salary after their release and do nothing. He said, “We have 7,000-8,000 ‎released prisoners who are receiving a salary like this.”‎

Though idle, they still qualify for benefits. ‎“Every prisoner who is released after a year is eligible to study at university ‎and also carpentry, metalworking, and the like,” said Abu Bakr. “Any profession that we can ‎cover for him. We are also covering dental treatment up to 5,000 [Israeli] ‎shekels. We cover implants.”

Implants! I just got paid big bucks for one. But you get them free if you commit terrorism against Israel!

Every American, especially those who see Palestine as a virtuous land of the oppressed, should know about this program, which violates every tenet of human decency. I hope Biden doesn’t resume unrestricted payments to Palestine, and I have to say that restricting those payments so they don’t finance terrorism was one of the few good things accomplished by the Trump administration.

Sources for the data in this post come from here, here, here, here, here, and here.  It need hardly be added that the U.S. mainstream media, which tilts towards Palestine, does not often report on this travesty. The New York Times did publish a heartening article in November saying that, to court Biden, the Palestinians are considering cutting back on these payments (there will still be payments), for Democrats are not all that keen on “pay for slay”. (I’m betting, though, that the Squad isn’t opposed to the program.)

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 21, 2021 • 8:00 am

These photos come from Robert Seidel, whose notes (and the Biblical quote) are indented. Click the photos to enlarge them.

“In my distress I called to the LORD; I called out to my God. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry for help came to his ears. – 2 Samuel 22:7”

In that vein, allow me to offer you some wildlife images, mostly of fossilized wildlife. I saw your review of the movie Ammonite early last month [JAC: here], which by co-incidence was right before I spent a weekend at Lyme Regis on the Jurassic coast of South England, where Mary Anning used to live and work and the film is set. My photos and notes:

Sunset at Lyme Regis harbour. The breakwater you see features in several films, including I believe Ammonite, as well as Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

View from top of the breakwater out to sea. I like how the stones and waves blend together in this picture.

The cliffs to the East of Lyme Regis. These are not your perfect white chalk cliffs of the Dover type, but rather more messy, with alternating layers of tough limestone and soft siltstone.

The beach in front of the cliffs, looking quite prehistoric in my opinion. This is a tidal beach which is submerged under high water. If you go out towards the East, you should take to heart the frequently posted warnings about the danger of getting cut off by the tide!

A tidal pool on the beach. Sea snails like to burrow into the soft siltstone, making it look like swiss cheese.

To the West of Lyme Regis lies Monmouth Beach, named after the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, who in 1685 landed at this point with an invasion force in an attempt to take the English throne (). Ammonites like this are ever present along that beach.

A very large ammonite, about a foot in diameter. Smaller ammonites got washed into the empty shell as it lay on the sea floor. At the nearby town of Charmouth, there is a small museum with some fantastic specimen of such “graveyards”.

The famous “ammonite pavement” of Monmouth Beach, just a few hundred meters walk from Lyme Regis. These should be Arietites bucklandii.

Bonus photo. There is an alternative feline theory about the origin of these structures. These are four out of five of my partner’s cats. From front to back: Simba, Bella, Tonto and Katie.