Month: March 2022

Antarctica (Patagonia): Days 30 and 31

March 31, 2022 • 12:30 pm

We’re out of the land of ice and penguins, and into the land of fishing boats, small villages, and sleepy dogs.  In other words, we land in Valparaiso in three days and then, the next evening (if all goes well and I don’t have Covid), I fly home.

But the last two days have been pretty swell anyway. We made only one landing, this morning, but the channels we went through, mostly between the mainland and islands off the mainland, were lovely.

In one of them lay the isolated hamlet of Villa Puerto Edén, population listed as about 176. Two notable facts from our crew and Wikipedia: it’s said to be the most isolated village in Chile except for Easter Island, and it’s where the last Kawéshkar people, once nomads and now residents of this lovely and remote place. The only way to get there is by boat.

(Be sure to click on the photos to enlarge them.)

We stopped here two years ago, and they disgorged loads of people from the ship into the town, which you can circumambulate in about 10 minutes. I felt bad because, aside from the ladies selling their wares at the landing site, we didn’t see a single inhabitant; it was clear that they all went inside. I felt like a gawker visiting a display, and was glad that we didn’t disturb the locals this time.

Wikipedia has a note about the climate:

Villa Puerto Edén has an extremely wet subpolar oceanic climate (Köppen Cfc) and is widely reputed to be the place in the world with the highest frequency of rainfall,[2] though according to Guinness World Records the highest frequency of rain in a year occurred at Bahia Felix, a little further south, with only eighteen rainless days in the whole of 1916.

The weather is mercurial here, and it can be overcast one minute and fully sunny ten minutes later. We had some glorious sun sailing along the coast:

Traversing smooth water:

We saw some fishing boats, although they seem to be connected to a long string of cages. As far as I can gather, these cages are where they put the caught fish, so they’re a kind of “fish farm.” Perhaps readers can give more details about these operations:

Each boat is connected to a very long string of submerged cages.

And glory be: we sailed through the Darwin Channel, described by Wikipedia this way:

The Darwin Channel forms a westward continuation of the Aisén Fjord and links it to the Pacific Ocean at Isquiliac Island. It is located in the coast of Chile at approximately 45.4° south latitude. This is one of the main channels situated between the islands of the Chonos Archipelago. Darwin Channel opens in the northern part of Darwin Bay and is considered the best of those which lead to Moraleda Channel, its navigation is free of dangers.

Here’s a panorama, though it’s much like many of the channels we’ve seen.

And here are a large and a small map of the channel. I’m not sure if Darwin actually went through here, but I fortuitously had my Darwin tee shirt on while sailing through:

Fishing operations became more numerous over the day:

And then it was bedtime (dinner at bottom). When we woke up, houses along the bank and fishing boats were quite common, for we were approaching the large town of Castro.

We dropped anchor (yes, that’s what the captain said; we never used our anchor in Antarctica) in Castro’s harbor. On one side it looks like this, with fish farms and smoke (are they smoking the fish?)

And on the other side was the town of Castro. It’s actually a city on Chiloé Island, with a population of about 42,000, and is the capital of Chile’s Chiloé Province.  It’s also, according to Wikipedia, the third oldest city that has existed continuously in the country, as it was founded in 1576.

It has a lovely situation, and I took the big tender (lifeboat) in with a lot of other people who wanted to walk on their own and stay off the big buses. I had a lovely 1.5 hour walk, which was good exercise as a lot of the town is hilly.

The tender, which can harbor a lot of people as a lifeboat.

And the port. You can see one structure in the background that resembles the palafitos, (traditional wooden houses on stilts for which Castro is famous, but the best view of them is obtained from the water and they’re so close together I couldn’t see many stilts.

Here are some of the stilt houses from a picture on Castro’s Wikipedia page:

A church on the town square, which reminded me of the square of Punta Arenas, where I stayed one night in 2019. I love the use of wood instead of stone.

Like the stilt houses above, many of the homes and shops of Castro are painted in bright colors.

You wouldn’t think that purple and green would harmonize, but I like this combination:

There were plenty of d*gs in town, nearly all of them sleeping. They looked to be in pretty good condition.

Look at this big boy! I don’t know what breed it is but surely a reader will know. It looked like a lion dog!

A lovely face!

Continuing on, I saw a car with a trailer, and sitting in the trailer was a sleeping CAT. I believe this is the first felid I’ve seen on this trip, so I took three pictures of it.

A calico! I did a bad thing because it woke up when I took its picture, and as we all know, it’s a sin to disturb a sleeping cat. (Look up the story of Muhammad and his cat Muezza.)

The cat, too, was in good condition. I’m sorry I woke you up, kitty.

There was a lot of street food in Castro, and I didn’t have any Chilean pesos! I had figured I’d get some from an ATM, but every ATM in town had a huge line of people in front of it. Otherwise I could have sampled one of these empanadas. This place was doing a land-office business.

The prices were low. One chilean peso is worth only one-eight of a cent, so 1800 pesos is about $2.30 U.S. (There are about 785 pesos to the dollar.)

Food trucks aren’t only in America. One street was lined with them, and they were well patronized

Freshly fried churros–my favorite! Alas, I had not a peso to spend. Six for about $2.50

I saw this statue of what looked like a Chilean laborer by the harbor. The plaque at its base translates like this: “Work completed in 2019, being Mayor Don Juan Eduardo Vera Sanhueza, the ‘Sculpture Marino Chilote’ was built by mandate of the Honorable Municipal Council.”

I’d guess this is a generic Chilean seaman. Nice statue!

Empanadas and churros weren’t on tap for me today, but here’s last night’s dinner: pork and shrimp dumplings followed by a round of chicken tortillas, washed down with a blueberry milkshake.

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I swear this will be the last picture of a milkshake I foist on you. But it may also be the last picture of this trip, for now we steam north without stops.

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 31, 2022 • 6:30 am

Where we are now: The ship’s real-time map shows that we’ve sailed a ways up the coast of South America and proceeded inland, where there’s a north-south channel. We’re heading toward Chloé Island, where we’ll dock and spend the day in Castro, the largish town that’s the capital of Chloé Province. The town is especially notable for its houses built on stilts (palafitos) to keep the water at bay. There are several paid excursions ashore, but I will forego the bus and wander around on my own. Pictures should be forthcoming.

In the map below, “Castro” is covered up by the blue symbol with an anchor, and at this writing (6:15 a.m.)., we appear to be close to the town.

And a photo of the sunrise at breakfast:

Welcome to the last day of the month: Thursday, March 31, 2022: Oysters on the Half Shell Day.

O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,
      You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
      But answer came there none —
And this was scarcely odd, because
      They’d eaten every one.”

If you want to help out with “this day in history”, go to the Wikipedia page for March 31 and give us your favorite notable events, births, and deaths.

*The NYT has dispensed with its large banner headlines about the war, and today we see this (click on screenshot to read):

And the latest NYT developments:

Despite Russia’s promises to scale back its offensive in parts of Ukraine, the war ground on into its sixth week on Thursday with no end in sight — and worrisome signs that its consequences for Ukrainian civilians and global economies were widening.

Diesel prices are soaring. Germany is taking steps toward rationing natural gas in anticipation of Russia’s potentially cutting off deliveries. The number of Ukrainian refugees has surpassed four million, half of them children. And the United Nations is forecasting the most dire hunger crisis since World War II for a world ordinarily reliant on Ukraine and Russia as major exporters of wheat and other grains.

Video negotiations between Ukraine and Russia will resume Friday, but don’t expect much. Once again the Russians have promised to create a humanitarian corridor out of Mariupol (don’t expect much again; they’ve promised this before), and the NYT adds that “Russian forces have accidentally shot down their own aircraft and refused to carry out orders, one of Britain’s spy chiefs said on Thursday.”

*In his NYT column “What if Putin didn’t miscalculate?“, Bret Stephens raises the possibility that Putin didn’t screw up after all—that everything he’s doing conforms to a nefarious but misunderstood plan:

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

It sounds weird, and the conventional scenario may be right, but I’ve thought of rational answers to objections. Why is he attacking Kiev and western Ukraine? Because he wants to destroy so much of the country that they’ll concede to Putin what he wants. What about his despotic censorship of dissent at home? Perhaps that’s exactly the kind of autocracy he wants, and the dissent gives him the chance to impose it.  I’m no pundit, but I don’t think we should sell Putin short. And I don’t want Zelensky to concede one inch of his country.

*The media have finally admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop issue is a Thing, after claiming it was a right-wing fiction. The Washington Post analyzes the deals with the Chinese found on the laptop, deals that, while not directly implicating Joe Biden, show that Hunter benefited from his position as Biden’s son (and didn’t Joe know about this?):

 . . . the new documents — which include a signed copy of a $1 million legal retainer, emails related to the wire transfers, and $3.8 million in consulting fees that are confirmed in new bank records and agreements signed by Hunter Biden — illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.

*Two days ago President Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act of 2022 into law. (If you don’t know the horrifying story of this Chicago lad, read about it here.) When I saw that on the MSNBC News, I thought “but there hasn’t been a lynching in decades.” It turns out that “lynching” is being used to denote “a hate crime that results in death or serious bodily injury.” And it’s a federal hate crime that can get you up to 30 years in prison (that’s on top of state laws against assault and murder). In a NYT column, for example, Charles Blow argues that Ahmaud Arbery was lynched.”  I suppose assaults on anyone because of their ethnicity or gender can now be considered “lynching”, but I don’t much care because we already have hate-crime laws.

*New York Magazine has a fawning article on AOC, who is worried about the midterm elections coming up in a few months.  She’s worried about Biden’s low approval ratings sinking the Democratic control of the House, but her solution is this: more progressive Democrats. She faults Biden for promising to reach across the aisle, which implicitly calls for an end to bipartisanship.

“I think that there is a sense among more senior members of Congress, who have been around in different political times, that we can get back to this time of buddy-buddy and backslapping and we’ll cut a deal and go into a room with some bourbon and some smoke and you’ll come out and work something out. I think there’s a real nostalgia and belief that that time still exists or that we can get back to that.”

But those days, she says, have been over for a long time. And the fact that Biden and others don’t realize it, she says, could spell disaster in the fall’s elections. With Biden’s low approval numbers and the historic tendency of the president’s party to lose, on average, 26 House seats in the midterms, the Democrats face an uphill battle to keep control of Congress — a situation that requires firing up the party’s progressive base, Ocasio-Cortez said.

“We need to acknowledge that this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters. This is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, who are feeling that they worked overtime to get this president elected and aren’t necessarily being seen,” she said.

Now some of the reforms that she’s been calling for are fine with me (environmental efforts, etc.), but others, like immigration reform, aren’t going to fly well with Democratic voters who aren’t “progressive”.  And of course one could make a good case that if the Democratic Party becomes more “progressive”, our chances of staying “in the game” are even worse.

*This Is a Job for the Webb Space Telescope Department: According to the Washington Post, reporting on a new paper in Science, the old Hubbell Space Telescope has detected the farthest individual star yet seen.

In a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a team of astronomers asserts that this is the most distant individual star ever seen. They describe it as 50 to 100 times more massive than our sun, and roughly 1 million times brighter, with its starlight having traveled 12.9 billion years to reach the telescope.

That makes the star 4 billion years older (or its light 4 billion years older) than the next-oldest star, a substantial difference. But there are a few caveats:

As with any stunning claim, this carries caveats and uncertainties, starting with the possibility that it is not a singular star at all. It’s possible Earendel is a pair of stars, or even a trio or more, a common stellar phenomenon in which one bright member of the group does most of the illumination. (Alpha Centauri, the closest sun-like star, is part of a triplet).

Another possibility is that Earendel is, at its core, a black hole — the remnant of a massive individual star that has collapsed. Black holes are invisible, of course, but their gravity can lure rapidly moving and visible material, known as an accretion disk.

The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to go online in a few months, should be able to sort out these possibilities.

*The NYT has a short profile on one of my favorite bluegrass guitarists: Molly Tuttle.  (SHe and Billy Strings are the Doc Watsons of our era.) Tuttle actually spurns the label “bluegrass musician”, but in my view that’s what she’s best at. (Here new bluegrass album, “Crooked Tree,” comes out tomorrow.) It also discusses her extreme case of alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that attacks hair follicles. In her case, it’s taken every hair off her body, so she wears wigs in concert. Hair loss seems to be the only effect, and she’s otherwise healthy. (She discusses the condition openly on her website.) There’s also a video of a song from her new album, though I can’t see it on the ship.

*Finally, according to the Daily Fail, an unnamed teacher at the well known Colchester Grammar School in Essex has been suspended for carrying a Jesus and Mo mug on the playground  (h/t  Steve)

The staff member is said to have been photographed carrying the item in the playground at Colchester Royal Grammar School in Essex.

The white mug appears to feature a cartoon of Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad.

In speech bubbles, the Jesus figure appears to say ‘Hey’, with the Prophet Muhammad figure responding: ‘How ya doin?’

How damning! (That’s the same image that got two University Students threatened by their college when they wore it on tee shirts at a UCL fresher’s fair in London.) There’s more:

Launched in 2005, the simply-drawn webcomic chronicles the lives of two religious prophets – Jesus and Mo – based on the Christian and Islamic faiths and generally understood to represent Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad.

The cartoons poke fun at various aspects of religion, such as arguments for the existence of God.

A school spokesman said: ‘We have been notified that an image has been shared online of an individual appearing to use a cup that has an offensive image on it.

‘At this time we are looking into the matter.

The worst part is this: the paper reproduces a picture of the cup, but blotted out the image:

(From the Fail): said to have been photographed carrying the white mug (above), which appears to feature a cartoon of Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad, in the playground at Colchester Royal Grammar School in Essex

What a cowardly thing to do, but of course the consequences of showing an innocuous depiction of Mohammad could be dire.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants to fly, but you know it’s only so she can more easily catch birds!

Hili: I’m looking and thinking.
A: And?
Hili: I would like to be able to fly.
In Polish:
Hili: Patrzę i myślę.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Chciałabym umieć fruwać.

And here is Andrzej with Karolina from Kyiv, who’s now going to the school in Dobrzyn and picking up Polish rapidly. Malgorzata sent a report on Karolina’s progress:

She goes to school and she loves it. There is another Ukrainian girl her age in her class and the two are now friends but they do not isolate themselves from others: they play with and talk to their Polish classmates. Karolina and the other refugee girl understand more and more Polish and all the kids manage to communicate somehow. The Polish kids have accepted the two girls and when I hear how well it’s  going I have trouble believing in this idyllic picture. But a huge smile on Karolina’s face when I ask her how the school was does much to convince me that this idyll really exists.

Good news! She’s smiling below, too:

From Ducks in Public (but do NOT give them bread!)

From Nicole:

A perpetually surprised cat from Divy:

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Titania is remarkably prescient (second tweet)!  I haven’t read the article in which “science” is stymied by defining “men” and “women”, but the simple biological answer is the disparity in gamete size. However, it wasn’t fair to ask Justice Jackson to give the biological answer, since few people know it. The first tweet is from last year, also showing La McGrath’s prescience.

From tweets that now come suggested to me by email (how did that happen?):

I can’t vouch for it, but this reminds me of Palestinian propaganda videos in which children bearing arms swear to destroy Israel:

I think this d*g has been trained to do this!

Reader Ken has two tweets for us, with commentary:

Here is a member of the Russian State Duma, on Russian State TV, calling for “regime change” in the US, so that Russia’s “partner” Donald Trump can be restored to the US presidency:

This is on top of Donald Trump’s appearance on the right-wing  tv show “Real America’s Voice” calling on Vladimir Putin (in the middle of the war in Ukraine) to release political dirt (relating to an unfounded conspiracy theory) on sitting US president Joe Biden:

Two tweets from Matthew:

Something has gone badly wrong at this journal!

Antarctica (Patagonia): Days 28-29

March 30, 2022 • 12:30 pm

This post extends through lunchtime yesterday: March 29.  There were two Big Activities to see and do on days 28 and 29: our second passage through the White Narrows, headed back east, and then, on Tuesday, a closeup view of the largest glacier in South America.

As usual, click the photos once or twice to enlarge them.

We left Puerto Natales in the late morning of the 28th and headed west through the fjords and mountains back toward the  “White Narrows“. I’ve previously posted about our west-to-east transit through this most treacherous of passages, but I’ve since learned a bit more and was better prepared to take pictures.

The approach to the Narrows from either direction is lovely, with snow-capped mountains on either side.

The White Narrows is a gap in the channel between the mainland and a small island, with shallow waters below. The minimum width of the Narrows is 80 meters (260 feet), while the beam, or width, of the Roald Amundsen is 24 meters (79 feet). That means that if we went straight through the middle, we’d have a gap of 28 meters (91 feet) on each side. 

But we don’t go through the middle, as the south side of the narrows is shallower than the north side. That means we thread the needle by going closer to the north than the south side. It looks and feels as if you could reach out and touch the trees on the mainland to the north.

Below is the gap through which we’ll pass (photo taken from the east side). The arrow shows the infamous narrows:

This site provided a cool picture of another ship making the transit; I believe this was taken with a drone. Note that the ship is staying closer to the north than to the south side of the Narrows.

Photo: Ross Vernon McDonald

You can traverse the narrows only during “slack water”: that period between low and high tide when there is very little current—a short period that occurs only four times a day. This is the time when the current through the Narrows is around 1 knot or less (about 1.2 mph). If it’s higher, it can make the ship harder to steer, as well as causing eddies that can throw off the navigation.

The only way to measure the current through the narrows, and determine an auspicious time for passage, is to send out a Zodiac with the proper instruments. That small inflatable ship, carrying a Chilean pilot, a navigator, and other bigwigs from the ship, goes into the gap about an hour before the ship does. The people on the Zodiac, I’m told, are constantly communicating with the bridge of the ship, giving information about currents, wind, and so on. Sometimes they stay in one spot and sometimes the Zodiac moves back and forth across the narrows testing the water flow.

Here’s what you see from the ship. Since you never know when the time is right, if you want to experience the passage you must go on deck roughly when the small ship enters the narrows, and wait for about an hour.

See the tiny Zodiac in the photo below?

Closer up (more zoom on my lens):

Finally, without fanfare, the bridge and narrows-watchers decide that the time is right for the ship to go through, the ship starts moving, and we approach the opening slowly and carefully:

Almost there. . .

And the passage through. This is the south side, where we’re farther from land.

And the closer north side, where people are amazed that they’re so close to land. It’s sure less than 90 feet to the rocks!

I was told by the Expedition Leader, who’s in charge of determining our itinerary, that he was on the bridge during the transit as the ship was steered MANUALLY through the gap. GPSs won’t do here because the currents and eddies change rapidly. The leader said that the captain loudly told all the interlopers on the bridge to remain absolutely quiet, as he had to concentrate on steering the ship.  There’s also a Chilean pilot on the bridge, who doesn’t steer the ship but is there to give advice.

And we’re through! Another great feat of navigation.  The sheep has to steer left immediately after going through to stay in the middle of the passage.

After the transit, the exploration Zodiac returns to the ship, which is stopped to disgorge the measurement team and then hoist the boat into the bay.

I was also told twice that when Chilean pilots come aboard—several times during this trip—they don’t stop the ship because it’s expensive to stop it and start it again. Instead, both the small pilot’s boat and our big ship assume similar speeds, the Admunsen opens its door, a platform or a ladder comes out, and the pilot has to JUMP from one ship to the other on the fly.  This is, I’m told, nerve-wracking.

Above and below: the intrepid Measurement Team returns to the ship. As you see, four people are needed to man the Zodiac, make measurements, and advise the ship’s captain.

Right on the other side of the Narrows, the lovely scenery resumes.

Watching the transit works up one’s appetite. It was dinnertime (I eat at 6 pm, which is early).

I alternate between beer and wine at dinner (no booze at lunch though some people toss it down then). I like the wine because you can see the scenery outside the dining room reflected in the glass:

A man needs a hearty “Steakhouse Burger” after that nail-biting passage. I hadn’t had a burger in several days, and so why not?

And a chocolate shake for dessert.

We spent the rest of the day wending our way through the channel, and since the ship’s streaming video is down, I had no idea where we were headed the next day. At 8:15 each night they used to stream the next days itinerary over the cabin t.v. Now you have to go to the auditorium to hear it, but I didn’t want to be in a big crowd, covid-free though we seem to be.

I opened up my cabin window to see the scene below; we were in front of a huge glacier and my balcony was facing it directly.

It turned out to be the face of South America’s largest glacier, the Brüggen Glacier, indicated in the map below. Wikipedia gives ancillary information:

Brüggen Glacier, also known as Pío XI Glacier, is in southern Chile and is the largest western outflow from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. Now about 66 km (41 mi) in length, it is the longest glacier in the southern hemisphere outside Antarctica. Unlike most glaciers worldwide, it advanced significantly from 1945 to 1976, Brüggen surged 5 km (3.1 mi) across the Eyre Fjord, reaching the western shore by 1962 and cutting off Lake Greve from the sea. The glacier continued advancing both northward and southward in the fjord to near its present position before stabilizing. The growth covers a distance of more than 10 km (6.2 mi) north to south, adding nearly 60 square kilometres (23 sq mi) of ice. The glacier is named after the German geologist Juan Brüggen Messtorff.

The Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the world’s second largest contiguous field, is the remnant of the ice field that covered much more of this area during the last big glacial period, about 40,000 years ago

It got sunny later in the day, and here you see a panorama of the glacier’s face (in the middle) and the surrounding area.

A morning selfie from my balcony. What a view I had!

The expedition leader and ship’s captain decided that it was sufficiently calm for us to go out in Zodiacs, though I didn’t expect that. I quickly threw on my warm clothes and was in the second boat to to out. The remarkable calmness of the water and relative quiescence of the glacier enabled us to travel very close to the face. (You never go right up to the face lest a deadly “calving event” occur.)

We were out early as the sun rose:

And we traveled in the Zodiac along the face for 45 minutes. Unlike Antarctica, it was relatively warm and I didn’t need gloves. There are no icebergs in this channel as the warmer waters melt the falling ice quickly.

It’s a moraine-ish glacier, with lots of dirt mixed in with the ice. That makes the waters in this fjord very silty, sometimes clogging up the water intakes of the Zodiacs.

You can see how close they let us get to the glacier:

As the tides go in and out, part of the glacier often overhangs the water:

 

Another view of the ice hanging over water:

The Amundsen lay in the distance. Perhaps I should have taken a later Zodiac when the sun came out, but I was eager and in fact had no idea whether there would be sun.

The Mother Ship waiting to receive its Zodiacs:

And the mountains around us:

I decided to have a “proper” lunch at the Aune restaurant because I had a tiny breakfast so I could rush to the Zodiac launch. Before lunch, though, I visited one of the things that they do for passengers: give them clay to make penguins and paint to paint their models. Then they fire the penguins and put them on display. Here’s the display from this trip’s workshop.

As you see, the quality varies. Two parents and their chick are on the left:

I don’t know who made this messed-up penguin head, but I give it the First Prize:

In the cabinet are penguin models from earlier trips:

Lunch yesterday in the Aune, just to show you the nature of the food. I translated the menu from German (the ship’s app with English menus was down)

Soup:  Traditional Ukrainian borscht (beet soup) with lamb and sour cream (I didn’t detect any sour ceam):

Main:  Beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes, sour cream, pickled vegetables, and beets

Dessert: Financier (a french cake), cream, and berry compote. As usual, dessert in the Aune is the best course .

And an after-lunch view of the fjord.  I have a few photos from later in the day, but I’ll combine them with photos of whatever happens in the next day or two. I asked our ornithologist what the rarest bird he’d seen was, and he said that he saw a local hummingbird fly by the ship (he was able to identify it, but I forgot the ID). Since we’re not often on land that has vegetation, there’s not much chance to see land birds.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ secularism

March 30, 2022 • 11:00 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “quite,” came with an email tag:”We thought they’d never end.” It’s surprising in view of the admission of the Divine Duo that it’s courageous to profess nonbelief in a world of believers. But of course what is “ending” here is the “religious world”, as the pair admit that the world is secularist (it really isn’t!):

What do we do if Russia and Ukraine make peace?

March 30, 2022 • 9:15 am

Of course the first thing we should do is rejoice, but I’m talking about what do we do with Russia if the two nations conclude a peace agreement?  In particular, what about all the economic and political sanctions that we and our allies have put on Russia?

If there’s a settlement that satisfies both Zelensky and Putin, it seems to me, that doesn’t release us from the need to continue some kind of sanctions on Russia. (I”m assuming by “satisfy Zelensky”, when it’s clear the man wants a country free of Russians and Russian threats, means that that “the agreement is something Zelensky decides to do to as the best way stop the killing and devastation wrought on his land.”)

Just as a criminal has to serve time as a form of deterrence and to keep him out of society until he’s reformed, so, I think, we cannot let Russia simply go scot-free if and when a peace is concluded.

Such a peace would surely involve some Ukrainian concessions to Russia, like giving up Ukrainian land in the eastern part of the country or agreeing that Ukraine won’t join either NATO and EU. But if there are no international sanctions in place thereafter, what has Russia lost? Well, it’s a pariah among nations, and it’s lost thousands of soldiers, and perhaps you think that would be punishment enough. Nobody will trust the country again, though of course it still has allies.

On the other hand, keeping sanctions on continues to punish innocent Russians, many of whom abhor this blasted “special action,” and might be seen as uncharitable. After all, after both Germany and Japan surrendered at the end of WWII, the U.S., in contrast to continuing punishment as a deterrent helped rebuild those nations. (We had learnt that lesson from WWI.)

Sanctions will also punish the allies. For example, much of Europe, especially Germany, will be economically strapped by a continued diminution of their gas supply.

Surely the world will pitch in to rebuild Ukraine after a war ends—lif it continues to exist as a sovereign state, but what do we do about Russia? Lift all sanctions, lift no sanctions, at least for a while, or lift some sanctions, and see what happens.

I have no solution to this question save that I don’t believe that all sanctions should be lifted immediately. But please weigh in below, as I’m curious to hear readers’ thoughts.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

March 30, 2022 • 7:00 am

Where we are now: The ship’s real-time map shows that, as expected, we’re proceeding north up the coast of South America, heading for a docking on Valparaiso on April 3.

The first map shows our detour to Puerto Natales and return:

I see nothing out my window save the snotgreen sea , as I’m on the port side and we’re heading north. On the starboard, however, here comes the Sun over the coastal hills:

If you want to help out with “this day in history”, go to the Wikipedia page for March 30 and give us your favorite notable events, births, and deaths.

Good morning on a Hump Day (“Hari Punuk”, as they say in Indonesian): Wednesday, March 30, 2022, and National Hot Chicken Day. We’re not talking about heat as in degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, but degree of spiciness, for “Hot Chicken” made with hot peppers is a speciality of the Southern US, particularly from Nashville, Tennessee. It comes in degrees of spiciness, and the hottest variety will burn out your oral mucosa. Beware of fiery, bright red chicken unless you’ve worked your way up to it (it is a form of masochism!):

The New York Times headline has changed in the last hour. First it was that progress was being made in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia; now it looks worse (click on screenshot to read):

And the NYT news summary:

A day after peace talks yielded hope for an easing of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, local officials reported new attacks on Wednesday on the outskirts of Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv, two areas where Russia had vowed to sharply reduce combat operations.

The continuing attacks signaled that Moscow was in no hurry to end its war, now five weeks old, despite claims that it would de-escalate its operations after hours of talks on Tuesday with Ukrainian representatives in Istanbul.

The “talks” between Ukraine and Russia, such as they are, are reported to be pretty much stalemated: this is what we must hang our hopes on:

[The Kremlin’s] spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, told reporters that although Ukraine’s proposals were “a positive factor,” reaching a deal would still take a lot of work.

We’re talking weeks or months here, and time translates into lives lost.

*Shades of Rose Mary Woods!  Logs of White House calls from the fateful day of January 6 show a seven-hour hiatus when Trump wasn’t communicating by phone. Ironically, one of the reporters on this Washington Post story is Bob Woodward, who helped bring down Nixon during Watergate (remember the gaps in the White House recordings?) The evidence comes from White House records turned over to the House by the National Archives.

Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in President Donald Trump’s phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 — from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. — means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.

. . .The House panel is now investigating whether Trump communicated that day through back channels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, known as “burner phones,” according to two people with knowledge of the probe, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. The committee is also scrutinizing whether it received the full logs from that day.

One lawmaker on the panel said the committee is investigating a “possible coverup” of the official White House record from that day. Another person close to the committee said the large gap in the records is of “intense interest” to some lawmakers on the committee, many of whom have reviewed copies of the documents. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal committee deliberations.

I tell you, this means big, big trouble for the Trumpster; perhaps even conspiracy charges. LOCK HIM UP!

*If you’re 50 or older, or have an underlying medical condition that puts you at risk of severe covid, you’re now eligible for a SECOND booster (Moderna and Pfizer boosters only, but the fourth shot also recommended to those who first got the J&J vaccine).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it would update its vaccine guidance to reflect the F.D.A.’s action. While she did not outright recommend a second booster for everyone now eligible, Dr. Rochelle P Walensky, the C.D.C.’s director, said the option for the added dose “is especially important for those 65 and older and those 50 and older with underlying medical conditions that increase their risk for severe disease.”

Dr. Marks [head of the FDA’s vaccine division]went a bit farther, saying those 50 and older who got their first booster more than four months ago, “should seriously consider getting another.”

However, my own doctor says the study supporting this conclusion was flawed, and he didn’t recommend my getting a second booster at present. Make your own decision!

You can read the FDA update here.

I’m late today, so I’ll just add this report from the Associated Press that there are monkeys loose in Florida! They live around the Fort Lauderdale airport:

The United States has no native monkeys, but the smallish vervets have roamed Dania Beach since the late 1940s after a dozen brought from West Africa fled a now long-closed breeding facility and roadside zoo. Today, 40 descendants are broken into four troops living within 1,500 acres (600 hectares) around the airport. Florida also has a few colonies of escaped macaques and squirrel monkeys.

A photo:

But the U.S. does have native monkeys. They’re called “humans.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrezej and squabbling again:

Hili: And what are you doing?
A: Taking a picture.
Hili: Do something wiser instead.
In Polish:
Hili: I co ty robisz?
Ja: Zdjęcie.
Hili: Zrób lepiej coś mądrego.

And a photo of little Kulka. Don’t you just want to rub her tummy?

The meme below is from Simon, who says, “I’m guessing from the label that he won’t be worrying about punctuation-just punches.”  Remember what happened at the Oscars?

From Merilee: Acme, Inc. fails again!

From Facebook. If you have an old teapot, you should repurpose it as an exaptation:

A tweet from God. I think things started going wrong when he created primates:

Even though I don’t “follow” anyone formally on Twitter, they’ve started sending me selections of tweets based on whose tweets I look at. Here’s one example

Titania has two tweets in her continuing series of things that are discovered to be racist. You can challenge yourself by trying to guess the reasons these things have been demonized; thumbs-up emojis, steam trains, and carrying babies mystified me. But you can track down the articles to find out.

 

Reader Peter tells us that this Tweeter has a number of hints for Ukrainians about simple ways to sabotage the Russian invasion. Have a look at the thread:

Tweets from Matthew. The Ukrainians who said “nuts” survived!

This is brave and sad at the same time:

Okay, I’m going to have to check this out. But who was Trump’s Rose Mary Woods?

What on earth is “cancel culture”?

March 29, 2022 • 1:15 pm

In a new piece in the Dailiy Beast, authors Komi German and Greg Lukianoff define what they mean by cancel culture (the best definition I’ve yet seen), show how pervasive cancel culture is (and worsening), and identify the Perpetrators of Cancellation. There is, however, one flaw connected with identifying the perps.

Both authors work for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an estimable organization that fights for free speech on campus, and is too often criticized simply because of their identification of free speech as the most important academic value.  (The Progressive Left, unlike traditional liberals, isn’t that keen on free speech since it’s said to “harm” some people, and by “harm” they mean “offend”.)

The bona fides from the article:

Komi T. German is a research fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). She earned her bachelor’s degree with highest honors at the University of California, Davis, and her doctorate in social psychology at the University of California, Riverside.

Greg Lukianoff is the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, and author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.

I’m not a credentials-promulgator, but one can at least have confidence in these authors’ statistics, which largely support their contentions.

Click on the screenshot to read.

 

While people often argue about whether “cancel culture” is real, you don’t often see that term defined. For example, the writers of the famous 2020 letter in Harper’s decrying cancel culture were criticized because many of them were well off and weren’t in danger of being “cancelled”. But the letter’s point was to defend those who were in danger of professional damage from speaking their minds, not to defend the lettter’s signers.

What is “professional damage”? Well, the very concept of free speech not only allows but welcomes pushback. Very few, despite what the New York Times asserts, thinks that “free speech” means “freedom from criticism”—even harsh and ascerbic criticism. Like German and Lukianoff, I prefer civil dialogue rather than social-media pile-ons, but those pile-ons themselves aren’t “cancel culture.” Rather, the definition I prefer is that given by German and Lukianoff (henceforth “G&L”). The bolding below is mine; the definition is theirs:

But just because the term has been grossly overused doesn’t mean we should give up on its popularly understood definition—which aptly describes a real (and growing) problem. This is the measurable uptick, since around 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is—or would be—protected by First Amendment standards. That’s “cancel culture.”

Cancel culture, then, is the culture of trying to harm someone’s career or silence or otherwise punish them professionally for issuing legal speech—speech permitted by the First Amendment. Of course private universities don’t have to allow First-Amendment-protected speech, but they should, and we all should insofar as we’re able.  Cancel culture exists not to promulgate open debate but to effect retribution and punishment. When you see people trying to shut someone up, cancel a speech, or call for someone’s firing because of what they said, that is cancel culture.

I can’t think of a better definition. Here’s where to draw the line: examples from the authors:

We say “would be” because the First Amendment does not apply to private companies. So, while the NFL was free to punish Colin Kaepernick, and The View was free to suspend Whoopi Goldberg, these are still examples of cancel culture under our definition, because the subjects of each controversy engaged in expression that “would be” protected, were the First Amendment standard to apply.

What happened to Ilya Shapiro, David Shor, and Kathy Griffin? Cancel culture.

I would add to that Don McNeil and James Bennet of the NYT, the University of Chicago’s Dorian Abbot (deplatformed), and any number of professors fired or disciplined for speech that offended the woke.

What happened to Andrew Cuomo, Jeff Zucker, Harvey Weinstein, Jan. 6 rioters, and the Russian military? Not cancel culture, despite their cries to the contrary.

If people call for your firing or disciplining because you committed a crime, or are likely to have committed one, that is not cancel culture. And, I suppose, if what you’re accused of involve acts rather than protected speech, and are so serious as to make your job no longer tenable, that, too, could be cancel culture.  But I think the line is fairly clear.

I’m not sure what to do about people whom others want to damage professionally, but who are immune to damage because they’re already wealthy and respected—people like J. K. Rowling and Woody Allen.  It’s okay to try to boycott their books, but not so okay to try to get publishers, as in the case of Allen, not to publish their books.

A few points made by G&L (their quotes are indented)

It’s pervasive. 

But The New York Times’ claim—that “[h]owever you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists and feel its burden”—was not outlandish. Far from it. Our own research corroborates it.

“Since 2015, there have been 163 investigations, 117 terminations, 109 suspensions, 48 resignations, 45 censorship incidents, 33 demotions, 18 retractions, and 13 mandatory trainings—all for ideological reasons.”

A survey commissioned late last year by FIRE, where we work, found that 73 percent of Americans are familiar with the term “cancel culture.” Of those, nearly 60 percent believe “there is a growing cancel culture that is a threat to our freedom”; only 25 percent do not. Additionally, 70 percent of those surveyed said they were afraid to say what they believe because they were worried it could impact their job or standing in school.

Other surveys of the American public have produced similar findings.

The UK-based Legatum Institute found that 50 percent of academics in the U.S. feel the need to censor their own political beliefs while on campus. These academics are making a prudent decision; more than one in three faculty admit they would discriminate against conservatives when making hiring decisions. Moreover, nearly one in four social science or humanities faculty—and almost one in two social science or humanities Ph.D. students—surveyed in the U.S. supported at least one campaign to dismiss a dissenting academic.

Simply put, study after study decidedly shows cancel culture not only exists, but also that, in too many places, it is thriving.

Cancel culture is getting worse.   

The authors give a lot of cases, some of which we know about, that involve true cancellation on campuses. But that doesn’t show the problem is getting worse.  The second paragraph below, however, does: in the last two years there have been 283 cancellation attempts, while over the last seven there have been 563 total. That is, almost exactly half of all cancellation attempts over the past seven years have taken place in just the latest two years. If one assumes that cancelation rates are equal over time, that’s surely a statistically significant increase.

Note, however, which direction the cancellations coming from—something the authors downplay in the rest of their article (my bolding below):

Since 2015, we documented 563 attempts (345 from the left, 202 from the right, 16 from neither) to get scholars canceled. Two thirds (362 incidents; 64 percent) of these cancellation attempts were successful, resulting in some form of professional sanction leveled at the scholar, including over one-fifth (117 incidents; 21 percent) resulting in termination.When Greg joined FIRE in 2001, the idea of one tenured professor being fired for protected speech seemed impossible, yet since 2015 there have been 30.

The problem has only gotten worse, particularly over the past few years. Just since the start of 2020, there have been 283 cancellation attempts. Scholars are canceled most often for expressing a personal opinion (338 incidents; 60 percent), encouraging discussion of sensitive material (145 incidents; 26 percent), or presenting a scientific argument (136 incidents; 24 percent).

Actually, it doesn’t concern me too much whether cancellation attempts are getting worse, though they surely are. There are already enough of these attempts to chill speech among a large proportion of college students and professors, not to mention the general public and the media.

But it’s in the next assertion where the authors seem to be a bit evasive.

Where is cancel culture coming from? 

G&L seem to imply that the cancellation attempts come mostly from the Right, while the Left claim to be victims. Only in the paragraph above do they say the truth: that cancellation of scholars is mainly from the left (61.2%), while only 35.8% come from the Right.  (2.8% come from neither side.). Judging from this, at least on campus it’s mostly the Left promulgating cancel culture.

But G&L spend most of their time indicting the Right—mainly for their attempts to pass “muzzling laws” forbidding teaching stuff like Critical Race Theory (I agree with FIRE that these laws are a bad idea).  Here’s what G&L say:

The perpetuation of cancel culture is bipartisan: Conservatives criticize it, while practicing it; progressives deny it, while being victims of it.

Over the past year Republican legislators introduced a series of anti-critical race theory (i.e.,“divisive concepts”) bills seeking to restrict teachers’ ability to teach topics related to race and sexuality. These bills, when applied in higher education contexts, are almost always unconstitutional.

Though conservatives talk a good game about defending “free speech” and decrying “cancel culture,” hypocrisy among the movement is not new. In 2017, three Nebraska Republican legislators sponsored a bill to protect free speech on campus, then called on the University of Nebraska to fire graduate teaching assistant Courtney Lawton for her progressive political activism.

Meanwhile, some progressives remain so committed to denying cancel culture is a problem they won’t even admit it exists even after they themselves are canceled.

But surely the perpetuation of cancel culture rests more on the shoulders of those who cancel others, not those who say they were canceled. It is true that the Right passes most of the muzzling laws, which often prohibit First-Amendment-compatible speech, but G&L blame the Left for perpetuating “cancel culture” only by saying they’re victimized by it. Yet their own data on deplatforming and disinviting given in bold above show that the Left perpetuates cancellation more often than they’re victims of it.

In other words, G&L are downplaying the responsibility of the Left. Why? I have no idea except that The Daily Beast is a Leftist venue that surely doesn’t like to indict its own side.

G&L further give the game away when they talk about the “elites” who really keep Cancel Culture going. Who are the “elites”? Mostly people on the Left:

When elites seek to control the terminology, they often do so for the purpose of signaling in-group membership. Doing so often excludes the vast majority of Americans from the conversation.

For example, although the term “Latinx” is popular within our news media, entertainment industry, corporations, politics, and universities, Pew Research found that only 3 percent of Latino adults use the word. It is an example of what James Carville calls “faculty lounge” language. As author Helen Pluckrose points out, modern social justice advocates derive power from controlling language. As the language changes, people who use an outdated term or phrase are quickly dismissed as ignorant or uneducated.

. . . When elites seek to control the terminology, they often do so for the purpose of signaling in-group membership. Doing so often excludes the vast majority of Americans from the conversation.

This is not just an implicit indictment of the Left’s role in cancel culture, but an explicit one. Who are “social justice advocates” but the Left? Who perpetuates the use of “Latinx” but the Left? Who creates “faculty lounge language”? The Left, as James Carville noted in his refreshing diatribe.

In the end, German and Lukianoff have written a very useful article. It gives the best definition of “cancel culture” that I know of, shows that it’s rampant and growing, and that it damages the First Amendment as well as all civilized discourse. We need to take that to heart and stop trying to get people fired for issuing speech that doesn’t abrogate the First Amendment.

But it’s a crying shame that G&L’s article is marred by what I view as excessive deference to the Left and excessive blaming of the Right.  I am not saying the Right is blameless, of course. All the laws they’re passing do perpetuate cancel culture in its true sense. But the Left seems more to blame for the culture as a whole, and at any rate my audience is not on the Righ. I’ve alwaysI see my brief as trying to clean up my end of the political spectrum. Remember, the elections are coming in November. While I can and have called out the Right’s mania to pass laws restricting what can be taught, there are plenty of other people willing to do that. What we need are liberals to keep other liberals from cancellng people.