Welcome to CaturSaturday, February 3, 2024, and cat shabbos. Foodwise, it’s National Carrot Cake Day, one of my favorite cakes, but only if it has cream-cheese frosting, comme ça:
It’s also American Painters Day, International Golden Retriever Day, The Day the Music Died, honoring the day in 1959 when rock musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson died in a plane crash in Iowa, National Women Physicians, Day, Martyrs’ Day in São Tomé and Príncipe.
Here’s a poster for the concert series during which the musicians were killed:
Four Chaplains Day (United States, also considered a Feast Day by the Episcopal Church). Here are the four chaplains from Wikipedia; they gave up their lifejackets to others and went down with the torpedoed ship S. D. Dorchester on this day in 1943. Wikipedia identifies them this way:
The relatively new chaplains all held the rank of first lieutenant. They included Methodist minister the Reverend George L. Fox, Reform Rabbi Alexander D. Goode (PhD), Catholic priest Father John P. Washington, and Reformed Church in America minister the Reverend Clark V. Poling.
A stamp honoring the chaplains; I had this in my stamp collection when I was a kid:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 3 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*This may taint Georgia’s case against Trump for election interference. The head prosecutor, Fani Willis, who brought the charges against Trump, has now admitted to having a romantic relationship witha another prosecutor she appointed:
Willis’s response came more than three weeks after MikeRoman, one of Trump’s remaining 14 co-defendants in the criminal case and a former high-ranking campaign aide during the 2020 election, alleged in a court filing that Willis was engaged in a “personal, romantic relationship” with Wade, whose firm has been paid more than $653,000 by the district attorney’s office since he was tapped as an outside prosecutor on the case in November 2021.
Roman claimed Willis may have broken the law by hiring Wade and then allowing him to pay for “vacations across the world” with her that were unrelated to their work on the case. Wade and Willis, Roman’s filing claimed, were “profiting significantly from this prosecution at the expense of the taxpayers.” Roman’s filing, which offered no proof to back up the sensational claims, called for the prosecutors to be disqualified and for the charges against him to be dismissed.
Roman’s motion was later joined by Trump and another co-defendant in the case, Atlanta-area attorney Bob Cheeley, who are also seeking to have the case moved out of Fulton County and charges dismissed.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, has scheduled a Feb. 15 evidentiary hearing on the allegations.
I don’t know what this means for the case, but I doubt that a tainted prosecutor can kill a case dead. But it will at least seriously delay the trial (if there is one). And the optics aren’t good: Willis hires a guy who then uses the money to squire her around the world.
*NYT columnist Pamela Paul has immersed herself in hot water again with a long NYT column “As kids, they thought they were trans. They no longer do.” (I found it archived here for free.) It’s bound to be controversial since it highlights transsexuals who have changed their mind about their transitions, and warns of the dangers of hormone therapy and “affirmative therapy” in general. Paul first describes one “detransitioner” and immediately jumps into the fire from the frying pan:
Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.
But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.
Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.
. . . Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”
She discusses other detransitioners, whose stories seem to be promoted mostly by right-wing outlets, but Paul’s point is not to inhibit people from becoming transsexuals, but for the system to ensure that gender transitions are not made automatically after parents and therapists unquestioningly accept the assertions of gender-dysphoric youth. Paul ends this way:
Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.
A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.
Paul knows what she’s getting into here: there is no group so eager to destroy their opponents than gender activists. But Ceiling Cat bless her for speaking the unwelcome truth in the pages of a woke newspaper!
*In an UnHerd article about Paul’s piece, “New York Times gets braver with gender coverage,” (subtitle “The paper is no longer shying away from difficult questions around transitioning”), Eliza Mondegreen says this (h/s Enrico)
This is a deeply moving piece that goes much further in its implications than anything the New York Times has run before. There are, however, also curiosities surrounding Pamela Paul’s piece, like the editorial decision to relegate her reporting to the opinion pages, and to run an apologia of sorts by Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, in which she suggests, in the mildest possible terms, that more conversation is a good thing for “humanity, nuance and empathy,” and that gender medicine is full of “complexities.”
Doctors, activists, and reporters alike have treated the subject of gender as an utter exception. Gender clinicians are meant to jettison everything they know about child and adolescent development, about the ways distress finds expression in our bodies, about how dangerous ideas can spread like wildfire. Activists have insisted that the whole world observe their taboos and echo their mantras. And media outlets like the Times have too often abandoned their responsibility to inform themselves and their readers, to bring the facts to light without fear or favor. There has been far too much fear and far too many favours to activists, who never should have been allowed to control the narrative.
The New York Times is still trying to tell a contained story of what has gone wrong in the field of gender medicine, but Pamela Paul’s piece lays out — much more clearly than anything the paper has dared to print before — just how deep and vast the scandal is, and just how much harm has been done.
Another article by Mondegreen about the effect of trans kids on parents can be found at Fairer Disputations. I may do a longer post about Paul’s article, which is far beyond an “op-ed” piece.
*As always, I steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s snarky and weekly news summary at the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Taylor vs. Trump“:
→ Ilhan Omar’s semi-scandal: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was speaking Somali to a group of her fellow Somalis, and she said some interesting stuff, namely: “We are sisters and brothers, supporting each other, people who know they are Somalis and Muslims, coming to each other’s aid and aiding their brothers and sisters. . . . Somalia belongs to all Somalis. Somalia is one. We are brothers and sisters, and our land will not be balkanized. Our lands were taken from us before, and God willing, we may one day seek them, but what we have now will not be balkanized.” (Emphasis my own.) It’s interesting that Ilhan, who never misses an opportunity to try to attack the Jewish state, is very comfortable with her own ethno-religious state. What’s more interesting: she wants conquest! The first honest thing she’s said is that she wants her people to conquer more lands. A note: this speech of hers was mistranslated at first, and people made fools of themselves jumping on scary-sounding quotes that weren’t quite right. What she actually says is shocking enough.
→ Biden pivots on the border: In what CNN calls a “stunning political shift,” Biden this week said that if he could, he would “shut down” the U.S.-Mexico border right now. But can’t he? I have no idea. This comes after Border Patrol, at the end of last week, finally released December’s immigration numbers (they held the numbers late, finally releasing them on a Friday afternoon, a classic strategy to try to get as little coverage as possible). And why would it be good to hide them? Because the numbers are shocking. Border Patrol reported 302,034 migrant encounters in December, which breaks the previous record set in September. Among those were 19 people on the FBI terror watch list. Nineteen! Enough to play a basketball tournament.
For a sense of the trend here, in 2023, Border Patrol reported 2.4 million total encounters. (That doesn’t count the 30,000 migrants lawfully allowed in each month through the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan parole program, or the estimated 800,000 “gotaways” in 2023.) In 2018 the number of encounters was 396,579. People always give politicians a hard time for flip-flopping. Me, as a flip-flopper, I am pro. I get it. Biden’s border policy has been a disaster. I mean, go figure that open borders don’t work. My rule: if you flop toward me, then I’m good with the flip.
→ And in news about Jews: Many Western leaders—like Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf—did a great job delivering lengthy Holocaust Remembrance Day addresses while carefully avoiding the word Jews. Chicago has voted in favor of a cease-fire in Gaza, while the rest of the world prays for a cease-fire in Chicago, a city that has led the nation in homicides 12 years in a row. Protesters in DC blocked traffic along the road in front of the Holocaust Museum (the building was probably picked at random, right?) holding up a sign that read: “Hands off Yemen.” A group of government workers announced that to support Gaza they would go on a one-day hunger strike, also known as Thursday at Delta Kappa before a semiformal. San Francisco taxpayers are funding the protesters who blocked the Golden Gate Bridge, according to new reporting from our friends at Pirate Wires. And after Israel’s special forces slipped into a West Bank hospital to kill three terrorists who were hiding inside, Mehdi Hasan called for outrage over the “government death squad.” Because it turns out, there’s no right way to kill a terrorist.
But there is good—and surprising—news. Even as the youth go pro-Hamas, the general feeling in America is actually that we should support Israel more:
*An amazingly well preserved iron glove, 600 years old, has been discovered in Switzerland.
Demolition work near Kyburg Castle, northeast of Zurich, threatened a site that was known to be the location of a medieval town. So a rescue excavation was carried out in the winter of 2021 and early 2022. “We knew that all the archaeological remains in the ground would be destroyed during this construction work,” said Lorena Burkhardt, the excavation leader.
Excavators unearthed a weaving cellar that had burned down in the 14th century. Much of what was found was prosaic: a hammer, tongs, tweezers, keys. But it was enough to indicate that blacksmith work had also been done in the area.
. . . And then there was the big find. A nearly complete right-handed iron glove from the 14th century, as well as some pieces from a left-handed one. Nearly every other gauntlet found over the years has been from a later period, according to Zurich Cantonal Archaeology, the body of experts employed by the local government, who announced the find this month. And while a few from the 14th century have turned up in Switzerland, “none of these pieces is anywhere near as well preserved and shows as many details of design and decoration as the Kyburg gauntlet,” the group said.
The gauntlet would likely have been worn by a medieval soldier or a knight, but so far it’s unclear who wore it and for what purpose.
“We know of tombstones of knights from the 14th century who wore similar gauntlets,” Ms. Burkhardt said. “Ultimately, however, we cannot say whether the gauntlets were actually made for a knight or for someone else who needed to equip himself for war.”
But there are clues pointing to the wearer’s high status. “What is certain is that the gloves were made to a high standard and the purchase of such pieces of armor was correspondingly expensive,” Ms. Burkhardt said. “It is therefore likely that the gloves were intended for a noble or other high-ranking person.”
The fingers of the gauntlet fold in four places to allow for movement; individual iron plates are layered atop each other and connected with rivets. Material inside the gauntlet would have been leather or textile.
Here it is (picture from NYT):
*And from Andrew Sullivan, a column called “The meaningless incoherence of ‘LGBTQ+’.”
Whether I like it or not, I am now deemed not a gay man but an “LGBTQ+ person”.
Google Trends captures the linguistic shift. The words “gay” and “lesbian” peaked in 2015 and 2014, respectively, and in 2016, “LGBTQ” took off. It’s now more common than either of the previous terms. “Transgender”, “LGBTQ+”, and “queer” also took off at around the same time. Language usually changes gradually, when it is organic, and it’s no biggie. But a change in language this swift is rare. Perhaps it was the combination of marriage equality — legalized nationally in 2015 — and the simultaneous launch of a woke cultural revolution that did it.
Gay groups, media outlets, academia, tech, and even corporate America have now almost entirely replaced “gay and lesbian” with this new acronym. There are even reddits out there on “who is your favorite ‘LGBTQ person’”?” — a definitional impossibility — and MSM headlines like “This Group Might Save Your LGBTQ Kid’s Life,” and “Meet Kate Brown, the first openly LGBT person to be elected governor of a state.” (Spoiler alert: she’s not gay or lesbian or trans. She’s bi and married to a man.)
The term “LGBTQ” has an obvious advantage: it’s concise. All those long, complicated words get reduced to an acronym. Who, after all, wants to say a phrase like North Atlantic Treaty Organization, when you can just say NATO and everyone knows what you mean?
. . .The trouble is that words have meanings, and the term “LGBTQ+” — like the term “Hispanic” or “Latino” — is not like NATO. It doesn’t refer to a single, identifiable group, experience, or community. It refers to multiple ones. And each is distinct, discrete and often very different. When you examine its component parts, you realize that the Ls and Gs and Bs and Ts, let alone the Is and the +s, differ dramatically in basic things like psychology, lifestyle, income, geography, education, and politics.
They don’t necessarily live in the same neighborhoods anymore — as the old gay ghetto has dispersed across a more tolerant landscape. They don’t routinely socialize as a single unit. Some bisexuals have never had a same-sex relationship, or know any gays at all. Gay men contain multitudes — from conservative Southerners in the Marines to “queer” club kids drinking the critical theory Kool-Aid. The lesbian dating scene is light-years away from gay men’s, and closer to the hetero experience in many ways. Transgender people are utterly different, often as comfortable with straight people as with gays, with a wholly separate life experience. Gay men are, after all, in a profound way defined by their sex; trans people are defined by their rejection of it.
Lumping them all together and treating them as a single unit is like treating Jews and Arabs as the “Middle East community,” or Cubans and Salvadorans as indistinguishable “Latinos.” “LGBTQ+” is a term that obscures and misleads more than it enlightens and clarifies. And it has made any study or understanding of homosexuals as a discreet group close to impossible.
Sullivan gives lots of examples of how lumping these disparate groups together causes problems. Here’s one example:
From the NYT recently, some examples: “the Oscar nominations announced yesterday were a high-water mark for queer representation,” … “Queer History Was Made in ’90s Clubs” … “At This Staten Island Garden, the Plants Are All Queer.” This is endemic in the MSM — as woke writers in woke newspapers vie with each other to prove their woke credentials. There’s even a radical chic frisson among straight lefties who delight in calling gay people “queer”. In what can only be called identity-slumming, many straights are now calling themselves queer as well.
We’re constantly told, of course, that all gays and lesbians have collectively co-opted and destigmatized the q-word. But polling shows that only 3 – 4 percent of the entire LGBTQ+ world call themselves “queer”. So the MSM routinely uses a word for the entire “LGBTQ+” world that 96 percent of this community rejects. It’s up there with “Latinx” as an accurate descriptor.
He concludes that activists have seized the discourse and that “it’s time to return to reality, to say things plainly and to consign this increasingly meaningless acronym to the dustbin of history.” That’s fine with me, for lumping a gay person with a transsexual person or a bixexual person creates an “identity” that doesn’t really exist.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being a masochist. She appears to be scrunched up in the spare bedroom.
A: You must be uncomfortable there.Hili: I suffer voluntarily.
Ja: Tam ci chyba niewygodnie.Hili: Cierpię z wyboru.
*******************
I forgot the source of this, but this tubby tabby could easily have been Hili—except groundhogs aren’t found in Poland:
From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:
A video Susan, who calls this a “screaming marshmallow with teeth”. Don’t miss this one!
From Masih, a new way that theocratic Iran targets families of executed political prisoners: arrest them if they visit the families of other executed political prisoners.
First they execute your son, then they hide the body, then they don’t allow you to have a funeral for your beloved one, and arrest you if you cry for justice. Welcome to Iran—where the Islamic Republic has taken the whole country hostage.
Dayeh Sahrifeh, mother of Ramin Hossein… pic.twitter.com/ceQnJg2Gv4
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 2, 2024
From Steve Stewart-Williams:
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) January 30, 2024
About that genocide accusation. . . This tweeter is a Yemeni Muslim you might want to follow if you’re sympathetic to Israel:
Did they call the death of 377,000+ Yemenis a ”genocide”? Nope
Did they call the death of 236,000+ Afghans a ”genocide”? Nein
Did they call the death of 5,400,000+ Congolese a ”genocide”? Nej
Did they call the death of 500,000+ Sudanese a ”genocide”? Nee
Did they call the death…— Luai Ahmed (@JustLuai) December 15, 2023
From Jon; how could I forget that yesterday was No Hijab Day? (There’s music.)
Happy #NoHijabDay to all you courageous and inspiring women who have fought for your freedom to shine ✨As Maya Angelou said: Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it, possibly without claiming it, she stands up for all women. pic.twitter.com/S1nWGMJzh9
— Yasmine Mohammed 🦋 ياسمين محمد (@YasMohammedxx) February 1, 2024
From Simon, who says it’s “from the middle of a fascinating thread.” And it is, especially if you’re a lichenophile. They’re TOUGH!
Around 2012, the lichen 'Xanthoria elegans' (commonly known as the Elegant Sunburst Lichen!) was attached to exterior of the International Space Station for 18 months AND SURVIVED!
With no water, no air, extreme temperatures and constant bombardment with radiation! pic.twitter.com/ugOTJvr3Qm
— Gnome "just a lil guy" Anne (@annethegnome) February 1, 2024
From Malcolm; teamwork:
teamwork pic.twitter.com/VS8TldPYdT
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) January 11, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a family extinguished, including a two-year-old girl:
3 February 1942 | A French Jewish girl, Marcelle Pizanti, was born in Vichy.
In June 1944 she was deported to #Auschwitz together with her parents Jacob and Alice. None of them survived. pic.twitter.com/0P57kXtAsM
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) February 3, 2024
A tweet from Dr. Cobb, who gives this one two exclamation marks:
Pigeon suspected of being Chinese spy released by police after eight months
Read more 🔗 https://t.co/zkfEUGHBks
— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 1, 2024
I do like that succinct description of three health care systems: very accurate!
Of course, there is a waiting list for dying, too.
At least it’s free.
The Liberal government has just decided to postpone, until 2027, plans to obligate doctors to kill suicidal mentally ill patients. The party wants to get its re-election out of the way before it wades in deeper.
My wife recently had a table fall on her (long story) and gashed her knee and broke her wrist. She had her knee stitched up at an urgent care facility that evening; luckily, they were able to see her right before that office closed. She had her wrist x-rayed (or ultrasounded), and although no break was seen, she was advised by her GP to have it examined by an orthopedist. She called for an appointment on Monday morning, and was seen the same day at 10:30am. She will have about a month’s worth of physical therapy on the wrist (it’s more of a severe dent to the bone than an actual break).
Total cost so far: under $200 for the doctor exam, which is applied to her Medicare deductible (it is a new year, after all). Although we don’t know how much Medicare will be billed for, and this doesn’t factor in our monthly premiums for Medicare, supplemental, and her GP, so far we are grateful for Medicare and have been very pleased with the ability to see the medical experts so quickly.
I appreciated Andrew Sullivan’s article analyzing the LTQ…etc…etc… nomenclature. What would be the logical endpoint of this self-performative identity slicing and dicing?
The fungi and lichens were in a cell with controlled environment, not just slapped onto the exterior of Station. More info at https://futurism.com/fungi-lichens-just-survived-18-months-outside-iss-means-might-able-survive-mars
Glad to see Shabbos Hili posted on time this morning as it must mean that you are feeling better today. Lot’s of people cycling in and out of viral type attacks this winter it seems.
Does/ did US “culture” (sense – E.coli and upwards) have a pasta-in tomato sauce tinned product where the pasta is cast into the shapes of various letters? Our version was called “Alphabetti Spaghetti” and many kids went through a parentally-approved phase of playing with food where they’d spell words out before eating their work.
The phrase recurs to me every time I see public acronymphomania like this.
At least the Astronomers have written software for automating the production of really strained acronyms from a project’s keywords. Efficiency of groan-generation.
Yep we had/(have?) “spaghetti-o’s” in U.S. and Campbells alphabet soup. Spaghetti-o may have been just o’s, but alphabetti spaghetti sound like hours of fun at the dinner table learning letters and words.
Well, we need to find a way to easily pronounce LGBTQ just as NATO is.
I suspect it’s similar to a semitic language where the vowels are elided.
So maybe: LuBuTuQ (lub-butuk ?)
On this day:
1488 – Bartolomeu Dias of Portugal lands in Mossel Bay after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, becoming the first known European to travel so far south.
1637 – Tulip Mania collapses within the Dutch Republic.
1690 – The colony of Massachusetts issues the first paper money in the Americas.
1809 – The Territory of Illinois is created by the 10th United States Congress.
1830 – The London Protocol of 1830 establishes the full independence and sovereignty of Greece from the Ottoman Empire as the final result of the Greek War of Independence.
1870 – The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing voting rights to male citizens regardless of race. [The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified on this day in 1913, authorizing the Federal government to impose and collect an income tax.]
1917 – World War I: The American entry into World War I begins when diplomatic relations with Germany are severed due to its unrestricted submarine warfare.
1918 – The Twin Peaks Tunnel in San Francisco, California begins service as the longest streetcar tunnel in the world at 11,920 feet (3,630 metres) long.
1931 – The Hawke’s Bay earthquake, New Zealand’s worst natural disaster, kills 258.
1933 – Adolf Hitler announces that the expansion of Lebensraum into Eastern Europe, and its ruthless Germanisation, are the ultimate geopolitical objectives of Nazi foreign policy.
1945 – World War II: As part of Operation Thunderclap, 1,000 B-17s of the Eighth Air Force bomb Berlin, a raid which kills between 2,500 and 3,000 and dehouses another 120,000.
1958 – Founding of the Benelux Economic Union, creating a testing ground for a later European Economic Community.
1959 – Rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson are killed in a plane crash along with the pilot near Clear Lake, Iowa, an event later known as The Day the Music Died.
1960 – British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan speaks of “a wind of change”, signalling that his Government was likely to support decolonisation.
1961 – The United States Air Force begins Operation Looking Glass, and over the next 30 years, a “Doomsday Plane” is always in the air, with the capability of taking direct control of the United States’ bombers and missiles in the event of the destruction of the SAC’s command post.
1966 – The Soviet Union’s Luna 9 becomes the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon, and the first spacecraft to take pictures from the surface of the Moon.
1971 – New York Police Officer Frank Serpico is shot during a drug bust in Brooklyn and survives to later testify against police corruption.
1972 – The first day of the seven-day 1972 Iran blizzard, which would kill at least 4,000 people, making it the deadliest snowstorm in history.
1984 – Doctor John Buster and a research team at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in the United States announce history’s first embryo transfer, from one woman to another resulting in a live birth.
1994 – Space Shuttle program: STS-60 is launched, carrying Sergei Krikalev, the first Russian cosmonaut to fly aboard the Shuttle.
1995 – Astronaut Eileen Collins becomes the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle as mission STS-63 gets underway from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Births:
1763 – Caroline von Wolzogen, German author (d. 1847).
1809 – Felix Mendelssohn, German pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1847).
1816 – Ram Singh Kuka, Indian credited with starting the Non-cooperation movement.
1821 – Elizabeth Blackwell, American physician and educator (d. 1910). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
1826 – Walter Bagehot, English journalist and businessman (d. 1877).
1867 – Charles Henry Turner, American biologist, educator and zoologist (d. 1923).
1874 – Gertrude Stein, American novelist, poet, playwright, (d. 1946).
1894 – Norman Rockwell, American painter and illustrator (d. 1978).
1904 – Pretty Boy Floyd, American gangster (d. 1934).
1918 – Helen Stephens, American runner, baseball player, and manager (d. 1994). [Rumours that she was male, which circulated after the 1936 Berlin Olympics, led to a physical check by the International Olympic Committee which concluded that she was a woman.]
1920 – Henry Heimlich, American physician and author (d. 2016).
1924 – E. P. Thompson, English historian and author (d. 1993).
1935 – Johnny “Guitar” Watson, American blues, soul, and funk singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1996).
1947 – Paul Auster, American novelist, essayist, and poet.
1947 – Melanie, American singer-songwriter (d. 2024).
1948 – Henning Mankell, Swedish author and playwright (d. 2015).
1950 – Morgan Fairchild, American actress.
1969 – Beau Biden, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 44th Attorney General of Delaware (d. 2015).
1970 – Warwick Davis, English actor, producer, and screenwriter.
1971 – Sarah Kane, English playwright (d. 1999).
1978 – Amal Clooney, British-Lebanese barrister and activist.
1984 – Elizabeth Holmes, American fraudster, founder of Theranos.
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. (Annie Dillard):
1014 – Sweyn Forkbeard, king of Denmark and England (b. 960).
1399 – John of Gaunt, Belgian-English politician, Lord High Steward (b. 1340).
1468 – Johannes Gutenberg, German publisher, invented the printing press (b. 1398).
1862 – Jean-Baptiste Biot, French physicist, astronomer, and mathematician (b. 1774).
1873 – Isaac Baker Brown, English gynecologist and surgeon (b. 1811).
1899 – Geert Adriaans Boomgaard, Dutch supercentenarian (b. 1788). [He is generally accepted by scholars as the first validated case of a supercentenarian on record.]
1924 – Woodrow Wilson, American historian, academic, and politician, 28th President of the United States, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1856).
1929 – Agner Krarup Erlang, Danish mathematician and engineer (b. 1878). [Invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory.]
1935 – Hugo Junkers, German engineer, designed the Junkers J 1 (b. 1859). [He was also born on this day.]
1967 – Joe Meek, English songwriter and producer (b. 1929).
1985 – Frank Oppenheimer, American physicist and academic (b. 1912).
1989 – John Cassavetes, American actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1929).
1996 – Audrey Meadows, American actress and banker (b. 1922).
1999 – Gwen Guthrie, American singer-songwriter and pianist (b. 1950).
2005 – Ernst Mayr, German-American biologist and ornithologist (b. 1904).
2011 – Maria Schneider, French actress (b. 1952).
2019 – Julie Adams, American actress (b. 1926).
Woman of the Day:
[Text from Wikipedia]
Elizabeth Blackwell (born on this day in 1821, died 31 May 1910) was a British and American physician, notable as the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, and the first woman on the Medical Register of the General Medical Council for the United Kingdom. Blackwell played an important role in both the United States and the United Kingdom as a social reformer, and was a pioneer in promoting education for women in medicine. Her contributions remain celebrated with the Elizabeth Blackwell Medal, awarded annually to a woman who has made a significant contribution to the promotion of women in medicine.
Blackwell was born in Bristol, England, but the family emigrated to the US in 1832 when she was 11 years old after her father’s most profitable sugar refinery was destroyed in a fire.
In New York, her father became active in abolitionist work and family dinnertime discussions often surrounded issues such as women’s rights, slavery, and child labour. Her parents had liberal attitudes toward child rearing and her father believed that each child, including his girls, should be given the opportunity for unlimited development of their talents and gifts. Blackwell had not only a governess, but private tutors to supplement her intellectual development. As a result, she was rather socially isolated from all but her family as she grew up.
The family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio a few years later. When Blackwell was 17, her father died, leaving the family with little money.
Not initially interested in a career in medicine, she became a schoolteacher in order to support her family but soon found it unsuitable for her. Blackwell’s interest in medicine was sparked after a friend fell ill and remarked that, had a female doctor cared for her, she might not have suffered so much. Blackwell began applying to medical schools and immediately began to endure the prejudice against her sex that would persist throughout her career. She was rejected from each medical school she applied to, except Geneva Medical College in New York, in which the male students voted unanimously in favour of Blackwell’s acceptance, albeit as a joke. Thus, in 1847, Blackwell became the first woman to attend medical school in the United States.
Blackwell’s inaugural thesis on typhoid fever, published in 1849 in the Buffalo Medical Journal and Monthly Review, shortly after she graduated, was the first medical article published by a female student from the United States. It portrayed a strong sense of empathy and sensitivity to human suffering, as well as strong advocacy for economic and social justice. This perspective was deemed by the medical community as feminine.
Blackwell founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children with her sister Emily Blackwell (the second woman in the US to get a medical degree) in 1857, and began giving lectures to female audiences on the importance of educating girls. She played a significant role during the American Civil War by organizing nurses, and the Infirmary developed a medical school programme for women, providing substantial work with patients (clinical education). Returning to England, she helped found the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, together with Florence Nightingale, Sophia Jex-Blake, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Emily Blackwell, and Thomas Henry Huxley. [She had strong and uncompromising opinions and fell out with many of them.]
A serious fall in 1907 left Blackwell almost completely mentally and physically disabled and she died at her home in Hastings, Sussex, on 31 May 1910 after suffering a stroke that paralyzed half her body. Obituaries honouring her appeared in publications such as The Lancet and the British Medical Journal.
[I should note that, her attitudes to abolitionism and sexism aside, she shared many of the prejudices of her time and was in favour of eugenics, opposed contraception, thought that Christian morality was as important in medicine as scientific inquiry and should be taught in medical schools, and considered inoculation to be dangerous because she believed that bacteria were not the only important cause of disease and felt their importance was being exaggerated.]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Blackwell
Immortalised – to a certain constituency – as the mineral biotite – a mica mineral (principle characteristic : cleaves readily into indefinitely thin sheets along one crystal plane ; dark brown colour in sheets thicker than about 100µm). Biot’s physics work included the optics of mica minerals.
My nicest specimen of biotite came from near (but not on ; I’ve never got there) my synonymous mountain, Ben Aden. But that’s a mere 5cm by 8cm. I’ve seen specimens from there 20cm by 30cm and weighing over 20kg. It’s far from the biggest mica reported from the area.
How much had come down the “Silk Road” from China, and how much did he develop himself? The idea of re-usable block printing certainly wasn’t new to him, but how much of the development of type, type setting, registering type blocks and ready-made stereotypes and clichés … Printing technology took a long time to develop. (The simple cost of metal for making up significant numbers of characters before he could sell any copies of a book was seriously inhibiting, IIRC.)
Pamela Paul et. al. :
[ note : I see Paul’s point clearly ]
I estimate over 10 references to some thing — yet that thing is never defined or backed up with references in any way.
What is that thing?
“gender”
Why or when does that happen? Where has it been seen before? When a word is used – ubiquitously (Sullivan alludes to similar ubiquity in his piercing, evidenced essay) – not rarely – without ever giving it a clear definition? Almost as if it is using the reader to invent the meaning for themselves?
If an alien came down from outer space to earth and read these pieces, how would they understand it?
When the meaning of the word is everything to the point, why does this happen?
Why am I reaching for my copy of the essay
Politics and the English Language
George Orwell
1946
TL;DR ( 😉 ) : It’s in the occult doctrine The Kybalion, 1908
I’m retired from the US Army with a combination of Active, Reserve and National Guard service. The chaplains are obviously for the religious only. I only attended church when in basic training because they said anyone who didn’t couldn’t sleep in and would be forced to clean the barracks. At least I could sleep a little in church. The military is a demanding job placed on young people who need help and guidance while maturing and coping so I think there’s some value to the chaplains. I’d like to see non-religious chaplains because there really are Atheists in foxholes.
Thank you for your service, but I see no need for chaplains. According to Google Books Ngram Viewer, use of the word has dropped precipitously in recent history, which is good news. Science-based psychologists would probably be more beneficial to military kids. And rather than a chaplain, I do think we need a Congressional Psychologist, given the questionable mental health of so many representatives.
Why capitalize “atheist”? People don’t capitalize “theist,” do they? (I’m an atheist.)
Whilst undergoing basic RAF training in 1961 there were officially four denominations, Church of England, Roman Catholic, Jew and non believer. We were marched to church on a Sunday, it was C of E. Those that chose not to attend stood outside formally “ at ease” for the duration of service, rain or snow. Formal Parades on the Parade Square always had prayers prior to parade activity. Parade Commander would announce “ Jews and non believers fall out to the rear and remain at attention”.
Chaplain or Padre as known in the RAF were always commissioned officers usually of the rank of Flight Lieutenant. Most were harmless useful idiots.
Most interesting meeting with an RAF Padre was during Cold War at QRA, Quick reaction alert with usually four Vulcan B1/2 fully armed and crewed located on special QRA pans two either side of main runway threshold for quick scramble. Ground crew and support were located in special QRA shelters and were dressed in NBC clothing.
Padre entered, paused and surveyed the “assembled congregation “ and asked “everything all right chaps” Armourer responsible for weaponry, nuclear, removes his NBC respirator, looks at padre and says “ everything all right, are you f****ing stupid? enough destruction outside ready to destroy much of the planet and you ask, is everything all right? Why don’t you just f**ck off!
Padre responds “ how dare you speak to me like that, I am not just the padre, but a man of god and furthermore a commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force.
Response I leave to your imagination but available on request. No further action taken.
So … 31 years after the Titanic, people still hadn’t enacted the requirement to have sufficient life-saving equipment on board for the entire complement, on each side of the ship (because sinking ships rarely go down without listing) .
The … Oh, I see – it was under the War (Industrial Scale Killing of People) Department. Well, that makes it entirely acceptable to not foresee the entirely foreseeable and act to minimise it’s consequences.
Why, if as the stamp asserts this is an example of “interfaith in action”, does only one of their implied four churches have then on a track to some sort of “canonisation” through a “saints day”?
You seem to think that heavy loss of life when a ship sinks due to hostile action ought to be the exception rather than the rule it is, preventable merely by having enough life jackets and lifeboats/rafts distributed around. Men escaping —if they could at all — flooding compartments and 5-high berthing spaces in a troopship might simply find themselves in near-freezing water with nothing but the underwear they were sleeping in as the ship broke up around them, if it didn’t take them down with it. The ones rescued quickly by escorting warships were too cold to cling to lines and cargo nets. Many bodies were found later floating dead in their life jackets.
Mindful of submarine attack, the Dorchester’s captain had ordered the soldiers to sleep in their lifejackets but compliance was poor. (Wikipedia) Surely it seems likely that some of the ship’s lifejackets were lost and abandoned in the dark confusion below decks in the mad scramble to get topside after the torpedo struck.
Couldn’t you just honour the decision by these four men to give their life jackets to four young sailors or soldiers whom they found themselves standing next to at the rail contemplating the jump into the cold, oil-slicked sea?
I certainly do honor them. They did the honorable thing. Whether chaplains or not.
I’m perfect well aware of how dangerous the North Atlantic is. It’s very unlikely that you’ve spent more time bobbing around in it and it’s surrounds than I have.
I just object to the cynicism with which politicians send other people to die in wars, instead of leading the charge and being amongst the first to die. It may be the “human condition” for approaching 11000 years, if the archaeology of mass conflict is to be believed, but that doesn’t mean it is defensible.
If it was driven – as their PR consultants seem to be saying – by their religion, what of value is there to honour? They did it for self-aggrandisement in a future life-after-death.
The Dorchester was built in 1925, and equipped to carry 314 passengers plus 90 crew. As a troopship, she carried over 900 men. A transition to high capacity troop ship would have included adding plenty of additional boats and rafts. Period images show that this was the case here.
It does not matter how many boats you have on board if you have been torpedoed and sink too fast to launch them. Launching boats from old fashioned davits is a sporting proposition when listing, but Dorchester sank down by the bow, while also listing to starboard.
Two lifeboats of fourteen (I believe) were launched successfully with their complement of survivors. One from each side of the ship. An unknown number of the boats or their davits were damaged in the explosion, others were destroyed at the water line when rafts were thrown down on them.
Then as now, rafts were designed to float free of the rapidly sinking vessel. But to make use of them, one must enter the freezing water before boarding the raft. The lifejacket you left on your bunk down below will be particularly missed when this happens.
I would be really reluctant to criticize the actions or sacrifices of the folks who went through such horrors.
Silence is complicity in the next mass murder.
This is pretty much “Standard Operations Practice”, in Europe at least (Britain’s alleged “loosening of planning restrictions” may well threaten it here, or at least in England ; I think it’s a devolved power). Contrary to the refrain I frequently hear from Americans that “if something like that were found in America, the construction company would bury it quickly, to avoid delays”, planning for investigative archaeology is part of architect’s professional competence here. If they don’t do it, they face losing their licence to practice. (I don’t think I’ve heard that assertion here, I’m glad to say ; but elsewhere it certainly seems a bit of popular culture that is widely celebrated).
Far more interesting to me is how the iron (or steel) survived in such good condition. I’d suggest (where I’d look, if I were on site) that the soil has a high pH (significantly alkaline). Iron and steel are relatively inert at high pH – which is vital for (say) steel in concrete (well casings ; reinforcing bars), which is why cement/ concrete mixtures typically have several percent free lime (CaO/ Ca(OH)₂) to keep the pH above about 11.5. A mixture of “lime-putty” mortar in building and lime whitewash on walls would help a lot in that direction.
Why an iron glove like that were at a weavers … doesn’t surprise me. See all those rivets? Would you wear a glove like that without an under-glove of some sort to keep the rivets away from the skin. You could sew such a glove from leather. Or you could weave it by a knitting technique. So, finding a glove in a weavers workshop is suddenly less than surprising.
This is the third well researched article arguing against the “trans genocide”/ trans victimization myth:
https://quillette.com/2024/01/29/no-theres-no-epidemic-of-anti-trans-violence/
There are numerous take downs of the trans teen suicide nonsense also.
I found a similar disaster of public understanding with the fake Anti-Asian hate crime wave which has subsequently been argued even better at the Manhattan Insitute’s site.
My article:
https://democracychronicles.org/on-the-anti-asian-hate-crime-wave/
Roll on the victimization industrial complex.
D.A.
NYC https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
That smiling, laughing Arctic fox made my day.
Cool gauntlet! Amazing craftsmanship. And it would be handy for a character like Reacher.
Tardigrades live on lichens…coincidence?
“But polling shows that only 3 – 4 percent of the entire LGBTQ+ world call themselves “queer”. So the MSM routinely uses a word for the entire “LGBTQ+” world that 96 percent of this community rejects. It’s up there with “Latinx” as an accurate descriptor.” Surely we can now look forward to “Queerx” in approved language.
In any case, I am disappointed that “2SLGBTQ+” has not achieved the wider currency it merits. Maybe in Canada, where 2S seems more common, perhaps because of its hint of the bilingual. Alas, it doesn’t Include those of us who are multiple S because our spirits include elements of animal and plant and Archaea.
I thought 2S in Canada meant “two spirit”, a reference to a (supposed) native name.
The gay men in my (Chelsea, the gay-est neighborhood in the universe) building and neighborhood seem to resent the turn things have taken. Admittedly they skew older than 30 – they’ve no time for acronyms, they call themselves gay and me straight.
Which is good – I refuse to use “cis” b/c I’m not a sissy nor a cyst and I resent the entire enchilada of recent times. One of those excellent British TERFs said that the only people who use cis are gender activists or those afraid of gender activists. I concur.
What Sullivan is referring to is called “forced teaming”.
D.A.
NYC
Is it goodbye to Cisalpine Gaul, home of the Celts, who received Roman citizenship in 49 BC? And goodbye to cis-dichloroethylene, and all of its congeners in Chemistry?