Tuesday: Hili dialogue

February 6, 2024 • 6:45 am

Did you notice the new header of this site? It’s a transitional form between reptile and bird, taken from the cover of Why Evolution is True.

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: February 6, 2024, and National Chopsticks Day, celebrating not a food but a utensil.

It’s also National Frozen Yogurt Day, the UN commemoration of International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation, Ronald Reagan Day in California (he was born on this day in 1911), Sami National Day in Russia, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and Waitangi Day, celebrating the founding of New Zealand in 1840.

The Sami used to be known as “Lapps” or “Laplanders,” but that term is now considered offensive. Here’s some Sami folk music, identified as “Sámi artist Berit Margrethe Oskal from Guovdageaidnu, singing/yoiking Eamifámut” (English: “Ancient Forces”).

 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*King Charles, who recently went into the hospital to treat an enlarged prostate gland, now is said to have cancer. Though it’s unspecified officially, it doesn’t seem to be prostate cancer.

King Charles III has been diagnosed with a form of cancer and will suspend his public engagements to undergo treatment.

The announcement, made by Buckingham Palace on Monday evening, came a week after the 75-year-old sovereign was discharged from a London hospital, after a procedure to treat an enlarged prostate. The palace did not disclose what form of cancer he has, but a palace official said it was not prostate cancer. Doctors detected the cancer during that procedure, and the king began treatment on Monday.

“During The King’s recent hospital procedure for benign prostate enlargement, a separate issue of concern was noted,” the palace said in a statement. “Subsequent diagnostic tests have identified a form of cancer. His Majesty has today commenced a schedule of regular treatments, during which time he has been advised by doctors to postpone public-facing duties.”

“Throughout this period, His Majesty will continue to undertake state business and official paperwork as usual,” the palace continued. “The King is grateful to his medical team for their swift intervention, which was made possible thanks to his recent hospital procedure. He remains wholly positive about his treatment and looks forward to returning to full public duty as soon as possible.”

Charles, who ascended to the throne in September 2022 after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, has generally had good health.

Although I’m not a big fan, I wish him well. It would be a shame if he waited so long to be King and then doesn’t live for very long after ascending the throne.

*The Free Press has an article by Tamara Pietzke, relevant to our recent discussions, called “I was told to approve all teen gender transitions. I refused.” As Bari Weiss commented before the piece, “Today, therapist Tamara Pietzke adds her voice to those of our other whistleblowers, and tells how she could no longer go along with the pressure to transition her patients.  Some excerpts:

I earned my master’s in social work from the University of Washington in 2012, and I have worked as a therapist for over a decade in the Puget Sound area. Most recently, I was employed by MultiCare, one of the largest hospital systems in the state.

For the six years I was there, I worked with hundreds of clients. But in mid-January, I left my job because of what I will go on to describe.

The therapeutic relationship is a special one. We are the original “safe space,” where people are able to explore their darker feelings and painful experiences. The job of the therapist is to guide a patient to self-understanding and sound mental health. This is a process that requires careful assessment and time, not snap judgments and confirmation of a patient’s worldview.

But in the past year I noticed a concerning new trend in my field. I was getting the message from my supervisors that when a young person I was seeing expressed discomfort with their gender—the diagnostic term is gender dysphoria—I should throw out all my training. No matter the patient’s history or other mental health conditions that could be complicating the situation, I was simply to affirm that the patient was transgender, and even approve the start of a medical transition.

I believe this rise of “affirmative care” for young people with gender dysphoria challenges the very fundamentals of what therapy is supposed to provide.

I am a 36-year-old single mother of three young kids all under the age of six. I am terrified of speaking out, but that fear pales in comparison to my strong belief that we can no longer medicalize youth and cause them potentially irreversible harm. The three patients I describe below explain why I am taking the risk of coming forward.

She met patients that had severe mental problems, which she was more or less told to ignore and just start them on cross-sex hormone therapy. She got disturbed and did some research:

I discovered that neither puberty blockers nor cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen) were approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, prescribing these treatments to kids can have drastic side effects, including infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer, bone density problems, blood clots, liver toxicity, cataracts, brain swelling, and even death.

While gender clinicians claim hormonal treatment improved their patients’ psychological health, the studies on this are few and highly disputed.

I found that those experiencing gender dysphoria are up to six times more likely to also be autistic, and they are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, trauma, and abuse.

The research also implies that the dramatic rise in these diagnoses across the West likely have a strong element of social contagion.

Pietzke underwent training, determined that “affirmative therapy” was the “standard of care” but it didn’t work on her patients, who were suffering from various mental issues. She concludes that “My biggest fear about the gender-affirming practices my industry has blindly adopted is that they are causing irreversible damage to our clients.” She no longer practices it, and it’s not clear whether she still works at that hospital.

*From reader Paulo Pinhiero, an announcement and video about Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, who banned woke words a few months ago.  Paulo says this:

We can’t let this be just a right wing thing: people on the left also have to stand up for this so it can’t be a right/left thing! Science and common sense are aligned in this!
It’s hard to comprehend how things got to where they are now…

Here’s her executive order:, which is described in the National Review. She says that the words below are banned from state documents on grounds of being “scientific” and “accurate” rather than “offensive”.

WHEREAS:    Women are women;

WHEREAS:    An XX chromosome is an XX chromosome. The science is clear and real;

WHEREAS:    There are things only women can do, like perform the miracle of birth;

WHEREAS:    Government should reject language that ignores, undermines, and erases women;

WHEREAS:    Government should celebrate gender distinctions between men and women—not erase them; and

WHEREAS:    It is the policy of this administration to prohibit the use of woke, anti-women words for official state government business.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, acting under the authority vested in me as the Governor of the State of Arkansas, do hereby order:

(1)    All state offices, departments, boards, and commissions are prohibited from using exclusionary, sexist language in official state government business, effective immediately.

(2)    In official government documents, the following exclusionary and sexist terms shall be replaced with accurate, female-affirming alternatives:

a.    Rather than “pregnant people” or “pregnant person,” use “pregnant women” or “pregnant mom.”

b.    Rather than “chestfeeding,” use “breastfeeding.”

c.    Rather than “body fed” or “person fed,” use “breast fed.”

d.    Rather than “human milk,” use “breast milk.”

e.    Rather than “birthing person,” use “birth mom.”

f.    Rather than “laboring person,” use “birth mom.”

g.    Rather than “menstruating person” or “menstruating people,” use “woman” or “women.”

h.    Rather than “birth-giver,” use “woman.”

i.    Rather than “womxn” or “womyn,” use “woman.”

IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and cause the Great Seal of the State of Arkansas to be affixed this 19th day of October, in the year of our Lord 2023.

Oy, what a mess! “Perform the miracle of birth”?  “An XX chromosome is an XX chromosome”?  No, those are two chromosomes she’s discussing, and usually are associated with females but not invariably. And of course I know about the odious political history of Governor Sanders., and her lies as Trump’s press secretary. But to the rest of the terms I have few exceptions, and if they’re mandated only in state-issued documents, I don’t object to that. However, could this violate the First Amendment by someone writing the wrong word in a state document and getting in trouble?

Here’s an 8½-minute video in which Sanders announces her decision and takes questions.

 

*Jesse Singal’s Substack has an article about the Woke Kindergarten, a federally-funded project at secondary schools in Hayward, California that we discussed the other day. Singal’s piece is called “‘Woke Kindergarten’ is capitalism at work.” Indeed; the “teacher” got $250,000 for the pathetic stuff she proffered as “teacher training”:

A lot of people are expressing a lot of opinions about this story. I’d like to point out how deeply capitalist this whole thing is, even if the founder of Woke Kindergarten claims to despise capitalism and everything it stands for.

That founder is Akiea “Ki” Gross, who uses they/them pronouns. If you peruse their social media history as I did (with a tinge of shame), you will see the sorts of posts you’d expect from a highly educated, well-traveled, politically activated, left-of-center type over the last four years. Amid photos of trips to Barcelona and Paris, there’s a lot of posting about Trump, about Black Lives Matter, and about the need for revolution. They have two bachelor’s degrees from UNC–Chapel Hill and two master’s degrees, one from the Teacher’s College of Columbia University. Prior to striking out on their own as a consultant type, they’d spent four years teaching at a charter school in Harlem. They were raised in Montgomery County, Maryland — I can’t speak to the circumstances in which they grew up, but Montgomery was one of the 25 wealthiest counties in the country as of December 2022.

I am not blaming Gross for having traveled around Europe (who would?), for teaching at a charter school, for having access to elite educational institutions like UNC–Chapel Hill and Columbia University, or for having radical politics. What I’m saying is that it isn’t an accident that Gross got this contract. Strip out their race and nonbinary identity and focus on the stuff that matters most to determining who gets what, almost all of which has to do with class, and Gross is. . . an intelligent, privileged, worldly, left-of-center person extremely well-positioned to succeed in this economy at this moment.

I’m speculating, but I suspect that Gross got this laughably remunerative gig — more details here — as a direct result of their privilege and their access to wealthy people and their money via their personal and professional networks. Gross was in a position to convince an elementary school that a quarter-million dollars spent on their curriculum — which is mostly just an incoherent grab-bag of far-left positions with occasional forays into at least borderline anti-Semitism — would help low-income, immigrant Latino kids who can’t speak or read English perform better in school.

If Gross had instead been a bland Midwestern centrist guy laser-pointing at a PowerPoint about the evidence base for various literacy interventions, they never would have gotten this six-figure deal. Similarly, if Gross had been a local immigrant mom with an imperfect mastery of English, simply begging the school to ignore the distractions of the moment and teach their goddamn kid how to read, they never would have gotten this six-figure deal.

But Gross was, instead, an effective entrepreneur. After the death of George Floyd, a super-hot market opened up for antiracist interventions. Tens or hundreds of millions of dollars — maybe billions — were at stake as institutions raced to signal that they were on board with this extremely important revolution. Who filled this market? It wasn’t the poor people being abused by the police. It was more privileged people who had the education and the networks to compellingly speak this language and market themselves to the buyers.

Gross is a scam artist, perhaps not consciously, but the people who paid her sure got scammed.  Here’s part of the “training” (i.e., propaganda) she proffers, as given on Instagram:

I had a Woke Kindergarten Instagram post here but forgot to take a screenshot. Now the account is private! But I managed to recover a degraded copy of the photo online:

Singal also gives this Instagram post, but I couldn’t find it on the Woke Kindergarten Instagram page. It may have been removed. It’s horrific to think this might have filtered down to students.

*The other dayDouglas Murray was scheduled to give a fund-raising talk about Israel in London’s Apollo theater, but his talk was cancelled after protests by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, which apparently made the staff feel “unsafe.”

Fortunately, the event was moved. Here he describes the incident to Julia Hartley-Brewer of TalkTV, and talks in general about deplatforming and cancellation. I’m not an all-out fan of Murray, particularly because of his xenophobia, but on most issues, particularly Israel and the shenanigans of the woke, I agree with him:

*According to The Washington Post, Sydney, Australia is being plagued by what’s known as the “bin chicken”, really an Australian White Ibis (Threskiornis molucca). The species has become semidomesticated, sort of like an Aussie Pigeon. Wikipedia says this about it:

The species has been able to colonise urban areas by reducing its fear response when in close proximity to humans, and by significantly widening its suite of food items to include human refuse – strategies that other closely related species such as the straw-necked ibis and the spoonbills have not replicated.

And from the WaPo:

Lisa Akkoumi was enjoying a leisurely summer lunch with friends in a Sydney park recently when her cafe table suddenly erupted in a flurry of black and white feathers. When she looked down, half of her meal was gone. And in its place was the grimy, six-inch beak of Australia’s most infamous bird.

Behold, the bin chicken: the bane of outdoor dining Down Under, toxic tormentor of children’s playgrounds and all-around avian villain — at least in the eyes of many here.

“They are a pest,” said Akkoumi, after shooing away the culprit. “I don’t know anyone who loves them.”

And yet, some Australians adore the bin chicken, whose real name — the white ibis — has been eclipsed by its dumpster-diving nom de plumage.

From Brisbane to Melbourne — but especially in Sydney — bin chickens are now ubiquitous. Driven from their natural wetlands, their urban numbers have risen in recent years, leading to growing resentment of the bird.

But the creature also has a cult following. No trendy neighborhood is complete without a bin chicken mural. Bin chicken tattoos are now almost as easy to spot as the bird itself. Several children’s books are devoted to the much-maligned species. And there’s even an effort to make it the mascot for the 2032 Summer Olympics in Brisbane.

. . . .Its resilience, meanwhile, has made it an emblem for immigrants, an icon for the LGBTQ+ community and a favorite of ornithologists.

“People don’t appreciate the noise, the smell, the sight of the bin chicken,” said John Martin, an ecologist and bird expert in Sydney. “They miss the picture that this is quite a unique species. They are living in our urban habitat with us. They’ve adapted.”

Martin calls them the winged equivalent of an “Aussie battler,” or everyday hero. “They just get on with things,” he said.

Bin chickens are also rather ugly and also smelly.

Here’s a short Attenborough-like video of bin chickens scavenging in Sydney:

And an ibis-denigrating Aussie song contributed by Divy:

Here’s a picture of one purloining bread taken from the Post article. But they’re Ceiling Cat’s creatures, just trying to get by, and we should love them all.


Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is playing with a shoelace:

Hili: Shoes with shoelaces are friendlier to cats.
A: There are fewer and fewer of them. The world is going to the dogs.
In Polish:
Hili: Buty z sznurówkami są bardziej przyjazne dla kotów.
Ja: Jest ich coraz mniej. Świat schodzi na psy.

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

From Mark. It seems to be a real NPS poster!

From somewhere on Facebook:

From Stacy, a cartoon by Tom Toro:

From Masih, who says she can’t sing but comes out with a song of revolution that’s actually pretty good:

From Christopher. I don’t understand how this works and would be delighted if some reader could explain it below:

From Jez, who notes, “This is appalling. He was harassed by activists a couple of weeks ago and has now been seriously injured after someone recognised from the video of that first incident.”  And so the Jewishness of the grandfathers shall be bequeathed until their descendants.  You can see the story of Lahav Shapira (the bearded guy) here,  the grandson of the Israeli athlete Amitzur Shapira, who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the Munich Olympics massacre.He’s trying to hang up a poster of a Hamas hostage.

I can’t remember where I got this one:

From Barry: a rare and beautiful box jellyfish

From Malcolm: a panoply of smart cats

From the Auschwitz Memorial: a boy shot at 17 for trying to escape Auschwitz:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. In the first he asked me “which are you?” My answer, of course, was “a bog”:

Not only is this cat accidentally onscreen, but it’s making a blep:

 

38 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1694 – The warrior queen Dandara, leader of the runaway slaves in Quilombo dos Palmares, Brazil, is captured and commits suicide rather than be returned to a life of slavery.

    1778 – American Revolutionary War: In Paris the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce are signed by the United States and France signaling official recognition of the new republic.

    1819 – The Treaty of Singapore was signed by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, Hussein Shah of Johor, and Temenggong Abdul Rahman, and it is now recognised as the founding of modern Singapore.

    1820 – The first 86 African American immigrants sponsored by the American Colonization Society depart New York to start a settlement in present-day Liberia.

    1840 – Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, establishing New Zealand as a British colony.

    1843 – The first minstrel show in the United States, The Virginia Minstrels, opens (Bowery Amphitheatre in New York City).

    1851 – The largest Australian bushfires in a populous region in recorded history take place in the state of Victoria.

    1862 – American Civil War: Forces under the command of Ulysses S. Grant and Andrew H. Foote give the Union its first victory of the war, capturing Fort Henry, Tennessee in the Battle of Fort Henry.

    1900 – The Permanent Court of Arbitration, an international arbitration court at The Hague, is created when the Senate of the Netherlands ratifies an 1899 peace conference decree.

    1918 – British women over the age of 30 who meet minimum property qualifications, get the right to vote when Representation of the People Act 1918 is passed by Parliament.

    1951 – The Canadian Army enters combat in the Korean War.

    1951 – The Broker, a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train derails near Woodbridge Township, New Jersey. The accident kills 85 people and injures over 500 more. The wreck is one of the worst rail disasters in American history.

    1952 – Elizabeth II becomes Queen of the United Kingdom and her other Realms and Territories and Head of the Commonwealth upon the death of her father, George VI. At the exact moment of succession, she was in a tree house at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya.

    1958 – Eight Manchester United F.C. players and 15 other passengers are killed in the Munich air disaster.

    1959 – Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments files the first patent for an integrated circuit.

    1959 – At Cape Canaveral, Florida, the first successful test firing of a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile is accomplished.

    1976 – In testimony before a United States Senate subcommittee, Lockheed Corporation president Carl Kotchian admits that the company had paid out approximately $3 million in bribes to the office of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka.

    1987 – Justice Mary Gaudron becomes the first woman to be appointed to the High Court of Australia.

    1988 – Michael Jordan makes his signature slam dunk from the free throw line inspiring Air Jordan and the Jumpman logo.

    1989 – The Round Table Talks start in Poland, thus marking the beginning of the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe.

    2018 – SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, a super heavy launch vehicle, makes its maiden flight.

    2021 – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken suspends agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to send asylum seekers back to their home countries.

    2023 – Two earthquakes measuring Mww 7.8 and 7.5 struck near the border between Turkey and Syria with a maximum Mercalli intensity of XII (Extreme). The earthquakes resulted in numerous aftershocks and a death toll of 57,658 people.

    Births:
    1577 – Beatrice Cenci, Italian murderer (d. 1599). [She was a Roman noblewoman imprisoned by her father, who repeatedly raped her. To escape the abuse and get away from the house, she killed him. The story of the murder and what led up to it shocked Europe. Despite outpourings of public sympathy, Beatrice Cenci was beheaded in 1599 after a lurid murder trial in Rome that gave rise to an enduring legend about her.]

    1695 – Nicolaus II Bernoulli, Swiss-Russian mathematician and theorist (d. 1726).

    1726 – Patrick Russell, Scottish surgeon and zoologist (d. 1805).

    1748 – Adam Weishaupt, German philosopher and academic, founded the Illuminati (d. 1830).

    1796 – John Stevens Henslow, English botanist and geologist (d. 1861). [Best remembered as friend and mentor to his pupil Charles Darwin.]

    1802 – Charles Wheatstone, English-French physicist and cryptographer (d. 1875).

    1811 – Henry Liddell, English priest, author, and academic (d. 1898). [Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for Liddell’s daughter Alice.]

    1834 – Edwin Klebs, German-Swiss pathologist and academic (d. 1913).

    1838 – Henry Irving, English actor and manager (d. 1905).I

    1847 – Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, American architect, designed the Plaza Hotel (d. 1918).I

    1861 – Nikolay Zelinsky, Russian chemist and academic (d. 1953). [One of the founders of theory on organic catalysis. He was the inventor of the first effective filtering activated charcoal gas mask in the world (1915).]

    1876 – Henry Blogg, English fisherman and sailor (d. 1954). [Referred to as “the greatest of the lifeboatmen”, he was awarded the gold medal of the RNLI three times and the silver medal four times, the George Cross, the British Empire Medal, and a series of other awards. There’s a statue of him in his home town of Cromer.]

    1895 – María Teresa Vera, Cuban singer, guitarist and composer (d. 1965).

    1895 – Babe Ruth, American baseball player and coach (d. 1948).

    1910 – Roman Czerniawski, Polish air force officer and spy (d. 1985).

    1911 – Ronald Reagan, American actor and politician, 40th President of the United States (d. 2004).

    1912 – Eva Braun, German wife of Adolf Hitler (d. 1945).

    1913 – Mary Leakey, English-Kenyan archaeologist and anthropologist (d. 1996). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1917 – Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hungarian-American actress and socialite (d. 2016).

    1922 – Denis Norden, English actor, screenwriter, and television host (d. 2018).

    1929 – Colin Murdoch, New Zealand pharmacist and veterinarian, invented the tranquilliser gun (d. 2008).

    1931 – Rip Torn, American actor (d. 2019).

    1931 – Mamie Van Doren, American actress and model.

    1932 – François Truffaut, French actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1984).

    1933 – Leslie Crowther, English comedian, actor, and game show host (d. 1996).

    1940 – Jimmy Tarbuck, English comedian and actor.

    1942 – Sarah Brady, American activist and author (d. 2015).

    1945 – Bob Marley, Jamaican singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1981).

    1946 – Richie Hayward, American drummer and songwriter (d. 2010).

    1946 – Kate McGarrigle, Canadian musician and singer-songwriter (d. 2010).

    1949 – Mike Batt, English singer-songwriter and producer.

    1950 – Natalie Cole, American singer-songwriter and actress (d. 2015).

    1951 – Kevin Whately, English actor.

    1957 – Robert Townsend, American actor and director.

    1960 – Jeremy Bowen, Welsh journalist. [He was the BBC’s Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem between 1995 and 2000 and the BBC Middle East editor from 2005 to 2022, before being appointed the International Editor of BBC News in August 2022.]

    1962 – Axl Rose, American singer-songwriter and producer.

    1966 – Rick Astley, English singer-songwriter.

    Sometimes I wish my first word was ‘quote,’ so that on my death bed, my last words could be ‘end quote.’ (Steven Wright):
    1515 – Aldus Manutius, Italian publisher, founded the Aldine Press (b. 1449).

    1783 – Capability Brown, English gardener and architect (b. 1716).

    1793 – Carlo Goldoni, Italian-French playwright (b. 1707).

    1804 – Joseph Priestley, English chemist and theologian (b. 1733).

    1865 – Isabella Beeton, English author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (b. 1836).

    1908 – Harriet Samuel, English businesswoman and founder of the jewellery retailer H. Samuel (b. 1836).

    1918 – Gustav Klimt, Austrian painter and illustrator (b. 1862).

    1986 – Dandy Nichols, English actress (b. 1907).

    1986 – Minoru Yamasaki, American architect, designed the World Trade Center (b. 1912).

    1989 – Barbara W. Tuchman, American historian and author (b. 1912).

    1991 – Salvador Luria, Italian biologist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1912).

    1993 – Arthur Ashe, American tennis player and sportscaster (b. 1943).

    1998 – Falco, Austrian pop-rock musician (b. 1957).

    2002 – Max Perutz, Austrian-English biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1914).

    2007 – Frankie Laine, American singer-songwriter and actor (b. 1913).

    2011 – Gary Moore, Irish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1952).

    2012 – Janice E. Voss, American engineer and astronaut (b. 1956).

    2016 – Dan Hicks, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1941).

    2019 – Rosamunde Pilcher, British author (born 1924).

    1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from Wikipedia]

      Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA (née Nicol, born on this day in 1913, died 9 December 1996) was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetoli footprints, and at the Laetoli site she discovered hominin fossils that were more than 3.75 million years old.

      In the 1960s the Leakeys started to work with the young Kamoya Kimeu with Mary particularly valuing his expertise. The family trained him in paleontology, evolutionary theory and excavating techniques, which he then trained the next generations of Kenyan fossil finders in, as he became a highly respected Kenyan paleontologist and curator.

      In 1972, after the death of her husband, Leakey became director of excavations at Olduvai. She maintained the Leakey family tradition of palaeoanthropology by training her son, Richard, in the field.

      From 1976 to 1981, Leakey and her staff uncovered the Laetoli hominin footprint trail which had been tracked through a layer of volcanic ash some 3.6 million years ago. The subsequent years were filled with research at Olduvai and Laetoli, follow-up work to discoveries, and preparing publications.

      Throughout her career, Leakey discovered 15 new species of animals, and one new genus. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979.

      Mary Leakey died on 9 December 1996, in Nairobi, Kenya, at the age of 83. Her family, who announced her death, did not give the cause, saying only that she died peacefully.

      In April 2013, Leakey was honoured by Royal Mail in the UK, as one of six people selected as subjects for the “Great Britons” commemorative postage stamp issue. Google celebrated the 100th anniversary of Mary Leakey’s birth with its Google doodle for 6 February 2013.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Leakey

      1. Thank you for highlighting Mary Leakey today. I just wanted to acknowledge it since I thought it needed such and have not seen a mention by anyone else today as of 1930 EST (US).

  2. Paulo Pinhiero :

    “We can’t let this be just a right wing thing: people on the left also have to stand up for this so it can’t be a right/left thing!”

    Bravo.

    It is a crazy concept at first, but I seem to recognize the dialectical political warfare – the manipulation – that is structured to direct the discourse (pioneered by Mao Zedong). The right definitely falls face-first into the traps and loses – all of that depends on opposing ends over a contradiction. The structure is a manipulation – there is no structure except alchemically, in my head. Hegel, Engels, Marx, Stalin, Mao…

    “And so the dialectic progresses.”

    -Delgado and Stefancic
    Critical Race Theory – An Introduction
    2017

    Sigh .. it takes so long to write out… but the right/left part is easy to see.

    Shrinking building

    See https://www.portcolborne.ca/en/recreation-and-leisure/visiting-port-colborne.aspx#Shrinking-Mill

    They say :

    “Your perspective sees the vertical alignment of the Mill, in conjunction with the refraction of the light off of the shallow water, and creates illusion that the structure has suddenly shrunk.”

    BTW – the new website header is spiffy – a beautiful hand-drawing (no computers?) of a bird, I think.

    1. Post-edit deadline addendum :

      I should add to Paulo Pinhiero’s important suggestion – to deflate R v L warfare :

      If ‘standing up’ is too much to take – and I can understand that – I still might be able to back people up – for instance if someone’s getting struggled over “triggering” expression.

      That goes a long way.

  3. I don’t understand how this works and would be delighted if some reader could explain it below:

    I would guess it’s filmed with a zoom lens. The lens is zoomed out as they approach the corner. The foreground looks the same (zooming out counteracted by getting nearer), while the zooming out makes the background look further away.

    1. Yeah, and the elements are interfering – like when the full moon is on the horizon, the trees interfere somehow and make the moon seem bigger … maybe slightly different scenario…

      And – and – one lens creates the image but we are using two eyes to view the image. Everyone does this, but it is false – we should use one eye to view pictures printed on photo paper, or on a screen, but it is too inconvenient.

      1. It also appears that the road is going slightly uphill so the top of the mill appears to be going down as you get closer.

    2. no zoom needed. The building is MUCH further away than anything else in the view. As the vehicle moves, the size of the building barely changes in the frame, while all of the other, closer, things, like the trees, grow in the frame.

      The human eye is VERY bad at perceiving actual size or scale, but VERY good at relative size and scale.

    3. I’m pretty sure it’s a zoom lens. A longer focal length flattens perspective i.e. things far away look bigger relative to things close. As the car gets closer, she shortened the focal length, making the shot more wide angle and making the building look smaller relative to the trees in the foreground.

  4. I’m British so the King Charles story interests me. I feel sorry for him as a human, however, now is the time for him to put his health and life where his mouth is. This man has pushed quackery for decades and even destroyed the career of a medical scientist (Edzard Ernst) who dared to publicly proclaim that his views (let’s say propaganda) were bullshit.

    If Charles follows his beliefs he should forgo science-based medicine and let himself be treated by naturopaths and homeopaths (and throw in chiropractors whose whole existence is based on a made-up pathology). Of course, he won’t, because nearly all of these people who rant about allopathic medicine (the sort that works) run to the science when their lives are at risk. Those who don’t do that are well represented by Steve Jobs who, having been diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer that was curable, chose to go all “natural”, and naturally of course, he died.

    1. I’m British too, and I also feel sorry for his family, because I know what it is like when a loved one receives a cancer diagnosis. Their lives have been turned upside down too. But I feel more sorrow for the thousands of other British people who also received a cancer diagnosis on Monday, but who — because of the evisceration of the National Health Service over the past 14 years — will have to wait a lot longer than Charles before their treatment starts.

  5. The second woke kindergarten poster looks faked to me–the children’s hands are cut off by the image and text box whereas in the others they are not.

  6. Thanks for publicizing Jesse Singal’s piece on the Woke Kindergarten contract. A very knowledgeable former colleague from NASA’s Office of Education once said that K12 administrators just love to purchase a course in a box. It is simple, clean and, as an activity metric, appears to be doing something positive regardless of actual outcomes. Yes, the soil was ripe for this type of scam…see anything (and everything) for sale by Kendi.

    I have never understood why K12 feels a need to buy or contract out rather than create curriculum and training. Certainly there is a critical mass of teachers in many or even most school districts who, over a summer, can do the research, analysis, and create school district specific material across wide swaths of expertise such as math, science, engineering, reading, civics, etc, better and cheaper than buying a box of tricks AND keep the dollars local, AND start to identify real leaders in the school district. The woke kindergarten box is just another example of K12 administrative failure.

    Ps: i like the new header image. Had not noticed what it was on the WEIT book cover.

    1. +1
      Ideology is such a poor substitute for reality.
      And students and teachers are short-changed.

    2. I can explain why the “curriculum in a box” is so popular. I taught biology (Biology I, AP, and IB) in a public school in Florida for 23 years. Our legislature’s official motto regarding education funding is, “Cheap and proud of it,” except when it shovels billions of dollars into unmonitored voucher programs. Kits/purchased curricula really are cheaper so the district saves scarce bucks and the purchased materials come self-contained which (supposedly) saves time for faculty. Local curriculum development needs to happen during the summer because teachers don’t have the time to do it during the school year. If a district does try to develop materials during the school year there is the expense of substitute teachers and the time required to produce lesson plans for the subs.

      Summer workshops to develop this material in house mean extra expense for supplies, paying the employees who do the work, distributing the materials to the end users, and training faculty to use the materials. That costs money and those dollars just aren’t available in a lot of districts.
      Textbook publishers try to produce an inclusive curriculum and sometimes come close to succeeding. Then it falls to the teachers to write the purchase orders (time) and collate the purchase orders for the department (more time) and make sure the supplies are being purchased from the lowest approved bidder (still more time) for all the things you want to do with your students next year. Purchasing is all done during the last quarter of the school year on top of regular teaching requirements. Again, kits are cheaper and easier to purchase even if they aren’t exactly aligned with what you are trying to accomplish (I rewrote the directions for most of the kits I purchased/used).
      This all comes from the perspective of a science teacher but the basic principles are the same for other areas of instruction.

      1. Thanks David. You have much more and very likely more timely experience than I. I taught high school math (9th grade general through AP Calculus, and post-calculus linear algebra and ode’s) and Physics in the early 70’s. I later served on a school board (88-96) and led some reviews of state math, science, and engineering standards for our Secretary of Education in 2007-15. I trust your ground truth in Florida. That said, there are components that are online and creative commons licensed that are reasonably vetted and just aching to be put together by teachers over the summer to create stronger and more contemporary curriculum. I am thinking of things like Sal Khan’s academy, Neeru Khosla’s CK-12 Foundation Flexbooks, modeling and simulation software inexpensively available from ISEE (STELLA), and programming languages such as Python. It is a philosophical change for your board/superintendent to trust teachers, pay each of them in working groups of 5-10 around $1-2k or so per week for 10 weeks over the summer and faciliate implementation of any results through teacher workshops during the school year.

    1. Yeah, it makes you feel squirmy inside, doesn’t it? The problem is that the left but not the right has bought into this kind of linguistic wokeness. My solution has been to judge ideas, not who’s expressing them.

    2. T’was my first thought, too. But then I read it, and caught a number of the things PCC(e) noted, and a few others, that moved it to the “even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes” territory

  8. Thanks for the piece about Tamara Pietzke. Reminds me of a very old quote by Francis W Peabody in 1925: “ … for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.” I thank Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stine) for this bit of true and humane wisdom. Wikipedia has an excellent article on Dr Peabody.

  9. Jerry wonders if Gov. Sanders’s proscribed and prescribed speech rules will fall afoul of the First Amendment. The civil service is a workplace, not a soapbox. Management can apply rules about how employees communicate on official business so as to help everyone get along and not be dicks. After all, I’m sure now that if any state employee referred to “coloured people” (or worse) instead of “people of colour” against the rules, progressive discipline would be applied that could lead to termination.

  10. Did you notice the new header of this site?

    Yes.

    King Charles…

    I had forgotten all about King Charles. I had gone back to thinking Queen Elizabeth was still alive. God Save the King, what?

    1. Definitely, Charles as self proclaimed “Defender of all faith” instead of “ the faith” he can call on a multitude of people praying for “God save the King” and will not require all that unnecessary scientific medicine and treatment plus as mentioned here he has all that mumbo jumbo stuff as well. He should make a rapid recovery.

  11. The Wokekindergarten.org web site is still up and running: https://www.wokekindergarten.org/. Click on the two horizontal lines at the upper right and you’ll see links to all of the craziness in all its glory. You don’t need the Instagram link to see all the pretty pictures in full color. Yes, Gross’s $250K contract is free enterprise at work.

    Love the Archaeopteryx banner!

  12. I noticed the new header! I spent a minute trying to identify the bird, and decided it was an anhinga (I’m obviously not an ornithologist). But stupid me – I should have realized instantly that it was a fossil bird like Archaeopteryx. This IS a site about evolution, after all

    PS It’s a nice enhancement.

  13. Oh I remember bin chickens – more in Sydney than Melbourne where I grew up.
    But they’re amazing – the bane of waiters at outdoor restaurants as they’re so aggressive. Not to people but they have so much chutzpah and balls they just don’t care, they’ll land next to you at the table and chomp at the food next to you.
    When you leave they’ll swarm your table.

    Very entertaining and with their shape and plumage they get away with stuff other, less aesthetic birds don’t. Sparrows would be shoo’ed and crows arrested by the cops.

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. I am also a fan.
      His editorials and articles in the Spectator are good as well. I have read all his books and they make sense to me.
      He has quite the repertoire for poetry and his broadcasts I believe are all completely from memory.

  15. The optical illusion:

    As stated above in the thread at 3:
    The building is MUCH further away than the other objects in the image. Therefore, as they move past the camera, the distant building appears to be immobile (and unchanging in size) relative to the near field.

    It is, in fact, getting closer and getting smaller; but the percentage is so small that your brain doesn’t register it.

  16. If Australia is sick of bin chickens it should send some to the US. They’d be a nice change from pigeons and seagulls.

  18. In short, further and farther both mean to a greater distance or extent. However, farther means a greater distance in a literal, physical sense i.e. it can be measured, whereas further is a greater figurative or metaphorical distance.

    Jerry – I love you whatever however you are called PCC(E) ???

    Relax on Israel and Trans – you are very wise and insightful.

    But just Relax and keep up with your great food and drink ideas.
    I so enjoy them.

  19. Henry Liddell — we know how his last name was pronounced, because of a college song that got preserved:

    This is the Dean,
    And this is Mrs Liddell;
    She plays the first
    And he the second fiddle

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