Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, March 17, 2024, and St. Patrick’s Day, when they dye the Chicago River bright green with a nontoxic dye. See below for last year’s dyeing:
From Stacy:
There’s also a Google Doogle celebrating the day; click below to see a shower of shamrocks:
This also means that it’s Irish Food Day. Sadly, the cuisine of the Emerald Isle, consisting largely of potatoes and cabbage, is not inspiring. And here’s colcannon, a dish made with both. (Actually, it doesn’t sound too bad as a side dish.)
It’s also Buzzard Day, Submarine Day, celebrating an early model that stayed submerged for 100 minutes on this day in 1898, Corned Beef and Cabbage Day (I prefer the meat on a sandwich with hot mustard), and Evacuation Day in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, celebrating the British withdrawal from Boston on this day in 1776.
Saint Patrick’s Day is also public holiday in Ireland, Montserrat and the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 17 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Humans know of only two diseases have been eliminated from this planet: smallpox in our own species and rinderpest in ungulates. Now we are close to a third. Matthew called my attention to this Guardian article with potentially good news, “Global eradication of polio ‘tantalisingly close’ with UK urged to keep up funding.”
The world is “tantalisingly close” to eradicating polio – with no confirmed cases of wild polio anywhere so far this year. But experts warn that vaccination efforts – and funding – must not falter if the world is to rid itself of a human infectious disease for the second time in history, after smallpox.
There have been no reported cases of wild polio infection in people for the last 19 weeks. Figures from the World Health Organization reveal that the last confirmed cases were on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan in October and September 2023 respectively; these are the last nations on Earth where polio is endemic.
“To have gone 19 straight weeks … is a long period to go without a single case, that’s why there is some hope [of eradication],” Gordon McInally, president of Rotary International, a founding partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), told the Observer. “All of us who are involved in this, every week we get an email giving us the updated figures … and every week when I click open that email my heart rate goes up until I see the number in the hope that it will be zero and not one, or worse. But we take it week by week.”
But those involved in eradication efforts are taking nothing for granted. The programme has come under fire before for its “almost-there narrative”, as described in a report last September by the Independent Monitoring Board, led by Liam Donaldson, a former chief medical officer for England.
Still, said McInally, if they can get through another 33 weeks (one full year after the last case), they will be “celebrating cautiously”, and if the world stays two years disease-free they can officially declare the global eradication of polio.
Bur remember that biologists have detected several dozen instances of wild poliovirus in sewage and other sources in the last several months, so the virus is out there. They have to get everyone vaccinated!
*In his Weekly Dish column, “The transqueers take the mask off“, Andrew Sullivan goes after a new book by Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, as well as the cover article of the latest New York Magazine (where Sullivan used to work), “Freedom of Sex: The moral case for letting transkids change their bodies” (archive link).
A bit on Butler’s book:
On the most blazing practical issues of our current gender debate, Butler has little to say. Can children really give informed consent to irreversible re-ordering of their entire endocrine system before they’ve gone through puberty or even had an orgasm? She offers this non-answer:
Of course, there are serious discussions to be had about what kind of health care is wise for young people, and at what age. But to have that debate, we have to be within the sphere of legality. If the very consideration of gender-affirming care is prohibited, then no one can decide which form is best for a specific child at a certain age. We need to keep those debates open to make sure that health care serves the well-being and flourishing of the child.
This is an evasion worthy of the most craven politician, not an argument by an honest intellectual. What about the fact that 60 – 90 percent of kids grow out of gender dysphoria, as JK Rowling has noted? Another non-answer from Butler: “She does not tell us whether those referenced are tomboys, sissies, genderqueer people, cross-dressers, trans people, or something altogether different.” This is pedantic whataboutism. Almost all of them are gay, as Butler surely knows.
Is it fair to have trans women who went through puberty as men compete against women in athletics? Butler cites a single outlier study using unreliable markers claiming that among top athletes, there is considerable overlap in testosterone levels between men and women. But of course, there is no such overlap in any other study — and there are countless of them. The highest testosterone levels among women are far below the lowest for men. They differ so much in degree they differ in kind.
Is the insistence by doctors that if you don’t trans your child he will kill himself, ethically defensible, as Rowling has asked? Butler responds: “She acts as if the claim is unfair or untrue, but what if it is true?” Memo to Butler: it isn’t true 99.7 percent of the time, making the “do you want a dead boy or live girl?” blackmail all the more ethically despicable. This easily found fact is something that Butler didn’t even feel the need to research.
The NY Magazine article is simply bonkers.
David Haskell’s New York Magazine has been committed to publishing the psychotic on the subject of transgenderism for a while: first by an “asexual gay man with a penis and a vagina” who carved a fake dick out of her thigh to place next to her actual vagina, and luxuriated in her edgy madness; and now an Ivy League porn addict marinated in postmodern nihilism who didn’t get a fake vagina and take female hormones to cure his gender dysphoria, but — prepare yourself for the épater la bourgeoisie frisson — because it made him feel shitty: “I feel demonstrably worse since I started on hormones … I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am … I want the tears; I want the pain … There are no good outcomes in transition.” That was in a memorable essay in the NYT a while back: a poem in baller nihilism.
For good measure, Chu in his new essay rejects any notion of the Hippocratic Oath in medicine. Almost in an aside! That’s how far he’ll go to make sure there are no limits on child transition, even if it destroys a kid’s life, even if informed consent is impossible, even though the treatment is experimental and off-label. If a patient demands a treatment, and a doctor believes it will be harmful, Chu believes the patient should be able to demand being harmed, just as he did.
Then there are the grave implications of abolishing any distinction between children and adults. Or to put it more baldly: New York Magazine has a cover story implicitly defending sex with children. That’ll get a National Magazine Award! But think about it for a millisecond: if a child of any age can demand to have his own genitals removed with no safeguards at all, why can’t he demand to have his genitals played with by an adult as well? Who dare impede a child’s total freedom?
Remember: Chu is not justifying child sex reassignment as a necessary medication for a serious illness; he is justifying it simply because a child wants it for any reason, specious or fantastic or real. Any editor reading this piece as a draft would ask the writer to grapple with this obvious, massive implication. I’ve been edited by New York Magazine and “fact-checked” by their social justice activists. I know how thorough they can be in demanding a writer address unintended implications. But not this time. Matt Taibbi compares direct quotes from Chu and from NAMBLA pamphlets. They are indeed hard to tell apart. And so we’re back to the pomo French intellectuals of the 1970s petitioning against age-of-consent laws. In fact, queer theory’s core pioneers — Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, and Patrick Califia — all once defended adults fucking kids. Foucault defended sex with infants. This is not extraneous to queer theory; it is intrinsic to it. The point of queer theory is that there are no limiting principles. Defending the integrity, dignity and safety of children makes you un-queer. It’s a label I will gladly wear.
*The NYT, writing of Chuck Schumer’s attempt to to control Israeli elections, produces this headline and sub-headline (author: Jonathan Weisman), which angered me up:
Over 44 painstakingly scripted minutes on the floor of the Senate on Thursday, the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, spoke of his Jewish identity, his love for the State of Israel, his horror at the wanton slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7 and his views on the apportionment of blame for the carnage in Gaza, saying that it first and foremost lay with the terrorists of Hamas.
Then Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat and the highest-ranking elected Jew in American history, said Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an impediment to peace, and called for new elections in the world’s only Jewish state.
The opposition was not nearly so painstaking.
Within minutes, the House Republican leadership demanded an apology. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, declared: “Make no mistake — the Democratic Party doesn’t have an anti-Bibi problem. It has an anti-Israel problem.” And the Republican Jewish Coalition proclaimed that “the most powerful Democrat in Congress knifed the Jewish state in the back.”
The months that have followed the slaughter of Oct. 7 and the ensuing, calamitously deadly war in Gaza have been excruciating for American Jews, caught between a tradition of liberalism that has dominated much of Jewish politics and an anti-Israel response from the political left that has left many feeling isolated and, at times, persecuted.
But Mr. Schumer’s speech was potentially a watershed moment in a much longer political process, pursued initially by Republicans but joined recently by left-wing Democrats — to turn Israel into a partisan issue. Republicans, as they see it, would be the party of Israeli supporters. Democrats, as the rising left would have it, would be the party of Palestine.
Good job, Senator Schumer; you not only interfere with the democratic politics of Israel, urging replacement of the PM in the middle of a war, but you are simply moving towards the wrong side, urging your fellow Democrats to help Israel lose the war. If Rafah isn’t taken, as Netanyahu swore it would be, and if there’s a permanent ceasefire, it’s all over: Hamas is still around and Israel remains susceptible to terrorism. As if that’s not enough, Senator Schumer, you’re driving centrists (even perhaps some Democrats who favor Israel) into the arms of Trump. I’ve never seen the U.S. try to interfere so much in the internal politics as well as the military strategy of an ally. But of course these allies are Jews.
Netanyahu will almost certainly lose the next election for Prime Minister, and I won’t mourn that. However, he’s doing a decent job prosecuting one of the toughest wars anybody can handle, so why try to interfere with Israel’s politics now? There’s only one reason I can see given Schumer’s long-standing affection towards Israel: too many civilians are being killed in the drive to eliminate Hamas. This is the issue that is the one Americans are concerned with. Pray tell us, Senator Schumer: what would you have Israel do differently? How could they bring the hostages back without stopping the war, keeping Hamas (or the corrupt PA) in power and without releasing thousands of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons? All those who criticize the war but claim to support Israel: besides the flub of not keeping the border secure at the beginning, what would you do differently now?
Malgorzata commented acidly,
“The author [Jonathan Weisman] does what he can to excuse Schumer and to accuse Republicans for making Israel a “partisan” problem. But Schumer did it all himself. His speech was not “painstaking” nor “nuanced”, as this author writes. He had to acknowledge the fact of Hamas’s barbarity. But then he put Netanyahu and Hamas as culprits for the lack of peace. ON THE SAME LEVEL! He said that Israelis should have an election in the middle of the war and choose somebody Mr. Schumer could approve of! In Israel Schumer’s speech was condemned by people of almost all political hues (well, except for the far-far-left). And, as far as I know, these Israelis aren’t members of the Republican party!
*Curiously, the uber-woke Guardian has an article going after Jonathan Glazer’s anti-Israel speech at the Oscars, which of course was a big hit with the Hollywood morons. (h/t Jez). Here it is:
And a transcript of the controversial part.
All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, rather, look at what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?
The Guardian finds and gives tongue to a big opponent of Glazer’s speech,
László Nemes, the director of acclaimed film Son of Saul, has criticised The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars acceptance speech.
. . .“Had he embraced the responsibility that comes with a film like that, he would not have resorted to talking points disseminated by propaganda meant to eradicate, at the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth.”
Nemes continued by saying Glazer’s speech would stoke antisemitic feeling. “It is especially troubling in an age where we are reaching pre-Holocaust levels of anti-Jewish hatred – this time, in a trendy, ‘progressive’ way,” he wrote. “Today, the only form of discrimination not only tolerated but also encouraged is antisemitism.”
The Zone of Interest is an important movie,” Nemes writes. “It is not made in a usual way. It questions the grammar of cinema. Its director should have stayed silent instead of revealing he has no understanding of history and the forces undoing civilisation, before or after the Holocaust.
“Had he embraced the responsibility that comes with a film like that, he would not have resorted to talking points disseminated by propaganda meant to eradicate, at the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth.”
Nemes continued by saying Glazer’s speech would stoke antisemitic feeling. “It is especially troubling in an age where we are reaching pre-Holocaust levels of anti-Jewish hatred – this time, in a trendy, ‘progressive’ way,” he wrote. “Today, the only form of discrimination not only tolerated but also encouraged is antisemitism.”
. . .Nemes suggested Glazer was part of “the overclass of Hollywood” who “preach to the world about morality” rather than concerning themselves with crises in their own industry.
Rather than concentrating on their jobs, Nemes continues, “the disconnected, hypocritical and spoiled members of the cinema elite are busy – for some reason – trying to moralise us.”
The Guardian asked Nemes for a comment, and there’s a long and eloquent one at the end of the article. How unusual for the Guardian to give a lot of space for such criticism!
*What’s going on in Haiti is heartbreaking and it’s been that way for years: the country has been ruled by dictators and plutocrats, controlled by armed gangs, nobody with any money is safe from being kidnapped, and the whole place is going to hell. Now the prime minister has resigned and there’s no leadership; there are only armed gangs. Further, food is running low for everyone. No clear solutions are evident.
A crowd of about 100 people tried to shove through a metal gate in Haiti’s capital as a guard with a baton pushed them back, threatening to hit them. Undeterred, children and adults alike, some of them carrying babies, kept elbowing each other trying to enter.
“Let us in! We’re hungry!” they shouted on a recent afternoon.
They were trying to get into a makeshift shelter in an abandoned school. Inside, workers dipped ladles into buckets filled with soup that they poured into Styrofoam containers stuffed with rice to distribute to Haitians who have lost homes to gang violence.
Some 1.4 million Haitians are on the verge of famine, and more than 4 million require food aid, sometimes eating only once a day or nothing at all, aid groups say.
“Haiti is facing a protractive and mass hunger,” Jean-Martin Bauer, Haiti director for the United Nation’s World Food Program, told The Associated Press. He noted that Croix-des-Bouquets, in the eastern part of Haiti’s capital, “has malnutrition rates comparable with any war zone in the world.”
Officials are trying to rush food, water and medical supplies to makeshift shelters and other places as gang violence suffocates lives across Port-au-Prince and beyond, with many trapped in their homes.
Only a few aid organizations have been able to restart since Feb. 29, when gangs began attacking key institutions, burning police stations, shutting down the main international airport with gunfire and storming two prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates.
The violence forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce early Tuesday that he would resign once a transitional council is created, but gangs demanding his ouster have continued their attacks in several communities.
Bauer and other officials said that the gangs are blocking distribution routes and paralyzing the main port, and that the World Food Program’s warehouse is running out of grains, beans and vegetable oil as it continues to deliver meals.
The more you read about Haiti, the more depressed you get. The Marines went in to guard the embassy, but the U.S. and probably the U.N. won’t intervene militarily to stop the gangs until there’s a new Prime Minister. And who would want that job?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej look for parallels of ideas with the bigoted “Doctors Without Borders” organization:
Hili: Does an organisation “Idiots Without Borders” exist?A: No, the intellectual proletariat unites spontaneously.
Hili: Czy jest organizacja Idioci bez granic?Ja: Nie ma, proletariat umysłowy łączy się ze sobą spontanicznie.
*******************
From the Dodo Pet:
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
From Masih, an Iranian woman who, at age nine, was told to cover up because she could “excite men’s desires.” She also recounts a litany of other bars faces by Iranian women. She has fled Iran and can never go back.
Women of Iran and Afghanistan came together, providing testimonies to call on free world to criminalize gender apartheid.
Stand with us as we say #UnitedAgainstGenderApartheid, as we fight for our dignity & human rights.
In Iran, we learn from a young age that we have to work… pic.twitter.com/IZrY1ygdXJ— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) March 15, 2024
Cancelation on the grounds of Zionism:
People are seeing this, right? Jews who support existence of Israel, the most normal thing in the world for both Jews and non-Jews to do since Israel exists and will exist, are being stopped from performing across America. Normal people can't just accept this. https://t.co/8Xl6MTiNvn
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) March 15, 2024
From Barry, a cat who makes strange growling noises. Kiffness needs to make a song from this one:
Cats have a wide spectrum of vocalizations, from the 'standard' meow, to purrs, to chirps and trills.
Sometimes they produce these lower pitch vocalizations that vaguely sound like a human speech.pic.twitter.com/3cMhHUAUrl
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 16, 2024
Yes, the Washington Post is a total disgrace; it’s even more biased against Israel than is the NYT:
WaPo has been a disgrace https://t.co/0a1Z5QlclR
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) March 15, 2024
From Malcolm, a strange creature that’s really not, plus “the power of perspective”:
The power of perspective 😳🕶️🤏pic.twitter.com/BM7ibunCAs
— Spellbinding Odyssey (@SpellOdyssey) March 9, 2024
From The Auschwitz Memorial: a two-year-old boy gassed upon arrival:
17 March 1940 | A Dutch Jewish boy, Barnett Greenman, was born in Rotterdam.
In February 1943 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber. pic.twitter.com/GiCMFv5I9b
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 17, 2024
Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. First, ducks sleep with a reluctant cat:
Mama duck leads her babies to a cozy spot in the house. i.e. a cat bed..🦆🐈🦆😍 pic.twitter.com/wmNqcP5AGe
— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) March 10, 2024
This is adorable:
Baby capybara uber ride pic.twitter.com/6FU5iAV3vR
— why you should have an animal (@shouldhaveanima) March 12, 2024
On this day:
1805 – The Italian Republic, with Napoleon as president, becomes the Kingdom of Italy, with Napoleon as King of Italy.
1861 – The Kingdom of Italy is proclaimed. [I’m not sure what the difference is between this declaration and the item above.]
1891 – SS Utopia collides with HMS Anson in the Bay of Gibraltar and sinks, killing 562 of the 880 passengers on board.
1942 – Holocaust: The first Jews from the Lvov Ghetto are gassed at the Belzec death camp in what is today eastern Poland.
1948 – Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom sign the Treaty of Brussels, a precursor to the North Atlantic Treaty establishing NATO.
1950 – Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley announce the creation of element 98, which they name “californium”.
1958 – The United States launches the first solar-powered satellite, which is also the first satellite to achieve a long-term orbit.
1960 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the National Security Council directive on the anti-Cuban covert action program that will ultimately lead to the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
1966 – Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the DSV Alvin submarine finds a missing American hydrogen bomb.
1968 – As a result of nerve gas testing by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps in Skull Valley, Utah, over 6,000 sheep are found dead.
1969 – Golda Meir becomes the first female Prime Minister of Israel.
1973 – The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph Burst of Joy is taken, depicting a former prisoner of war being reunited with his family, which came to symbolize the end of United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
1985 – Serial killer Richard Ramirez, aka the “Night Stalker”, commits the first two murders in his Los Angeles murder spree.
1992 – A referendum to end apartheid in South Africa is passed 68.7% to 31.2%.
2000 – Five hundred and thirty members of the Ugandan cult Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God die in a fire, considered to be a mass murder or suicide orchestrated by leaders of the cult. Elsewhere another 248 members are later found dead.
2003 – Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council, Robin Cook, resigns from the British Cabinet in disagreement with government plans for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Births:
1665 – Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, French harpsichord player and composer (d. 1729).
1777 – Patrick Brontë, Irish-English priest and author (d. 1861).
1806 – Norbert Rillieux, African American inventor and chemical engineer (d. 1894). [Widely considered one of the earliest chemical engineers and noted for his pioneering invention of the multiple-effect evaporator, an important development in the growth of the sugar industry. He was a cousin of the painter Edgar Degas.]
1820 – Jean Ingelow, English poet and author (d. 1897).
1834 – Gottlieb Daimler, German engineer and businessman, co-founded Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (d. 1900).
1842 – Rosina Heikel, Finnish physician (d. 1929). [The first female physician in Finland, she specialised in gynaecology and paediatrics.]
1846 – Kate Greenaway, English author and illustrator (d. 1901).
1849 – Charles F. Brush, American businessman and philanthropist, co-invented the Arc lamp (d. 1929).
1849 – Cornelia Clapp, American marine biologist (d. 1934).
1862 – Martha P. Falconer, American social reformer (d. 1941).
1877 – Edith New, English militant suffragette (d. 1951).
1880 – Lawrence Oates, English lieutenant and explorer (d. 1912).
1912 – Bayard Rustin, American activist (d. 1987).
1919 – Nat King Cole, American singer, pianist, and television host (d. 1965).
1930 – James Irwin, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut (d. 1991).
1933 – Penelope Lively, English author.
1938 – Rudolf Nureyev, Russian-French dancer and choreographer (d. 1993).
1939 – Robin Knox-Johnston, English sailor and first person to perform a single-handed non-stop circumnavigation of the globe.
1942 – John Wayne Gacy, American serial killer and rapist (d. 1994).
1944 – Pattie Boyd, English model, author, and photographer. [Inspired songs by both George Harrison and Eric Clapton.]
1948 – William Gibson, American-Canadian author and screenwriter. [Widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk, he coined the term “cyberspace”.]
1951 – Scott Gorham, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
1962 – Clare Grogan, Scottish singer and actress.
1975 – Justin Hawkins, English singer-songwriter.
1979 – Stormy Daniels, American adult film actress. [And Trump’s nemesis.]
1988 – Grimes, Canadian musician, singer-songwriter, producer, and visual artist.
No one can avoid death; it is inevitable. Therefore, I should create in my mind a kind of willingness and accepting for that event without any fear. (Lobsang Tenzin):
180 – Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (b. 121).
1704 – Menno van Coehoorn, Dutch soldier and engineer (b. 1641). [Regarded as one of the most significant figures in Dutch military history. In an era when siege warfare dominated military campaigns, he and his French counterpart Vauban were the acknowledged experts in designing, taking and defending fortifications.]
1741 – Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, French poet and playwright (b. 1671).
1782 – Daniel Bernoulli, Dutch-Swiss mathematician and physicist (b. 1700).
1853 – Christian Doppler, Austrian physicist and mathematician (b. 1803).
1871 – Robert Chambers, Scottish geologist and publisher, co-founded Chambers Harrap (b. 1802).
1902 – John Houlding, English businessman, founded Liverpool Football Club (b. 1833).
1942 – Nada Dimić, People’s Hero of Yugoslavia, victim of Genocide of Serbs. [An undercover agent for the Yugoslavian partisans, she was tortured but refused to give any information. She was murdered at the Stara Gradiška concentration camp, aged 18.]
1947 – Mike, American Wyandotte chicken, lived 18 months following decapitation (h. 1945).
1956 – Irène Joliot-Curie, French physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1897).
1958 – Bertha De Vriese, Belgian physician (b. 1877).
1961 – Susanna M. Salter, American activist and politician (b. 1860). [The first woman elected to serve as mayor in the United States and one of the first women to serve in any political office in the country.]
1983 – Louisa E. Rhine, American botanist and parapsychologist (b. 1891).
1986 – Clarence D. Lester, African-American fighter pilot (b.1923). [One of the first African-American military aviators in the United States Army Air Corps, the United States Army Air Forces and later the United States Air Force.]
1994 – Charlotte Auerbach, German-Jewish Scottish folklorist, geneticist, and zoologist (b. 1899). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
Woman of the Day:
[Text adapted from Wikipedia]
Charlotte “Lotte” Auerbach FRS FRSE (born 14 May 1899, died on this day in 1994) was a German geneticist who contributed to founding the science of mutagenesis. She became well known after 1942 when she discovered, with A. J. Clark and J. M. Robson, that mustard gas could cause mutations in fruit flies. She wrote 91 scientific papers, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Royal Society of London.
Charlotte Auerbach was born into a Jewish family in Krefeld in Germany. An only child, she may have been influenced by the scientists in her family: her father Friedrich Auerbach (1870–1925) was a chemist, her uncle a physicist, and her grandfather, the anatomist Leopold Auerbach.
She studied biology and chemistry at the universities of Würzburg, Freiburg and Berlin and initially decided to become a secondary-school teacher of science, passing the exams for that with distinction in 1924.
She taught in Heidelberg (1924–1925) and briefly at the University of Frankfurt, from which she was dismissed – probably because she was Jewish. In 1928 she started postgraduate research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology (Berlin-Dahlem) in Developmental Physiology under Otto Mangold. In 1929 she abandoned her work with Mangold: he would later join the Nazi party, and Auerbach found his dictatorial manner unpleasant. In reply to her suggestion to change the direction of her project, he replied “You are my student, you do as I say. What you think is of no consequence!”
She again taught biology in several schools in Berlin – until the Nazi party ended this by law as she was Jewish. Following her mother’s advice, she left the country in 1933 and fled to Edinburgh where she got her PhD in 1935 at the Institute of Animal Genetics in the University of Edinburgh. She would stay affiliated to this Institute throughout her whole career. (She became a naturalised British citizen in 1939.)
Auerbach’s PhD dissertation was on the development of legs in Drosophila. After her dissertation she became a personal assistant to Francis Albert Eley Crew, who connected her to the lively group of scientists he had assembled, and to invited scientists including Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, and Hermann Joseph Muller, a geneticist and mutation researcher, who stayed in Edinburgh from 1938–1940.
Initially, she rejected Crew’s suggestion to work with Muller but the latter persuaded her that since she was interested in how genes operate it would be important to understand what happens if the genes are mutated. She later said, “His enthusiasm for mutation research was infectious and from that day on I switched to mutation research. I have never regretted it.”
Auerbach’s genetic mutation research remained unpublished for many years because the work with mustard gas was considered classified by the government. She was finally able to publish in 1947.
After being an assistant instructor in animal genetics, Auerbach became a lecturer in 1947, Professor of Genetics in 1967 and ended her professional career as a Professor Emeritus in 1969.
She wrote several books to teach genetics, several of them were translated in other languages. Her book, Genetics in the Atomic Age (1956) was praised by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for her excellent explanations of “an inherently technical matter”.
She became a Fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh (1949), Fellow of the Royal Society (1957), Foreign Member, Danish Academy of Science (1968), and Foreign Member, National Academy of Sciences (1970). In 1976, she was awarded the Royal Society’s Darwin Medal and in 1984 the German Genetical Society’s Gregor Mendel Preis. However, the reward she valued the most was the telegram her hero Hermann Joseph Muller sent after her first striking mutant results in June 1941, which read: “We are thrilled by your major discovery opening great theoretical and practical field. Congratulations.”
She died in Edinburgh on this day in 1994.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Auerbach
Well, I looked up “épater la bourgeoisie frisson” (this is on Wikipedia).
“Épater la bourgeoisie” means “to shock or scandalise the (respectable) middle classes.”
“The term bourgeoisie does not mean middle class in the modern sense, but refers to the owning class under capitalism. As such, it was the middle class between peasantry and aristocracy when emerging in the Late Middle Ages.”
… frisson means a sudden strong feeling of excitement or fear; a thrill – and goosebumps seems similar.
Re the cat making strange noises: cats yowl like that when they are extremely threatened (one can also see that in her eyes and the fact that her ears are back), most often by another cat. In this case I suspect someone is being mean to the cat to get her so stressed out that she yowls.
The United States of America has–ever since Haitian independence in 1804–exacerbated that nation’s difficulties to survive through a hateful and obstructive foreign policy. Rather than welcoming Haiti into the community of nations, the U.S. from the start viewed the country as a problem. And so it was: to the U.S. South. The Haitian Revolution that freed the Haitian enslaved and led to independence was anathema to the South, for the region deeply feared that revolution’s exportation to the U.S. Our then-young nation had too many presidents, too early, from Virginia!
Agreed, that cat looks very stressed.
You can write to Senator Schumer here: https://www.schumer.senate.gov/contact/message-chuck, as I did as soon as I heard the speech.
Sadly, the damage has already been done, and media around the world are piling on. Even before the war, it seemed almost to be a media requirement to portray Netanyahu as corrupt, power-hungry, extremist, and all the rest. Now, his prosecution of the war in Gaza has been added to his list of transgressions.
This demonization of Netanyahu puts the war effort at serious risk. A new Israeli leader, one more susceptible to outside influence, might indeed succumb to the siren’s song of cease fire, leaving Hamas to regroup and fight another day. It’s Netanyahu’s tenacity that the U.S. administration wants to break, yet his tenacity is precisely what is required to bring Hamas to its well-deserved end.
In other news, earlier this week primatologist Frans de Waal passed away. I like his books.
https://news.emory.edu/features/2024/03/er_frans_de_waal_16-03-2024/index.html
Thanks for this info. I suppose the media was too busy this week covering doctored royal family photos to report on his passing.
I feel this one. Didn’t know him but his writing changed the way I see us humans and our cousins.
Andrew Sullivan:
Chu is also pissing off a lot of the trans-genderists by pointing out some of the weaknesses, flaws, and contradictions in the current strategy of denying sex while arguing for a biological basis for an inborn thing called a Gender Identity.
Yes; he’s valuable in his way because he doesn’t dissemble.
(He’s openly autogynephilic; wrote a book based on his masochistic fantasies of womanhood; before his own vaginoplasty he wrote that he knew perfectly well it wouldn’t make him happy.)
Once again, thanks PCC for this daily rundown.