Monday: Hili dialogue

53 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

1. Lady Day again? The years are flying by.

   I take Harris’s new role as a positive development; it means the Administration isn’t serious about the issue.

   1. ha!

      Indeed. 😀

      +1

2. She’s studied the maps?! Even before reading further, I had the exact reaction that pcc(e) noted for himself. But I also take some solace in DrB’s comment above that if a role is contracted out to the VEEP, the administration is less than serious about it..for of course that is a vice-president’s job description.

   Also: it might be time for another unscientific WEIT poll: this one asking readers whether tRUMP will ever pay even one cent of his own money or spend even one day in jail. Yes or no? (Or, of course, “don’t know”)

   1. I try to follow the news as much as I can, but I have seen no details on the maps mentioned here. PCC mentioned today:

      “As I noted yesterday, Israel not only has reserved a camp near the Mediterranean for refugees from Rafah, but has also told the people of Rafah where to go, and when, to avoid encountering the IDF when it attacks.”

      And yesterday:
      “That last sentence is a lie. Israel has not only set up a refuge for Gazans along the Mediterranean, and has also given civilians in Rafah a map of where to go and when, revealing to Hamas its attack plans.”

      If such maps exist and have been distributed to civilians, how come I can’t fins any such maps online? Sure, I made a simple Google search and spent no more than two minutes on it, but nowadays information distributed to civilians gets out pretty fast. Can anyone post a link to those here?

      Thanks.

      1. The camp along the coast of Gaza is called Al Mawasi. Yesterday I found this from two weeks ago by al-Jazeera about kids in what appears to be a day camp there. You may come to your own conclusions from it, but to me they don’t look to be in dire condition, despite the Genocide banner that al-J runs on it.

         1. Thanks! The video is in fact a ray of sunshine. It is nice to see that there is still a place where a few children can be children for a minute. I wonder how a camp like this, apparently mostly sand dunes (though apparently medical facilities are being built) in an area of 3.3 sq miles will fare with over a million people in it.

   2. I had the same reaction when I read that Kamala Harris had “studied the maps.” I could only conclude that she has descended even deeper into her idiocy than before. She’s done a great job at the border, and she’s now joining the effort to ruin Israel.

3. Spidercat
   Spidercat
   Does whatever a Spidercat does
   Can he swing
   From a web?
   No he can’t
   He’s a cat

   1. +1

4. What a gracious exchange between Crick and Sanger! Particularly Professor Sanger’s self-effacing, handwritten reply. Thanks for digging this up, Matthew.

5. P-P-P-Professor Butler’s expositions strike me as gnostic wizardry.

   I can find myself beholden to the mystification – “ooo, the gestures, yeah! I gesture too! Wow – it’s all constructed by society! Wow, far out man…”

   Almost like getting a hit of euphoria, I imagine the congregations in the church get by reading the holy scriptures or even listening to the guys in the robes.

   Yet, when society shows material inconsistency, perhaps empiricism, that gets the post-whateverism treatment.

   1. Your religion analogy reminded me of a discussion (if I may dignify the exchange as such) I had four-or-so years ago with several of the usual suspects at Pharyngula. They were getting increasingly frustrated that I constantly dismissed the metaphysical aspect of transgenderism as nothing more than wordplay, staying instead with the biological reality of sex, until eventually the ringleader lost it and, in all-caps, shouted “HAVE YOU EVEN READ JUDITH BUTLER?”
      How stupid of me to dismiss their belief system without first studying the works of their leading theologian.

      1. That’s what cults do – find ways to make competing thought appear ignorant, stupid, or uninformed with thought-terminating clichés.

         That needs to be discerned from perhaps telling creationists to read Why Evolution Is True -because WEIT simply collects so many observable phenomena into a very efficient package to give the reader a grand view of It All. And really, it’s their loss if they still can’t believe it – maybe it will take time.

         Chiding someone to read Judith Butler, Foucault, or Gayle Rubin – which, BTW, one should do … a bit … – is to punish them with a wild goose chase.

         “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

         Neil DeGrasse Tyson
         —From Real Time with Bill Maher, “2011-02-04”

6. Curie got chemistry and physics.

   And I’m stumped for anyone else… BTW I’m not counting the peace prize, which Pauling got as well as chemistry.

7. Marie Curie, chemistry and physics.
   What’s-his-name, who later became a vitamin C crank, for peace and chemistry (or possibly medicine? It was for protein structure anyway). (The fact that I’m blanking on his name proves that I’m not cheating!)

   1. Linus Pauling, for chemistry and peace, as you say. He also proposed that DNA was a triple helix.

      It’s funny, the first thing I always think about when I hear his name is the vitamin C thing. Told to me by a chemistry teacher over 40 years ago. It’s funny what sticks and what doesn’t.

   2. He is in record somewhere sort of admitting he overstepped on the vitamin C thing.

      But, too late.

   3. On the positive side, Pauling also invented molecular phylogenetics and the concept of the molecular clock (with Emile Zuckerkandl).

8. Link to international token day is incorrect. It’s a repeat of previous link to the MOH recipy

   1. Fixed it; thanks!

9. Re: Judith Butler. As a college student many years ago I was introduced to anthropology via a film in which a prominent anthropologist discussed cultural differences in the “performance” of gender – and gender differences in the performance of culture. Several examples stood out in my memory. Back in those days, when lots of people smoked cigarettes, women struck matches away from themselves, while men struck matches toward themselves. There might not have been 100% conformity to this practice, but there was no question that an American seeing two hands striking a match toward one’s body assumed that the match striker was a man, and the parallel assumption was expressed (though slightly less often) about two hands striking away from the body: that was most likely a woman. Similarly, the film showed dozens of men with their cigarettes off to one corner of their mouths, while photos of women smoking showed them holding the cigarette in the middle of their lips. And, of course, back in those days “co-eds” at my college could not wear trousers/pants, and no male student would have considered wearing a dress or skirt.

   Countless example of such “performance” of gender are available, so Judith Butler’s early approach to the subject made some sense. She’s not a psychologist or biologist, so the lens through which she analyzed “gender” was more or less restricted to the cultural dimensions that get performed when women had beehive hairdos and men got buzz haircuts (as opposed to a period in history when men wore powdered wigs and both genders slathered on the makeup). You didn’t need to wear a sign publicly announcing what sort of gametes you produced for everyone around you to know whether you were male or female.

   The possibility that we recognize masculine women (“butch”) and effeminate men (lots of euphemisms) suggests that Butler’s early suggestion was reasonably accurate: each of us is one biological sex or the other, and how we express “gender” in performance is based on assumptions about that biological sex. But that creates four options, not two: male sex/masculine gender performance; male sex/feminine gender performance; female sex/feminine gender performance; female sex/masculine gender performance. In each case, biological sex is fixed, but gendered performance can be variable. We all know ‘masculine’ women (I was reminded of this recently in the comic film “Scary Movie” in which the very butch gym teacher is named “Ms. Mann”), and we all know effeminate men. If the concept of “gender” is helpful in understanding how we are able to make such a judgment, a judgment we make all the time (parodied by the Pumping Up “girlie man” jokes by Hans and Franz on Saturday Night Live), perhaps there is some value in trying to understanding this, rather than rejecting it as not biology.

   1. +1

      Where and when did “gender” originate?

      Was it in 1908, in the “occult” publication The Kybalion?

      I’m puzzled why this looney-tunes book doesn’t get cited more than, IMHO, it should.

      1. “Where and when did “gender” originate?”

         The term or the concept? Ancient Egyptians recognized two genders, and I suspect that every early human society did as well. They might not have used a lexeme that we can easily translate as “gender,” but they certainly understood that there is something that today we would call gender, and two of them at least.

         Imagine a society that did not recognize gender and gender differences, kind of like the wonderful thought experiment Urusula Le Guin’s explored in her famous sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness. In that case, for most of the year the inhabitants of the planet Gethen were sexually indistinguishable — ambisexual — and had no concept of different genders that might map on to sexual difference. For a brief period each cycle, each Gethen acquired either male or female sex — they never knew which it would be during any cycle — and engaged in reproduction. But apart from the brief period of pregnancy there were no biological sexual differences, and no gender difference. Everyone wore the same clothing, adorned themselves in the same manner, spoke in the same registers, etc. They were, in this novel, as close to being gender-free as you could get. And even when, during that brief period, sexual differences emerged, the inhabitants of Gethen did not adopt different displays of gender — or displays of different gender — since there was no concept of gender, implicit or explicit. It was a fun thought experiment to try to understand how “gender” works and its relationship to biological sex.

         So, when did women and men start to dress differently? When did a culture start to tell its members that males and females were different in numerous ways, and needed to display those differences in the presentation of their selves: through clothing; bodily decoration; hair styles; speech; assumptions about appropriate behaviors etc. I can assure you that it was long before 1882, which is when the OED noted the first use of the lexeme “gender.”

         1. Your every use of “gender” there, Barbara, could be replaced by “sex” or “sex-role stereotypes” depending on context without loss of precision and with some gain. What gender has come to mean is something different. It is some feeling about what sex one ought to be but isn’t, and so the physical body, not just adornment and social role, needs to be brought into alignment to provide a simulacrum of what the person believes his/her desired sex ought to look like. Further, the person seeks to compel others, on pain of fines levied by the state, to affirm legally that he has in fact—“transwomen are women”—become the sex he claims to be.

            I can’t accept a thought experiment premised on something that can’t happen: individuals randomly changing their reproductive sex from cycle to cycle.

            1. Thanks for your note. My original point was to explicate, briefly (!), Judith Butler’s focus on gender as “performance” rather than the psychology or biology. A more influential version might be Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus,” but there seems to me to be no doubt whatsoever that we, each of us, “perform” our gender. I taught at several major R1s for just over 40 years, and of the thousands of students in my classes over that time I suspect that there were only 3 or 4 whose gender I could not assign accurately pretty much immediately, though what biological sex they might have been hiding was less obvious, and frankly not very important!

               Butler herself noted that any culture’s ideas about ‘gender’ are derived from its model of biological sex, so your opening sentence would not be problematic for her. Nonetheless, ‘gender’ is a useful concept for understanding how cultures expand the biological notion well beyond what biology supports. (You might remember the classic story from the Hawthorne Study: Burleigh Gardner was told that Western Electric hired women to assemble complex telephone components because they were best at detailed, fine manual work as evidenced in sewing. Gardner asked why, then, all neurosurgeons were men?)

               I deliberately ignored the transgender issue here, since I am not a psychologist, even less so a biologist. I assume that a small number of people do in fact have a sense of self that they believe is at odds with their biological sex, and when seeking ways to manage that disconnect discover that we are not very good at changing psychological states or traits, but we have some success with altering bodies. I think you are correct when you imply that the social issues that emerge from that kind of resolution are the more interesting ones.

         2. OK, I appreciate that reply (in case this seems snarky – I’m not trying to do that):

            What I mean is the sharp break from a linguistic function to some material property of human beings.

            The elaboration upon “gender” in The Kybalion (1908 – free online) is quite unrelated to language conventions. For instance, one chapter is “Mental Gender”. It states that male and female is different in degree but not in kind. That is irrelevant to how language employs gender.

            Then there’s John Money’s “gender identity” in roughly the 1960s. That can be seen in a strong uptick in counts in Google Ngrams.

            Both those examples constitute – IMHO – abuse of language. Using “gender” outside conventional language rules to manipulate thought along literally sexual dimensions as applied to humans like a medical finding.

            Here’s The Kybalion – the http is left out so this comment doesn’t hang up:

            en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Kybalion/Chapter_13

            … anyone following along is urged to read that to see if there’s any merit to my argument that there is an abuse of language afoot, and 1908 is a significant milestone.

   2. I agree that the distinction between sex and gender, where gender is defined as a kind of performance (or, to put it another way, as the societal norms that are expected of each sex,) can be useful.

      But Butler certainly wasn’t the first to make that distinction. Simone de Beauvoir, for one, made it in The Second Sex:

      One isn’t born, but rather becomes a woman

      (That quote is often misused by trans activists. De Beauvoir wasn’t claiming that womanhood is a mere “social construct” divorced from sex, but that many of the behaviors expected of women are, and do not come naturally but must be learned.)

      Really, any time a woman defies social norms that diminish or oppress her, she’s behaving “like a man” per Butler’s conception of womanhood as “gender performance”. And so we see trans activists claiming that women like Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, George Elliott, James Barry, and even Louisa May Alcott, were trans men (or “non-binary.”) How any feminist–or anyone, really–can’t see how offensive this is to female human beings, is beyond me.

      1. >How any feminist–or anyone, really–can’t see how offensive this is to female human beings, is beyond me.

         Yes!

10. On this day:
    421 – Italian city Venice is founded with the dedication of the first church, that of San Giacomo di Rialto on the islet of Rialto.

    1584 – Sir Walter Raleigh is granted a patent to colonize Virginia.

    1655 – Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is discovered by Christiaan Huygens.

    1725 – Bach’s chorale cantata Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1, is first performed on the Feast of the Annunciation, coinciding with Palm Sunday.

    1807 – The Swansea and Mumbles Railway, then known as the Oystermouth Railway, becomes the first passenger-carrying railway in the world.

    1811 – Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.

    1894 – Coxey’s Army, the first significant American protest march, departs Massillon, Ohio for Washington, D.C.

    1911 – In New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers.

    1919 – The Tetiev pogrom occurs in Ukraine, becoming the prototype of mass murder during the Holocaust.

    1931 – The Scottsboro Boys are arrested in Alabama and charged with rape.

    1948 – The first successful tornado forecast predicts that a tornado will strike Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.

    1957 – United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” on obscenity grounds.

    1957 – The European Economic Community is established with West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg as the first members.

    1965 – Civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. successfully complete their 4-day 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.

    1979 – The first fully functional Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.

    1988 – The Candle demonstration in Bratislava is the first mass demonstration of the 1980s against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

    1996 – The European Union’s Veterinarian Committee bans the export of British beef and its by-products as a result of mad cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)). [I believe that it’s only in the last couple of years that Europeans have been able to give blood donations in the US, because of BSE.]

    Births:
    1745 – John Barry, American naval officer and father of the American navy (d. 1803).

    1867 – Gutzon Borglum, American sculptor, designed Mount Rushmore (d. 1941).

    1881 – Béla Bartók, Hungarian pianist and composer (d. 1945).

    1881 – Mary Webb, English author and poet (d. 1927).

    1891 – Marie Laura Violet Gayler, English metallurgist (d. 1976). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1906 – A. J. P. Taylor, English historian and academic (d. 1990).

    1908 – David Lean, English director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1991).

    1912 – Melita Norwood, English civil servant and spy (d. 2005). [She has been described as “both the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest serving of all Soviet spies in Britain”.]

    1920 – Paul Scott, English author, poet, and playwright (d. 1978).

    1920 – Patrick Troughton, English actor (d. 1987).

    1920 – Usha Mehta, Gandhian and freedom fighter of India (d. 2000).

    1921 – Nancy Kelly, American actress (d. 1995).

    1922 – Eileen Ford, American businesswoman, co-founded Ford Models (d. 2014).

    1923 – Bonnie Guitar, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2019). [She became one of the first female country music singers to have hit songs cross over from the country charts to the pop charts with her 1957 song “Dark Moon”.]

    1928 – Jim Lovell, American captain, pilot, and astronaut.

    1934 – Gloria Steinem, American feminist activist, co-founded the Women’s Media Center.

    1942 – Aretha Franklin, American singer-songwriter and pianist (d. 2018).

    1942 – Richard O’Brien, English actor and screenwriter.

    1947 – Elton John, English singer-songwriter, pianist, producer, and actor.

    1949 – Sue Klebold, American activist. [Her son Dylan was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. After the massacre, she wrote A Mother’s Reckoning, a book about the signs and possible motives she missed of Dylan’s mental state.]

    1965 – Sarah Jessica Parker, American actress, producer, and designer.

    1966 – Jeff Healey, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2008).

    1972 – Naftali Bennett, Israeli politician, 13th Prime Minister of Israel.

    When you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. (J D Salinger):
    1736 – Nicholas Hawksmoor, English architect, designed Easton Neston and Christ Church (b. 1661).

    1818 – Caspar Wessel, Norwegian-Danish mathematician and cartographer (b. 1745). [The first person to describe the geometrical interpretation of complex numbers as points in the complex plane and vectors.]

    1857 – William Colgate, English-American businessman and philanthropist, founded Colgate-Palmolive (b. 1783).

    1860 – James Braid, Scottish surgeon (b. 1795). [A significant innovator in the treatment of clubfoot, spinal curvature, knock-knees, bandy legs, and squint; a significant pioneer of hypnotism and hypnotherapy, and an important and influential pioneer in the adoption of both hypnotic anaesthesia and chemical anaesthesia.]

    1918 – Claude Debussy, French composer (b. 1862).

    1931 – Ida B. Wells, American journalist and activist (b. 1862).

    1932 – Harriet Backer, Norwegian painter (b.1845). [A pioneer among female artists both in the Nordic countries and in Europe generally, she is best known for her detailed interior scenes, communicated with rich colours and the interplay of light and shadow.]

    1965 – Viola Liuzzo, American civil rights activist (b. 1925). [Known for going to Alabama in March 1965 to support the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. There she was shot and killed by three Ku Klux Klan members while driving activists between the cities and transportation. The role of an undercover informant working for the FBI, who was also in the pursuit car, was not revealed until 1978. To deflect attention from the FBI, its head J. Edgar Hoover made defamatory claims about Liuzzo.]

    1975 – Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabian king (b. 1906). [Shot and killed by his nephew.]

    1976 – Benjamin Miessner, American radio engineer and inventor (b. 1890). [Most known for his electronic organ, electronic piano, and other musical instruments, he was the inventor of the Cat’s whisker detector.]

    1988 – Robert Joffrey, American dancer, choreographer, and director, co-founded the Joffrey Ballet (b. 1930).

    2002 – Kenneth Wolstenholme, English journalist and sportscaster (b. 1920). [He thinks it’s all over…],

    2008 – Abby Mann, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1927). [Best known for his work on controversial subjects and social drama. His screenplay for Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), which was initially a television drama that aired in 1959, won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.]

    2008 – Herb Peterson, American businessman, created the McMuffin (b. 1919).

    2014 – Lorna Arnold, English historian and author (b. 1915).

    2022 – Taylor Hawkins, American drummer and singer (b. 1972).

    1. Woman of the Day
       [Text from Wikipedia]

       Marie Laura Violet Gayler BSc, DSc, MISI/MIM, HonMBDA (born on this day in 1891, died 2 August 1976) was an English Metallurgist whose most notable contributions to her field were in the areas of Aluminium alloys and dental amalgams. She spent most of her career at the National Physical Laboratory, where she, along with Miss Isabel Hadfield, were the first women to be appointed as staff in the department of metallurgy.

       Gayler was born in Bristol on 25 March 1891, the youngest of five daughters. Her parents were William Gayler, Director of Stamps and Excise at Somerset House and Ellen Amelia Chrismas, an artist, recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal from the Slade School in 1880 and whose work was exhibited at the Royal Academy.

       Gayler was educated at St Mary’s School, Gerrards Cross and went on to study Chemistry and Mathematics at Bedford College, London (part of the University of London), graduating with a BSc in 1912.

       She went on to gain an MSc in 1922 and, in 1924, became the first woman to attain a DSc in Chemistry from the University of London.

       After completing her BSc, she took a post teaching Botany at Colston’s School, Bristol, before joining the Metallurgical Department of the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) (NPL) in 1915 where she was one of the first two women to be appointed to Walter Rosenhain’s scientific staff. Through her work at NPL, Gayler was elected member of the Institute of Metals in 1917 and member of the Iron and Steel Institute in 1918.

       In 1934 Gayler married her NPL colleague Dr. John Leslie Haughton, although she continued to use her maiden name for professional purposes. Although the marriage bar remained in force in the UK civil-service until 1946, Gayler’s boss applied for special dispensation and she became one of only 5 women within the civil service to be granted the privilege of being allowed to continue working once married. This was sufficiently significant to be reported in the newspapers at the time.

       Gayler’s work at NPL alongside Hanson and Haughton established an understanding of the mechanisms of age hardening in the duralumin family of aluminium alloys. This work lay the foundations for the development of Y-alloy, an aluminium alloy containing nickel as well as the copper, magnesium and silicon found in typical duralumin alloys. The addition of nickel improved upon the strength and hardness of age-hardened duralumin at temperatures of 150-200degC, making it ideal for use as a piston material in combustion engines. A Y-alloy was also used as the skin of Concorde to enable it to withstand the temperatures caused by the movement of air over the aircraft when travelling at supersonic speeds.

       In 1935, Gayler took-over NPL’s work on dental amalgams, developing new metallographic techniques to study the diffusion and reactions within these alloys that govern their setting and hardening behaviour. She was made an honorary member of the British Dental Association in 1947 in recognition of this work.

       In addition to her work on duraliumin and dental amalgams, Gayler also conducted noteworthy research on iron-manganese alloys and on the melting points of pure silicon and iron and on the behaviour of mild steel and duralloys for armour-piercing projectiles. In 1947, the Institute of Metals awarded its Platinum Medal jointly to her and her husband.

       Gayler retired from NPL in 1947 at the age of 56 and used her retirement to devote more time to her interest in sculpture. She sculpted the head of renowned Professor William Hume-Rothery which stands in the library of the Department of Materials at Oxford University.

       Marie Laura Violet Gayler died in Winchester in 1976.

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

    2. William Colgate: I guess it is his name we see on toothpaste as well. According to Wikipedia, Colgate toothpaste is manufactured by Colgate-Palmolive.

11. You can pet tigers in Pattaya Thailand at http://www.tigerpark.com/home-pattaya. And elephants at many sanctuaries in Thailand. And lot’s of other things to see and do in Thailand. You work hard, maybe you deserve a vacation!

12. For the postmodern left, scholarship itself is play. Or to use Butler’s term, scholarship is *performative*. That helps explain why their vaunted theories have no more connection to reality than works of fiction.

    But there’s another reason for this lack of connection with reality, which was revealed to me by one scholar (I forget who), who wrote (to the best of my memory): “Empirical evidence is low prestige in the academy today.” Since she was pomo herself, this wasn’t a criticism.

    But it sickened me. People, after all, are empirical. We’re flesh and blood. And yet, to these pseudo-intellectual circle-jerkers, WE are low prestige. That explains why they don’t care what harm their moronic theories have on human reality – their goal is academic PRESTIGE, not improvement of the human condition.

    I apologize for this lengthy rant, but I feel a visceral loathing for these people. Although the worst of them are confined to the ivory tower, their appalling ideas are actually being put into practice in professional fields of vital importance to human beings, such as the law. The extent to which this is the case is not fully appreciated.

    1. +1

    2. I agree. Thinking that your ideas about real things should be taken seriously by others even though you’ve made no attempts to validate them by empirical means, and even though they lack any support from empirical evidence even indirectly, that’s bad enough. But to explicitly reject empirical evidence in general as necessary to validate your ideas about real things is worthy of scorn.

    3. Butler is one of the vilest humans alive. A colossal fraud. Phony at Trumpian heights.
       D.A.
       NYC

       1. +1

    4. I feel a visceral loathing for these people.

       Me too. No apology necessary!

       1. Butler’s stupidity was also on display here (see the bolded part; bolding added; and remember: Butler is a lesbian Jew):

          The uprising of Oct 7 was an act of armed resistance. It is not a terrorist attack, and it is not an antisemitic attack … I did not like that attack … It was for me anguishing, it was terrible. However, I would be very foolish if I then decided that the only violence in the scene was the violence done to the Israeli people. The violence done to Palestinian people has been done for decades. This was an uprising that comes from a state of subjugation, and against a violent state apparatus.”
          https://youtu.be/Yuf3iQmxsNQ?si=rcN-wNCXDyMGN9wh&t=25

          There you have it: Hamas is not an antisemitic organization.

          For more on Butler, see:
          Martha C. Nussbaum: The professor of parody. The New Republic, 1999. reprinted in: Philosophical Interventions. Reviews 1986-2011. Oxford UP, 2012
          https://archive.org/details/ProfessorOfParodyByNussbaum/mode/2up?view=theater

          1. Some feminist she is.

13. Ingsoc had the advantage over the Assembly of God in brevity, at least.

14. Without looking at any of the other comments on this page, the other two are the obvious one: Marie Curie (chemistry and physics(?)) and I think Linus Pauling (ditto I think – I know he was a rival to Crick and Watson in the DNA structure race).

    1. Oh peace! Shut up!

       (John Cleese – Life of Brian).

15. They may have intended Lebanese or Lebanon Feta.

16. Coming in late & maybe piling on a bit, but regarding J Butler as “a famous intellectual whom I see as the world’s most overrated academic” — Just so & a succinct summary. A lot of deliberate obscurantism in that crowd. Seemed pompous to me, but I would have no standing in their eyes.

    See also Brook ONEILL, above & similar well thought commentary.

17. Sanger’s first Nobel was for determining the amino acid sequence of insulin, which was an enormously laborious task involving “Sanger’s reagent”, 1-Fluoro-2,4-dinitrobenzene, with which he derivatized the N-terminal amino acid of peptides derived from insulin, and then identifying them by total (acid) hydrolysis of the derivatized peptide. It took a huge number of overlapping peptides plus deduction from amino acid compositions to come up with the total sequences of the two relatively short A and B chains of insulin. Sanger’s reagent never became popular because of the laboriousness due to inability to repetitively (sequentially) derivatize the sample peptides, and also because anyone who worked with it apparently developed allergic dermatitis from derivatizing their skin proteins.

    In contrast, with Per Edman’s phenylisothiocyanate, derivatization of the N-terminus with subsequent release of a derivative of the N-terminal amino acid was possible, enabling the reaction to be successively performed on a peptide, revealing its sequence. The foundation of proteomics was built on Edman degradation, but Edman never won a Nobel, supposedly because one had already been awarded for the same thing. However, I have also been told by someone who was close to the scene that it didn’t help that Edman had been married to Sune Bergström’s sister until he ran off with his lab assistant. (Sune Bergström was Secretary of the relevant Nobel Committee)

18. I have long wondered why people who are not ideological continue to use the word “gender” when they can have little assurance that the people with whom they speak have a shared understanding of its meaning. Common language should facilitate conversation and understanding, not confuse.

    Once that word escaped the academic laboratories in the late seventies to early eighties, then it both spread and evolved quickly. While it is now likely endemic, I do my part to stop the spread by not breathing it on anyone outside the confines of controlled environments such as this.

    1. +1

19. I did my duty and had waffles with maple syrup this morning. Many years ago, we spent days collecting maple tree sap and then watching the big boilers turn 40 gallons of sap into one gallon of syrup. Sometimes we would keep the boiling going for a while yielding a nice goo that we could “pull” into taffy.

20. Kamala Harris: America’s Cartographer!

    Re: the petting of wild animals:
    (and risking being a killjoy)

    Visiting wild-animal petting-parks should be undertaken with caution.

    The “wild animal” petting business is notoriously unethical. In South Africa (where I am temporarily located), the lion petting “business” is tantamount to a pipeline that begins with petting cubs and ends with killing adults for trophies.

    What happens to the animals when they get older (and “not so pettable/cuddly) is a question that has to be pondered.

    If you can spare the time, watch: https://bloodlions.org/ “Blood Lions”.
    “Every single day in South Africa captive-bred and human habituated lions continue to be used in tourism activities, killed in canned hunts, exported live and hundreds more are slaughtered annually for their bones to be harvested for, among other uses, traditional medicines in Southeast Asia.”

    Similarly, elephant petting “sanctuaries”, where elephants are -also- “taught” to “paint” and “dance”, often come at a steep cost to the animals. No wild elephant presents itself to be *petted*; not naturally. Many animals are captured when very young. forcefully separated from families/herds, and subject to a process called the “Phajaan” (in Thailand). A similar process is adopted in Sri-Lanka and India, home to earth’s remaining Asian elephants.

    The Phajaan is essentially a “crush”.

    “The Phajaan, called “elephant crushing” or “training crush”, is a method by which wild baby elephants can be tamed for domestication, using restriction in a cage, sometimes with the use of corporal punishment or negative reinforcement. This practice is condemned by a variety of animal-welfare groups as a form of animal cruelty”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_crushing

    In Sri-Lanka (where I was born) the Kandy Esala Perahera, a flamboyant parade of “dressed up” elephants, drummers and fire dancers -paying homage to the “Sacred Tooth Relic” of Buddha- is underwritten by the lives of suffering elephants.

    (Cultural practices that are thousands of years old -as is the Kandy Esala Perahera- are not inherently commendable by virtue of their age; many have a shelf-life that has long expired.)

    The tiger-park in Thailand has an equally unsavory reputation; “Following years of accusations against Thailand’s notorious Tiger Temple, operations began in June 2016 to begin removing tigers from the property after officials came in and found 40 dead cubs in the facility’s freezer. Before this episode, travellers would stop by the temple to take pictures of themselves close-up to the creatures. It’s since been revealed that many of the tigers would be sedated so that visitors could have their picture taken with them. The temple has also been accused of irresponsible breeding practices and illegal animal trade.”
    http://www.responsiblethailand.co.uk/green-tourism/6-things-not-to-do-in-thailand
    *Also, tiger bone is harvested and used in tiger-bone-wine, believed to have curative powers a la TCM – Traditional Chinese Medicine.

    In general, elephant-rides and petting wild-animals (elephant, tigers and lions in particular) should be held suspect and -preferably- avoided.

    Conversely, all facilities that permit petting/cuddling and physical interaction with “tamed” wild animals are not necessarily unethical nor corrupt. Many – however – are; particularly if you are paying $$$ for the “experience”.

    1. Thank you for the reminder on these “experiences.”
       I had hoped that such practices had been curtailed, but it seems they still thrive.

       1. Welcome.

21. Nice to see the sun shining on Hili.

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