Welcome to Monday, April 8, 2024, and Eclipse Day. Sadly, I didn’t get a promised ride to a locus of totality, but it will still be 94% coverage in Chicago, which is pretty good. There’s a Google Doodle celebrating the eclipse today (and emphasizing your eclipse glasses), click on the screenshot below to see that Google has made an animated eclipse on its search page.
And a groaner from Margaret:
For a snack during the eclipse, consider that it’s also National Empanada Day, a day of pure cultural appropriation. Here’s one I photographed (and ate) in Valparaiso, Chile:
It’s also Dog Farting Awareness Day, but does this mean that dogs are supposed to be aware of other people or dogs farting, or of themselves farting? Or are WE supposed to be aware of dogs farting? It’s a mystery. Further, it’s Draw a Picture of a Bird Day (I’ve put one below), National Dog Fighting Awareness Day, Zoo Lovers Day, and International Romani Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 8 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Who knows what’s going on in Israel? Yesterday morning I gave a brief report that the IDF had withdrawn from southern Gaza, leaving only a single brigade, while apparently dividing Gaza into two moieties, north and south. More from the NYT:
The Israeli military said it withdrew a division of ground troops from southern Gaza on Sunday, raising questions about its plans as the war reached the six-month mark.
Israel has significantly reduced the number of troops it has on the ground in Gaza over the past several months. Only a fraction of the soldiers that it had deployed in the territory earlier in the war remain.
The army said that the 98th Division had left Khan Younis in southern Gaza in order “to recuperate and prepare for future operations.” Israeli news media reported that the withdrawal of the 98th meant there were no Israeli troops actively maneuvering in southern Gaza.
It was unclear what the latest drawdown of forces meant for the prospect of an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.
Despite warnings from the Biden administration that a ground invasion would be catastrophic for the more than one million Gazans sheltering there, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to invade the city, saying on Sunday said that Israel was determined to “complete the elimination of Hamas in all of the Gaza Strip, including Rafah.”
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, added in a briefing Sunday night that “we are far from stopping,” though he did not mention Rafah by name.
“Senior Hamas officials are still hiding,” he said. “We will reach them sooner or later.”
As for the reason, even the White House doesn’t know, though they might just be pretending:
A senior White House official said he was uncertain what the withdrawal of the 98th division meant for the future of the war.
“It’s hard to know exactly what that tells us right now,” John Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “As we understand it, and through their public announcements, it is really just about rest and refit for these troops that have been on the ground for four months, and not necessarily, that we can tell, indicative of some coming new operation for these troops.”
Update: Things are getting even more confusing, at least if you read this short piece from the Times of Israel:
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant says Israeli troops were withdrawn from the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza to prepare for the expected offensive in Rafah.
“The forces came out [of Gaza] and are preparing for their future missions, we saw examples of such missions in action at Shifa [Hospital], and also for their future mission in the Rafah area,” Gallant says following an assessment at the IDF Southern Command.
“We will reach a situation where Hamas does not control the Gaza Strip and where it does not function as a military framework that poses a risk to the citizens of the State of Israel,” he adds.
Okay, that’s deeply confusing. To prepare for an attack on Rafah, in southern Gaza, the IDF pulls most of its troops out ot southern Gaza? In what universe does that make sense. This is all deeply weird. And it’s compounded in this morning’s Times of Israel:
The IDF’s Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, also speaking Sunday, was adamant that the withdrawal of ground forces from southern Gaza did not signal the end of the war. “We are far from stopping,” he insisted. But “we are fighting this war differently… Senior Hamas officials are still in hiding. We will get to them sooner or later. We are making progress, continuing to kill more terrorists and commanders and destroy more terror infrastructures.
“We will not leave Hamas brigades active in any part of the Strip,” Halevi promised. “We have plans and we will act when we decide.”
*Let’s not forget about Ukraine, victim of the evil ambitions of Putin and hard pressed to fight his troops. The NYT reminds us in a full editorial-board op-ed called “Help Ukraine hold the line.”
After more than two years of brutal, unrelenting war, Ukraine is still ready and has the capacity to defend its democracy and territory against Russia. But it cannot do so without American military assistance, which the United States had assured the Ukrainians would be there as long as it was needed.
A majority of Americans understand this, and believe that curbing the revanchist dreams of Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, is America’s duty to Ukraine and to American security. A survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Ipsos found that 58 percent of Americans favor providing economic help to Ukraine and sending more arms and military equipment to the Ukrainian government. And 60 percent of respondents said that the U.S. security relationship with Ukraine does more to strengthen American national security than to weaken it.
While that support has declined somewhat since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, and it is weaker among Republicans, many Republican members of Congress also support continuing military aid. So it is distressing that the fate of Ukraine has fallen prey to internecine Republican politicking. House Speaker Mike Johnson has the power to do the right thing, but time is running critically short.
Without American artillery, as well as antitank and antiaircraft shells and missiles, Ukraine cannot hold off an army that has a far deeper supply of men and munitions. “Russia is now firing at least five times as many artillery rounds as Ukraine,” as Andrew Kramer of The Times reported. As summer approaches, Russia is expected to prepare a new offensive thrust. Mr. Johnson knows this. He also knows that, if he brings it to a vote, a $60.1 billion aid package for Ukraine would most likely sail through the House with bipartisan support. Many Republican members and most Democrats want to pass it. The Senate passed it in February.
Yet so far, Mr. Johnson has avoided a vote, fearing that a clutch of far-right House members, who parrot the views of Donald Trump and oppose any more aid for Ukraine, could topple him from the speaker’s post. To placate them, the speaker has said he will produce a proposal with “important innovations” when legislators return to work on Tuesday. These may include lifting the Biden administration’s hold on liquefied natural gas exports, including a proposed terminal in his home state, Louisiana; calling the aid a loan; or seizing billions of frozen Russian assets.
. . . .Mr. Trump and his followers may argue that the security of Ukraine, or even of Europe, is not America’s business. But the consequence of allowing a Russian victory in Ukraine is a world in which authoritarian strongmen feel free to crush dissent or seize territory with impunity. That is a threat to the security of America, and the world.
Congress is prepared to stand up to this aggression; it is Mr. Johnson’s duty to bring this effort to a vote.
I suppose I sound like a jingoist when I say that America stands for liberty, not jut in our country throughout the world. And that means helping a democratic Ukraine avoid a takeover by a psych0pathic autocrat. The fact that the GOP doesn’t really care about them isn’t really Making America Great Again.
*As we know, immigration seems to be the #1 issue on the minds of voters as the November election looms ever larger. And the Democrats seem to be taking the brunt of disapprobation, as most voters think the Republicans are doing better on border security. Thus Biden, pivoting furiously to outflank Trump on issues like immigration and Israel, is trying to show that the Democrats (many of whom seem to implicitly favor open borders) can do the job:
With immigration shaping the elections that will decide control of Congress, Democrats are trying to outflank Republicans and convince voters they can address problems at the U.S. border with Mexico, embracing an issue that has traditionally been used against them.
The shift in strategy, especially from Democrats running in battleground states, comes as the Biden administration has struggled to manage an unprecedented influx of migrants at the Southwest border. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has led his party in vilifying immigrants as “ poisoning the blood ” of the country and called for mass deportations of migrants. And as the GOP looks to flip control of the Senate, they are tying Democrats to President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration.
The tactic has already figured large in elections like Arizona’s Senate race, a seat Democrats almost certainly need to win to save their majority. Republican Kari Lake has repeatedly linked Rep. Ruben Gallego, the likely Democratic nominee, to Biden, telling the crowd at a March event that “there’s really not a difference between the two.”
Democrats are no longer shrugging off such attacks: They believe they can tout their own proposals for fixing the border, especially after Trump and Republican lawmakers rejected a bipartisan proposal on border security earlier this year.
. . .Some Senate Democrats have also recently leaned into legislation focused on immigration enforcement. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has launched ads criticizing GOP senators for opposing the bipartisan Senate deal.
It is all a part of a strategy to neutralize the GOP’s advantage on the issue by convincing swing voters that Democrats are serious about border policy.
“Democrats aren’t going to win on immigration this year, but they have to get closer to a draw on the issue to get to a place where people take them seriously,” said Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist Democrat think tank. “Be palatable enough on that issue that people are then willing to consider other priorities.”
Still, Democrats face a difficult task when it comes to the politics of border security. A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research has found that almost half of adults blame Biden and congressional Democrats for the current situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, while 41% blame Republicans in Congress.
Well, Biden hasn’t done almost nothing, although there was a bipartisan deal in the Senate that was scuppered by House Republians. The problem is that although we need serious immigration reform, Democrats not only don’t want to look like they’re keeping people of color out of the country, but also know that unless they come up with specific proposals for reform, the Republicans, who don’t have to (all they have to do is beef about the border) will win this one by default.
*Caitlin Clark, who plays women’s basketball for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, is without a doubt the best woman player of all time, and, in fact, has scored more points in her college career than any man. She’s a phenom, and has inspired many younger girls to take up basketball, as well as promoting a resurgence in all women’s sports (there are sports bars now that show only women’s teams). And tonight she and her team go up against an undefeated team, the South Carolina Gamecocks, for the national championship. South Carolina has won 37 games and lost none this season (Iowa is 34-4). It will be a game that nearly all sports fans will be watching (I’m not a sports fan. . ). The WSJ reports on the matchup:
Caitlin Clark achieved something in last season’s Final Four that appeared all but impossible. She took down South Carolina, the undefeated juggernaut of women’s college basketball.
If she wants to write the storybook ending to her storied college career on Sunday afternoon, Clark will have to do the impossible all over again.
For the second consecutive year, Iowa will square off against South Carolina in the NCAA tournament, after both teams won their semifinal matchups on Friday. Only this time, there is a national championship on the line.
“South Carolina has been the best all year and been on a different level than everybody else,” Clark said, minutes after she produced 21 points, nine rebounds and seven assists in a thrilling 71-69 victory over Connecticut. “But we know better than anybody, anybody can be beaten on any given day.”
Iowa proved as much a year ago. South Carolina had a perfect record of 36-0 before running into the Hawkeyes. Or, put more accurately, before running into Clark, who set a Final Four scoring record by dropping 41 points to propel Iowa to a stunning upset. It remains perhaps the signature performance of her career.
“I don’t think anyone thought we were going to win that game, but we did,” Iowa guard Gabbie Marshall said. “And you know what? We still have that same belief in each other that we had last year.”
It’s gonna be a tough game. Clark is great at the three-point shot, which she fires with ferocious accuracy. But she’s only (!) six feet tall, while the Gamecocks have a secret weapon, as well as depth of talent:
Nobody in the country has had an answer for Kamilla Cardoso, the 6-foot-7 forward from Brazil, who scored 22 points and snagged 11 rebounds against the Wolfpack. Cardoso and Ashlyn Watkins, a former volleyball player, form the nation’s most fearsome and effective defensive tandem around the rim.
And that’s just the beginning. Magic Johnson declared early this season that Gamecocks guard MiLaysia Fulwiley had made the “best move in all of basketball.” Fulwiley is a freshman—who comes off the bench.
Earlier in the tournament, Oregon State coach Scott Rueck flatly said of the Gamecocks’ depth: “They’ve got two starting lineups.”
UPDATE: And, indeed, the Gamecocks won, depriving Clark of a national victory as the cherry on top of her epochal career. The upshot:
For the first time since 2016, the NCAA has an undefeated national champion in the Gamecocks. South Carolina capped its perfect season (38-0) with an 87-75 win over Iowa, avenging last year’s Final Four loss that ended an undefeated season.
As has been the case all season, South Carolina’s depth was on full display Sunday. The Gamecocks had four players in double figures led by Tessa Johnson with 19 points. Star center Kamilla Cardoso had 15 points and 17 rebounds, Te-Hina Paopao had 14 points and Chloe Kitts had 11 points and 10 rebounds. South Carolina guards Raven Johnson and Bree Hall may not have been in double figures, but they played a major hand in attempting to slow down Iowa star Caitlin Clark, who had 30 points on 10-of-28 shooting. Thirteen of those points came in a two-minute span of the first quarter.
Here: have some Clark from the last season:
*A British guy has run the entire length of Africa—over 16,000 km and more than 19 million steps in nearly a year! The equivalent of 376 marathons! (h/t Matthew) As I write this on Sunday afternoon, he’s apparently just finished. From the Guardian. And he’s a geezer! (Not really, he’s only 27.)
After more than 9,940 miles (16,000km) over 352 days across 16 countries, Russ Cook, aka the “Hardest Geezer”, has completed the mammoth challenge of running the length of Africa.
The 27-year-old endurance athlete from Worthing, West Sussex, crossed the finish line in Tunisia on Sunday afternoon, and planned to celebrate with a party – as well as a strawberry daiquiri – having raised more than £600,000 for charity.
His achievement, believed to be the first person to run tip to tip from southern to northern Africa, was the more extraordinary given several setbacks including a robbery at gunpoint in Angola, being held by men with machetes in Republic of the Congo, health scares and visa complications.
On 22 April 2023 he set off from South Africa’s most southerly point, Cape Agulhas. By the time he crossed the line at Tunisia’s most northerly point, Ras Angela, he had run the distance of about 376 marathons.
Cook was accompanied on the final leg by supporters who had flown out after following his journey on social media, as he documented his odyssey on X, Instagram and YouTube, with posts amassing millions of views.
He finished to cheers of “Geezer, Geezer” and took a well-deserved dip in the sea, telling Sky News: “I’m a little bit tired.”
The route:
From his Twitter feed with three days to go!
Day 349 of running the entire length of Africa🫡 pic.twitter.com/VVPglOBiX9
— Russ Cook (@hardestgeezer) April 4, 2024
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has forgotten her kittenhood (but yes, after she was rescued she had a happy life as baby Hili.
Hili: Did I have a happy childhood?A: Ask a psychotherapist.
Hili: Czy ja miałam szczęśliwe dzieciństwo?Ja: Zapytaj psychoterapeuty.
*******************
From the Dodo Pet:
From Jesus of the Day:
From Not Another Science Cat Page:
And a reply from Jonathan Ross Buckham:
From Masih, who posted an interview former broadcaster Sima Sabet, who was, like another journalist in the UK who broadcast in Farsi about Iran, the target of an Iranian assassination plot.
In my interview with @SkyNews, I urged the UK government to take a strong stance against the audacity of Iran's regime. https://t.co/a5b2zdXigf
— Sima Sabet | سیما ثابت (@Sima_Sabet) April 6, 2024
J, K. Rowling espouses the gamete-based sex binary, and other stuff, too. Read the whole thing, but here’s part of it:
Some people feel strongly that they should have been, or wish to be seen as, the sex class into which they weren’t born. Gender dysphoria is a real and very painful condition and I feel nothing but sympathy for anyone who suffers from it. I want them to be free to dress and present themselves however they like and I want them to have exactly the same rights as every other citizen regarding housing, employment and personal safety. I do not, however, believe that surgeries and cross-sex hormones literally turn a person into the opposite sex, nor do I believe in the idea that each of us has a nebulous ‘gender identity’ that may or might not match our sexed bodies. I believe the ideology that preaches those tenets has caused, and continues to cause, very real harm to vulnerable people.
I am strongly against women’s and girls’ rights and protections being dismantled to accommodate trans-identified men, for the very simple reason that no study has ever demonstrated that trans-identified men don’t have exactly the same pattern of criminality as other men, and because, however they identify, men retain their advantages of speed and strength. In other words, I think the safety and rights of girls and women are more important than those men’s desire for validation.
You’ve asked me several questions on this thread and accused me of avoiding answering, so here goes.
I believe a woman is a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes. It’s irrelevant whether or not her gametes have ever been fertilised, whether or not… pic.twitter.com/X6mbdJ0YVm
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 6, 2024
She’s good in the comments, too and has a wicked sense of humor, viz.:
I've thought about it, but where would I fit it in? After a long day's cooking and shopping for shoes and lipstick, I'm really only fit for a good hormonal cry and bed.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 6, 2024
Speaking of sex, here’s Colin Wright responding to Peter Tatchell, who should know better. The clownfish changes from male to female under certain conditions, the forest dragon changes the other way around, while the hyena doesn’t change sex at all: it just has a long clitoris that looks like a penis. But hyena females still produce eggs, get pregnant, and give birth. The attempt to say that such animals are “trans” in any way that resembles humans (who cannot change from one biological sex to another, or change their gamete type), is a pathetic attempt to justify trans people by pointing to nature. We don’t have to do that to give them rights and respect!
This is absolute pseudoscience, Peter. None of these animals challenge the binary nature of sex. Stop spreading scientific misinformation.
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) April 7, 2024
I guess today is sex tweet day. I was disappointed to see Ed Yong on Bluesky retweeting with approbation an odious tweet from Michael Hobbes about a perfectly good op-ed by Carole Hooven and Alex Byrne in the NYT (about the problems with using the term “sex assigned at birth”). It’s not only rife with whataboutery, but calls the authors “fucking ghouls”. I’ve lost a lot of respect by Ed Yong (read his feed if you think he’s only tweeting this for information).
Caught in flagrante delicto!
Licentiousness pic.twitter.com/iQV5Rhe4fa
— Enez Özen (@Enezator) April 7, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, something I retweeted in honor of International Romani Day:
Like Jews, the Romani were considered to be of an inferior non-Aryan race. The Nazis killed between 250,000 and 500,000 of them–out of a total European population of a million. https://t.co/rxJKmfwwnj
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 8, 2024
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first is an animal you have to guess (answer below the fold). What group does it belong to?
ご帰宅されるヤベガワモチさん。 pic.twitter.com/QPi3XOloHP
— とっとりゅうね (@tottoryuune) June 15, 2023
And cat hell:
“At my signal, unleash hell” pic.twitter.com/GpLfYoN9KZ
— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) April 7, 2024
What was the animal two tweets above? Click “read more” to find out:
It is a species of Onchidium, a genus of air breathing mollusc (gastropod).
On this day:
1730 – Shearith Israel, the first synagogue in continental North America, is dedicated.
1820 – The Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Milos. [“Come on, boys, fish ‘er out – she looks ‘armless enough …”]
1886 – William Ewart Gladstone introduces the first Irish Home Rule Bill into the British House of Commons.
1904 – The French Third Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland sign the Entente cordiale.
1911 – Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity.
1918 – World War I: Actors Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin sell war bonds on the streets of New York City’s financial district.
1924 – Sharia courts are abolished in Turkey, as part of Atatürk’s Reforms.
1935 – The Works Progress Administration is formed when the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 becomes law.
1943 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an attempt to check inflation, freezes wages and prices, prohibits workers from changing jobs unless the war effort would be aided thereby, and bars rate increases by common carriers and public utilities.
1943 – Otto and Elise Hampel are executed in Berlin for their anti-Nazi activities.
1945 – World War II: After an air raid accidentally destroys a train carrying about 4,000 Nazi concentration camp internees in Prussian Hanover, the survivors are massacred by Nazis.
1959 – A team of computer manufacturers, users, and university people led by Grace Hopper meets to discuss the creation of a new programming language that would be called COBOL.
1968 – BOAC Flight 712 catches fire shortly after takeoff. As a result of her actions in the accident, Barbara Jane Harrison is awarded a posthumous George Cross, the only GC awarded to a woman in peacetime.
2002 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched on mission STS-110, carrying the S0 truss to the International Space Station. Astronaut Jerry L. Ross also becomes the first person to fly on seven spaceflights.
2005 – A solar eclipse occurs, visible over areas of the Pacific Ocean and Latin American countries such as Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Venezuela. [Good luck to everyone hoping to catch today’s!]
2010 – U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sign the New START Treaty.
2013 – The Islamic State of Iraq enters the Syrian Civil War and begins by declaring a merger with the Al-Nusra Front under the name Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham.
2014 – Windows XP reaches its standard End Of Life and is no longer supported.
2020 – Bernie Sanders ends his presidential campaign, leaving Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee.
Births:
1732 – David Rittenhouse, American astronomer and mathematician (d. 1796). [An American astronomer, inventor, clockmaker, mathematician, surveyor, scientific instrument craftsman, and public official, Rittenhouse was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the first director of the United States Mint.]
1842 – Elizabeth Bacon Custer, American author and educator (d. 1933). [Largely as a result of her decades of campaigning on his behalf, General Custer’s image as the gallant fallen hero amid the glory of Custer’s Last Stand was a canon of American history for almost a century after his death.]
1892 – Mary Pickford, Canadian-American actress, producer, screenwriter and co-founder of United Artists (d. 1979).
1886 – Margaret Ayer Barnes, American author and playwright (d. 1967). [She won the Pulitzer Prize for her first novel, Years of Grace, in 1931.]
1889 – Adrian Boult, English conductor (d. 1983).
1896 – Yip Harburg, American composer (d. 1981). [Wrote the lyrics to the standards “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (with Jay Gorney), “April in Paris”, and “It’s Only a Paper Moon”, as well as all of the songs for the film The Wizard of Oz, including “Over the Rainbow”. Championed racial and gender equality and union politics and was also an ardent critic of religion.]
1900 – Marie Byles, Australian solicitor (d. 1979). [An Australian conservationist, pacifist, the first practising female solicitor in New South Wales (NSW), mountaineer, explorer and avid bushwalker, feminist, journalist, and an original member of the Buddhist Society in New South Wales, she was also a travel and non-fiction writer.]
1905 – Helen Joseph, English-South African activist (d. 1992).
1911 – Melvin Calvin, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1997). [Using the carbon-14 isotope as a tracer, Calvin, Andrew Benson and James Bassham mapped the complete route that carbon travels through a plant during photosynthesis, starting from its absorption as atmospheric carbon dioxide to its conversion into carbohydrates and other organic compounds. The trio won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.]
1917 – Winifred Asprey, American mathematician and computer scientist (d. 2007).
1929 – Jacques Brel, Belgian singer-songwriter and actor (d. 1978).
1937 – Seymour Hersh, American journalist and author.
1938 – Kofi Annan, Ghanaian economist and diplomat, 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations (d. 2018).
1938 – Mary W. Gray, American mathematician, statistician, and lawyer.
1943 – James Herbert, English author and illustrator (d. 2013).
1944 – Hywel Bennett, Welsh actor (d. 2017).
1947 – Steve Howe, English guitarist, songwriter, and producer.
1949 – Brenda Russell, African-American-Canadian singer-songwriter and keyboard player.
1955 – Barbara Kingsolver, American novelist, essayist and poet.
1963 – Julian Lennon, English singer-songwriter.
1968 – Patricia Arquette, American actress and director.
[It’s also the birthdays of my father-in-law, Geoff, who visited last week, and WEIT readers Dom and Ken Kukec. (I hope Ken’s OK, I don’t think I’ve seen him post here in a while.) I’ve omitted their birth years to spare their blushes…]
I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon):
1492 – Lorenzo de’ Medici, Italian ruler (b. 1449). [His life coincided with the mature phase of the Italian Renaissance and the golden age of Florence. As a patron, he is best known for his sponsorship of artists such as Botticelli and Michelangelo.]
1861 – Elisha Otis, American businessman, founded the Otis Elevator Company (b. 1811).
1906 – Auguste Deter, German woman, first person diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (b. 1850).
1969 – Zinaida Aksentyeva, Ukrainian astronomer (b. 1900). [She was the first to organize a study of slope fluctuations at great depths in the mines of Kryvorizhye, Donbass, and Carpathians, and the first in the USSR to observe tidal changes in gravity using a gravimeter.]
1973 – Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter and sculptor (b. 1881).
1985 – John Frederick Coots, American pianist and composer (b. 1897). [Composed over 700 popular songs and over a dozen Broadway shows. In 1934, Coots wrote the melody with his then chief collaborator, lyricist Haven Gillespie, for the biggest hit of either man’s career, “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”.]
1997 – Laura Nyro, American singer-songwriter and pianist (b. 1947).
2000 – Claire Trevor, American actress (b. 1910). [She appeared in 65 feature films from 1933 to 1982, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Key Largo (1948), and received nominations for her roles in The High and the Mighty (1954) and Dead End (1937). Trevor received top billing, ahead of John Wayne, for Stagecoach (1939).]
2010 – Malcolm McLaren, English singer-songwriter (b. 1946). [Best-known for managing the Sex Pistols. By coincidence, his former business partner fashion designer Vivienne Westwood was born on this day in 1941.]
2013 – Margaret Thatcher, English politician, first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1925). [ “I saw a newspaper picture / From the political campaign…” ]
2022 – Mimi Reinhardt, Austrian Jewish secretary (b. 1915). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
Woman of the Day:
[Text from Wikipedia]
Mimi Reinhardt (born Carmen Koppel; known as Carmen Weitmann c. 1936–c. 1950; born 15 January 1915, died on this day in 2022) was an Austrian Jewish secretary. She worked for Oskar Schindler and typed his list of Jewish workers to recruit for his factory.
Carmen Koppel was born to Emil and Frieda Koppel in Wiener Neustadt, Austria-Hungary. She learned shorthand to take notes better during her language studies at the University of Vienna. In Vienna, Austria, she met her future husband, whom she followed from Austria to Kraków, Poland, in 1936. Their son, Sascha Weitmann, was born there in June 1939.
Now named Carmen Weitmann, she and her husband managed to evacuate their son and her grandmother to Hungary during the Nazi occupation of Poland. She and her husband were arrested; he was shot at the gate of the Kraków ghetto while trying to escape. At the time, she was 30 years old.
After the liquidation of the ghetto, she was transported with other Jews to the Plaszow camp. As she knew shorthand, she was employed in the camp administration, where she met Oskar Schindler. She knew he treated his Jewish workers well and became Schindler’s secretary. After Schindler had asked the SS camp commander Amon Göth for more workers, she began to type out the list of workers from the ghetto of the Polish city of Krakow so that they could then be transferred to the Brünnlitz subcamp, where Oskar Schindler continued his armaments business.
The train that was supposed to take the Jewish workers on the list from Plaszow to Brünnlitz in the fall of 1944 was diverted to Auschwitz. She and the other “Schindlerjuden” were there for about two weeks and they described this time as “straight out of Dante’s Inferno”. At the time, Schindler was trying to get “his” Jews from Auschwitz to Brünnlitz. Due to his help, 1,200 Jews survived there until the liberation in May 1945.
After the war, Weitmann found her son in Hungary and moved with him to the Tangier International Zone, Morocco. There she met and married her second husband, a hotel manager surnamed Reinhardt. In 1957, the family moved to the United States and lived in New York. She had a second child, a daughter, with her second husband, but her daughter died of an illness at the age of 49. In 2007, at age 92, Reinhardt moved to Herzliya, Israel, to live with her son, Sacha Weitman, who was then a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University. She died there in 2022, at age 107, in a retirement home.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimi_Reinhardt
I too have missed Ken’s insights lately. But I think I recall him writing several months ago that he was still around and reading WEIT, but was just taking some time off from commenting.
Thanks, Jim, I hope you’re right.
The Attagirls went with the amazing Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick for their Woman of the Day – the first woman to parachute from a plane and she invented the ripcord during a jump! TheAttagirls/status/1777221693028643086
Ah…Barbara Kingsolver- Happy Birthday! I consider the The Poisonwood Bible one of the best books to explore the “job” of a Baptist missionary, especially in a place so different from America- the African Congo. It has many themes, but the examination of the morally superior “savior of savages” was of great interest to me.
I grew up in a “born-again Christian” family, and we knew many missionaries from all over the world (none from Africa). One question I would ponder and never get a good answer; if someone never knew about Jesus when they died, like an infant or someone deep in the Amazon, would they go to hell? I once got an answer that they would go to purgatory; since they never had a chance to know Jesus, they wouldn’t be sent to eternal fire, but then they wouldn’t bask in the glory of God either. So that led me to think that missionaries were actively sending people to hell, because they were introducing people to Jesus who would have otherwise never known him and if these people rejected the savior (as I’m sure a high percentage did) they were going to suffer in hell instead of non-suffering in limbo/purgatory. Anyway, even before I became an atheist (senior in High School) I’ve always mistrusted missionaries and was skeptical of their zeal and motivation. The Poisonwood Bible reinforced that notion.
“Styles of sculpture, music, and dance used to vary greatly from village to village within New Guinea. Some villagers along the Sepik River and in the Asmat swamps produced carvings that are now world-famous because of their quality. But New Guinea villagers have been increasing(ly) coerced or seduced into abandoning their artistic traditions. When I visited an isolated triblet of 578 people at Bomai in 1965, the missionary controlling the only store had just manipulated the people into burning all their art. Centuries of unique cultural development (“heathen artifacts,” as the missionary put it) had thus been destroyed in one morning.”
[Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, 1992, Harper Collins, New York, page 231]
I agree with Christopher Hitchens.
I look at Ed Yong’s Bluesky feed and didn’t see any elaboration on, or discussion of, Hobbes’s post. Did I miss something? Apparently.
Are there any Brazilian readers here? Can you fill us in on the spat between Twitter and the Brazilian courts?
Don’t feel too bad about the eclipse. According to Ventusky.com, the area in the path of totality nearest Chicago will probably be covered in clouds at the time of totality.
Also, given the population density around that part of the country, I’d imagine the traffic will be horrendous? As I recall, when my son and his pals drove to rural Oregon from northern CA for the 2017 eclipse, there was such terrible traffic that they only managed to arrive in an area in the path of totality with 20 or so minutes to spare.
Biden can easily stop the war in Ukraine this month. All he needs to do is to help Ukraine to attack one Russian refinery per day. Why doesn’t he do it?
There are many reasons not to do that, and you may argue against them, but here is an analysis from 3/22/24 I found interesting.
https://www.ft.com/content/98f15b60-bc4d-4d3c-9e57-cbdde122ac0c
I clicked the link and it looks to be paywalled. Damn the bad luck. If you google “can America attack Russian refineries” you might see a link to the Financial Times article that isn’t paywalled.
Pete Maravich played 83 games in College, Caitlin Clark played 139 games. 50% more games and there was no 3 point shot when Pistol Pete played. Pete scored 3,667 total points. Clark in 50 more games scored 3951.
With equipment changes, new training techniques, and new technologies, it is difficult to compare athletes in a sport across generations. But, I happened by the tv set a couple of times over the past week when my wife had the tourney and Iowa on. Wow, these girls are good. It is not our girls’ basketball of the 1950’s and 60’s. Caitlin can shoot, both three pointers and lay-ups with astounding effectiveness; she can challenge the defense with passing and dribbling; and she executes the role of floor general, pretty much always anticipating an open team mate for a pass…much as I think I recall Pistol Pete doing when I was a kid. Both great! I say all that even though I hate the very existence of college-scholarship athletics in the U.S. to the same extent as I hate DEI offices…they both detract from any academic mission of the university. Again, I like Matthew’s description of university athletics in the UK as being recreational, not reputational.
Yes, Caitlin averaged 28,4 ppg and Pistol Pete 44.2 also without a shot clock as well as no 3 pt which many of his would have been. But his teams were not very successful and they relied on him more. Comparing athletes is very difficult and a matter of opinion in many cases. Declaring Clark to be “without a doubt the best woman player of all time” is, Like Tucker Carlson’s pronouncements, something not be be taken as undisputed fact.
Sports statistics etc are not just simple numbers to be compared. They (and sports media etc) will tell you that Oregon was the 1938 men’s collegiate basketball champion but not tell you that Long Island U and Loyola (IL, yes that one) were presumably both better teams but they played in the NIT tournament rather than the initial NCAA one.
The Roman Catholic Church just came down hard on trans and gender theory.
https://apnews.com/article/vatican-gender-surrogacy-abortion-pope-3f84d8eb97f045b0cfb0ec1efa4e614e
Vatican blasts gender-affirming surgery, surrogacy and gender theory as violations of human dignity
I disagree with the above–I’m sorry about you missing the eclipse. It’s a one of a kind wonder that words cannot describe. Would be curious what you’d write about it. 94% is nice, but nothing near totality. It’s just a completely different thing. I always find it funny when someone says “I saw 99%, and it was neat, but not that big a deal”. Going from 99% to 100% is like flipping a switch on on physics and things get weird and wrong.
Traffic will be bad, yes, but I’d sit in hours and hours if needed. Luckily it’s coming right over my house in Indiana today and the weather looks really good. There’s still time to hitchhike or call an Uber!
Nice! I wondered how Indiana would fare wrt cloud cover. A friend of mine lives in Lafayette and I’m hoping she can escape the building she works in (a pharmaceutical company) and experience it. Enjoy!
Thanks!! It was awesome (the last wispy cirrus cloud cleared out literally 10s before totality) and most of my coworkers through southern Indiana said it was near perfect.
Yes. A partial eclipse is like foreplay (or just a tease). A total eclipse is like climax. If you’ve never had a climax or never seen totality, you don’t know what they are.
Former astronaut Chris Hadfield posted a 20-second video showing how Jupiter & Venus became easily visible during totality. (Photos taken with better equipment will be showing more objects that became visible — including a comet!)
https://x.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/status/1777423461738045524
What makes a bill “bipartisan”? How does this sentence not strike people as ludicrous: The Senate Democrats resoundingly rejected a bipartisan bill today . . .
If a party overwhelmingly rejects a bill, how can we consider it “bipartisan”? Because one or two members of the rejecting party supported it? Because three senators developed the draft and each party was represented by at least one person? Yes, people will differ on what counts as adequate support to be bipartisan. A majority on each side? Clearly. A majority on one and a large plurality on another? Sure. Unanimity on one side and a token representative or two from the other party? Hardly. Please!
I think the answer is this: whenever each party (and the press on issues favoring Democrats) want to depict the other party as unreasonable, they trot out ad nauseum the line, “They rejected the bipartisan bill on . . .”
I’d like to know more about any reasons for rejecting the hypothesis that there exist brain structures which cause the experience of identifying as a gender.
Clearly there are 2 sexes of humans, and these are quickly recognized by other humans, at least up close! We know very little about the brain compared to what we still don’t know, but it seems likely that there are at least some structures that are built to recognize sex, and that there could also be a structure that tells me I’m male, for instance. There could also be a third structure that tells me I’m attracted to females, for instance.
So, given all the known defects in chromosomes, and in development, that can cause varieties of intersex conditions: I can hypothesize the possibility that someone of a given biological sex can have a defect which causes gender dysphoria; their brain tells them they are identified with female, for instance, while their body is definitely male.
(Note that I’ll happily agree that there might be all kinds of ethical questions that are important to answer, many of them brought up by Rowling in that thread, and elsewhere about children, sports, etc. The existence of this hypothesized brain structure, the possibility of it failing to match the sex of my body due to genetic or developmental error, and the possibility that the healthiest approach to that problem is transitioning: all these are hypotheses that are independent of the ethics, although they of course give rise to ethical questions, like everything else.)
There might be some good scientific experiments to nullify my hypotheses. I’m just objecting for now to the reasoning that rejects them without any experiments! Rowling says “nor do I believe in the idea that each of us has a nebulous ‘gender identity’ that may or might not match our sexed bodies.” That ought to be stated as a hypothesis, not a belief, and then either backed by evidence or experiments.
I would suggest that for more information you read Alex Byrne’s recent book, Trouble with Gender.”
Thanks! $24 on Google Play, and the rest of the day off (for the eclipse) means I got to read it! (I did skim some parts, but I found the relevant sections pretty fast.) It is relatively short, and well written.
Byrne does spend a lot of time addressing my question. He does so by first trying to take down the “myth of gender identity” by which he means the “myth” that we are born with a really hard to modify brain structure that tells us we are a boy or a girl. He points out the classic cases of boys raised as girls, or vice versa (after medical accidents at very young ages) but lists one case where the child refused to conform and another who accepted their identity. He points out that lots of kids with gender dysphoria accept their natal sex after puberty exposes them to being that sex. Finally he reviews the evidence of actual intersex conditions, concluding that they are very rare. His conclusion from all this is that our gender identity is largely learned, not innate, and largely mutable if attempts to do so are early (although not so easy later in life). I agree that he has dismantled the belief that brain gender is immutable and universal, but he has not shown that it never exists, or that it doesn’t exist on a spectrum, with some people feeling it more than others.
In the remainder of the book he discusses alternative (and troubling) causes that might be the real sources of gender dysphoria. I think his point is to warn readers against allowing young children to transition.
Well, the jury is out on the original question—do people exist who are born with a mismatch between brain gender and body sex? Byrne’s anecdotal counterexamples, like the natal boy who accepts life as a girl, only illustrate that there are certainly all kinds of individuals. They do not negate the possibility of having or developing a nearly immutable gender identity, based on physiological neuronal structure, that does not match my body sex. Byrne’s stats on intersex people argue that they are rare, and so also must be “naturally born trans people.” But not impossible.
The practical conclusion that kids should be prevented from making unalterable changes is still a good conclusion. Statistically, most of those kids will regret it if they take drastic steps that young, like surgery. But it is still possible that the next trans person I meet has just as much or greater claim to being born with (or formed soon after) the brain gender that matches their current presentation of their self as do I! They might still have the chromosomes and gametes of a specific binary sex, but that might not be the most important part of their personality.
There have been some interesting neuroimaging studies. Here’s a roundup:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987404/
Now, I am not a scientist, but here are my thoughts with regard to the above. (I’d appreciate any corrections or thoughts from PCC and any other biologists in the house.) —
First off, note that there is a clear difference between homosexual (to be very clear, same-SEX oriented people) transsexuals/people with severe gender dysphoria and heterosexual male transsexuals. (To my knowledge homosexual female transsexualism is a fairly new phenomenon and these girls and women have not been studied.)
This suggests that “trans people” are a heterogeneous group. A polyphyletic group, if you like.
It also supports the Blanchard/Bailey typology of transsexualism. Here are Drs B and B explaining their typology to a lay audience:
https://4thwavenow.com/2017/12/07/gender-dysphoria-is-not-one-thing/
Finally, it’s important to note:
Trans activists refuse to acknowledge that these differences exist. They are especially hostile to the notion of autogynephilia. They also insist that it’s possible to be “trans” without ever experiencing gender dysphoria.
Not everybody who experiences gender dysphoria identifies as “trans.” I have a friend in this category.
Can we distinguish between homosexual transsexuals and regular gay people? I don’t know if anybody has ever compared the neuroimaging studies of the two groups. I do know that many gay men and lesbians have said that, had current trans propaganda been around in their childhood, they might have transitioned (remember that early childhood GD usually resolves on its own around puberty–assuming the child has not had their puberty blocked–and a large proportion of these kids grow up to be gay.)
Just wanted to report that we had one heck of a solar eclipse up here in Burlington, VT a few minutes ago!
Nearly cloudless skies and 64F out until the moon started blotting out the sun. The light became more eerie with each passing minute, and the temperature seemed to drop 15F by totality. And it got dark! Nearly as dark as a full moonless night, with a ring of sunset orange all around us on the horizon for a full 3.5 minutes. You could look directly at the sun without protection for those minutes, a perfect disc of black blotting out all but the corona of the sun.
Cheers broke out over the crowd as the first crescent of the sun peeked out, bringing light and shadows back to the scene, the beginning of the end of the first total eclipse in northern Vermont since 1932. Magical.
Clearly, the picture of the Toto Eclipse was taken in Africa.
(Sorry, a little late…)
Duuuude! 🙂
Correction: Friday was not April 8th, Jerry. Monday is April 8th
Yes, I fixed this, thanks. Best to email me as soon as you see it; I don’t get to the comments until later.
Every day is Friday in WEIT land. IIRC, last Thursday was also Friday.
I fixed the last one, at least.
It is said the Iron Law of Woke Projection never misses.
I’ll leave it to the reader to guess the item from today’s selections that refers to.
Very late comment, but I really appreciate the JK Rowling link as well as other discussion.