Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I’ve written quite a bit about the brouhaha over species names of plants and animals considered offensive to biologists and laypeople.
Remember first that every species has two names: the Latin binomial that is standard for the scientific literature (e.g., Passer domesticus), and the “common” name, which varies among countries (e.g., “House sparrow” in English). Along with the present climate of trying to purify the world from words considered offensive and hurtful, scientists have been trying to purify species names, too, changing common names to conform to modern ideology.
They’ve had mixed success with animals. Common bird names, for example, are being purified, especially when birds are named after “bad people”, like John James Audubon. Anybody who had a connection with the slave trade is toast. In fact, some have suggested that we simply ditch all common names derived from people’s names, and use descriptors of the bird’s appearance and location. But even that has its drawbacks. Reader Lou Jost, for instance, pointed out that there is substantial benefits to conservation to name organisms after people, both in Latin binomials and common names:
. . . . naming species after people has always been a powerful tool that biologists have used to thank their patrons, recognize their field assistants and honour their colleagues or loved ones. This is the highest honour that an individual biologist can bestow on a person; we have very little else at our disposal. In recent years some biologists have also used the naming of species to raise funds for research and, especially, for conservation. Guedes et al. mentioned the auctioning of names by the Rainforest Trust. Fundación EcoMinga2 —an Ecuadorian non-governmental organization that is managed by some of us — was the beneficiary of two naming auctions for species new to science3,4. With these funds the foundation was able to pay for journal publication fees so that the resulting articles would be open access as well as pay for some of the logistics of the investigations. Most importantly, we were able to use the funds to help to directly conserve many hundreds of hectares of the habitats of these very same species. In many megadiverse countries of the tropics, funds for these purposes are otherwise scarce or non-existent.
And of course common names vary from language to language, so the purification process occurs only in Anglophone countries.
The debate over the Latin binomials for animals has already been settled by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), which decided that ANIMAL bibnomials will not be changed, for those Latin names are standard throughout the literature, and changing them now would seriously screw up the literature. The ICZN did suggest, however, that Latin names proposed for newly described species not be such as “would be likely to give offense on any grounds. But that is only their suggestion, not a rule. So you could still name a species like the blind cave beetle Anophthalmus hitleri(yes, it was named in der Führer’s honor), though I doubt anybody would do that now. As for common names, the ICZN has no authority over them, and no recommendations. I agree with their decision not to give new Latin names to already-described species, as this would seriously confuse the scientific literature. And of course what’s considered “offensive” changes as our morality and ideology changes. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, for instance, were slaveholders, and any Latin binomials with their names would be seen as “offensive”; as should “Washington, D.C.” site of the ill-named “Jefferson Memorial.”
But the ICZN decision goes for animals only. The botanists, on the other hand, have just decided that offensive Latin names for plants already given can be changed, and some will be changed. Click below to read the article in Nature:
Excerpts (bolding is mine):
For the first time, researchers have voted to eliminate scientific names of organisms because they are offensive. Botanists decided that more than 200 plants, fungi and algae species names should no longer contain a racial slur related to the word caffra, which is used against Black people and others mostly in southern Africa.
he changes voted on today at the International Botanical Congress in Madrid mean that plants such as the coast coral tree will, from 2026, be formally called Erythrina affra, instead of Erythrina caffra.
“We throughout had faith in the process and the majority global support of our colleagues, even though the outcome of the vote was always going to be close,” says Gideon Smith, a plant taxonomist at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) in Gqeberha, South Africa, who proposed the change along with fellow NMU taxonomist Estrela Figueiredo.
Their proposal takes species names based on the word caffra and its derivatives and replaces them with derivatives of ‘afr’ to instead recognize Africa. The measure passed in a tense secret ballot, with 351 votes in favour against 205 opposed.
Alina Freire-Fierro, a botanist at the Technical University of Cotopaxi in Latacunga, Ecuador, says it was good that the ‘caffra’ amendment was passed, because of the offence it causes. But its passage could open the door for other similar changes, she says. “This could potentially cause a lot of confusion and problems to users in many fields aside from botany.”
And that’s the rub! I can barely agree with the notion of changing “caffra” (a derivative of “kaffir”, a deeply insulting term for a black African—the African equivalent of the n-word), but only because changing “caffra” as the species name to “affra” will not cause much confusion. But in general I think the botanists, do what they will with the common names of plants (“Trumpet vine” may have to go), should go along with the ICZN, and leave Latin names of plants alone, both new and old. The damage to the scientific literature is potentially large. Yet the International Botanical Congress also seems to be vetting all newly suggested Latin names as well:
A second change to the rules for naming plants that aimed to address problematic names, such as those recognizing people who profited from the transatlantic slave trade, also passed — albeit in a watered-down form, says Kevin Thiele, a plant taxonomist at the Australia National University in Canberra, who made the proposal.
Scientists attending the Botanical Congress Nomenclature Section voted to create a special committee to deal with the ethics of names for newly described plants, fungi and algae. Species names — usually determined by the scientists who first describe them in the scientific literature — can now be rejected by the committee if deemed derogatory to a group of people. But this applies only to species names given after 2026, not to historical names that Thiele and others would like to see eliminated.
Still, this opens the door to Pecksniffian policing of plant names. I am not comfortable with someone vetting all suggested new binomials for offense, as “offense” is a slippery word, and a mere suggestion (like the ICZN’s) should suffice for guidance. As for changing older names, well, the botanists have created a slippery slope here. If they can change one name, they might change others, as was suggested by Thiele in an earlier article:
Kevin Thiele, a plant taxonomist at the Australia National University in Canberra, expects that, if his proposal to create a mechanism to remove offensive names is approved, a relatively small number of species names would change. It’s likely that the argument for stability in species names would be outweighed only in cases in which plants are named after “sufficiently egregious” individuals, he says.
One change Thiele would like to see is to a genus of flowering shrubs, most of which have yellow blooms and are found in Australia, called Hibbertia, with new species routinely discovered. They are named after George Hibbert, an eighteenth-century English merchant who profited from the slave trade and fought abolition. “There should be a way of dealing with cases like Hibbert,” he says.
You know how these things go. Once “caffra” is changed to “affra”, people like Thiele will create a movement to change older species names not derived from “kaffir”, because, after all, opposing changing the names of plants named after those in the slave trade (or who did other bad things) would be considered racist, and who wants to be called a racist? (Note that even the vote for “caffra”—>”affra” was pretty close.) It is the loudest people, even when they’re in the minority, who ultimately win in this kind of endeavor.
These acts are performative only, for offensive species names don’t seem to affect whether people go into botany or zoology because of offensive Latin binomials (I haven’t heard of a single case). The Botanical Congress should simply make a suggestion to avoid offensive Latin binomials and then keep its sticky fingers off names that botanists suggests for new plants. And, after making the “caffra” change, they should vow that this one change will be the only older species name to be changed, and will also be the last one.
A while back I was a big fan of Doctors without Borders (or “MSF”, for “Médecins Sans Frontières”). It was put in my will to get a big bequest, and when I auctioned of a copy of Why Evolution is True, autographed by many famous scientists and nonbelievers, and illustrated and illuminated by Kelly Houle, every penny of the $10,000+ we got on eBay went to MSF.
Then I heard that the organization was anti-Israel (this was well before October 7 of last year). Checking up on the Internet, I found some confirmation of that claim, including several reports that MSF refused to cooperate with Israeli medical teams working in the same location. This, from the article below, may be what I remember (Rossin is named as “secretary general of MSF in the 1970s”)
Rossin recalled his experience in 2010 on a mission to Uganda when an MSF Holland contingent refused to interact with a fellow Israeli medical NGO team dispatched to help. Rossin remembered it as an episode of “one-way empathy,” where prejudice had poisoned the MSF team’s ability to cooperate with Israel in their shared goal of helping civilians.
(See also here, though MSF denies all these allegations.)
I subsequently wrote MSF asking them if they ever used Israeli doctors in their relief efforts. I got no reply, even though in the letter I told them I was a donor. Their ignoring me after the dosh I’d given them was, well, uncharitable.
Now I can’t really criticize MSF’s humanitarian efforts: they’ve done a great deal of wonderful medical work during crises all over the world. No, here I’m pointing out an article in Canada’s National Post that documents a pervasive anti-Israel—a former MSF secretary calls it “antisemitic”—attitude on the part of the organization, an attitude reflected in its refusal to criticize Hamas for the terrorist’s group own blocking or hijacking medical aid and turning Gaza hospitals into terror centers. In the piece below, quite a few former directors and employees of MSF, not to mention donors, weigh in criticizing the organization on this account.
My own decision, based on what I’ve read over the years, is to stop donating to MSF, and I’ve taken them out of my will, replacing them with other humanitarian organizations (and that is a fair amount of dosh!). Read the article below for yourself (click on the headline) and decide if you want to support them. The article is free, and you can also find it archived here.
I’ll simply give a number of quotes from the article. According to its charter, MSF is supposed to be politically neutral and impartial, but former executives, donors, and employees say that when it comes to Israel, that’s not the case.
Former leaders and a major Canadian donor of Doctors Without Borders are distancing themselves from the venerable aid organization after its employees celebrated the October 7 atrocities, gave aid to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, ran a one-sided social media feed and internally circulated articles accusing Israel of creating Palestinian “death worlds.”
“To be frank, I was very, very, surprised because it’s not the MSF I knew,” Alain Destexhe, the secretary general of the organization, popularly known by its French acronym MSF, from 1991 to 1995, told National Post.
Destexhe said MSF’s messaging throughout the Israel-Hamas war is markedly different than past conflicts.
“We used to make statements, you know, in Bosnia and Rwanda, but not taking sides like this,” he said. “We always took into account the political context, but not to take sides from one group to another. In the Gaza War, I really got the feeling that MSF was totally biased.”
From a donor:
Destexhe wasn’t the only MSF loyalist to have an October 7 wake-up call. One major Canadian Jewish donor told the Post he urged his mother to support the group despite pushback from family members cautioning him against MSF’s reputation of being institutionally biased against Israel.
“I think most people know that they have a history of not being the friendliest towards Israel,” the philanthropist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Post.
He said he reassured his mother, following conversations with MSF Canada’s leadership, that the organization was duty-bound to be apolitical and strictly adhere to its mission of providing aid and observation. However, the inconsistencies between their initial promise and their treatment of Israel reached a boiling point in November 2023 when the patron confronted MSF Canada’s executives.
“I will be honest,” the donor told then-executive director Joe Belliveau in an email shared with the Post, “the more I review MSF public communications (Instagram, specifically), the evidence is overwhelming that the MSF stance has a pronounced bias. There is still not one single mention of the 200+ civilian hostages; not one mention of Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket fire into civilian centers, both of which are war crimes and violations of the Geneva conventions,” he wrote in late November.
. . . and a former MSF executive:
The donor’s November 2023 email rattled Byron Sonberg, who’d proudly served as MSF Canada’s treasurer for two years. He’d begun to sense the organization straying from its principle of impartiality, especially after he was copied on the donor’s email chain expressing growing frustration with the group. But the final straw came in mid-February 2024 when he, and hundreds of MSF global leaders, were forwarded an article: “Israeli necropolitics and the pursuit of health justice in Palestine.” [JAC: I found some of that article here; just read the “summary box”]
It was shared by Ruby Gill, president of MSF Canada’s board of directors, to provide “more insight” into the ongoing conflict. It argued that “framing Palestinian violence on October 7 as provocation and Israeli violence as response is ahistoric and indicates indifference to the everyday violence experienced by Palestinians.”
In other words, Israel “had it coming” on October 7. And the article was apparently sent out by MSF! More:
Hamas receives a single passing reference in the piece, while Israel is cited nearly eighty times to bolster the claim that the Jewish State’s military response is unjustifiable. It accuses Israel of creating “death worlds” for Palestinians. The ideas expressed in the article, and the silence of MSF’s leadership, disturbed Sonberg, a self-described political moderate.
This concentration on Israel and complete neglect of Hamas is distressing in light of the fact that Hamas repeatedly impedes medical efforts in Gaza, including highjacking medical supplies, turning hospitals into terror bases, and even shooting Gazan civilians.
From another former MSM executive:
Richard Rossin, who served as secretary general of MSF in the 1970s and later co-founded Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), said that he perceived a tone shift within the organization several decades ago.
“I think it was perceptible around the beginning of the ‘80s,” Rossin told the Post by phone from his home in southern Israel. Antisemitism within MSF “began under the cover of anti-Zionism.”
See the quote from Rossin in the opening paragraphs.
One of the most distressing parts of this narrative is that MSF blamed Israel for the attack on the al-Ahli Hospital on October 17 of last year, an “attack” that did not involved Israel at all, but came from a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad that landed in the hospital’s parking lot, with the casualties greatly exaggerated by Hamas. MSF never retracted its accusation, which has been abandoned by everyone familiar with the evidence, including the Associated Press (no fan of Israel), which summarizes the evidence. (there’s also a telling conversation between two Hamas operatives saying the rocket was “from us).
By comparison, after the al-Ahli Hospital blast on Oct. 17, 2023, MSF rushed to blame Israel.
“We are horrified by the recent Israeli bombing of Ahli Arab Hospital in #Gaza City, which was treating patients and hosting displaced Gazans. Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed. This is a massacre. It is absolutely unacceptable,” MSF International wrote on X on the day of the explosion.
Although the blast was the result of a misfired rocket from Gaza, likely launched by a Palestinian group, MSF never corrected the record. The post, as well as several Instagram posts published by major chapters — including Spain, Canada, Brazil, and France – remain active. No apology or correction has been issued.
To a scientist, refusal to retract an accusation like this is shameful. But that’s MSF. Here’s their tweet, still up on X, but with “context corrections”:
We are horrified by the recent Israeli bombing of Ahli Arab Hospital in #Gaza City, which was treating patients and hosting displaced Gazans. Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed. This is a massacre. It is absolutely unacceptable…
After Hamas invaded and killed over a thousand people, MSF did not release a single post addressing the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust and it has not called for the return of kidnapped Israelis. Five days after the terrorist attack, the group issued a statement drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. [JAC note: I think the link is meant to go to the MSF “X” feed, not to just one post.)
“We are horrified by the brutal mass killing of civilians perpetrated by Hamas, and by the massive attacks on #Gaza now being pursued by Israel,” MSF International wrote on Oct. 12. The remainder of the thread denounced Israel for “indiscriminate violence and the collective punishment of Gaza.” Two days later, the group called on Israel to “show humanity.”
The tone set by MSF International trickled down to its chapters across the globe.
By Oct. 17, MSF Canada wrote, “unconditional humanity needs to be restored in Gaza,” calling Israel’s response “unimaginable” and “inhumane.” The statement made no reference to Hamas or their invasion, which ignited hostilities.Before October 7, several nations facing humanitarian issues were highlighted in MSF Canada’s social feeds – including Malawi, Venezuela, Sudan, Haiti and Burkina Faso – but its coverage following the Hamas attack veered near-exclusively to covering Israel. At one point, in early November 2023, MSF Canada’s Instagram account was blanketed with six red-bolded calls for an immediate ceasefire, something not previously done as part of its advocacy for Sudan or Ukraine.
No calls on Hamas to “show humanity,” not just towards Israel but to civilian Gazans?
Despite the fact that the Gaza Ministry of Health, run by Hamas, is known to exaggerate death tolls, which have been revised strongly downward by even the UN, MSF continued to use them. Another comment from MSF’s former secretary-general:
MSF’s relationship with the Hamas-run Ministry of Health was another major reason why Destexhe lost faith. Their failure to admit “health facilities (are) being used by Hamas and by soldiers,” he told the Post, left him “really sad, and then I became angry.”
More:
MSF International’s Instagram page was comparatively muted in February 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, calling the situation “extremely worrying.” Within a month, the organization’s focus had quickly shifted to Libyan refugees, midwives in South Sudan, and social workers in the Palestinian Territories.
The messaging inequality was studied by Gerald Steinberg, founder and leader of NGO Monitor, a watchdog organization based in Jerusalem, who combed through MSF’s X feed. He found over a hundred tweets between the Hamas invasion and late November, “not one (solely) mentions Israeli victims.” There were five instances when Israelis were mentioned, but always alongside Palestinians.
Steinberg has grown accustomed to this discrepancy. “MSF is both a humanitarian and advocacy organization, and on Israel and the Palestinians, the partisan dimension is dominant and destructive,” Steinberg told the Post by email. He recalled the group showing similar favouritism during an earlier flare-up in 2009.
Finally, there are further claims in the article that a sizable percentage (a third) of MSF staffers celebrated the October 7 massacre, that some MSF employees have been linked to terror groups, and that MSF had donated to Gaza’s Ministry of Health but refused to respond when asked how MSF ensured that medical supplies weren’t getting hijacked by Hamas.
And a final comment by another former secretary general of MSF:
Rossin, a former secretary general who predated Destexhe, remains pessimistic that MSF can take a more balanced approach to Israel and Gaza moving forward.
“It cannot be fixed,” he said, exasperated. “How can you fix antisemitism, which is not an opinion but a mental disease?”
Although I long ago decided to give no more money to MSF, but divert it to organizations that have a “more balanced approach”, readers may wish to have a look at this article. I was angered by MSF’s failure to even respond to my email about Israel, despite Kelly Houle and I having given them a substantial lump of money. (I haven’t asked Kelly for her opinion on this article.)
If you’re looking for reputable organizations that do good humanitarian health work without constantly impugning Israel and making unretracted false claims, I’d suggest you do what I did: go to Peter Singer’s list of reputable charities called The Life You Can Save. It shows a number of charities (not all involved with health), all of which have been vetted by Singer’s uncompromising criteria of providing the most assistance for the least money. The second time Kelly and I did an eBay auction of an autographed and illustrated book, my Faith Versus Fact, we deep-sixed MSF and gave all the money to Helen Keller International, a charity that prevents blindness and death in children by giving them inexpensive vitamin A supplements. The charity provides a lot of bang for the buck.
And you can bet that in my rewritten will, the part that goes for children’s health and poverty (the other parts go for wildlife conservation and purchasing lands for reserves) isn’t directed to MSF, but to Singer’s charities.
It’s Sunday, and so we have a batch of bird photos from John Avise. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
More Avian Young-‘uns
Last Sunday I mentioned that mid-summer would be the doldrums for avian photography here in Southern California, except for the welcome appearance of chicks in resident species.It’s fun to watch them grow.This week’s photos show youngsters (and their parents) in several more avian species that live here year-round.All of these photos were taken near my home in mid-summer.The Egyptian Goose is an introduced species, native to Africa.
Welcome to the sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, July 21, 2024, and National Ice Cream Day. Here’s the best place to go for ice cream in Chicago: Margie’s Candies, founded in 1921, and looks like it hasn’t changed. The ice cream and hot fudge (and chocolates) are superb, and the portions, as you see, are ample. Plus the Beatles ate here on Aug. 22, 1965.
Evan, falsely accused of espionage, was convicted by a Yekaterinburg court after a brief closed-door trial that the U.S. government has condemned as a sham and sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony.
It was another blow for the gregarious, energetic, ever-smiling 32-year-old who has devoted much of his career to telling the story of Russia—and has spent more than a year in Russian prisons since he was detained by the security services in March 2023.
Evan moved to Moscow in 2017 and threw himself into life in the Russian capital, where he joined broomball and soccer leagues and cycled with friends on a used Soviet-era single-speed bike.
. . .Based in London after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Evan made regular trips back to Russia to report and write stories. In the newsroom, where I met him, he was a constant fount of chatter about Russia—about its politics, about the changes he witnessed during his visits and about the craft of reporting on the country from afar.
Now, instead of writing the news, he has become a global news story of his own—his name popping up on the U.S. presidential campaign trail and at a United Nations Security Council meeting.
Evan was arrested in a restaurant while on a reporting trip for The Wall Street Journal and shipped to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, where he was locked in a cell for 23 hours a day for almost 15 months. He was recently moved to Yekaterinburg for the trial.
By all accounts Gershkovich, who left the NYT to move to Russia, which he loved, was a great reporter and had many friends. Now he’s facing 16 years breaking rocks, though I have substantial hopes that the U.S., or perhaps Germany, will dig up a jailed Russian spy to trade for him, just like they did with Brittney Griner.
In a recent email to over 1,000 members of the Pennsylvania branch of the American Psychological Association, the PPA’s leadership denounced Britain’s Cass Review, which found that pediatric gender-transition treatment is based on “remarkably weak evidence,” as “failing to meet the professional standard” of the PPA’s adherence to “evidence-based practices.” Accordingly, the PPA forbade any further mention of the Cass Review on the listserv.
Published in April, the Cass Review was nearly four years in the making. The report was commissioned by England’s National Health Service (NHS) and at 388 pages, is the most thorough analysis of the controversial field of pediatric gender-transition treatment to date. It was based in part on seven systematic literature reviews—the gold standard of scientific evidence—by evidence-based medicine experts at the University of York.
The review has led to a major pivot in the United Kingdom, putting the nation’s policies about pediatric gender medicine in line with four Scandinavian nations. The NHS has forbidden its health care providers from prescribing minors puberty blockers to treat gender-related distress. And the outgoing Tories put in place an “emergency” three-month ban of private prescribing of such drugs, one that the new Labour health secretary Wes Streeting has indicated he wishes to make permanent.
The NHS is at least ostensibly following the Cass Review’s recommendation to plan a clinical trial of pediatric gender-transition treatment, which is meant to be the only way for gender-distressed minors to access blockers and hormones. Such a trial would need to pass muster with an ethics review board and is not expected to launch until the beginning of 2025 at the very earliest.
The Cass Review has been met with scorn by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a largely U.S.-based activist-medical association that published updated treatment guidelines for caring for transgender people in 2022 called the Standards of Care 8.
. . .The Pennsylvania Psychological Association, despite being adamant that it was being transparent with its members about the reason for forbidding discussion of the Cass Review, did not specify in its email why it believed that the review did not meet the group’s evidence-based standards. Instead, in explaining its new policy, the PPA said that members of the LGBTQIA+ community on the listserv and their allies felt “targeted, harmed, and hurt” by the sharing of the Cass Review.
As an alternative, the PPA recommended that members reference WPATH’s Standards of Care 8 and the APA’s policy statement on gender-affirming care. This came after the Cass Review found that the WPATH’s guidelines “lack developmental rigor” and that the document “overstates the strength of the evidence.”
WPATH is a gender-activist organization that by no means deserves the word “World” in its title. The U.S. is uniquely resistant to the Cass Review’s conclusions because WPATH and many American doctors favoring “affirmative treatment” have ignored the studies that, to date, show that the treatment doesn’t work, and that puberty blockers should be used only on a clinical trial basis until their long-term effects become clearer. (Patient payments may be involved in this.) What’s worse, in my view, is that if blockers and other hormones aren’t given to kids suffering from gender dysphoria, most of their cases resolve without surgery or drugs, with many kids simply winding up gay. This mandates against a laissez-faire policy of snipping and dosing, although of course someone who’s of greater age, an age of “consent”, is free to transition as they want.
Note that WPATH, thanks to the Biden Administration, no longer has any minimum age guidelines for surgery or drug dispensation for children or adolescents with gender dysphoria. (See tweets by J. K. Rowling and Elon Musk below).
*Israel should be attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, but are impeded from doing so for two reasons: the war in Gaza that saps IDF manpower, and because it would mire Israel in another war that, despite U.S. intimations that it would help Israel go after Hezbollah. But Israel can expect no help if it goes after Hezbollah big time, but will accrue plenty more hatred from the world. However, Israel did strike at the Houthis in Yemen today after a Houthi drone that killed one man in Tel Aviv and damaged a building.
Israeli fighter jets bombed sites in Yemen affiliated with the Iran-backed Houthi militia on Saturday in retaliation for a deadly drone attack in Tel Aviv a day earlier, the Israeli military said. It was the first time Israel has publicly attacked the group in months of escalating tensions.
The Israeli airstrikes targeted gas and oil depots and a power station in the area of Yemen’s Red Sea port of Hodeidah, two regional officials said. The port is controlled by the Houthis and contains oil export facilities, but also serves as a vital conduit for civilian goods and humanitarian aid to impoverished Yemen.
An Israeli military statement said that fighter jets struck targets near the port “in response to the hundreds of attacks” by the Houthis in recent months. The military said it was not tightening its emergency civil defense regulations after the attack, indicating Israeli officials might not expect a more serious escalation.
Nasruddin Amer, a Houthi spokesman, wrote on social media after the Israeli bombardment that the group would continue to attack Israel in support of Gaza.
“Yemen’s operations in support of Gaza will not stop,” Mr. Amer vowed. “The response to this aggression is inevitable.”
On Friday, the Houthis claimed responsibility for firing a long-range drone that hit the coastal city of Tel Aviv, killing one Israeli and wounding several others. The attack was part of a monthslong Houthi campaign against Israel, during which the Houthis have lobbed hundreds of missiles and drones and menaced ships passing through the Red Sea to try to blockade the Israeli port of Eilat.
. . .The deadly Houthi drone attack in Tel Aviv — which struck close to an American diplomatic compound — was a rare breach of Israel’s vaunted air defenses. Most of the missiles and drones fired by the Houthis at Israel have been shot down by U.S. and Israeli forces.
Until Saturday, Israel had avoided a full-on attack against the Houthis in Yemen, which is more than 1,000 miles away. But the drone attack in Tel Aviv appeared to tip the scales.
“The Houthis attacked us over 200 times. The first time that they harmed an Israeli citizen, we struck them — and we will do this in any place where it may be required,” Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, said on Saturday.
Now if only the UN (or even a few Western countries) would report Hezbollah to the International Court of Justice for arrant war crimes (Israel only responds to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks and never initiates firing), maybe they could stave off a wider war in the Middle East. Naaah—not with Iran masterminding it.
*Speaking of Iran, I’ve written many, many times how the U.S., and especially Democratic administrations, have tried to bargain with Iran to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons. That’s a fool’s errand, similar to trying to bargain with North Korea to the same end. Iran wants nukes, especially to go after Israel, and it will have its nukes. In fact, it’s almost there:
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday said that Iran’s breakout time – the amount of time needed to produce enough weapons grade material for a nuclear weapon – “is now probably one or two weeks” as Tehran has continued to develop its nuclear program.
The assessment marks the shortest breakout time that US officials have ever referenced and comes as Iran has taken steps in recent months to boost its production of fissile material.
“Where we are now is not in a good place,” the top US diplomat said at the Aspen Security Forum Friday.
“Iran, because the nuclear agreement was thrown out, instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that,” he said.
“They haven’t produced a weapon itself, but that’s something of course that we track very, very carefully,” Blinken added.
Blinken said the policy of the US is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and that the administration would prefer to stop that from happening through diplomacy.
Blinken is SUCH a sap! Diplomacy hasn’t worked yet, and how on Earth does he expect to diplomacize Iran out of its single-minded purpose? More:
The Biden administration engaged in more than a year of indirect negotiations with Iran aimed at reviving the Iran nuclear deal, from which the US withdrew in 2018 under the Trump administration.
This is one of the big mistakes that the Biden administration made: thinking that they could talk (or sanction) Iran out of its nukes. Well, it’s too late now, and I wonder if Israel will do something to stop it. Since Iran’s nuclear facilities are now deep underground, resistant to even “bunker-busting” bombs, that would be hard.
*Judge Aileen Cannon disposed of a lot of legal precedent when she dismissed the documents case against Trump, but, according to the WaPo, she may be on shaky ground. Shakier, in fact, than the ground that Trump is on, even if he is eventually found guilty.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s stunning dismissal this week of the most serious charges faced byDonald Trump put her on shaky legal ground, according to experts, who say she is on track to be reversed on appeal and could even beremoved from the case — an extraordinary, but not unheard of step.
Because of the political calendar, however, any legal repercussions could be short-lived.
Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified national security records and obstruction of government efforts to retrieve the material may not matter if the former president and current Republican nominee is elected in November. If he gets back to the White House, Trump couldpressure his Justice Department to close the case. He could also promote Cannon to the very appeals court that will soon examine her decision to tossthe case.
Yes, he’d have no compunction about doing that, and he’d succeed, too.
Cannon’s finding that special counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump conflicts with numerous past court decisions and the nation’s long history — during both Democratic and Republican administrations — of allowing independent prosecutors to handle high-profile instances of alleged wrongdoing.
. .Smith has filednotice of his plans to appealto the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which reviews decisions from the Florida district where Cannon, a relatively inexperienced judge appointed by Trump in 2020, sits.
The court has already rebuked her twice for her handling of other aspects of the classified documents case, sending what Yale Law School professor Akhil Amar described as a message that her decisions had been “way out of line.”
The question now, Amar said, is how quickly and dramatically the appeals court acts on the latest ruling, which dismissed the entire indictment for Trump and his two co-defendants.
“They may not want to stick their head in a buzz saw if they can just let the case take its slow, deliberative course,” he said.
*And from the AP’s ever-reliable “Oddities” section, we learn about a rare orange lobster, appropriately named “Crush”, who’s been saved from the pot:
The Downtown Aquarium in Denver has a new resident — a rare orange lobster that was rescued from a shipment of crustaceans delivered to a Red Lobster restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado.
A long-term employee who is a dishwasher and head biscuit maker spotted the bright orange lobster while unpacking a shipment last Friday and alerted restaurant managers, aquarium officials said. The staff named it Crush after the Denver Broncos’ legendary Orange Crush defense from 1976 to 1986.
“Myself and many of my team are born and raised Denver Broncos fans, so as soon as we saw that orange color, we knew that Crush would be an excellent representation,” said Kendra Kastendieck, the restaurant’s general manager. “And we all want our defensive line to be that good again.”
When the Pueblo Zoo couldn’t take Crush, Kastendieck called the Downtown Aquarium, which she said was interested right away.
. . .Crush will be examined by a veterinarian and after 30 days in quarantine will be placed in the “Lurks” exhibit that houses other cold water North Atlantic Ocean species, aquarium staff said.
“We are thrilled to be able to share this very rare and extraordinary animal with the community and visitors to Colorado,” Ryan Herman, general curator at Denver Downtown Aquarium, said in a statement.
Crush was shipped to the Pueblo restaurant from a supplier in Tennessee. It was caught off a coast of Canada, said Kastendieck, but she was unable to confirm which coast.
Genetic mutations can lead to lobsters that are orange, blue and yellow. Downtown Aquarium has had one orange lobster previously.
The Downtown Aquarium has more than 700 species of fish along with a stingray reef and three Sumatran tigers.
Yay! Lobster diversity preserved! And I always hate it when people throw live lobsters in boiling water. Imagine how the lobster perceives that. We don’t know if they feel pain in the way we do, but their neurons surely send off a huge and disturbing alarm signal.
Meet Crush:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is impressed by the biodiversity of her yard:
Hili: Wherever we look there are organisms.
A: Luckily we do not see all of them.
In Polish:
Hili: Gdzie nie spojrzeć tam jakieś organizmy.
Ja: Dobrze, że nie wszystkie widzimy.
And a blurry picture of Szaron:
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From Science Humor(a terrestrial animal like this–chevrotains spend a lot of time in the water–could have been the kind of ancestor that whales had.
From Kitty Memes. No wonder the cat is, like, “yuk!” Give that moggy a pint of Landlord!
From Masih, with the Google translation below (I helped):
The father was beaten for supporting his daughter without hijab. As long as there is an Islamic Republic, no one will be safe. This video was sent to me by a citizen from the Abroud salt tourist area near Chalus. In his description, he wrote that on the 28th of July, hijab abusers and police officers clashed with a family from Isfahan who had come to Namak Abroud for sightseeing and recreation because of hijab. They severely beat the father of the family in front of the family members. The sender of the video wrote that in the continuation of this conflict, the mother of this family and one of her children were run over by a police car, and he could not record the video of that scene. I ask all the citizens who witnessed this governmental brutality on July 28th in Namak Abroud to publish their observations or pictures if they have prepared them in any way they can. Solidarity is the way to escape from the evil of these violent people. #WomenLifeFreedom #WarAgainstWomen
پدر را به جرم حمایت از دختر بدون حجابش کتک زدند. تا جمهوری اسلامی هست، هیچ کسی در امنیت نخواهد بود.
این ویدئو را شهروندی از منطقه توریستی نمک آبرود در نزدیکی چالوس برای من فرستاده است. او در شرح آن نوشته است که در روز ۲۸ تیرماه آزارگران حجاب و ماموران پلیس با یک خانواده اصفهانی… pic.twitter.com/JlFzNJmlcv
From Luana, a tweet linking to a BBC article reporting that restriction the use of puberty blockers does not, as some gender activists claim, increase the suicide rate (the assumption is that people not allowed to transition will kill themselves). The BBC article is here.
Almost every child goes through some kind of identity crisis during puberty. It is deeply wrong to make them permanently infertile with “puberty blockers”.
If they still wish to transition as adults, provided they are fully informed of… https://t.co/4THoppUaqy
From Richard. I think this book is definitely worth a read. You can order it on Amazon here.
Listening to Coleman Hughes (@coldxman) reading his wonderful book, The End of Race Politics. Scarcely a sentence goes by without my wanting to burst into spontaneous applause. Martin Luther King would be applauding loudest of all. Please read it. With an open mind.
Here’s the latest Bill Maher comedy shtick from his “Real Time Show.” It’s a good one, too. This time he argues “there’s nothing, not even an assassination attempt, that can’t be made at least at little worse by adding religion. Since the bullet that was meant for Donald Trump missed him last Saturday, Republicans have been indulging in an orgy of magical thinking.”
And there’s a lot of this sacralization of Trump, which is sickening. According to Maher, people have said that Trump “wears the armor of God” (Steve Bannon) and is even one of “God’s angels” (Jake Paul). Oy! God’s angels apparently love KFC.
Maher notes that all this amounts to treating Trump like a “demigod,” and “that never turns out well”. Maher shows some scenes from his movie “Religulous,” just to show that he’s still antireligious. And he adds, re the assassination attempt, “It’s the twenty-first century. Enough is enough—interpreting every random event as a DM from Heaven.”
The rest of the piece is a hilarious tirade against religion and about people’s tendency to read religious significance into everything, including dog butts that resemble Jesus. Finally, Maher gets in a few more licks at Trump (and one about Biden).
From the Washington Post, we hear of a cat named Max who’s become a fixture at the Carleton campus of Vermont State University, So much a fixture, in fact, that he got a Ph.D.
Click to read:
Max the cat has hitched rides on top of students’ backpacks, participated in campus tours and more than once has sauntered into a psychology lecture at Vermont State University’s Castleton campus.
The 5-year-old tabby is even listed on the staff roster at the university, where he has his own email address.
So it seemed like an obvious next step when the university bestowed an honorary doctor of ‘litter-ature’ degree upon him, making him officially part of the graduating class of 2024, in addition to being a staff member. Max wears many hats, said Rob Franklin, a photographer and social media manager for Vermont State University.
Last spring, Franklin had just started working at the university when he noticed the cat was everywhere, and he was treated like a celebrity.
“I was talking to a colleague outside Woodruff Hall – the main building on campus – when I noticed this cat wandering around and everyone greeting him,” Franklin said.
“I said, ‘What’s the deal with the cat?’ and I was told he came to the campus every day to socialize, then students would take him home when it got dark,” he said.
Max lives down the street from the main entrance to campus with Ashley Dow and her family, but he rarely hangs out at home, Dow said.
Ever since she started letting Max outside when he was 1, he’d head straight to the college campus and soak up the attention from students.
“He usually goes over in the morning about 8 when I go to work, and he’ll come home in time for dinner, or one of the students will come over and drop him off,” said Dow, a special-education teacher.
. . .Max had been roaming around campus and its 4,000 undergraduate students for four years – the same amount of time it takes to earn a bachelor’s degree, he said.
“We don’t hand out doctoral degrees here, but I thought it would be fun to give Max one,” Franklin said, noting that Vermont Public Radio covered the story.
He had a diploma made with corny cat puns, then posted it on Instagram in advance of the university’s commencement ceremonies on May 18. The photo in the post showed Max wearing a cat-sized graduation cap.
“With a resounding purr of approval from the faculty, the Board of Trustees of the Vermont State Cat-leges has bestowed upon Max Dow the prestigious title of Doctor of Litter-ature, complete with all the catnip perks, scratching post privileges, and litter box responsibilities that come with it,” the diploma reads.
He’ll have to be called “Dr. Max” now! Here’s a screenshot of his degree taken from the video below, which shows Max and his staff:
A one-minute video from Channel 10. What a great cat!
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The NYT has a piece on a new book about Louis Wain (1860-1939), the famous cat artist who supposedly went mad, and whose drawings of cats got more and more bizarre as his sanity waned. Here’s a group of his pictures, not in chronological order, but the most bizarre ones are from later in his life. (He spent the last 15 years of it in a mental hospital.)
Arriving to explore this mystery — and to complicate it further — is “Catland,” by the writer and critic Kathryn Hughes. The title is both literal and metaphorical, a nod to the intertwined worlds the book explores: the imaginary place invented by the Victorian cat illustrator Louis Wain, and the lived landscape we continue to inhabit some 150 years later.
“Catland” is, at its core, an examination of a quickly modernizing, post-Industrial Revolution Britain, where everything was transforming, including cats — who went “from anonymous background furniture into individual actors.” In short order, cats lost their “weaselly faces and ratty tails” as their faces and eyes became rounder. (While Hughes refers to the quick genetic turnaround possible given cats’ reproductive behaviors, it is not entirely clear whether cats really looked like this or were simply represented as such by artists.)
. . . The commercial artist and illustrator Louis Wain’s art evolved alongside this emerging feline paradise, and his cats also grew both rounder in face and elevated in status — until, eventually, their society was as weird and complex as their owners’. At the height of his popularity, Wain’s cats were everywhere, doing everything — selling soap and boots in advertisements, being patriotic on postcards, riding bikes or bickering with spouses in newspapers and magazines.
Unfortunately, Wain’s business acumen was virtually nonexistent. His fortunes, like those of the cats and cat fanciers of his era, had significant highs and lows. (His worsening mental illness did not help financial matters, but it also did not seem to hamper his productivity or creativity.)
How much did Wain actually influence the new cat aesthetic? Despite the author’s claims to the contrary, his work seems less a propellant than a reflection of the zeitgeist — as seen through his own increasingly eccentric perspective.
Indeed, “Catland” is populated by other characters who, in the author’s own telling, were at least as deeply involved in shaping the emerging cat world. There’s Harrison Weir, who organized the first Crystal Palace cat show in 1871, and “kick-started the modern cat-fancy,” and the clergyman’s daughter Frances Simpson, who had enormous influence on cat culture. Alongside her involvement in breeding, showing and judging, she became an authority whose feline-adjacent endorsements, pronouncements and opinions appeared in countless publications and in a column called “Practical Pussyology” (a lost Prince B-side if ever there were one).
. . . The sensitive should brace themselves: Stories of cruelty, violence and animal hoarding abound — difficult, but necessary, context. (Hughes does not bring us to the present moment, but the perceptive reader, particularly one well-versed in cat rescue, TNR and animal welfare, will find plenty of parallels to our current moment.)
Similarly, those looking for a straightforward biography may at first be disappointed, but cat lovers, and even the cat-indifferent, are encouraged to put their trust in Hughes. “Catland” is a delight. This is history as told by someone whose knowledge of and infectious enthusiasm for her subject is matched by obvious delight and warm, expressive writing.
In Louis Wain’s last illustrations of cats, his favorite subjects were freed from their constrained Edwardian interiors, romping through imagined landscapes and, in some kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic instances, freed from their own forms. Perhaps Wain truly was both of and ahead of his time. In either case, it’s easy to see how much has changed — and strangely, how little.
It’s $25.59 in hardcover (Amazon link above), and would make a great Christmas present for the cat lover with a penchant for the bizarre. Here’s the cover:
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From SK Pop, a Website, we learn of the passing of a beloved cat whose existence I didn’t know about. I can’t copy most of the text, so I’ve put a few screenshots and tweets below. Click the headline to read:
Screenshots of text:
“I am devastated to share that Cala has passed away. I adopted Cala thinking she was young and full of life ahead of her, however, Cala had gotten sick and was not recovering.”
. . . and a few Instagram comments by Cala lovers (her Instagram page is here):
“I wonder if she was meowing so much because she felt her time coming or felt the pain,” @pomkckase stated.
“Her meow did seem like it came from a place of experience. She was a wise old cat,” @woldprospect stated.
“She will stay my favorite singer forever,” @edanmore_ said.
The cat’s official Instagram page, under the username cala_and_elizabeth, had amassed over 500K followers. Other comments online read:
“She will always be remembered, her beautiful voice will live on. Sending you all so much love right now,” @louietheraccoon stated.
“This is the kind of news that really breaks my heart I send my love to her family,” @uriel.calderone said on Instagram.
Multiple Instagram users also attached gifs of people crying. Others also shared loving tributes, which read:
“Thank you so much for the legacy you’ve imprinted on my heart,” @dougggdimmadome said.
“You finally crossed that bridge kitty,” @mikejamesb3 stated online.
RIP Cala:
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Lagniappe from a news site (click to read and see a one-minute video:
Can artificial intelligence tell when your cat is in pain? The Japanese app CatsMe! claims it can. Tokyo resident Mayumi Kitakata, concerned for her 14-year-old cat Chi, turned to CatsMe! in March to help decide when to visit the vet. Buzz60’s Maria Mercedes Galuppo has the story.
The video will tell you that the app uses facial expressions correlated with pain to give an idea whether the cat is in pain. It’s not using pain itself, but something correlated with pain, so I’m a bit dubious. If it worked, vets all over the world would be using it.
It must have been a few years since I posted a video by Tara Tanaka; I think she forgot about me! But I saw one of her video posts on FB and reconnected, asking permission to show her wildlife videos from her Florida property (there are several videos, so we have more to come). This is one of them starring wood storks (Mycteria americana), and here’s her caption:
Last summer at this time the water level in our backyard cypress swamp was about 7′ lower than it is now, and dropping quickly. We had hundreds of Wood Stork nests, and many Great Egret and Anhinga nests as well as those of other wading bird species. We had up to 14 young Roseate Spoonbills visiting on different days in the late spring and early summer. It is rare for the adult storks to feed in our pond – my theory is that they are saving the fish and frogs for their soon to fledge youngsters, since once they begin flying they keep returning to the nest for some time – and having food right in their own backyard makes learning to fish and hunt a lot easier. Last year, however, the water was dropping so fast and there was so much concentrated prey, it’s possible that the adults knew that if they didn’t take advantage of it, the swamp would go dry and the fish would just be wasted. So they did what any intelligent stork would do – they gorged!! This period of time provided the most amazing scenes I’ve ever witnessed in 31 years of living here. It’s taken me a year to finally share it, but I hope you enjoy it!
Be sure to enlarge the video! Most of it save the end is speeded up deliberately, and there’s a great classical-music accompaniment which I, as an ignoramus, don’t recognize. Thanks to Tara for granting permission to repost her videos (her Vimeo channel is here.)
