It’s Friday! It’s Friday! Gotta get down on Friday! Yep, it’s Friday. May 16, 2025, and National Barbecue Day. Below is a stupendous barbecued beef rib with all the trimmings from one of my favorite places: Black’s in Lockhart, Texas. It was part of my first trip after the pandemic: a 2021 BBQ Tour of Texas. You can see Potato salad, beans, raw onions, jalapeño corn muffin, and sweet tea on the side (not visible). Or get the brisket, but GO!
It’s also Biographer’s Day (which biographer?), National Pizza Party Day, Endangered Species Day, Love a Tree Day, National Chartreuse Day (the green version is one of my favorite liqueurs, and National Coquilles St. Jacques Day.
There’s a Google Doodle today, which takes you (click on screenshot) to another lunar game. I think Google is getting all astrology-y:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 16 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*It looks like what I thought would be a no-brainer Supreme Court case: the birthright of citizenship, which Trump opposes, has run into some trouble. The Justices seem divided!
The Trump administration asked the justices to scale back nationwide injunctions to apply only to the pregnant women, immigrant advocacy groups or states that challenged the ban — which opponents say conflicts with the Constitution, past court rulings and the nation’s history. More than 300 lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s actions, and courts in many cases have at least temporarily blocked many of his initiatives.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices that relief should be granted to people who sued, not other people, which he said “results in all these problems.” Justice Clarence Thomas, who asked the first question, said the country “survived until the 1960s” without nationwide injunctions.Justice Elena Kagan, a former solicitor general, questioned the practical effects of limiting nationwide injunctions, asking how else courts could address unconstitutional issues.
In the end the Court has to decide this one; injunctions by federal courts that apply nationwide won’t hold until the Big Court weighs in. Either you’re a US citizen or not, and you can’t be a citizen in, say, Oregon but not Alabama. And the idea that relief applies only to those who sue is palpably stupid. It’s time for Roberts & Co. to bite the bullet. Are they afraid of striking down Trump’s orders?
*On her Broadview site, Lisa Selin Davis, who identifies as a liberal, tells us “There is a way to save PBS [Public Broadcasting System] and NPR [National Public Radio.” And that’s to get rid of government funding and get all the money from the real public: individuals (h/t Enrico).
While I agree that Trump is depraved, I disagree that federally defunding NPR and PBS exemplifies it. Rather, I see this move as anything from reasonable to necessary. Mostly, I see it an opportunity.
Trust in the media remains at an all-time low. Many liberals understand the problem with highly biased news outlets, and regularly decry the slant of Fox or Breitbart, which baldly sell the intermeshing of editorial and news. But few of us would admit that NPR and PBS are also slanted—just in a complementary direction to our own views. (Well, not my views, but those of the people around me, aghast that someone would steal the Pride flag from in front of a brownstone, while preventing a woman from posting on the neighborhood listserv when her Israeli flag was stolen. My view is that if you’re gonna be upset about flag theft, you gotta be upset about both of those instances equally.)
Groups that comb the media for bias tend to rate NPR and PBS as left-ish, not full blown propaganda. But former NPR employee Uri Berliner wrote in The Free Press that the organization had “lost America’s trust” by representing “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”
NPR’s coverage of social and health issues has dutifully reflected the left-leaning worldviews such billionaires and their advocacy groups support. They took Dr. Rachel Levine at face value when saying that “Transgender Health Care Is An Equity Issue, Not A Political One.” A sampling of headlines: “Shifting Federal Policies Threaten Health Coverage For Trans Americans;” “New research finds trans teens have high satisfaction with gender care.” “How school systems, educators and parents can support transgender children.”
What reporters at NPR should have been doing was questioning whether the psychological and medical interventions of “gender-affirming care” added up to healthcare. They should have asked, and educated others about, what “trans” means, and where the idea of gender identity came from. They should have scrutinized the research they reported as showing interventions were successful, and not just reported the research with conclusions that affirmed their own worldviews. They should have examined the differences between adult transsexuals and young people seeking transition, and taken the idea of rapid-onset gender dysphoria seriously, rather than ignoring it. They should have explained that, no, this is not an equity issue—it’s an issue of science and of medical ethics, and it’s a cultural issue, related to how we understand, or don’t, gender… whatever the hell that word means.
Some of the bias:
· NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, calling it a waste of time and a distraction, despite that it was highly relevant to the presidential election.
· NPR repeatedly insisted COVID-19 did not originate in a lab and refused to explore the theory.
· The FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy have all since deemed the lab-leak theory the likely cause.
· NPR ran a Valentine’s Day feature around “queer animals,” in which it suggested the make-believe clownfish in “Finding Nemo” would’ve been better off as a female, that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites,” and that “some deer are nonbinary.”
· Research shows that “congressional Republicans faced 85% negative coverage, compared to 54% positive coverage of congressional Democrats,” on PBS’s flagship news program.
· Over a six-month period, PBS News Hour used versions of the term “far-right” 162 times, but “far-left” only 6 times.
. . . . I’d say it’s a little more complicated when it comes to PBS, which relies more heavily on federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting than NPR does. I don’t think Masterpiece Theater and Antiques Roadshow are suffering from ultra-biased leftism, even if PBS NewsHour is. And I think Sesame Street was one of the greatest things that ever happened in television history (and I highly recommend this documentary about it). But I still don’t see a reason for all of America to subsidize such programming. Trump’s declaration is correct about this: “No media outlet has a Constitutional right to taxpayer subsidized operations, and it’s highly inappropriate for taxpayers to be forced to subsidize biased, partisan content.”
Like most Americans, I’d rather defund CPB than I would the police—and that’s not because I’ve turned right-wing. It’s because I ended up learning a lot more about race, gender, Covid, George Floyd, and many other things than my incredibly slanted liberal media gave me. Some of that knowledge came from consuming an omnivorous media diet, including certain outlets I was told would forever stain my soul if I consulted them. Mostly, I learned more because I found individuals whose reporting and analysis I could trust—the Substack model of journalism. But that’s not what I want, nor do I think most people have the time to figure out whom to trust. They want to trust a news outlet, not an newsperson.
After saying that the priorities of these venues should change, she avers that that’s nearly impossible, and so suggests this:
So here’s another version, although one that takes a similar route. If PBS and NPR want to stay open, they’re going to need to rely more on a different kind of public funding—by individual members of the public, not the money we give the government through taxes. That means they shouldn’t just appeal to a small band of educated elites who want to bask in the glow of their own certainty. They should undergo a massive ideological overhaul to more accurately reflect the views and tastes of America.
I agree. I used to listen to NPR a lot, as it’s one of the few stations I can get on my car radio, but lately I learn almost nothing by listening, and am angered that the station’s coverage is so slanted. It takes about 15 minutes of listening before you see where it’s coming from. Now, only 10% of NPR’s total budget comes from the taxpayers, and 15% for PBS, but why not get rid of taxpayer funding altogether? If you want slanted media, that’s fine. But I’d really like a PUBLIC station that discusses all sides of the issues instead of the MSNBC of the airwaves.
*Several major league baseball players, including Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, formerly placed on a list ineligible to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame, have been reinstated again. Rose was banned for repeatedly betting on baseball, though not against his team (the Cincinnati Reds) when he was a player, and lying about it. He may have bet on the Reds, however, when he became manager. Jackson was expelled for supposedly accepting bribes to throw the 1919 World Series when he played for the Chicago White Sox (this is the “Black Sox Scandal”). Rose admitted guilt, but never admitting betting on (or against) his team; he holds several all-time records. From Wikipedia:
Rose was a switch hitter and is MLB’s all-time leader in hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), singles (3,215), and outs (10,328).[1] He won three World Series championships, three batting titles, one Most Valuable Player Award, two Gold Glove Awards, and the Rookie of the Year Award. He made 17 All-Star appearances in an unequaled five positions (second baseman, left fielder, right fielder, third baseman, and first baseman). He won two Gold Glove Awards when he was an outfielder, in 1969 and 1970. He also has the third longest hit streak in MLB history at 44, and remains the last player to hit safely in 40 or more consecutive games.
The NYT asked 12 living Hall of Famers if they thought Pete Rose should get in, even though he’s dead (article archived here). By my count, four said “yes,” one said “no,” and the other seven either had no opinion or said it should be left up to those who vote. In my view, Rose shouldn’t get in for betting on baseball, for betting on (or against) his team, for besmirching the reputation of baseball (though players like Ty Cobb have done that, too), and because one reason he’s now eligible is because Trump raised a ruckus with the Commissioner of Baseball. Pressure from anybody shouldn’t count, only performance; but Rose’s betting and lying was part of his performance.
*Martha Nussbaum, a highly regarded professor of law and philosophy at my University, has given Judith Butler what the kids call “a sick burn” in a New Republic piece called, “The professor of parody: the hip defeatism of Judith Butler” (h/t Bryan). As I recall, she’s gone after Butler in print before. A few excerpts:
Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.
These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.
One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of old-style feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler’s work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat.
. . .It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler’s work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.
ADA further problem lies in Butler’s casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of “interpellation,” you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.
This is a very long article, and dissects many of Butlers’ views, concentrating on her idea that sex is not a biological reality but a social construct mirroring the power of those who make the constructs. If you want to see what a fraud Butler is, read the article, which ends this way:
Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler’s hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.
*I didn’t realize until today that Chicago’s Field Museum has its own specimen of Archaeopteryx, a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds, and one of the world’s most famous fossils (there are 12 body specimens and some bits and bobs). It was perhaps the earliest transitional form discovered (1861, only two years after publication of The Origin), though its status as evidence for transitions between major forms wasn’t touted until later.
Here’s Wikipedia’s dope on the Chicago specimen, which is the subject of a brand-new paper (below):
The existence of a fourteenth specimen (the Chicago specimen) was first informally announced in 2024 by the Field Museum in Chicago, US. One of two specimens in an institution outside Europe, the specimen was originally identified in a private collection in Switzerland, and had been acquired by these collectors in 1990, prior to Germany’s 2015 ban on exporting Archaeopteryx specimens. The specimen was acquired by the Field Museum in 2022, and went on public display in 2024 following two years of preparation. In 2025, the paleornithologist Jingmai O’Connor and colleagues officially published a study describing this fourteenth Archaeopteryx specimen.
From Reuters:
The new study, examining the Chicago fossil using UV light to make out soft tissues and CT scans to discern minute details still embedded in the rock, shows that 164 years later there is more to learn about this celebrated creature that took flight 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.
The researchers identified anatomical traits indicating that while Archaeopteryx was capable of flight, it probably spent a lot of time on the ground and may have been able to climb trees.The scientists identified for the first time in an Archaeopteryx fossil the presence of specialized feathers called tertials on both wings. These innermost flight feathers of the wing are attached to the elongated humerus bone in the upper arm. Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs, which lacked tertials. The discovery of them in Archaeopteryx, according to the researchers, suggests that tertials, present in many birds today, evolved specifically for flight.Feathered dinosaurs lacking tertials would have had a gap between the feathered surface of their upper arms and the body.
“To generate lift, the aerodynamic surface must be continuous with the body. So in order for flight using feathered wings to evolve, dinosaurs had to fill this gap – as we see in Archaeopteryx,” said Field Museum paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, opens new tab.
“Although we have studied Archaeopteryx for over 160 years, so much basic information is still controversial. Is it a bird? Could it fly? The presence of tertials supports the interpretation that the answer to both these questions is ‘yes,'” O’Connor added.
It’s still not clear that tertial feathers are a strong indicator of flight, though they do provide lift. But that can also be used for gliding, or hopping up in the air to get prey. I have to get down to the Field Museum to see this specimen; I think it’s one of the few in the world—and the only one in America—that you can see with your own eyes.
And a short video that shows the specimen, which took two years to prepare:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are enjoying the good weather (she’s down by the Vistula River):
Hili: I have a dream.A: What dream?Hili: That May would last all year round.
Hili: Mam marzenie.Ja: Jakie?Hili: Żeby maj był przez cały rok.
*******************
From Another Science Humor Group:
From Animal Antics:
From Things With Faces, a goofy ice cream bar:
Masih is quiet as she’s still recovering from surgery. Have a tweet reposted by JKR; the original Torygraph article is archived here. And get a load of this excerpt:
The NHS is treating nursery-age children who believe they are transgender after watering down its own guidance, The Telegraph can reveal.
The health service was previously set to introduce a minimum age of seven for children to be seen by its specialist gender clinics, claiming anything less was “just too young”.
The limit was removed after the proposals were put out to consultation, with new guidance due to be published showing that children of any age are eligible.
However, a source close to the consultation process said NHS England had “caved to the pressure” of trans activists to remove the limits.
The children are not given powerful drugs such as puberty blockers at the clinics, but are offered counselling and therapy along with their family.
The tweet:
The class action lawsuits coming down the line are going to turn all previous medical scandals into mere footnotes. The medical establishment has buckled to the demands of an unfalsifiable ideology and children are being sacrificed on its altar. https://t.co/kyqWemxVIU
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 15, 2025
From Luana: another post I can’t embed (what’s going on with “X”?). But here’s a screenshot AI is doing grading now!
More mockery from Simon:
— George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-05-14T20:03:54.847Z
From Jay; a prank AND a marriage proposal!
A great prank😭 pic.twitter.com/8q6HBmyQFi
— Out of Context Human Race (@NoContextHumans) May 13, 2025
Two from my site (I’m having trouble embedding):
This is the craziest video I have seen in a long time.
Remember that these are people wearing the Star of David.
That’s it.
Anyone have the name of the person filming?
Video by @Awesome_Jew_ pic.twitter.com/yW6PWWQX6r
— Shirion Collective (@ShirionOrg) May 15, 2025
parakeet befriends an owl and compliments its feathers
pic.twitter.com/uk9AI5SJMc— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) May 14, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I reposted:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was nine (I think they got the birthdate wrong; should be 16 May.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-16T09:53:19.042Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. I never saw anything in baseball like this one:
THAT BALL WENT THROUGH HIS GLOVE
— Codify Baseball (@codifybaseball.bsky.social) 2025-05-14T13:36:22.392Z
And a baby rattler:
Carefully avoided an adorable baby rattlesnake on the trail at the Santa Rosa Plateau today. #iNaturalist #herps
— Flower Prof (@flowerprof.bsky.social) 2025-04-12T01:17:08.232Z
That BBQ looks good. I lived many years in a part of the country that specialized in that, and it is delicious.
As to Rose, I would vote for him. Arguably, he was one of the greatest BB players of all time, and he bet for, not against, his team. My answer might be different had he bet against, since he could have done things to throw games. Maybe he played harder by betting for his team (doubtful, since Rose was noted for his work ethic), but playing hard is something that they should all be doing, especially considering their wages. (Not sure what the pay was when Rose was part of the Big Red Machine, but he lived in a modest house, located very close to mine – different subdivision). But of course, just my opinion, and maybe I’m wrong.
Have a good Friday.
I come from a Reds family (father, wife, four rabid Pete Rose brothers in law), and surely admired Charlie Hustle in his playing days. But in looking at the Hall of Fame guidelines, it ain’t just about baseball on the field merit. According to article in Wikipedia (I no longer get an annual One for the Book with a Sporting News subscription), voting is based on “…the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and team contributions..”. So by its own rules, Hall of Fame membership is based on more than a player’s on the field accomplishments, and, Pete clearly does not satisfy the non-athletic morality components.
And I do not have a copy of what the voting criteria were in, say, 1970, so MLB may have added the morality characteristics more recently, but the current guidelines are pretty clear.
Alright, I appreciate the additional info. Definitely must be considered.
Dan, my brother in law who thinks that rather than change the name of Pete Rose Way, they should have named all streets in Cincy Pete Rose Way, also said that the fact that Commissioner Giamatti died soon after declaring Pete ineligible meant that there is a god….but had he died BEFORE declaring Pete ineligible then that god would be a just god.
Jim, he truly is a “rabid” fan! That is funny.
A scenario how betting FOR your team can have negative consequences: Rose bets for his team to win. He has a pitcher recovering from injury, not quite ready to play. But Rose needs a victory TODAY. He plays the pitcher, the pitcher reinjures himself, isn’t available down the stretch of games, and the Reds lose games they otherwise may have won.
plus, what do the Sharps think about the days when Rose does NOT bet on his team to win ???
Of course, Rose could mostly inoculate himself from those possibilities by betting the same amount on EVERY game! It’s a guaranteed money loser, but one needs to get his thrill somewhere. I was a boy in his prime, but he never struck me as the type who would embrace the concept of strategic losing—whether money was on the line or not. Makes me want to see NBA coaches bet on their teams to win.
I’m curious whether guys like Rose and Michael Jordan ever find anything to replace that competitive drive that so consumed them.
No thoughts for today
Unfortunately I will be unable to post birthday-related quotes for a while. I am presently hospitalized with a mysterious condition and my only access to the internet is my phone.
The comments and discussions to my posts have been very gratifying. Hopefully I will be able to resume posting them soon
Cheers, good luck – I enjoy catching the quotes you find.
Best wishes that docs figure it out, fix things, and restore your full interweb access soon, Rick.
Thanks! I enjoy the often timely quotes you post. I hope you feel better soon!
Sorry to hear this. You will be missed and hope you can return with more quotes soon.
Please get well soon, Rick.
OMG. Get better. Feel better!
Get well soon!
We look forward to your rapid return to good health!
“Get well soon, Rick B.” — The Commentariat at Why Evolution is True.
I worry about defunding NPR and PBS. Look at the commercial networks. The public seems to WANT biased reporting, as long as the bias matches their own.
Exactly. Except for the remaining .01% of us who are science-based in our thinking, it really does seem as if we live in a post-truth society. Both the left and the right push their worldview with little, if any, regard for truth.
Then you’d like Canada where we have a massive taxpayer funded outlet—left biased of course.
In the last election there was talking of defunding CBC but the Conservatives lost so on we go.
The bit about students writing and professors grading by using “AI” reminds me of an old definition: “A lecture is information transferred from the notes of the professor to the notes of the student, without passing through the brains of either.”
I’m very glad that the courses where I’m in charge of the assessment are hard to scam with AI. Two are written exams (actual pen and paper, honest) and the other is writing a critical evaluation of the simulation/ergonomics experiment they just did.
I assume that the biographer in question is Boswell.
Given their recent comments about opposing President Trump, Justices Sotomayor and Jackson should both recuse themselves from cases like the birthright citizenship one.
Very amusing, but be careful what you ask for. If you read the SCOTUSBlog and other sources regularly, you might conclude that every justice should recuse him- or herself from most cases brought to the Court by the DOJ on the grounds that he or she has made disparaging comments about the president, whichever president is in office at the time.
I have an Ongoing Struggle with students using AI in my intro biology class to answer forum questions. I am having to re-write maybe 80-90% of my questions so that students can’t just copy and paste the question and copy and paste the answer without even reading either. ChatGTP or whatever is damnably clever.
Not clever, but outstandingly good at well-organised regurgitation.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html
I teach a course on Human Genetics for non-majors, and I do not use any forum-type questions or any essays outside of test periods. All my testing is real time quizzes and tests, and participation in class discussions.
NPR and PBS have robust donor programs. If their product provides something that people want and need, they should be able to generate the necessary operating funds on their own without government support.*
I may have a point of view regarding the quality of their coverage—at least the coverage in my local area—but my opinion regarding the quality of coverage isn’t relevant to the call for the end of government support. The argument applies whether the coverage is biased or not. Just run a couple more on-air fund drives per year to make up the revenue. L*rd knows they are always asking for money and they know how to get it. PBS and NPR already have a good head start on getting off the dole.
*I understand that the funding structures of PBS and NPR are different, but that difference does not affect my argument.
Is it the same in other cities that their local PBS station recycles the same now quite old repeats over and over with less and less new content each year? We’ll get about 6 weeks of some Masterpiece series and 6 weeks (minimum) of begging for money and they go like that all year. It’s really excessive how much time they spend asking for money on the air. This same PBS channel, 20 years back was phenomenal.
Edit/add: I was a paying member 20 years back when the channel was worth contributing bucks to. Not today. They seem to put the bulk of their monies into administration while the programing goes downhill.
I was (past tense) a member of our local PBS station and an NPR contributor as well. That’s how it should work. People who want the programming should pay for it. Public Broadcasting isn’t a prescription drug that needs subsidy because it may be essential to life. PBS and NPR are non-essential services.
Maybe related to Nussbaum’s Brilliant Butler Breakdown – I saw this quote yesterday :
“What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.”
P.26 in
“No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality”
Camille Paglia
(I have not confirmed this publication and quote)
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia
Bryan, I’m not sure you noticed it (Jerry didn’t mention it): the very educational piece by Nussbaum on Butler is from 1999 – though it merits re-reading if one is interested in these kind of things.
My favorite part from the essay (from section VI):
Yes I only heard of it yesterday 😁
“It takes about 15 minutes of listening before you see where [NPR’s coverage is] coming from.”
The actual time required is the variable in a game we play often in the car, but with CBC Radio One. It can also be fun to break down the game by topic, e.g., how many minutes until a story asks, “Is Canada a racist colonialist genocidal state?”
During our recent federal election, CBC switched things up, dropped all the reporting about genocide against Indigenous people, and emphasized instead a kind of maple-glazed anti-Trump patriotism featuring phrases like “elbows up”. Average time to hear this alternative form of biased reporting during the election campaign was similar to average time to hear something about trans toddlers pre-election (p > 0.05).
Very good, Mike.
I’m glad you split your last two sentences though. Otherwise someone would surely have objected that you can’t write, “anti-Trump patriotism” and “biased reporting” in the same sentence.
And we can’t get rid of CBC. I remember my parents complaining about in the 1970s.
And Americans complain about a tiny amount of funding for NPR and PBS.
Lisa S. Davis’ main Thing is trans but she’s good on other topics.
I hate-watch PBS Newshour every miserable night at 7 mainly because ALL… not some but ALL the other news on TV is so deeply r*tarded, pitched at grade school level and ignorant of a world outside the US.
Sorry PCC(E) but his beloved NBS Nightly Noos is possibly the stupidest. It puzzles me how he watches it without his head caving in. (again, sorry boss)
That said, PBS is DREADFUL. Nightly hard left lunacy toggling between trans genderwang and “Gx’Haza” (the ladies there obviously take Arabic pronunciation lessons there to be more cringe) and the fictional “Nakhba”. Just translate Hamas’ communiques directly – they’d be less Jew hating Israel bashing. FFS.
I think we’re at a stage whereby TV news as an institution is beyond help. Things change – 20 years ago the BBC wasn’t woke garbage for instance.
I get actual news from higher IQ youtubes (like “Perun” on war/defense stuff) or thinktanks or unis. Not Rogan, Tucker or other brain damaged youtube clowns. The problem for many is they might not have the discernment to tell the difference. I’ll cop to the intellectual snob label, btw. No shame in not being a fool.
D.A.
NYC
Lisa Selin Davis offers several examples of NPR’s liberal bias, but I’m a little skeptical of more than one of them. For example, the claim that “NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, calling it a waste of time and a distraction, despite that it was highly relevant to the presidential election.” is demonstrably false, and my search on NPR turned up a number of reports on the Biden laptop and issues surrounding it. What is clear is that the mainstream press – not merely NPR – were unable to verify claims about the laptop that were being circulated by Giuliani and others, and in such cases a certain level of restraint is appropriate. After all, Fox ended up paying $878 million to settle a defamation suit over its reporting on the 2020 election, and faces another suit of over a billion dollars for a similar defamation case. Worse yet, I am unaware of any relevance of the Hunter Biden laptop issue to Joe Biden, though I may simply have missed some blockbuster revelation apart from the simply salacious reports of a private citizen acting badly.
I was also struck by the point that NPR referred to the “far right” 162 times, but the “far left” only 6, since it left me wondering what she considers the “far left” to be? Student loan forgiveness? I wondered if the problem is that we have Republicans in congress who spout QAnon fantasies, blame “space lasers” for forest fires, and tout the most ridiculous conspiracy nonsense – and they are the core of the Republican Party. I am seriously unaware of anything like that among Democrats in Congress or other elected positions nationally. The crazy left-wing nut cases that I have heard of are not within light years of elected office or positions of influence in national affairs.
I could go on, but even these two cases were enough to leave me skeptical of Davis’s other examples.
Presumably that is simply a count of the number of times the specific phrases “far right” and “far left” were used.
In other words, they were often trying to paint right-wing policies as extreme but not doing the same with left-wing policies.
Yeah, and my point was left-wing policies seem to fall within the realm of rational political perspectives, while AQnon and Proud Boys do not. I have not yet seen an example of a “far left” policy that is being promoted by any our elected officials, for example. You attribute a motive to NPR that might not be backed up by evidence.
Pursuit of equality of outcome (“equity”) as distinct from equality of opportunity, is pretty much the definition of “far left” is it not?
“Pursuit of equality of outcome (“equity”) as distinct from equality of opportunity, is pretty much the definition of “far left” is it not?”
You illustrate my point nicely with this example. Thanks.
Lisa Selin Davis, who identifies as liberal, makes many valid points listed above. She also demonstrates that liberals are also often ignorant regarding the origins and vagaries of infectious disease, despite the deep and extensive literature on these matters.
The great preponderance evidence and argument point towards the origins of SARS-CoV-2 entry into the human population as a zoonotic spillover at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan via the wildlife trade. There are detailed, thorough (open access) papers re SARS-CoV-2 origins and, for example, recombination in Coronavirus in top-tier journals. This work is contiguous with decades of thought and research regarding origins of infectious diseases. So the publications on Coronavirus biology and ecology make for extensive, if difficult, reading, and aren’t lilely to have wide consideration.
I don’t think NPR covered that very well, either, but not as L. Davis seems to think.
But it’s true that she does seem to understand that humans are sexually dimorphic.
I think you’d get some pushback on that. The arguments for where covid started seem to be leaning towards the Wuhan virology lab, and nobody says “that great proponderance of evidence” indicates otherwise. I am agnostic about this but there’s a big debate with knowledgable people on both sides.
I might get “pushback”, but there’s nothing cogent in the “pushback” science other than unspecified “intelligence” arguments “leaning towards the Wuhan virology lab”. But the open source science, rigorous — but studiously ignored — is actually quite clear.
I take great issue with this: “nobody says “that great proponderance of evidence” indicates otherwise” That’s simply not true — there are many of these “nobodies” — learned ecologists & virologists! — but that statement does illustrate the tribalism that afflicts even the best of us.
As a different, but related examples, most people in the USA can’t be bothered with evolution, for example, so must we decide it’s something else?
A new, open access paper in Cell, with authors from 20 different institutions, after sampling copious numbers of bats in SE Asia, concludes that the closest ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 was circulating there 10yrs ago, 1000km away, in areas where live-market animals are found, and that the only logical way the virus made its way to the Wunan market was via the animal trade.
I don’t think it’s tribalism or studious ignorance to say that the quality of evidence for zoonotic spillover at the market is poor but not as poor as the quality of evidence for an accidental lab leak at WIV. I have a pretty strong prior for lab leak because WIV had a large collection of bat coronaviruses, and EcoHealth Alliance had grants to do gain-of-function research by serial passage of those viruses through humanized mice or through human cell cultures. Because of that prior, I don’t find the weak evidence for the market or the even weaker evidence for the lab leak very convincing, so my prior leaves me thinking it was more likely lab leak. But good evidence for either hypothesis would convince me – I’m open minded. Finding the wild population that harbours SARS-CoV-2 and linking it to the Hunan wildlife market would be good evidence for zoonosis.
The EcoHealth Alliance denies that it conducted gain-of-function research
https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2024/06/ecohealth-alliances-response-to-recent-allegations
and I am interested in any evidence that they did — or that the WIV did. I have no dog in this fight, but I am cautious about a lab leak theory that relies so heavily on clinical evidence rather than biological evidence, and I wonder why Lisa S. Davis failed to mention that, not only do a few agencies find only weak or moderate support for a lab leak source of SARS-CoV-2, other agencies find stronger evidence for a wet market, zoonotic origin. I have no position on this, but I am troubled by intentionally ignoring evidence either way….
“….intentionally ignoring evidence …”
This is de rigueur in almost all commentary today. Ignoring contrary evidence is required in politics and when politics is mixed with science, all you get is politics.
Sorry if my explanation of my thinking has been unclear. I don’t think it was a lab leak and I don’t think it was wet market. My reason is that all the evidence for lab leak and for wet market is poor. But my prior on lab leak is stronger. Lab leaks have happened before. The bats that host SARS-CoV-2-like viruses live hundreds of km from Wuhan. There are hundreds of wet markets around China but the market a few km from WIV is where lots of people got sick with SARS-CoV-2. EcoHealth wrote successful NIH grant proposals that said they would collaborate with WIV on gain-of-function work using the WIV collection of bat coronaviruses.
I agree there’s no evidence afaik that they did those experiments. All the evidence would have been at WIV.
None of this is good evidence for either hypothesis, it’s all just priors on my expectations. For me better evidence is needed given the strong prior on lab leak. Again not evidence, all the evidence is relatively poor in comparison to the high-quality evidence that pointed to specific sources of previous bat coronavirus zoonoses that caused previous outbreaks (SARS from bats via palm civets, MERS from bats via camels). I apologize again if my distinction between priors and evidence was unclear. I’m not a conspiracy nut but I do research that uses Bayesian statistical methods including non-uniform priors based on prior knowledge from past events, and it colours how I think about new experiences and events.
And sorry for overcommenting.
My tribalism comment was a bit broad, but it has to do with having a reality-based belief because tribe paired with non-reality because same tribe. As in John Oliver touts gender-woo and then slams RFK (easy target), — or White house says sex binary but also Climate Hoax. Many depressing examples of both parties. I feel quite alone.
There’s abundant evidence for SARS-CoV (now SARS-CoV-1) spillover at a previous wildlife market. My opinion, somewhat educated — Worobey, Holmes, Anderson, and others make a case — in difficult circumstances — for the Wuhan Market as the spillover nexus for SARS-CoV-2. These are not trivial papers. You may have read them and disagree with my reaction — I find them tough going, as is the case for any current rigorous paper in the field. But they hang together with other work, and the literature cited gives further threads to follow. We’d like to be able to trace the full thread of the wildlife trade to the source farms, but the obstreperous attitude of the Chinese government in that regard makes for a delicate position for those few “western” scientists who still have some access. And the wildlife trade & “wet markets” — let us not speak of that. There we expect “gain of function” & viral evolution at a massive scale in those circumstances.
The question of finding an ancestral population — ideal — but given the frequency of recombination of CV’s and sampling difficulties, that’ll be tough. The Wuhan lab did not have a plausible virus grown in stock that could be ancestral to SARS-CoV-2. I’m not impressed by allegations of “gain of function” research — standard research approaches, but it makes a great scare-line for political purposes.
Important to me is the plethora of previous (to 2020) papers around Coronavirus circulation and zoonotic potential. There is also recently published work on other potential spillover threats in the Chinese fur farm industry, published by Chinese scientists & I think Holmes is a co-author. Essentially there’s an edifice of decades of work pointing to the ecology and evolution of zoonotic viral spillover.
But it’s not important to most people. I have not been party to that work, but consider myself, um…adjacent. Adjacent — a fine appropriation of a woke term! So zoonotic viral origin, spillover, and the pandemic context caught my fancy many years ago, in the context of HIV, for reasons. See Beatrice Hahn and Phil Sharp’s 2011 review on that…
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/lab-leak-mania
Outlines the case against lab leak.
“Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways.”
“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss” ???
Small children can’t be given puberty blockers — nothing to block — but the psychological
indoctrinationtreatment ensures emotional support to very disturbed parents to produce fucked-up adolescents. They and their parents will be the source of endless agitation to permit puberty blockers to be reinstated in England.Forgot to note re: Butler :
I’ve read a good amount of some of her pieces – I could not go cover-to-cover. I found it as intoxicating as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s.
A grimoire is a spell book – and I think they can cast a spell on the reader. I think both authors’ writing produces that effect.
Specifically, it’s a spell book for invoking demons. Maybe Butler mis-cast the necessary protection spells when summoning hers….
Re Clarence Thomas saying the country “survived until the 1960s” without nationwide injunctions, that’s true. It’s also true that the country survived until the 1860s with chattel slavery (maybe including some of CT’s ancestors). Things change, including, for a recent example, the constitutional right to abortion.