Now they’re coming for plant names

June 3, 2024 • 10:00 am

The Pecksniffs, having tried to gain control over scientific names of animals but failing to do so—at least for the Latin binomials that scientists use when communicating with other scientists (e.g., Homo sapiens, Drosophila mauritiana)—are now coming for plant names. And not just common names, but, more important, the Latin binomials. The article below, by Banu Subramaniam, a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology and now a professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College, takes a deep dive into the perfidy of botanical names, but also indicts the field for other abrogations of morality, like demonizing “invasive” plants and making us falsely think that sex is binary. (It is, as I’ve argued many times before.)

While Subramaniam has some good points, like criticizing “parachute science”, in which Western biologists take botanical samples from undeveloped countries without permission (this practice is now largely illegal and disappearing), in general the article, which summarizes her new book Botany of Empire, comes off as just one more performative attempt to reform a scientific field in a way whose effects are generally malign rather than good.

Click to read the Guardian article by Zoë Corbyn, which summarizes Subramaniam’s book:

An excerpt from the article:

Subramaniam is the author of the provocative new book, Botany of Empire. The book challenges plant science to better see the ways in which it has been profoundly shaped by European colonialism and how imperial attitudes, theories and practices endure. Colonialism and colonial logic remains “sedimented at every level”, argues Subramaniam, who also looks at what a more widespread and serious effort to “decolonise” might look like, even if such a project is never-ending. The book focuses on three subfields: taxonomy, plant reproductive biology and invasion biology (the science of the spread of introduced species).

Yes, the book wants to decolonize botany. But read on, even if your stomach is starting to hurt. I’ve put in bold three assertions that Subramaniam makes in response to “problematic” areas in botany, and I’ve given excerpts of her prose (indented) as well as my own comments (flush left)

1.) Names of plants can be bad. 

The attempt to change common names of animals that some find offensive, like Audubon’s warbler, doesn’t bother me too much. That’s because common names vary among cultures, and aren’t crucial for scientific communication in books and publications. But Latin binomials (Setophaga auduboni for the warbler) are crucial in scientific communication, and if they were changed, everything in botany would be messed up forever. That’s why the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the official body for approving “scientific” names (Latin binomials) for animals has said that it will not change existing animal names, but that future names might take into consideration the person honored by the name.

Subramaniam, however, wants “offensive” scientific names of plants changed, though she doesn’t answer the crucial question: Who will decide what names are offensive?  After all, given that she’s proposing changing the scientific literature, she can’t possibly suggest that every plant named after a person be changed. That would cause confusion widespread beyond imagining in the botanical world. That means that somebody has to decide what is “offensive.”

Her suggestion:

When Banu Subramaniam thinks about whether plants should be renamed so as not to honour white supremacist colonialists – Cecil Rhodes, for example, is commemorated in the names of 126 plant species – she contrasts it with how, for so many years in our patriarchal system, women were expected to change theirs. “That wasn’t considered complicated… and yet those in power give any number of reasons why this is,” says the professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College, outside Boston, Massachusetts.

Here are three examples of offensive names given in the article, all of whose binomials involve the demonized Cecil Rhodes: Crotalaria rhodesiae, Cyphostemma rhodesiae and Coptosperma rhodesiacum. Interestingly, none of these seem to have common names with “Rhodes” in them; the last one’s common name, for example, is “butterspoon.”

More:

[Botany of Empire] enters the fray at a contentious moment. It is the International Botanical Congress (IBC) in Madrid in July and the so-called Nomenclature Section, responsible for the International Code that governs the scientific naming of plants, will be meeting to discuss and decide on a number of amendments that taxonomists have proposed since it last met seven years ago. Included is whether a mechanism should be added to the code so plant names that are regarded as culturally offensive or inappropriate can be rejected. If it passes the preliminary voting stage, it will be over to about 200 taxonomists who have individual votes along with the power to cast secret votes for their institutions.

Here’s one of the proposals in Taxon taken from the penultimate link above:

(121) Amend Art. 56.1 as follows (new text in bold)

“56.1. Any name that would cause a disadvantageous nomenclatural change (Art. 14.1) or that is regarded as culturally offensive or inappropriate (Art. 51.2) may be proposed for rejection. A name thus rejected, or its basionym if it has one, is placed on a list of nomina utique rejicienda (suppressed names, App. V). Along with each listed name, all names for which it is the basionym are similarly rejected, and none is to be used (see Rec. 50E.2).”

Again, who makes the decision? Presumably a committee, and I bet that if this happens they will choose an all-woke committee that will reject anybody who is morally impure. Would Darwin fall into that class?

But I object to the whole endeavor. There are two upsides, neither important, and one big downside.

The upsides are, first, the assumption that people have been put off botany or even driven out of the field by culturally offensive names. I don’t believe that at all, for I’ve seen no evidence of it.

The second “upside” is that it makes those like Subramaniam feel as if they are enacting social justice in the botanical realm. But that would be true only if the first upside were true, which it isn’t. This the second upside is a purely performative endeavor with no substantive effects.

The big downside, which I’ve mentioned, is that changing botanical binomials would throw the scientific literature into a tizzy. When you use a “new” name, do you still have to also say what the former name was? That’s the only way to avoid confusion. And you’d have to do that forever, because the “offensive” name is already ensconced in the literature. And so this proposal does not get rid of the offensive name from the literature at all.

Going forward, however, you could still have a committee to eliminate proposed NEW names considered offensive. I’ll leave that endeavor to the Pecksniffs.

2.) Botany reinforces a false sex binary.  Subramaniam sees “colonial” botany as having distorted sex in plants, falsely implying that sex in plants is binary. But in fact it is binary, though plants have hermaphrodites, which combine male and female functions in one individual, far more often than do animals. But hermaphrodites are not a “third” sex, as their reproductive partners have reproductive systems that are either male or female. There are only two gametes: big, immotile female ones and small, motile male ones.

In the case of plant reproduction, Subramaniam draws on the work of historians of science who show how European colonial sexual norms based around heterosexual romance were transposed on to plants by Linnaeus. She argues that, as a result, our vocabulary and how we think about the way plants reproduce today “relies obsessively” on binary categories of male/female with their limited possibilities. Into this “impoverished” framework we try to shoehorn a breathtaking array of plant reproductive arrangements. More than 85% of flowering plants end up classified as “bisexual” or “hermaphrodite”, because the flowers have male and female parts; and that’s not to mention all the “asexual” ways flowering plants can propagate such as through roots, stems, leaves and buds. “There are more exceptions than rules,” says Subramaniam. “Plants do such interesting things… if we had better ways to describe them that aren’t based around human reproduction, it might open up other ways to study them.” (Subramaniam has published suggestions of new terminology and vocabulary.)

Being asexual is, of course, not a sex. It’s a way of cloning yourself, not reproducing sexually.  Below is the paper by Subramaniam and Bartlett that includes her suggestions; read it for yourself (it’s from Integrative and Comparative Biology) and check the glossary about how she wants to move away from a binary notion of sex into a spectrum. She also sees plants as being “queer”, which of course is a concept that applies to humans, not plants.  Here’s how plants can be “queer” (from the glossary):

Queer: is perhaps best described by Eve Sedgwick: “That’s one of the things that “queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 1993: 7).

If that has a definite meaning, I can’t parse it out. If plants are “queer” because they have hermaphrodites or reproduce asexually, then just use those words instead of dragging in terms from human sexual preference.

But of course that importation of ideology into science is the real point of the article and book.  Here’s the author’s point at the end:

[Subramaniam’s] takeaway message when it comes to plant science: “Botany, like everything, is political. Question received wisdom.”

Yep, everything is political, including my work on speciation in Drosophila.

Click to read:

3.) The idea of “invasive plants” leads to xenophobia. Here we have another performative act with no evidence that the concept produces what it’s said to:

Meanwhile, when it comes to invasion biology, the good native/bad foreigner binary that has become so pervasive in how most people think about plants’ place in the world is deeply ironic. We seem to have forgotten that it was European colonialism that ushered in the “massive and grand reshuffling of global biota” that we see before us. That they are here, for good or bad, is a legacy of colonial botany. And most of our agricultural species are foreign, too, though we don’t hate them on our dinner plates.

Yet today we demonise non-native plants as evil and undesirable. Subramaniam worries this is helping to fuel xenophobia and giving us poor approaches to species conservation and management. Blame the plant and attention flips to violent eradication, which rarely works. Meanwhile the real problem, landscapes disturbed through overdevelopment (for it is often here that introduced species find their chance), takes a back seat. Former colonies’ promoting and protecting of native plants – essentially trying to return the environment to some kind of idyllic past state – while simultaneously showing so little regard for the Indigenous people who co-evolved with those flora and fauna, is a continuation of a colonial settler logic, suggests Subramaniam. “We need other logics for our approach to nature… not ideological litmus tests,” she says.

This is hyperbolic: we are worried about invasive plants because they can displace native ones, leading to extinction.  Subramaniam’s claim that the concept “fuels xenophobia” has not an iota of evidence behind it, as critic Dan Simberloff says later in the article:

Yet for Daniel Simberloff, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, Subramaniam’s arguments, which he has encountered before, remain tortuous and unconvincing, and lack evidence. Not only does she “almost completely” ignore the impacts of many non-native species, but there is also scant proof that judgments about the aesthetics of non-native plants transfer to xenophobia. And approaches to restoration, which involve removing non-native species, aren’t so much about trying to return land to some unspoilt past but giving degraded ecosystems a fighting chance to recover. There are plenty of examples where campaigns to eradicate invasive non-native species have worked, he notes.

Responding to a recent study that found invasion biology research negatively frames non-native species, regardless of whether they cause harm, Simberloff and others in the field point out that the accumulating evidence is that substantial numbers of non-native species are going on to have a harmful impact. The rule of thumb used in the past – that only 1% of non-native species can be expected to become pests – is a “highly misleading low estimate” (though a new estimate is hard to give). Given that it isn’t always clear which non-native populations can “irrupt into invasion problems”, a precautionary principle, even if they seem benign, is prudent, they argue. They also point to a “formidable international scientific consensus” that non-native species pose threats, citing a sobering Invasive Alien Species Assessment published last September by an intergovernmental body representing 143 member countries.

I’ll quote one more critic: well-known botanist Sandra Knapp, who points out that botany is already scrutinizing itself and that Subramaniam is exaggerating ideas that, in some form, are already being tackled:

For Sandra Knapp, a taxonomist at the Natural History Museum and past president of the UK’s Linnean Society, the book provides an interesting perspective on botany but she questions some of Subramaniam’s characterisations.

While colonialists’ names do persist in plant names, it is a stretch to say the field is “celebrating” those people; big herbaria aren’t just confined to the global north, although there are more there; and “parachute science” is diminishing. One of the reasons botany used male and female when talking about plants’ pollen and ovule-bearing organs is because it made common understanding easier. “As plant scientists discover more about plant reproductive biology, they realise it kind of defies categorisation,” says Knapp, referring to a recent discovery about the sexual fluidity of an Australian bush tomato.

But, chiefly, Knapp questions the book’s starting point: that botany has its head in the sand over its colonial past. While botany isn’t a monolith, from Knapp’s perspective, the journey is under way: the field is actively engaged with thinking about and coming to terms with its past, as well as how it might create a more inclusive future. “There’s a blossoming of this discussion throughout botany now,” says Knapp. “It might not be the conversation [Subramaniam] thinks there should be, but that’s all the more reason to keep it going.”

Knapp points to a wealth of projects taking place at institutional and grassroots levels to amplify different voices: the Linnean Society’s addition to its library of portraits celebrating its first female fellows; a recent project by botanists to relay untold stories of individuals who collected and studied plants but who have been excluded from historical accounts; and work she has been undertaking with colleagues to produce a dataset of plant genera named after women.

Subramaniam is a good example of the maladaptive incursion of ideology into biology, an incursion that has virtually no upsides except for the good feeling it gives the Pecksniffs. Yes, parachute science is bad, but we realized that a long time ago, and you need all kinds of permits to collect either animals or plants from different countries, particularly underdeveloped ones. But as for changing names or worrying about the name “invasive” or about whether plants are too “queer” to support a sex binary, that’s what’s called “pilpul” in Hebrew, referring to “casuasitic hairsplitting” in analysis of the Talmud.

In the end, everything is political, and so Subramaniam sees her endeavor as “good politics” that will enact social justice among vegetables.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 3, 2024 • 8:15 am

James Blilie sent in some photos of the Aurora that his son Jamie took in Washington State.  (I wish I could have seen this!)  His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his son’s photos by clicking on them.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the big Aurora event; but I thought I’d send a selection of my son Jamie’s photos from that night.  I took a few (poor) photos with my iPhone; but mainly I just sat and watched the amazing light show.  Mainly we just gaped and kept up a patter of “holy cow!’ and “holy s**t!”.

The Aurora show of 10-May-2024 was certainly worth staying up for!

I thought I’d seen some pretty spectacular Auroras in Alaska, Canada, and far northern Minnesota. Last night’s event put them all in the shade. It was an event different nearly in kind.   We are fortunate to live in a dark, rural area with little light pollution.

At its peak, it filled the entire northern sky, east to west, horizon to zenith. I’ve never seen anything like it. At times it was apparent that the lights were directly overhead (we are in far southern Washington state; 45° 45’ north).  It was so bright it illuminated the ground, blanked out all but the brightest stars, and put the light of the poor little moon to shame.

The colors were not this intense to the naked eye; the camera picks up more color than the eye. The camera sensor also discerns the “structure” of the lights better than the naked eye. But, make no mistake: this was a spectacular Aurora event.

Equipment:
Nikon D5600 camera
Opteka 6.5mm f/3.5 Ultra Wide Angle Aspherical Manual Focus Fisheye Lens
Sturdy Manfrotto tripod
Adjustments in Lightroom 5 software

Monday: Hili dialogue

June 3, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, June 3, 2024, the start of another damn week and National Egg Day. Remember when eggs were bad for you? Here from Wikipedia are some bird eggs of various colors and sizes. Look at the size of that ostrich egg (I guess the sea urchin is there for size comparison, as it’s not an egg, and, anyway, the chicken egg will suffice.

Zureks, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Chocolate Macaroon Day (remember the difference between “macaroons” and “macarons”; the picture erroneously shows the latter), World Cider Day (an estimable drink in the UK if you can get a pint of properly kept cider from the keg), National Itch Day, World Clubfoot Day, Opium Suppression Movement Day in Taiwan and World Bicycle Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Netanyahu’s between a rock and a hard place after Biden announced a deal that, he said, was from Israel, and told Hamas to accept it. (It’s still not clear to me if that deal, which may leave Hamas in power, really was proposed by Israel.) Thus the NYT article called “Netanyahu may face a choice between a truce and his government’s survival.”

On Friday, Mr. Biden outlined broad terms that he said were presented by Israel to the American, Qatari and Egyptian mediators who have been pushing for a deal to pause the fighting and free hostages in Gaza. Israeli officials confirmed that the terms matched a cease-fire proposal that had been approved by Israel’s war cabinet but not yet presented to the Israeli public.

Now, analysts say, it is crunchtime for Bibi, as the prime minister is popularly known.

Mr. Biden “booted Netanyahu out of the closet of ambiguity and presented Netanyahu’s proposal himself,” Ben Caspit, a biographer and longtime critic of the prime minister, wrote in Sunday’s Maariv, a Hebrew daily. “Then he asked a simple question: Does Bibi support Netanyahu’s proposal? Yes or no. No nonsense and hot air.”

The leaders of two far-right parties in the coalition — Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s minister of finance, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister — have pledged to bring Mr. Netanyahu’s government down if the prime minister goes along with the deal outlined by Mr. Biden before Hamas is fully destroyed. Some hard-line members of Mr. Netanyahu’s own Likud party have said they will join them.

At the same time, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two former military chiefs who joined the emergency government for the duration of the war, have threatened to withdraw the support of their centrist National Unity party by June 8 if Mr. Netanyahu fails to come up with a clear path forward. And opposition parties have begun organizing to try to topple the government.

The cease-fire proposal involves three phases. Under the plan, groups of hostages would be released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, a temporary cease-fire would turn into a permanent cessation of hostilities, and an internationally backed effort would be launched to rebuild Gaza.

This is what worries me: first, the release of convicted Palestinian terrorists, who would simply go home and take up their business again. The hostages are not equivalent to prisoners, and Israel should not insist on a trade, or a bit-by-bit release. They should all be released NOW.

Second, a “permanent cessation of hostilities” is likely to leave Hamas in power, and so nothing will have been resolved. If you ask me what my solution is, I would say “no ceasefire until Hamas has become powerless”, and a demand for unconditional surrender. That’s not realistic, of course, but it’s not realistic to leave Hamas in power, either. Thus I think the title of the article should have been: “Netanyahu may face a choice between a truce and his country’s survival.”

*My colleague Dorian Abbot just republished on Heterodox STEM an essay by an anonymous author posted three weeks ago on his Substack site, an essay called “DEI: The great misunderstanding“. The author appears to be of Russian or East European origin (the first paragraph tells you why):

In my view, the problem here is that many Westerners misunderstand what DEI is, how it works, and why it is so destructive. They misunderstand it because they were born, grew up, and lived in democratic, capitalist societies that valued individual freedoms and responsibilities, while DEI at its core is a collectivist ideology. Therefore, its comprehension comes easier to those of us who experienced collectivist notions first-hand.

A good example of this misunderstanding is the term “DEI hire” that is being applied to individuals, most recently the disgraced former president of Harvard University Claudine Gay and the democratically elected Mayor of Baltimore Brandon M. Scott. The problem is that DEI does not operate at the level of individuals, but on the scale of the entire society, by modifying the selection criteria for admissions, hiring, and promotion. The term, therefore, is an oxymoron; everyone hired in academia in the past decade or so has been a DEI hire, and that is precisely why the ideology is so destructive. DEI works by replacing selection criteria that have previously been based on merit with those based on an allegiance to the ideology, propagating its destruction in the space of multitude of institutions, and in time—through generations of faculty and students. Whereas in the past, hiring and admission decisions were based on one’s ability to do the job, thirst for knowledge, and aptitude to pursue it, now they are based on one’s ability to perpetuate the ideology and its growing bureaucracies. The result is a communist dream, where those who were nothing, are becoming everything—with the associated destructive consequences.

A detour is needed here to address one of the most pervasive myths behind the need for DEI: that academia was never a meritocracy. This nonsense is being repeated ad nauseum in the hopes that repeating it will somehow make it true. One argument is that it could not possibly have been a meritocracy because the applicant pool was limited: e.g., women were not admitted to educational institutions, quotas were instituted limiting the admission of Jewish candidates, etc. Yes, imposing such limits on the applicant pool is a bad thing. Progressive societies have been doing away with these practices (unlike regressive societies, cue the Taliban). Yet, the principles that were used to select candidates from the limited pool – those principles were based on ability and aptitude and were, at their core, meritocratic, much like sex-segregated athletics or chess remain meritocratic in each sex category.

A more poignant criticism is not that academia wasn’t meritocratic, but that meritocracy itself is imperfect; that the failure of nominally meritocratic procedures resulted in the selection of the proverbial “wrong man for the job”. This, of course, is true: anyone who’s ever set foot on a university campus has no doubt encountered people of very questionable qualifications. Coupled with limited applicant pools, such failures of meritocratic selection evoke a deep sense of unfairness: why should someone incompetent be selected over someone who had no chance to compete in the first place? They shouldn’t, of course.

DEI grew out of authoritarian ideologies and is repeating their tried and tired destructive paradigms. It is based on the fallacy that a fair selection must reflect the composition of the population, on fighting “overrepresentation”—the same notions were used by the Nazis to justify their antisemitic policies in German and Austrian universities, and beyond, in 1930s; It is based on the notion that everyone must first and foremost be an activist, guarding ideological purity and promoting contemporary notions of morality and social justice—the notion adopted in the USSR, where every act and statement were imbued with political significance, one that was either in accordance the party line, or against it.

There follows a rather weak analogy to natural selection:

. . . Those, who survive the selection based on DEI ideology, are fit for activism, cowardice of mobs, bigotry, antisemitism and other forms of racism, violence and destruction. This is exactly what we see in today’s campus protests, and this has always been the point: to produce generations of activists who not only lack knowledge, but who were robbed of the skills needed to develop it, of the curiosity to seek answers to their questions beyond the “party line”. There never were any good intentions.

But all professors, by the author’s admission, have survived the selection, and so all faculty should be unthinking activists. Surely this is not the case, so while DEI can be blamed for the rise of activisim born of ignorance, it doesnt explain why all faculty aren’t activists. Or perhaps you can save the hypothesis by saying that only younger faculty are activists, as those were the ones hired and raised in the Era of DEI. And indeed, younger faculty are the most common among faculty involved in war protests, but there are plenty of younger ones who have sense, too.

*The Shroud of Turin is renowned as the “burial shroud of Jesus”, and there are still many people who think it was, despite dispositive evidence that it was not—that it was made long after the event is supposed to have happened, the image is pigemented, not made from blood, and and it’s not anatomically correct. The “body image” is best seen when you look at a negative of a photo of the shroud, and see this:

See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I happen to have read the most thorough analysis of the shroud, this long book by Andrea Nicolotti (click for Amazon link), which recounts the history of the “artifact” and then concludes it’s a fraud. (Many people hate that conclusion as they want to believe in Jesus.)

In Michael Shermer’s new Substack Post on Skeptic, “The shroud of Turin,” he, with the help of Massimo Pigliucci, who happens to be in Turin and hosted by Nicolotti, persuaded the author to give an excerpt of the book showing why it’s most likely a forgery. The post and the book are long, so I’ll just give a few salient points. Prose is Nikcolotti’s:

While this approach is legitimate, what people most want to know about holy relics like the Shroud of Turin today is their authenticity, particularly during the Age of Science with its emphasis on evidence-based belief. Unfortunately for believers in the Shroud and related relics, the likelihood of being fake becomes almost 100 percent when it has to do with people who lived at the time of Jesus or before.

The Shroud of Turin is part of the trove of Christ-related relics that were never mentioned in ancient times. When the search for relics in the Holy Land began—with the discovery of the cross, belatedly attributed to Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine—no one at that time ever claimed to have found Jesus’ burial cloths, nor is there any record of anyone having thought to look for them.

. . . It was not until the second half of the 6th century that pilgrims began to mention relics of Jesus’ burial cloths in Jerusalem, albeit with various doubts as to where they had been preserved and what form they took. The next step was the systematic and often unverified discovery of additional relics from the Holy Land, including the bathtub of baby Jesus, his cradle, nappy, footprints, foreskin, umbilical cord, milk teeth, the tail of the donkey on which he entered Jerusalem, the crockery from the Last Supper, the scourging pillar, his blood, the relics of the bodies of Jesus’ grandparents and the Three Wise Men, and even the milk of the Virgin Mary and her wedding ring. But no shroud.

. . .  The Turin Shroud first appeared in the historical record in France (a place that already hosted many competing shrouds) around 1355. It is different from all the previous shrouds in that the others did not display the image of the dead Christ, and until then no source had ever mentioned a shroud bearing such an image (although Rome hosted the well-known Veil of Veronica, a piece of cloth said to feature an image of the Holy Face of Jesus). The explanation behind its creation can be found in the contemporary development of a cult of devotion centered on the representations of the physical suffering of Christ and his wounded body.

. . . The clash between sindonology and science reached its peak in 1988; without involving STURP but with permission from the archbishop of Turin, the Holy See and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a radiocarbon examination was carried out that year involving 12 measurements conducted in three different laboratories. As expected, the test provided a date that corresponds perfectly with the date indicated by the historical documents, namely the 13th-14th century. As often happens when a scientific finding contradicts a religious belief, however, from that moment on attempts to invalidate the carbon dating proliferated on increasingly unbelievable grounds, including: conspiracy, pollution of the samples, unreliability of the examination, enrichment of the radiocarbon percentage due to the secondary effects of the resurrection, etc.

. . . The results were published in the world’s leading multidisciplinary scientific journal, Nature. Conclusion: the cloth of the Shroud can be assigned with a confidence of 95 percent accuracy to a date between AD 1260 and 1390.

If you read reviews of the book, you’ll still see people kvetching about the methods used to date the shroud, though the lack of historical provenance isn’t mentioned! There’s more, But I’ll quote one more bit; one of the many critiques by people who really the shroud to be real:

A more curious variant of the pollution theory suggests that the radiocarbon dating was performed on a sample that was repaired with more recent threads. This would force us to imagine that two widely recognized textile experts who were present on the day of the sampling were unable to notice that they had cut a piece so repaired, despite the fact that they had observed the fabric carefully for hours; to distort the result by 13 centuries the threads employed in the mending would have had to have been more numerous than the threads of the part to be mended. To eliminate any doubt, in 2010 the University of Arizona reexamined a trace of fabric leftover from the radiocarbon dating in 1988, concluding:

But read the rest; you’ll be well equipped to debunk the Shroud Lovers.  Or read the book, which I’ve done, but do be aware that it’s a long slog. The summary that Shermer gives tells you all you need to know.

*Speaking of Substacks, Friend of the Website and artist Kelly Houle has her own new Subtack called Ut Pictura Poesis (“As is painting, so is poetry“); do consider subscribing as a way of subsidizing natural-history art. Her first post, “Capturing the Queen: The problem of painting a nocturne,” is about of her favorite subjects: plants that bloom in the night. An excerpt:

This week I made a trip to Tucson to deliver a painting to Tohono Chul Park for this year’s Queen of the Night exhibit, an annual celebration of the night-blooming cactus that flowers en masse in the Sonoran Desert each summer. Each year Tohono Chul celebrates its world famous collection of Peniocereus greggii or night-blooming cereus, with an exhibition in the Entry Gallery. Artists are asked to contribute works that represent any part of the Peniocereus greggii plant. This year the exhibit includes 15 works by local artists and will run from June 1st through July 28th.

Capturing The Queen is no small feat. For weeks the horticultural staff at Tohono Chul measures the buds of the night blooming flowers daily to try to predict when the bloom will occur. It’s a tricky business, as the mechanism that causes the flowers to open on the same night isn’t well understood. When the flowers do decide to put on a show, they often give only a few hours notice. Anyone who wants to witness the event in person must be willing to drop everything and head out into the desert. For the months of June and July serious garden partiers are on call. For me, it’s a two-hour drive from Phoenix, so I need to make my hotel reservation and leave within an hour of the initial announcement. I’ve been able to make the trip twice in the last ten years.

. . .Seeking out the night-blooming cactus requires a sense of adventure. For a homebody like me, even venturing out to the botanical garden a bit of a big deal. If I have to travel I tend to turn into Emily Dickinson in a letter to Elizabeth Holland complaining about having to move:

“I cannot tell you how we moved. I had rather not remember. I believe my “effects” were brought in a bandbox, and the “deathless me,” on foot, not many moments after. I took at the time a memorandum of my several senses, and also of my hat and coat, and my best shoes – but it was lost in the melee…”

I’m usually very happy to stay at home in my routines that allow me to paint and write with as little interruption as possible. Travel is difficult for people like me, but I make an exception to commune with the night-flowering. My bag is packed. On bloom night I will be out with lanterns looking for myself.

Here’s her painting, based on her observations from 2017 (see the caption).  If you’re interested in it, please reach out to the Tohono Chul Gallery: exhibits@tohonochul.org, with the website: https://tohonochul.org/art/
My painting “The Queen and Her Knight,” part of a series inspired by the hummingbird paintings of Martin Johnson Heade, shows a life-size hummingbird next to the open flower of the Peniocereus greggii. The painting is a composite made using photo references from my trip to Tohono Chul on Bloom Night July 18, 2017.

Here’s what the flower of this species looks like (every flower on every cactus in one area blooms on the same night); the photo was taken by Kelly:

*The WSJ reports that lung cancer, once equivalent to a death sentence, is now being cured or held at bay for years—all thanks to new drugs and gene sequencing that allows targeted therapy on cancer-causing mutations.

There is more hope than ever for people diagnosed with the deadliest cancer.

Declines in smoking and the advent of screening and newer drugs have transformed the outlook for patients with lung cancer, once considered a death sentence. Progress against the disease has propelled the drop in overall cancer deaths in the U.S. over the past three decades.

And there is more to gain. More patients can fend off the disease for months or years with targeted or immune-boosting drugs, results released this weekend at a top cancer conference showed. That includes patients with forms of the disease that are notoriously tough to treat.

“It had such an abysmal prognosis. And now we have people who are being cured who we never thought would be cured,” said Dr. Angela DeMichele, a medical oncologist at Penn Medicine.

AstraZeneca’s drug Tagrisso can contain lung cancer nearly three years longer than chemotherapy and radiation alone for some stage-three patients, one study released Sunday showed. Another found that some patients with aggressive disease survived nearly two years longer with the company’s immunotherapy drug Imfinzi, the first advance for that lung-cancer subtype in decades.

Another study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago found that 60% of advanced patients were alive without their disease advancing at five years after taking Pfizer’s Lorbrena, a drug that targeted a genetic mutation in their tumors. That compares with just 8% of patients on an older drug with the same target.

“These results are really outstanding,” said Dr. David Spigel, chief scientific officer at Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Tennessee, lead researcher on the Imfinzi trial. “A really major step forward in lung-cancer care.”

Tagrisso, Imfinzi and Lorbrena are all approved by the Food and Drug Administration and in use.

. . .More than 234,000 Americans are diagnosed with lung cancer annually. It is the leading cause of cancer death among men and women, killing some 125,000 Americans each year. The lung-cancer survival rate has increased by some 20% in the past five years, according to the American Lung Association.

Projected U.S. cancer deaths, 2024Source: National Cancer Institute
LungColorectalPancreaticBreastProstateLiverLeukemiaNon-Hodgkin lymphomaBrain/nervous systemBladder040,00080,000120,000

Lung cancer has responded to newer drugs such as immunotherapies better than some other cancers, doctors said, in part because its tumors tend to have many mutations that make it easier to find and attack.

Here’s a figure showing the change in survival rates of lung cancer versus other cancers. Lung cancer is by far the most common form of cancer, probably because of the prevalence of smoking, but the mortality rate has dropped significantly. But so has that of all cancers combined, a story that’s not told in the article.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is supervising another editorial meeting of Listy.

Hili: That’s the end of the editorial meeting.
A: But are we taking Liat’s article?
Hili: You and Małgorzata decide.
In Polish:
Hili: Zebranie redakcyjne zakończone.
Ja: Ale czy bierzemy ten artykuł Liat?
Hili: Ustalcie to z Małgorzatą.

*******************

From Now That’s Wild:

From somewhere on the Internet:

From Science Humor (now think of all the religious assertions that were later proven wrong by science:

From Masih, another Iranian woman with her eye shot out for protesting (English subtitles):

Here’s a comment Simon found on the Trumpiverse:

From Luana on accusations that appear to be floating around. Have a look at the thread:

As Barry says, “The hawk survived. . . but the snake is deeply disappointed. Can anybody identify the snake?

From Malcolm; tiger gets a belly rub!

From the Auschwitz Memorial; an eight-year-old boy gassed upon arrival at the camp.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first came from his work on Crick’s biography, and Matthew adds this: “If you don’t know who David Liu is, he is a Harvard chemist who has developed a new, incredibly safe single-base pair form of gene editing that is being used in therapies. He is amazingly smart and nice. Make sure you click to see all our interactions.”

I didn’t know about this one:

 

Bill Maher on gender apartheid

June 2, 2024 • 12:00 pm

This may not be Bill Maher’s funniest “bit” on his Real Time show, but it’s one of his best: a diatribe against the oppression of women in most majority-Islamic countries. He does get in a few humorous licks at American protesters who, he says, should be fighting Muslim gender apartheid instead of putting up tents and doing performative protests. And he’s right: half the population in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and, yes, territories like Gaza, aren’t even close to having equal opportunity. This problem is sorely neglected by most Western feminists.

Not only are women surely restive under these restrictions, which are immoral because they treat people grossly unequally, but it would be much better for these societies to tap the potential of people with two X chromosomes.  It’s impossible for me to agree that maintaining gender apartheid (usually derived from bogus religious beliefs) is socially better than giving women equal opportunities. We know this is true from how Iran and Afghanistan used to be before they became fundamentalist Islamic countries, and how they are now, with veiled and monitored women agitating against the restrictions of the regimes. Do a Google Image search for “Women, Afghanistan, 1970s” and then compare it to a search for “Women, Afghanistan, 202os“. (See this post as well.)

h/t Muffy

University of Chicago’s 2024 Graduation

June 2, 2024 • 10:50 am

Speaking of graduation, here are a video and some photos of convocation that took place yesterday. The expected protest by pro-Palestinian demonstrators did take place, but it wasn’t serious enough to disrupt the ceremony (see news report below), and so the seniors were able to have their Big Moment. Unfortunately, it drizzled and the ceremony was long, so many students and parents donned plastic ponchos that were provided for free. It often seems to rain on graduation day.

I have to admit that although I’ve witnessed many of these graduations, and hooded some of my students in them, I never get used to it. It’s a tremendous accomplishment (especially here, where the work is hard), and it’s heartwarming to see the students pose before and after the ceremony with their proud parents. (They used to post by Botany Pond, but it’s still under construction and fenced off.)

Because there were restrictions about being on campus, I wasn’t able to wander around freely to photograph, but here are a few things to give a flavor of the day.The police did let me film and take pictures before the ceremony and, from the door of my building, of the procession.

First a video of the beginning of the ceremony. The procession always begins with two bagpipers:

Miscellaneous shots:

Going through Hull Gate to the Quad:

Lots of selfies:

“Only the strong survive” on a mortarboard. Indeed. One of the tee-shirts they sell on campus says: “The University of Chicago: Hell does freeze over.”

There were students wearing keffiyehs, who probably participated in the subsequent walk-out during the ceremony (see below). I avoided taking photos of their faces to avoid implicating them in anything.

Foreground, my friend Eliza Ross, a pro-Israeli activist in the UChicago Maroons for Israel (along with Talia Elkin, Eliza brought charges against the Students for Justice in Palestine for disrupting a Jewish “event” in the Quad. SJP was given a slap on the wrist). I avoided showing her face, but look at her shoes:

She showed them off for me. The Hebrew says “Am Yisrael Chai”—”the people of Israel live.”

Here’s the whole set-up of the stage on the east side of the Quad, but before the students arrived. It’s a panoramic shot, so click to enlarge it.

An Instagram post from UChicago United for Palestine, alerting demonstrators to the graduation protest. I doubt that the masks are for safety against viruses; rather, they hide the identity of protestors so they can avoid punishment:

Here’s a Channel 7 news video of the pro-Palestinian protesters. There was not only a walkout during the ceremony itself, but also a group of non-University protesters to the west of the venue.  One of them, not affiliated with the University, was arrested for battery.  I tried to film the University protesters, clad in gowns and keffiyehs, as they walked out past my building, chanting “Free free Palestine”, but at that point the campus police wouldn’t let me take any pictures. I don’t think that’s a legal order, but I wasn’t about to buck the campus cops, who were clearly on high alert. Here’s a news report showing some of the protest:

Jesse Singal on the ridiculous “punishment” given to NYU protestors

June 2, 2024 • 9:40 am

As the Chicago Maroon reported in February (see my post on it here), a group of pro-Palestinian protestors who had violated University of Chicago rules by participating in sit-in in the admissions office were required to submit essays as part of their punishment.  I guess the point was to give students a chance to reflect on—and presumably repent about—their disruptive conduct. But the result was the opposite: the students doubled down in their activism and demonization of the University. Here are just two of several letters I reproduced:

“… I participated in the sit-in on November 9 because it is proven that my University has investments in weapons manufacturing companies, and I could not continue to attend classes and go about my day-to-day without thinking about how the institution I am a part of is facilitating the genocide and displacement of millions of Palestinian people. There is a long and honorable legacy of the sit-in protest being used to peacefully remind large institutions of the harm that they are causing people through their actions, a legacy that was taken up by students of UCUP. And if UChicago, a supposed stalwart of free speech, retaliates against students for taking up this form of protest and trying to communicate with administration at the University they themselves attend, what does that mean about free speech at this institution? Although I can understand the stress this may have placed on the Deans-on-Call, that was not intentional. The stress I experienced for the past several months knowing that my University is invested in companies that build bombs, and the stress that I experienced when the administration repeatedly refused to meet with us to discuss our demands, however, has been caused by the University…”

Sahar Punjwani, Class of 2024

. . . . and another:

“… The University of Chicago has, in my time here, taught me a lot. This sit-in, my arrest, and your office’s obligation to begin disciplinary proceedings against me, have taught me a lot as well that the University would rather criminalize and punish its students—those most committed not only to values of free expression but also noble pursuits of justice, equality, and liberation, and, as it has not passed my notice, most of whom are Black/Indigenous and students of color, and low-income—than meet with them and be transparent about its investments in arms companies.…

… I believe myself to be an excellent student and upstanding member of the UChicago community. I would never and have never sought to violate university policy. I sought to exercise my right to free expression, as established and championed by the Chicago Principles; and, after having attended the numerous quad tabling events, art builds, and rallies leading up to this sit-in, I felt moved to participate in this sit-in in an abundance of despair over my university’s failure to recognize its role in or even name the Israeli genocide in Gaza, where now over 22,000 Palestinians have been killed. Knowing that a Palestinian child was being killed every 10 minutes, knowing the school year in Palestine was canceled as all schools had been bombed or turned into refugee shelters, I could not continue to merely attend my classes. It is precisely because of my education that I participated in this sit-in; my education here has fostered a young mind that cannot turn a blind eye to the genocide that is taking place with my tuition money…”

Kelly Hui, Class of 2024, Student Marshal [JAC note: Hui,  was one of the four students whose degree was withheld by the University over their participation in the later Encampment, spurring a lot of protest on graduation day yesterday (see next post).

As you see, if the essays were meant to “reform” the students, they failed miserably.  The self-reflection that was supposed to teach students that “free speech” does not justify disruption (or at least disruption without punishment) led only to intensified demonization of the University and increased emphasis on its support of the so-called Israeli “genocide”. As you see, Hui, one of the students disciplined for participating in the sit-in, is now subject to disciplinary proceedings over participation in the later encampment. She is of course entitled to her views, but clearly the “essay” assignment didn’t change them.

A similar and risible attempt to get protestors to “self-educate” is the subject of Jesse Singal’s latest Substack post, dealing with protestors at New York University (NYU) who were asked to “self-educate” after illegally disrupting campus activities. But their “self-education assignment”, involving completing a complex series of exercis in a module, is even more ludicrous than was Chicago’s.

Click to read:

The background (Singal’s words are indented, and one quote he gives is doubly indented):

As you may have heard, there is a war between Israel and Hamas. As you may have also heard, there has been a surge of pro-Palestinian and/or anti-Israeli activism on many college campuses. While NYU didn’t get as much attention as its bigger and more Ivy-covered brother uptown, Columbia University, a group of students there were disciplined for their actions during protests.

Now that the dust has settled, the generous administrators at NYU have offered these students a chance to evade disciplinary action. As Ginia Bellafante reported in TheNew York Times a couple weeks ago:

While the university eventually moved to have the criminal charges against the students dropped, it initiated a disciplinary process against some of them (the university will not disclose how many) that seemed as if it had been conjured in the writers’ room of a dystopian sci-fi series. In order to return to the university, some students would be required to complete a 49-page set of readings and tasks — “modules” — known as the Ethos Integrity Series, geared at helping participants “make gains” in “moral reasoning” and “ethical decision making.” In a letter to the administration, Liam Murphy, a professor at the law school, called it “an intellectual embarrassment,” betraying the university’s mission as a training ground for independent thought and forcing students merely “to consume pages and pages of pablum.”

The Ethos Integrity Series was not the only command. Some students would be assigned a “reflection paper,” the details of which were laid out by the Office of Student Conduct. In it they would address several questions, among them: What are your values? Did the decision you made align with your personal values? What have you done or need still to do to make things right? Explicitly instructed not to “justify” their actions, the students were told to turn their papers in by May 29 in “12-point Times New Roman or similar font.”

Ben Burgis, who wrote a piece about all this in Jacobin that you should read, got a copy of the module, which he generously shared with me. You can read it here.

You should read Burgis’s piece but especially the copy of the module students were supposed to work through. The object, of course, was to convince the students, after reading and writing about morality and their own actions and values, that their illegal protests were immoral and wrong.  But as you see above, these protesters are already convinced that they were right, regardless of how much deep thought they’d devoted to their actions, and so these questions are a waste of time. NYU’s module includes, for example, a list of 42 “personal values” that you’re supposed to rank in order of importance. Here are the first ten:

Then there are a series of essays designed to promote self-reflection that leads to contrition. Here’s one:

Part 2: Essay about Sanctioned Action

In this essay, discuss the following questions using your responses from above to provide thorough reflection:

1. What was going on in your life leading up to and at the time of the sanctioned action? What influenced your decisions with regard to the sanctioned action?

2. Which of your values influenced your involvement in the situation that resulted in the sanctioned action, and which values were not considered in this situation? How so?

3. Why did you make the decisions you made regarding the action that lead to this sanction?

4. What were the outcomes of the situation and who was affected by those outcomes?

5. What have you learned (in general and about yourself) since the time of the situation that resulted in the sanctioned action?

Now think about how protesters are going to answer those questions. Here’s one more (it’s a LONG module):

9. What decision would a “Person of Character” make?

In fitting with a non-consequentialist perspective, Nash discusses asking what you would do if you were acting in character – meaning if you were acting in a manner to further your own personal, moral story that you are “attempting to live‟” (p. 15). Nash also suggests stepping into the shoes of a person who you respect and consider to be an ethical person. Identify a few of these people. The Persons of Character may be parents, professors, religious leaders, a co-worker or boss, etc. Look at the ethical dilemma from the perspective of one or two of these Moral Exemplars. What decision would these people make? Are these decisions a part of your set of options? If not, add them to the list.

You can image which “people of character” would be chosen!

The whole point is that this dumb series of modules is highly unlikely to change the minds of any protesters, particularly those who were so determined to act that they went beyond free, unsanction speech to violate university principles.  The module is not an “educational” experience in which students get to reflect on both sides of an issue. Rather, it’s designed to make students come to a predetermined conclusion—that their actions were wrong.

Singal also concludes that this exercise is fatuous, but favors leniency towards protesters, in the form of a warning for a first violation and punishment after subsequent ones. I agree with that, except that many of the protesters—like Hui mentioned above—were involved in multiple disruptions but were never given any initial warnings (Hui did participate in the essay exercise, which I suppose counts as a warning).

This stuck out to me as neatly exemplifying a certain very buzzword-heavy, bureaucracy-friendly approach to serious issues like ethics and social justice. My preference, at the end of the day, is toward leniency for nonviolent student protesters. If that means they have to fill out some idiotic form, fine. But why not do what Columbia did to some of the student protesters up there, and simply ask them to sign a document agreeing that henceforth, they will follow the student conduct guidelines? Then if they violate them again, no one can say they weren’t warned or didn’t have every opportunity to follow the rules.

This approach, on the other hand. . . it’s just debasing. It perverts the whole idea of moral inquiry and self-examination. It feels like what you get when the administrative class becomes too powerful within education.

Singal is right. Let students engage in civil disobedience if they feel strongly, and then impose the proper sanctions on them for doing so. (Until the war protests this year, accepting one’s punishment was an integral part of civil disobedience.)  But don’t try forcible education to change their views. That violates the entire purpose of a university, which is fostering free inquiry.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 2, 2024 • 8:15 am

John Avise is back with his third installment of the birds of Spain and Portugal (part 1 is here and part 2 is here). John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Portugal and Spain Birds, Part 3 

This week’s post is the third and final of a mini-series on birds I photographed while on a business (i.e., seminar) trip to Portugal and southern Spain in 2010.

Red Kite (Milvus milvus):

Red-legged Partridge (Alectoris rufa):

Red-rumped Swallow (Cecropis daurica):

Eurasian Scops Owl (Otus scops):

European Serin (Serinus serinus):

Eurasian Spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia):

Eurasian Spoonbill flying:

Spotless Starlings (Sturnus unicolor):

Spotted Flycatcher (Muscicapa striata):

European Stonechat (Saxicola rubicola) male:

White Stork (Ciconia ciconia):

Common Swift (Apus apus):

Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 2, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, June 2, 2024, and National Rotisserie Chicken Day. The best bargains in roasted pullets come from Costco, which have cost only five bucks for the past 20 years. And they’re three-pound giants that will provide at least four meals. Here’s a video about their chickens:

 

It’s also American Indian Citizenship Day, National Cancer Survivors Day, I Love My Dentist Day, National Frozen Yogurt Day, National Rocky Road Day, Decoration Day, honoring Canadian veterans, and International Sex Workers Day

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As far as I can see, President Biden simply made up an offer that he said Israel had extended to Hamas for ending the war, and then urged Hamas to accept it. But there’s no evidence Israel made such an offer, and Netanyahu has implicitly denied it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel threw up a hurdle on Saturday to President Biden’s declaration a day earlier that it was “time for this war to end,” reiterating that Israel would not agree to a permanent cease-fire in Gaza before the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities.

President Biden, in an unusually detailed address at the White House on Friday, described what he said was a new Israeli proposal for a three-stage road map to a permanent cease-fire. But Israel remains deeply divided over the shape of any possible truce agreement — particularly whether to commit to an end to the war against Hamas.

As outlined by Mr. Biden, the proposal did not mention who would rule the Gaza Strip after the war. Unless other arrangements are reached, that could leave Hamas de facto in charge of the territory, which the Palestinian armed group would consider a major strategic victory after nearly eight months of an Israeli military offensive.

On Saturday, Mr. Netanyahu did not explicitly endorse or reject the proposal as outlined by Mr. Biden, which broadly conformed to previous Israeli truce plans. But the timing of his remarks, first thing the following morning, seemed to put the brakes on Mr. Biden’s hopes for a speedy resolution to the war.

“Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in the statement released on Saturday morning.

Mr. Netanyahu has promised his public “absolute victory” against Hamas in Gaza, but its leaders have largely managed to evade Israeli attempts to take them out. He has pledged to bring home the remaining 125 living and dead hostages, but would most likely have to accede to Hamas’s demand for a permanent truce to do so. And if he did agree to such a deal, his far-right coalition allies could pull out, threatening his hold on power.

What’s clear is that the Israeli public wants Hamas destroyed as the first priority, with hostage recovery an important but not overweening on.  And Biden really has to stop making stuff up in his attempt to get reelected stop the war, leaving Hamas the winner.

*In February I reported that a stingray in a North Carolina aquarium had been pronounced pregnant, despite the fact that there was no male around to impregnate her (see this AP story). It was either parthenogenesis (offspring without fertilization, or a miracle.) But now we know that, after considerable waffling and the failure of Charlotte the Stingray to produce offspring after twice the gestation period, it was all a hoax. (h/t Norman, Robert).

There will be no “virgin birth” or “sharkrays.” Charlotte, the stingray that showed signs of pregnancy earlier this year, is not pregnant, according to the owners of the aquarium where she resides.

Brenda Ramer, the owner of Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO in Hendersonville, N.C., told an Asheville TV station that Charlotte has a reproductive disease that “negatively impacted her reproductive system.”

A Facebook post by the aquarium did not mention Charlotte’s purported pregnancy but called the findings “truly a sad and unexpected medical development.”

Reproductive disease is common in older female rays in captivity and is already a topic of interest for aquatic vets and scientists.

The aquarium is still weaselly, though (from the second link):

Brenda Ramer, the owner of Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO on Main Street in Hendersonville confirmed the news to News 13 exclusively after the aquarium posted information on its Facebook page that Charlotte had a reproductive disease that “negatively impacted her reproductive system.” The post stopped short of stating Charlotte wasn’t pregnant.

The story has created a bit of a national frenzy following Charlotte since February when the aquarium, using ultrasound images, reported Charlotte had become pregnant on her own without a male stingray swimming around with her.

“The labs show she has a reproductive disease,” said Ramer. “That’s all it’s called is a reproductive disease and that’s the tricky part. If you just look up reproductive disease you’ll start getting, there were papers written in 2008, 2013. There are a couple of papers out there in regard to it.”

Ramer said she’s trying to get the information out to a level people can understand around possibly what happened that ended Charlotte’s pregnancy.

Ramer said she has known Charlotte wasn’t pregnant since last Friday. She said her vets have given her a diagnosis of “diapause” as to why perhaps Charlotte’s reported pregnancy ended.

Righto: no babies produced after six months when the gestation period is three months. These people are not honest, and I’m worried that the place doesn’t have the resources to treat this poor ray.

*Most Israeli hostages that have been released have remained silent, through choice or fear of damaging hostages still in captivity, but enough has now slipped out to let us know that, as expectred, they haven’t been treated kindly. One of them, Israeli Moran Stella Yanai, tells her story in the Washington Post. The only saving grace is that she wasn’t sexually abused, but she tells of other women hostages that were, and beyond that the treatment was execrable. Pretending to be Arab, she had been caught and released twice on October 7, but the third time she was taken back to Gaza.

She then climbed a thin tree, hoping to find a hiding place, but fell and fractured her ankle in two places. Limping and exhausted, she said she fell into the hands of a larger and more organized pack of militants — 13 in total — who seized her and did not let go. They ripped off seven of her rings, her body chain, her bracelets, and most of her other jewelry, she recalled, and packed her into one of their stolen Israeli getaway cars.

From that moment, and throughout her captivity, she said, she was keenly aware of her body and its vulnerability.

The men laid her down across their laps, like a hunted animal, she thought. They beat her on the short ride to Gaza, she said. She remembers trying to close her eyes, but the group’s leader pulled her hair and shouted at her to keep them open. He forced her to watch the gunmen as they glared at her and, as the rocky desert road gave way to city blocks, to see the revelers who lined the streets, cheering and jeering. She said some tried to strike her on the head as the men transferred her from the car to a hospital.

“Welcome to Gaza,” the group’s leader told her.

“They felt like they had won a prize,” Moran recalled. “It was the biggest party I’ve ever seen.”

Moran recounted being moved from house to house over the next seven weeks, with new guards each time. She lived in fear of them, she said, but also depended on them for survival.

“They didn’t rape me, they didn’t touch me,” she said.

What haunts her most are the firsthand accounts of rape from other female hostages, whispered to her in captivity. She holds their secrets, not divulging names to protect their privacy, and to not further endanger their lives.

Their stories “broke me a little bit,” she said. “But they also gave me so much strength to fight even harder for my brothers and sisters, to get them home.”

Wherever she was held, the rules were the same, she said. Begging, speaking audibly, crying, or expressing any kind of emotion was forbidden — unless ordered otherwise. In one hideout, she described her captors forcing her to perform a scene they had choreographed. Over and over, she was made to rest her face between her hands, to pout like “a lost little girl,” and use a soft, high-pitched voice when asking for food or water.

People haven’t exactly forgotten about the hostages, rather (except for Israelis) they seem to have downgraded the immorality of taking civilians and subjecting them to mental and physical torture for months.  They should ALL be returned (my depressing theory is that many are dead), and there should be NO exchange for jailed Palestinian terrorists.

*From Peggy Noonan’s provocatively titled op-ed in the WSJ, “We are starting to enjoy hatred.”

When was the last time you saw anyone try to address the other side with respect and understanding, and venture something like, “I think you’re seeing it this way, but I want to explain why I see it so differently, and that way we might both understand each other and proceed with respect.” Instead we accuse each other and put each other down and it doesn’t feel merry and high-spirited, like political business as usual, it feels cold.

Both sides have an equal but different sense of superiority. Both sides enjoy looking down on the other.

The left leans toward condemnation. It is going from “Trump is a criminal” to “Trump supporters are criminal.” They understand things the other dopes don’t. Class is involved. I have quoted the friend who said recently, with no bitterness, that Democrats see Trump voters as toothless, smelly Walmart shoppers. The left does look down, sometimes from a privileged economic position, which makes it the more shameful.

Trump supporters lean toward manipulation. They charge the other side are bad human beings—selfish elites who have no feeling for, no affiliation with, the common man. They’re coastal elites who look down on flyover states as they sip martinis in first class. Some Trump voters say his foes oppose him to go to “Georgetown cocktail parties” or similar gatherings in New York and Los Angeles. This started about a quarter-century ago but sped up with Donald Trump, and I thought at the time: Are cocktail parties still going on? I knew they existed in the 1930s and 1940s, because they were featured in the old movies I watched on television as a child. Nick and Nora Charles threw them! In my town the elites who oppose Mr. Trump don’t have cocktail parties, they doggedly attend fundraisers for hospitals and libraries and go to professional events. The most establishment Trump foes are among the hardest-working people in America. They are earnest. They run the institutions you’ll rely on if you have a heart attack on the sidewalk or a story that needs exposing or a court case that needs taking. And they drink water. At least cocktail parties make them sound glamorous and carefree.

But it really is something that we’re so estranged we know nothing of the other side’s lives, and because we know nothing even our insults are lame and need updating.

Her theory, which is hers:

But some enjoy their hatred—this is the new part, and I think pretty widespread—because it helps them avoid seeing that they are involved in a tragedy.

The tragedy is that one of two old men, neither of them great, neither of them distinguished in terms of character or intellect, who are each in his way an embarrassment, and whom two-thirds of voters do not want as presidential candidates, will be chosen, in this crucial historical moment in which the stakes could not be higher, to lead the most powerful nation on earth.

. . .This is a tragedy—that this is what we’ve got, these are our choices.

When you’ve got a major hate on, you don’t have to notice.

This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me; people like me like to hate Trump because we don’t notice that we don’t have a good electoral choice? I don’t think so; I majorlated hated Trump when he ran against Hillary Clinton, and there was more of a clear-cut choice. But Noonan is right: the division in our country is palpable and horrible. But how can I sit down with a Trump supporter and reason? Neither of us is going to give an inch.

*One of the San Blas islands off Panama, Cardi Sugtupu (also called Gardo Sugdub), is about to be evacuated due to rising sea levels. It’s 1.2 km form the mainland, and here’s a photo from Wikipedia:

Cotopaxi5897, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On a tiny island off Panama’s Caribbean coast, about 300 families are packing their belongings in preparation for a dramatic change. Generations of Gunas who have grown up on Gardi Sugdub in a life dedicated to the sea and tourism will trade that next week for the mainland’s solid ground.

They go voluntarily — sort of.

The Gunas of Gardi Sugdub are the first of 63 communities along Panama’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts that government officials and scientists expect to be forced to relocate by rising sea levels in the coming decades.

On a recent day, the island’s Indigenous residents rowed or sputtered off with outboard motors to fish. Children, some in uniforms and others in the colorful local textiles called “molas,” chattered as they hustled through the warren of narrow dirt streets on their way to school.

“We’re a little sad, because we’re going to leave behind the homes we’ve known all our lives, the relationship with the sea, where we fish, where we bathe and where the tourists come, but the sea is sinking the island little by little,” said Nadín Morales, 24, who prepared to move with her mother, uncle and boyfriend.

Gardi Sugdub is one of about 50 populated islands in the archipelago of the Guna Yala territory. It is only about 400 yards (366 meters) long and 150 yards (137 meters) wide. From above, it’s roughly a prickly oval surrounded by dozens of short docks where residents tie up their boats.

Every year, especially when the strong winds whip up the sea in November and December, water fills the streets and enters the homes. Climate change isn’t only leading to a rise in sea levels, but it’s also warming oceans and thereby powering stronger storms.

The Gunas have tried to reinforce the island’s edge with rocks, pilings and coral, but seawater keeps coming.

“Lately, I’ve seen that climate change has had a major impact,” Morales said. “Now the tide comes to a level it didn’t before, and the heat is unbearable.”

‘One thing is for sure: more of these islands, and then those elsewhere, like the Maldives, will abandoned because of rising sea levels. Worry about your grandchildren. It looks as if humanity will be destroyed not by the Sun burning up Earth, but humans making that happen via greenhouse gases.

Here’s a video of the island and its indigenous inhabitants. There’s a shot of how it looked 40 years ago, and there was a lot of land then.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili caught a mouse. Malgorzata explains the dialogue:

Andrzej found a dead mouse on the verandah and he blamed Hili (correctly) which she doesn’t really understand because it was a gift to us from her. Though she knows that we do not like such gifts

Hili: I know.
A: What do you know?
Hili: THat you have a grudge against me for the mouse on the verandah.
In Polish:
Hili: Wiem.
Ja: Co wiesz?
Hili: Że masz pretensje o tę mysz na werandzie.

And a photo of the loving Szaron:

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From Fat Cat Art:

From Science Humor:

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From Merilee; he fought the law, and the law won (sound up):

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From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:

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I’m not into this game (I don’t even know how to play it), but I’ll defer to Matthew: