Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Yep, it’s time for another edition of the Curmudgeon Gazette: a list of words and phrases that rankle me. As usual, most of them come from HuffPost, and, as usual, people will tell me that some of these phrases are fine. “Language evolves,” say the Excusers. Great, but I still don’t like these phrases.
On this cold but sunny Chicago afternoon, I have three for you. (Click on screenshots to see article.)
1.) “I’m all about X.” This one really burns my onions (see the subtitle below). First of all, nobody is all about anything—every human is multifaceted and has multiple interests and concerns. The phrase is simply gross exaggeration, and could easily be replaced by phrases (as in the sub-headline below) like, “This month, we focus on. . . ” or some equivalent.
You will never hear this phrase pass my lips.
2.) “All the feels”. I’m pretty sure that I’ve used this one before, but I keep seeing it, and it never ceases to irritate me, as in the HuffPost article below:
The word is “FEELINGS”, chowderheads! And even that is hyperbole. No movie moments give you the totality of human emotions, which run the gamut from despair to horror to complacency, to anxiety, to elation—and many more. Can’t these peabrains just say “13 Emotional Movie Moments”? My “feel” when I read headlines like this one is disgust.
3.) “The thing is. . . is that. . ” Now this one baffles me. Why can you just say “The thing is X” instead of “The thing is. . . is X”? For example, “The thing is, is that he’s been a real jerk to me for a long time” can be replaced by “The thing is that he’s been a real jerk for me for a long time.” Better yet, deep-six “the thing is” part, which adds little, or replace it with “The important thing is.”
Here’s a discussion from the website Language Rules:
From that site:
It may be much more clear to see when sentences are rearranged. One of the above examples [JAC: the grammatically correct sentence”How correct this is is clear to see”] can be arranged as follows:
How correct this is is clear to see.
or
It is clear to see how correct this is.
In this instance, we can immediately tell that “how correct this is” in this case is a complete noun phrase able to stand on its own. When we try to reconstruct an example of an incorrect sentence using “The thing is is…” in exactly the same way, we get this:
The thing is is that this is incorrect.
or
It is that this is incorrect the thing is.
Most folks should be able to tell that the second sentence is totally jacked, which immediately tells us that the first sentence, merely a rearrangement of the words, must be incorrect as well, even though it sounds slightly better.
You know the drill: it’s time to be petulant and put your bête noire phrases below.
I just talked to a friend, and we shared our feelings about the new Biden administration. We were both relieved and hopeful, but when I expressed some of the same worries that Bari Weiss does in her new Substack column (below), my friend admonished me: “Oh, don’t look for needs in haystacks, enjoy the relief!” I responded that I was a Jew, and therefore could be elated for one hour at most—the duration of the Inauguration. After that, the worries set in again. I think this is a legacy from our history: a pogrom was always around the corner. If one was a genetic determinist, one could argue that a form of natural selection was at play: the nervous and anxious Jews who were the ones who survived.
At any rate, I told my friend that the best one can do as a “glass-half-full” Jew is complacency, not unalloyed happiness.
Perhaps that’s also true for Ms. Weiss, also Jewish but, unlike me, religiously so. She’s worried about the Biden administration, or, rather, that people are ignoring potential problems with the administration down the line. Click on the screenshot to read about Weiss’s angst. Her site will be free for the time being, but do consider subscribing. I am waiting a few weeks to decide. This week, though, it’s pretty good. For one thing, she limns the content of her column, which emphasizes political hypocrisy and inconsistency:
I’ll be focusing on topics where the mainstream media gets . . . confused. Remember this summer, when it decided that anyone who did not want to defund the police was considered a right-winger? Or that to use national guardsmen to keep the peace was considered unthinkable on June 6, but by January 6 was bipartisan national policy? Or that Big Tech’s power was terrifying and evil, until it was used to put down Parler? Or that anyone who violated the lockdowns denied science, unless they were marching for the right political cause?
After the ritual (and necessary) statement that Weiss detested Trump and voted for Biden, she says a few words about her fractious experiences at the New York Times:
If I were still at a newspaper, I’d be compelled to write something about the inauguration — a riff about how it’s morning again (again) in America; the powerful symbolism of Eugene Goodman, the heroic police officer who faced down the rioters, escorting the vice president; Lil Wayne’s pardon.
But I am no longer at a newspaper. That’s because my politics — center-left on some issues, center-right on others, a centrism that most Americans still occupy — were unwelcome. I see the ideological capture and institutional transformation that occurred at The Times as a sign of what’s to come these next four years. Which leads me to the purpose of my newsletter and what I hope to cover in the Biden era.
I voted for Joe Biden. I think that he is past his prime. I also think he is an eminently decent and kind man. That fact that his decency seems positively refreshing is a tragic sign of where we are. But it does. And I welcome it.
I’ve said it many times, but I will say it here again: Trump was a malignant narcissist. Seeing that did not require a psychology degree. He coarsened everything and everyone he touched. He trashed all of our guardrails. He hastened our undoing.
. . . The truth is that Joe Biden is a fig leaf. He is a fig leaf for the deep problems that roil our country, for the totalizing ideologies spreading through the nation like wildfire, and for the dramatic political realignment that we are living through.
Weiss, properly, sees problems on both the Right and Left: the polarization that leads to the unrealistic expectations we’ve heaped on Biden, the Woke on the Left and the bigotry and fascism on the Right, with authoritarianism at both poles.
And so Weiss proposes “five litmus tests for the Biden era”. I’ll just give her headers and a few of her words (and my take) on each, as you should read her column (and consider subscribing).
Will the Biden administration make the case that America is good?
That’s not sarcastic or rhetorical. And it’s not a question about what’s in Joseph R. Biden’s heart.
I mean: Will his administration embrace the new re-understanding of America that shot through the streets this summer and issues forth daily from the mouths of our elites? That view goes like this: America was born for the purpose of upholding white supremacy and it remains irredeemably racist. Our founders were not primarily political geniuses but slaveholders who wanted to find a way to hoard their property. And while the rioters may have gotten a little out of hand, they weren’t wrong to target statues of men like Lincoln. . .
Yes, Biden will embrace that woke re-understanding. It’s already doing so. I didn’t realize that the power of the Woke rests in their ability to demonize others on the Left by calling them racists or bigots.
Will neo-racism be normalized?
A few months ago I spoke to a Trump administration official who confirmed that the president wouldn’t know what Critical Race Theory was if it smacked him in the face. Nevertheless, in September of 2020, Trump passed an executive order banning training for federal agencies and federal contractors that relies on this ideology. . . .
Biden just reversed this order, so CRT can be taught to our kids again. Not a good move, and another Biden order that worries me. It is not a conciliatory move, but a divisive one. Every white kid in America will now be taught that he/she/etc. carries a burden of guilt and is a racist whether they know it or not.
Will cancel culture become the culture?
Cancelling has become a normal part of American life. We are no longer surprised when someone is fired for a bad tweet, or when a publisher drops an author for an unpopular view, or when teenagers spy on one another like little Stasi and adults applaud.
But all of that could be child’s play compared to what will come from the strong alliance between the Democratic Party and the press, which are advocating that major tech companies crack down on “hate,” or “disinformation,” which has quickly become a synonym for “information I don’t like.”
Yes, expect more censorship and even more cancellation of those with the Wrong Opinons.
Can you make a living in the wealthiest country in the world?
One in five small American businesses will not make it through this pandemic. Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports seems to care more about that number more than anyone in Congress.
We live in the wealthiest country in the world, yet the three jobs with the most projected growth all earn less than $28,000 a year. They are home health and personal care aides at $25,280; fast-food and counter workers at $22,740; and restaurant cooks at $27,790, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. . .
Economics is beyond my bailiwick, so I’ll just wait and see.
This is what I worry most about: the continuing division in America that Biden has promised to heal. But I think if you’ve kept your eyes and ears open over the last few years, you’ll know that while Biden’s words sound good and soothing, they’re malarkey. How will Biden bring together Democrats and Republicans, each party hating the other and thinking it’s the embodiment of Satan?
Weiss:
Is there a way to end our ongoing uncivil war?
When the 46th president said at the inauguration that “disagreement must not lead to disunion,” and that “we must end this uncivil war,” I nodded along. Then I thought about the fact that serious people are calling for enemies’ lists and the banning of Fox News, and I wondered how, really, we could put an end to our current uncivil war.
Half of Americans say that other Americans — not poverty; not China — pose the biggest threat to the country.
During one of the presidential debates, Marianne Williamson set off a thousand memes when she said: “If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in the country, then I’m afraid Democrats are going to see some very dark days.” People laughed. But she got it mostly right.
If you think stability and normalcy are about to return to America, ask yourself if you said that there was no way in hell that Donald Trump could win the White House.
That last sentence should make you stop and think.
There’s also a podcast interview in which Megyn Kelly, conservative former broadcaster for Fox News (and then NBC News) interviews Weiss. I listened to 40 minutes of the 100-minute interview, and it wasn’t bad—so long as Weiss was talking. I found Kelly’s take too conservative and predictable, and I still remember her cringeworthy statements at Fox.
I suspect I’ll wind up subscribing to either Weiss or Sullivan (I already subscribe to him) but not both. In the meantime, I’ll read their weekly columns.
There’s a new paper in Science Advances by a group of Japanese researchers who investigated the attraction of cats to catnip and silver vine. This involved isolating the compounds that attracts cats, showing that they activate the pleasure centers of cats (duh!), and, most important, proposing and testing an adaptive hypothesis for why cats rub all over catnip (Nepeta cataria, in the mint family) as well as on a related cat-drug plant, silver vine (Actinidia polygama, in a different family).
Their theory, which is theirs, is that the these compounds, which plants have evolved to repel insects (aphids), do a similar job for the cats, but act for them as a mosquito repellant. The paper is below, and free, but let me add that I don’t think their answer, while it might be correct, is strongly convincing—for reasons I’ll discuss.
Click on the screenshot to access the article. You can also get the pdf here, find the full reference is at the bottom, and see a News & Views about the paper in Science, “Why cats are crazy for catnip,” written by Sofial Moutinho, which doesn’t mention any problems with the paper and also omits a fascinating line of speculation.
First, some biogeography and history for cat owners. Catnip, while native to Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, has been planted widely throughout the world, and is the drug of choice for American and European cats. In contrast, silver vine is native to both Japan and China, and in Asia has supplanted catnip as the weed to give your moggy. Some cats who respond to one species won’t respond to the other, and for each species some cats do not show the typical euphoric rubbing and “getting stoned” reaction. In catnip, this is due to genetic variation among cats. More on that later.
With both plants the cat’s attraction is transitory. If you’ve given nip to your cats, you’ll know that they roll around and get stoned for a few minutes, but then recover and subsequently ignore the weed. This goes along with the authors’ hypothesis below (once you’ve put repellent on your fur, your job is done). Further, the “big cats” like lions, lynx, leopards, and bobcats also show a catnip response, and that has to be incorporated into any hypothesis about adaptation.
There’s a bit of history in the paper that drove me to further investigation. The authors say this:
The first reports of the feline behavioral response to silver vine and catnip were described by a Japanese botanist in 1704 and by a British botanist in 1759, respectively. The behavioral response to silver vine has been captured in Japanese culture: An Ukiyo-e (a type of traditional painting) drawn in 1859 depicts a folk story concerning a battle between cats and mice, wherein mice use silver vine as a weapon to intoxicate cats
Well I simply had to find that 1859 painting, but it wasn’t easy. Finally I found it in a tweet by Tom Price. Behold: “Cats Tempted by a Delicious Smell” by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Look at those nefarious samurai mice!
Here’s a short Science video showing both housecats and big cats attracted to filter paper imbued with the isolated attractant, while d*gs ignore it (part of the experiment).
The experiment consisted of several distinct parts.
Isolation and testing of the attractant compounds. The authors chemically fractionated extracts of catnip and silver vine, isolating various compounds and testing them as cat attractants by putting the compounds on filter paper and comparing whether cats were drawn to the experimental papers versus control papers soaked in hexane. They found that the active ingredient in silver vine, which induced head and face rubbing in domestic and feral housecats, was nepetalactol. The attractant in catnip was a related compound, nepetalactone. These are part of the plants’ defensive systems against insects, especially aphids, so they evolved to protect plants from being chewed and sucked. Here are the two compounds so you can see their chemical similarity (they’re both part of a family called iridoids):
Here’s a sample photo and graph of the tests (the paper has lots of cool photos). Fraction 3 has the nepetalactol, of course:
(From paper): (B) An image of behavioral assay using cats to find bioactive fractions in purification steps (see movie S1). (C) Duration of face rubbing and rolling over toward fractions 3 and 4 in four cats.
The authors then synthesized these compounds so they’d have them in pure form for further tests. The tests:
Attraction of the plants to various cat species. As we know, house cats are polymorphic for the catnip and silver vine reactions, and that’s what the authors found with silver vine: only about two-thirds of both lab cats and feral cats were “postitive responders”. Because there was more nepetalactol than nepetalactone in plants, and because the silver vine compound was more potent than the catnip compound, most further tests used nepetalactol and its source plant, silver vine.
When filter paper soaked in this compound was given to captive leopards, jaguars, and lynx, all of them showed the face-rubbing and rolling seen in house cats. Dogs showed no reaction because they are no fun.
Activation of the “pleasure” system by nepetalactol. As the authors note, the μ-opioid system, which includes release of endorphins, “controls rewarding and euphoric effects in humans.” Sure enough, in house cats the beta-endorphins were significantly elevated in cats after sniffing nepetalactone—but not control papers. And a chemical that blocks the μ-opioid system, naloxone, significantly reduced the rubbing and rolling response. The authors conclude that the μ-opioid system is involved in the response to silver vines. In other words, the cats probably experience pleasure when they sniff the stuff. (Taste, by the way, doesn’t seem to play a role here; it’s all done through the nose.)
Mosquito repelling activity of nepetalactol. The compound was shown to be highly repellent to a local mosquito, Aedes albopictus, consistent with previous reports. The authors have in fact patented a mosquito repellent, something reported in Moutinho’s News & Views summary. It’s interesting to contemplate using a mosquito repellent that also attracts cats—a double benefit!
The authors then hypothesized that when cats rub silver vine on their heads and bodies, it acts to repel mosquitoes. They first tested whether cats actually got nepetalactol on their fur when rubbing impregnated filter papers. Unfortunately, they could not detect the compound on cats who had rubbed. So they did a bio-assay: they rubbed filter paper on the faces of cats who had rubbed against impregnated filter paper, and then tested the papers on other cats. Sure enough, the face-wiped papers showed a significantly higher attraction for the secondary cats than did the controls. The statistical significance was not high, though, with probabilities equal to 0.034 and 0.025—pretty close to the “standard cut off” level of significance, 0.05.
Finally, the crucial experiment: do cats who have had their heads treated with pure nepetalactol actually repel mosquitoes? The researchers rubbed the compound onto cat’s heads, and had a control where the heads were rubbed with solvents. They then anesthetized the cats and stuck their heads into cages containing A. albopictus mosquitoes, seeing how many skeeters landed on the cats’ heads. They also did the experiment with cats who had rubbed their heads on silver vine leaves.
In both cases the cats who had the compound on their heads showed significantly fewer mosquitoes landing on them than on the control cats (again, the results, while statistically significant, aren’t overwhelmingly so, with p values of 0.033 and 0.019 respectively). The authors conclude that “the characteristic rubbing and rolling response functions to transfer plant chemicals that provide mosquito repellency to cats.”
The upshot—and some issues:
The authors have a strong adaptationist bent in the paper, looking for the adaptive significance of the catnip reaction. And yes, they’ve shown a possible one, but there are lots of gaps in their story.
1.) Does resistance to this once geographically limited species of mosquito (now more widespread after human conveyance) confer higher fitness on the cats? There’s no evidence for this. The authors hypothesize that other mosquitoes that might be repelled carry diseases like yellow fever, dengue, and Zike viruses, but are these serious diseases of wild cats, including leopards and lynx? And are these other species of mosquitoes repelled by these iridoids? (Don’t forget, they didn’t test catnip, just silver vine, though I suspect they’d get similar results with nepetalactone from catnip.) Remember too that northern cats like lynx also show the response, but do not contract tropical diseases like dengue and yellow fever.
An alternative hypothesis floated by the authors is that cats, when stalking prey, have to remain motionless for long periods, and that might be hard if mosquitoes are biting you. If you’ve rolled on silver vine and catnip, you might be less plagued by mosquitoes, less likely to move, and thus less likely to be detected by prey. As the authors note, “Face rubbing against plant sources of the repellent will help to protect the face and head of the animal, as the mouth, eyelids, ears, and nose of felines have relatively little fur and are therefore easy targets for mosquitoes.” But they haven’t shown that the stalking behavior of treated and untreated cats differs. This would be fairly easy to do—or at least possible—with house cats and tethered rodents (you don’t want to kill the prey, of course).
So while the authors assert “we have uncovered an adaptive benefit of the behavioral response in cats”, they have uncovered a possible adaptive benefit, but haven’t shown any decisive reproductive advantage of cats who roll on silver vine or catnip.
2.) Do the wild cats who show catnip responses, like the ancestor of the housecat, and the jaguar, leopard, and lynx, coexist or coexisted in the past with silver vine or catnip? The fact that the big cats tested show rolling and rubbing implies that they either independently evolved that response or inherited it from a common ancestor. But for the response to be maintained over the millions of years since cat species diverged from that ancestor, a selective advantage should have been there pretty consistently. The authors don’t consider the problem of the geographic coexistence of these cat species, their ancestor, and of the two plants that evoke a response. That at least should have been mentioned.
3.) What about the polymorphism in house cats? Some house cats show the “nip response” to silver vine and catnip, while others don’t. This variation is known to be genetic, at least for catnip. How variable is it in other cats like lynx? And why have house cats lost a lot of their response?
One possible answer is that house cats no longer either coexist with wild catnip or are so domesticated that the proposed advantages of catnip no longer impose a selection pressure on cats. In other words, the variable response of house cats to catnip could be a “vestigial behavior.” We know that traits that were once useful but are no longer so tend to become more variable and even disappear. This variability is seen, for instance, in human wisdom teeth, considered a superfluous feature and also variable among people (some have them, others don’t, and their eruption is variable, which is why they are often pulled.)
And a fascinating topic the authors neglect: What about the adaptive significance of the pleasure response?
Both the authors and Moutinho in her N&V piece have a strange take on the fact that cats apparently get pleasure from catnip. The authors hypothesize this:
As many felids rely on stealth to stalk and ambush their prey, requiring them to remain cryptic and often unmoving, a repellent that reduces their susceptibility to both the irritation of biting mosquitoes and the diseases that these insect vectors carry is likely to provide a strong selective advantage. Stimulation of the μ-opioid system might further help by providing analgesia to reduce irritation where biting arthropods have not been repelled.
And Moutinho says this:
Most scientists and pet owners assumed the only reason that cats roll around in catnip was for the euphoric experience, Miyazaki says. “Our findings suggest instead that rolling is rather a functional behavior.”
But a “functional behavior” can also go hand in hand with the evolution of “a euphoric experience.” They are not alternative explanations, but complementary ones.
I wish the authors, and Moutinho, had gone down a fascinating byway here: the supposition that cats can evolve to feel pleasure from rubbing on catnip, for feeling pleasure constitutes a powerful impetus for them to rub.” That is, the writers don’t seem to have pondered that the pleasure need not be inherent in the behavior at the very beginning of its evolution, but could have itself evolved to facilitate the behavior.
This resembles the pleasure of the orgasm: it almost certainly evolved as a way to get us to want to copulate, so there’s powerful selective pressure on our pleasure systems to feel fantastic when we copulate. Anything that makes us want to pass on our genes will be selected for, including the great pleasure of orgasms.
Evolution can act not just on behaviors, but on the sensations attendant to them. We like sweets because sugar was good for us in our ancestral habitats, and so our taste system evolved to evoke pleasure when eating sugar. As I always says, “to a vulture, rotten meat probably tastes as good as ice cream sodas do to us.” It’s important to realize that sensations and feelings, good and bad, aren’t necessarily inherent in our physiology and neurology, but are themselves evolved. (Pain receptors, too, alert us to possible danger to our bodies.)
I should add that using plant compounds to repel insects and other arthropods is not a behavior unique to cats. Here are some examples cited by the authors (I love the cigarette-butt example and have written about it before):
There are other examples that nonhuman animals may exploit some chemicals emitted from other species for protection against insect pests: boat-tailed grackles (Quiscalus major) and white-nosed coatis (Nasua narica) rub fruits of Citrus spp. against themselves, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) use sleeping platforms created from specific trees as a source of repellents , house sparrows (Passer domesticus) and house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) living in urban habitats bring cigarette butts to the nest, and capuchin monkeys (Cebus olivaceus) anoint themselves with millipedes (Orthoporus dorsovittatus).
Finally here’s a photo of Jango, whose staff is reader Divy and her husband Ivan, trying to get to the jar of Cosmic Catnip put on the top shelf. Jango is a “positive reactor.”
Please send me in your good wildlife/street/people photos. Thanks!
Today’s beautiful photos come from Joe Routon, who photographed at a Buddhist monastery. His captions are indented, and click on the photos to enlarge them.
Here are a few photos that I made on a trip to a Buddhist monastery in Myanmar a few years ago. The country has many monasteries and shrines, some of which are the most beautiful in Asia.
A growing number of children have been seeking refuge in monasteries as a result of conflict in Myanmar. Buddhist monks can be ordained as young as 8. Traditional guidelines state that a child must be “old enough to scare away crows.”
The Buddhist monastic school system in Myanmar dates back to the 11th century. All Buddhist boys in Myanmar are expected to spend some time, as little as a few weeks, in a monastery. In addition to reading, math, history, and other secular subjects, they learn the basics of the Buddhist faith and earn merit, a kind of spiritual credit that will benefit them and their families in this and future lives. Schooling in a monastery is the only education that many children in Myanmar ever get, especially rural and poor children. They also receive food, board, and health care.
While most young men remain at the monastery for only a short time before returning to the secular life, some become fully ordained monks. The 500,000 Buddhist monks in Myanmar wear saffron- or rust-colored robes.
Child and adult nuns, who live in convents, shave their heads and wear pink robes.
Monks wash themselves in the monastery pool before meditation.
Monks usually follow the traditional rule from the time of the Buddha and eat only one meal a day, before noon. Eating in silence is a necessity for monks. When you eat, your mouth is used for that purpose, and talking is a distraction and impractical. There is little or no snacking outside meals.
We’re almost through the “work” week: it’s already Friday, January 22, 2021, and National Southern Food Day, celebrating America’s finest regional cuisine. Here, for example is the archetypal dish: the “meat and three” (served always with sweet tea and usually cornbread). Here we have BBQ, black-eyed peas, collards, and mac-and-cheese (the last is always seen as a “vegetable” in the South), along with a corn muffin and sweet tea (also called the “table wine of the South”).
Although it’s still tough times, there’s something to smile about: Bernie Sanders’s informal Vermont attire at the Inauguration, which spawned a thousand memes and tweets. You’ll see some of them in the tweets at the bottom.
Many people quickly highlighted the 79-year-old independent Vermont senator’s look, and created endless memes, from Wednesday’s inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, which he said was more about keeping warm than fashion.
“You know in Vermont, we dress warm, we know something about the cold, and we’re not so concerned about good fashion, we want to keep warm. And that’s what I did today,” Sanders told CBS on Wednesday.
People were particularly enthralled with Sanders’ mittens, which were made by a Vermont elementary school teacher who has a side business making mittens out of recycled wool.
“I love it that he loves them, and that he wears them,” Jen Ellis, an elementary school teacher, told NECN-TV. “And I’m totally honored that he wore them today.”
Joe Biden has been busy signing 17 executive orders (most of which I like) and overturning unwise decisions of the Trump administration. I won’t reprise his efforts to combat the pandemic, including a federal mask mandate on public transportation (see here), and invoking the Defense Production Act to up the supply of vaccines (something Trump should have done) and other measures. You can see a summary of his executive orders here.
Over at the New York Times, Ezra Klein has a long piece on what Biden needs to do to avoid a disastrous Democratic defeat (loss of the Senate and perhaps even the House) in two years. He’s worried in particular about the Senate filibuster, which takes 60 people to stop:
President Biden’s agenda will live or die in the Senate. Odds are it will die, killed by the filibuster.
And referring to Biden’s “rescue plan” and bills for D.C. statehood and improved campaign financing regulation, Klein says this:
. . . none of these bills will pass a Senate in which the filibuster forces 60-vote supermajorities on routine legislation. And that clarifies the real question Democrats face.
At the City Journal, the much maligned Heather MacDonald has some words that, just because she’s a critic of the Left, shouldn’t be ignored. She criticizes Biden’s speech for actually being divisive, and foresees the return of Wokeness:
The diversity obsessives in the federal science bureaucracies waited out Donald Trump’s presidency. They will now redouble their efforts to treat a researcher’s race and sex as scientific qualifications in the awarding of federal research grants. Expect to see any mention of merit or excellence denounced as a form of bigotry, a response that the University of California and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, as well as an army of corporate diversity trainers, have already perfected.
The next four years will likely be one long anti-white-privilege struggle session. Any real effort to close racial achievement gaps, such as fighting the “acting white” ethic that prevents many inner-city children from trying hard in school, will be deferred and discredited. Biden is betting that white liberals, at least, will continue hanging their heads in penance for their hereditary crimes and trot off to their latest show trial. Given past behavior, he’s probably right.
What is going on with the impeachment? The House vote is done and dusted, but Nancy Pelosi is holding off on sending it to the Senate, where a trial could begin within a day after its receipt. Mitch “666” McConnell has suggested delaying the Senate trial until February so that Trump’s legal team can have time to prepare. Trump just hired a lawyer from South Carolina to represent him.
Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 410,336, large increase of about 4,200 deaths over yesterday’s figure. We may past half a million deaths in less than a month. The world death toll stands at 2,102,386, a big increase of about 14,900 deaths over yesterday’s total.
Stuff that happened on January 22 includes:
1901 – Edward VII is proclaimed King after the death of his mother, Queen Victoria.
1905 – Bloody Sunday in Saint Petersburg, beginning of the 1905 revolution.
1924 – Ramsay MacDonald becomes the first Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
1927 – Teddy Wakelam gives the first live radio commentary of a football match, between Arsenal F.C. and Sheffield United at Highbury.
Here’s a photo from Wikipedia showing “S67-50927 (November 1967): Lunar Module-1 being moved into position for mating with Spacecraft Lunar Module Adapter (SLA)-7 in the Kennedy Space Center’s Manned Spacecraft Operations Building.”
1970 – The Boeing 747, the world’s first “jumbo jet”, enters commercial service for launch customer Pan American Airways with its maiden voyage from John F. Kennedy International Airport to London Heathrow Airport.
1973 – In a bout for the world heavyweight boxing championship in Kingston, Jamaica, challenger George Foreman knocks down champion Joe Frazier six times in the first two rounds before the fight is stopped by referee Arthur Mercante.
Here’s a short video showing the full fight. Frazier took a real beating. I’m glad that boxing is no longer popular:
Here’s that commercial; remember it? It was a great one, playing off the year of introduction:
2006 – Evo Morales is inaugurated as President of Bolivia, becoming the country’s first indigenous president.
Notables born on this day include:
1552 – Walter Raleigh, English poet, soldier, courtier, and explorer (d. 1618)
1561 – Francis Bacon, English philosopher and politician, Attorney General for England and Wales (d. 1626)
1788 – Lord Byron, English poet and playwright (d. 1824)
1849 – August Strindberg, Swedish novelist, poet, and playwright (d. 1912)
1898 – Sergei Eisenstein, Russian director and screenwriter (d. 1948)
1931 – Sam Cooke, American singer-songwriter (d. 1964)
Cooke was shot to death under mysterious circumstances in a Los Angeles motel. He was only 33.
1938 – Peter Beard, Australian photographer and author (d. 2020)
Beard, the scion of wealth, spent many years in Africa taking photographs that put into books with handwritten annotations. He owned land in Kenya adjacent to where Karen Blixen once lived, and made it his African home. Here’s one of his pictures:
PETER BEARD (B. 1938) Lion Pride, 1976 unique gelatin silver print, printed c. 1990 signed, dated, titled ‘from Ndutu…Southern Serengeti’ and inscribed in ink (on the recto) image.
1959 – Linda Blair, American actress
Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on January 22 include:
1901 – Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (b. 1819)
1966 – Herbert Marshall, English actor (b. 1890)
1968 – Duke Kahanamoku, American swimmer and water polo player (b. 1890)
With the huge surfboards that were standard at the time, Duke (a five-time Olympic swimming medalist) helped popularize the sport of surfing. Here he is in 1921 with his huge redwood board:
1994 – Telly Savalas, American actor (b. 1924)
2000 – Craig Claiborne, American journalist, author, and critic (b. 1920)
2008 – Heath Ledger, Australian actor and director (b. 1979)
2012 – Joe Paterno, American football player and coach (b. 1926)
2018 – Ursula K. Le Guin, American sci-fi and fantasy novelist (b. 1929)
Le Guin below. I haven’t read any of her works, as I’m not much into science fiction, but I know she has many fans:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is indoors, avoiding the other cats:
Hili: Kulka is upstairs, it’s cold outside, Szaron is at home. I will be sitting in the hallway.
A: As you wish.
In Polish:
Hili: Na górze Kulka, na dworze zimno, w domu Szaron. Posiedzę sobie w korytarzu.
Ja: Jak wolisz.
Little Kulka has just played in the snow, and now wants to come inside (she learned the trick of jumping onto the windowsill from Hili):
Caption: “And Kulka outside the window.”
In Polish: A za oknem Kulka
From Natalie via Harmonia Early Music(see caption), a cat that smiles. It’s the Weird Medieval Cat of the Week:
From Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu, Savoy c. 1475.
From reader Bruce:From Laurie. He could be Polish, too, as in my experience they eat five meals per day, including a “second breakfast”:
Now that Biden has ensured that trans athletes can compete in women’s sports, no doubt the bigots will be complaining about how they tend to win all the medals.
"You want Medicare for all? I can get you Medicare for all. Believe me, there are ways, Dude. You don't want to know about it. Hell, I can get you Medicare for all by 3:00 this afternoon, WITH single payer." pic.twitter.com/8BiTWnCIgp
Tweets from Matthew. I’ll write about this cool paper tomorrow. There’s more to be learned about house cats!
Want to know why cats love catnip? This amazing paper shows they use it as mosquito repellent, giving them an endorphin high! (pic is Cats Tempted by a Delicious Smell by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi) https://t.co/jWJfnRK33Ppic.twitter.com/xpPF23E1Bv
It seems churlish to begin worrying about the Biden administration when it’s held sway for only a bit more than a day. I voted for Joe and Kamala and approve of many of their policies. I teared up at the Inauguration and was hugely relieved when the Great Miscreant was helicoptered over the Potomac yesterday. But we still have to call out the new administration if it violates standards we oppose, and, during the flurry of policies to come in the next several months, now is the time to suss out whether Biden really is a centrist, or will cave in to the Woke wing of the Democratic Party.
As I’ve said, one thing I worry about is the exacerbation rather than the diminution of Wokeism under Biden—something that seems very likely to me. (And do I really have to affirm that Trumpism is way worse than Wokeism? You can have Biden without extreme Wokeism, you know, and you don’t need to remain silent just because he’s a Democrat.)
At any rate, when I saw the tweet below from Abigail Shrier, oft-excoriated author of the book Irreversible Damage, a book about too-rapid promulgation of sex-change operations in young children, I got worried. Is Biden really advocating accepting biological males who claim that they’re women—and haven’t had any medical intervention to transition—into women’s sports, scholarships, and so on? We’ve discussed the sports issue here, as well as Connecticut’s rule that any male who identifies as female can participate in women’s sports without further ado (much less hormonal supplements and/or surgery). The results were predictable: males, with their greater strength and muscle mass, clean up. I don’t think any reader here thinks that “unaltered” biological men who identify as women should, by virtue of that identity alone, be able to join women’s sports teams.
Yet that’s what Shrier says Biden’s executive order does: “eviscerates women’s sports”, as well as women’s scholarships and so on:
On day 1, Biden unilaterally eviscerates women's sports. Any educational institution that receives federal funding must admit biologically-male athletes to women's teams, women's scholarships, etc.
You can read the order below, as I did; it’s short (click on the screenshot).
When I initially saw that it seemed to be about Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I thought Shrier must be wrong. Title VII is about employment and workplace discrimination, not discrimination by colleges in scholarships, sports, and so on. Those things are the purview of Title IX. which mandates no sex discrimination in education or activities for educational institutions that get Federal funds. So why is Shrier so exercised?
It may be because of this statement from the order (my emphasis):
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy. Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love. Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes. People should be able to access healthcare and secure a roof over their heads without being subjected to sex discrimination. All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.
These principles are reflected in the Constitution, which promises equal protection of the laws. These principles are also enshrined in our Nation’s anti-discrimination laws, among them Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2000e et seq.). In Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. ___ (2020), the Supreme Court held that Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination “because of . . . sex” covers discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. Under Bostock‘s reasoning, laws that prohibit sex discrimination — including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, as amended (20 U.S.C. 1681 et seq.), the Fair Housing Act, as amended (42 U.S.C. 3601 et seq.), and section 412 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended (8 U.S.C. 1522), along with their respective implementing regulations — prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, so long as the laws do not contain sufficient indications to the contrary.
Notice that Biden folds Title IX into Title VIII, and explicitly mentions school sports. Now I don’t give a rat’s patootie about restrooms (we have unisex restrooms in my department), but locker rooms are a bit more problematic, since some women don’t want a person with male plumbing watching them in the buff. Still, that can be and has been dealt with in various ways. And of course the thrust of Title IX is good: stop discriminating on the basis of sex or gender. But participation in school sports is the rub—and the exception.
If Biden is saying here—and despite Shrier’s claim, it’s not completely clear—that men who identify as women have carte blanche (and legal rights) to enroll in women’s sports teams, then Shrier is right: this has the potential to eviscerate women’s sports. I won’t go into the biological differences between the sexes that, even with hormone treatment, make this “right” problematic, but I’ll call your attention to this order as a red flag. So far nothing has happened, and Shrier’s feared outcome may require either legislation or intervention of the courts, not an executive order.
There are other Bidenesque red flags as well, but none so worrisome that I need mention them now. I do predict, however, as I did yesterday, that the election of Biden is not the end of Wokeism but an acceleration of it. Those of us who consider ourselves liberals and who voted for Biden because of his decency, his ardent (but ill-fated) desire to reconcile Republicans and Democrats, his center-Leftism, and most of his legislative aims, may be in for a few years of cognitive dissonance. Joe is a decent man, but if you buck the Woke you get called all kinds of names. Joe may be more pliable than we think.
