Sunday: Hili dialogue

January 17, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good Sabbath to you (if you’re Christian): it’s Sunday, January 17, 2021: National Hot Buttered Rum Day (you can find a recipe here; you’ll need rum, butter, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, vanilla extract, and water).  It’s also Ben Franklin Day (he was born on this day in 1706), National Hot Heads Chili Day, and World Religion Day, which we’re not celebrating.

News of the Day:

In the early morning of yesterday, the Trump administration executed its 13th and last federal prisoner (three in the last week), only four days from Inauguration Day. Dustin Higgs, convicted of killing three people, was given a lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, maintaining, as he has all along, that he was innocent. Trump could have stayed the execution until Biden took over, but he’s been on a rush to kill people right up to the last minute. A note from CNN:

One-third of the justices on the Supreme Court — which has repeatedly overturned decisions by lower courts to halt executions — were appointed by Trump. The decision to allow Higgs’s execution to proceed came down to a 6-3 split, with the liberal justices opposing the move.

You can see the dissents by Breyer and Sotomayor here (h/t Ken). From Sotomayor’s dissent:

Betty White turns 99 today (see below). How will she spend her birthday? Look at this great headline from Mic (click on screenshot):

When legendary actor and comedian Betty White turns 99 on January 17, she’ll be celebrating her quarantine birthday with a pair of unconventional party guests. “What am I doing for my birthday? Feeding the two ducks who come to visit me every day,” she told Entertainment Tonight in an interview published on Thursday.

There’s no need to be alarmed: the Golden Girls star and nonagenarian hasn’t lost her marbles. “Betty has [a] beautiful backyard with a number of wild animals visiting,” a press representative told TODAYvia email back in May. “Two ducks always come by to say hello. They waddle up to her glass door and look in” — which is so wholesome and utterly delightful. Maybe she’ll feed them some fowl-friendly cake on the big day.

Now how awesome is that?

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 395,882, an increase of about 3,300 deaths from yesterday’s figure. In two days we’ll pass 400,000 deaths: double what the most pessimistic pundits thought we’d have. The world death toll is 2,032,342, an increase of about 12,500 deaths over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on January 17 includes:

  • 1377 – Pope Gregory XI reaches Rome, after deciding to move the Papacy back to Rome from Avignon.
  • 1773 – Captain James Cook leads the first expedition to sail south of the Antarctic Circle.
  • 1904 – Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard receives its premiere performance at the Moscow Art Theatre.
  • 1912 – British polar explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott reaches the South Pole, one month after Roald Amundsen.

Here’s a picture of Scott’s disconsolate team at the South Pole, having discovered that Amundsen’s team had beaten them.  All of these men died attempting to return to their base:

Scott’s party at the South Pole. Left to right: Oates, Bowers, Scott, Wilson and Evans.

“Totenkopfverbände” means “death’s head units,” and members of this branch of the SS, identified by wearing the insignia below on their collars, were responsible for the concentration camps:

Here’s a dramatic photo from Wikipedia captioned: “A freed Buchenwald concentration camp prisoner identifies a member of the SS camp guard.”

  • 1945 – Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg is taken into Soviet custody while in Hungary; he is never publicly seen again.

Wallenberg, below, saved thousands of Jews from extermination by the Germans during WWII. He is thought to have died in the Lubyanks in Moscow, but why he was arrested or how he died remain mysteries:

  • 1950 – The Great Brink’s Robbery: Eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston.
  • 1961 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a televised farewell address to the nation three days before leaving office, in which he warns against the accumulation of power by the “military–industrial complex” as well as the dangers of massive spending, especially deficit spending.
  • 1977 – Capital punishment in the United States resumes after a ten-year hiatus, as convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by firing squad in Utah.
  • 1991 – Gulf War: Operation Desert Storm begins early in the morning as aircraft strike positions across Iraq, it is also the first major combat sortie for the F-117. LCDR Scott Speicher’s F/A-18C Hornet from VFA-81 is shot down by a Mig-25 and is the first American casualty of the War. Iraq fires eight Scud missiles into Israel in an unsuccessful bid to provoke Israeli retaliation.
  • 1998 – Lewinsky scandal: Matt Drudge breaks the story of the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair on his Drudge Report website.

Here’s the headline that started it all and ended with Bill Clinton’s impeachment (he was not convicted):

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1834 – August Weismann, German biologist, zoologist, and geneticist (d. 1914)
  • 1899 – Al Capone, American mob boss (d. 1947)
  • 1899 – Robert Maynard Hutchins, American philosopher and academic (d. 1977)

Hutchens became President of the University of Chicago at only 30, and established many of the principles on which the school rests (shakily, I’ll add). He got rid of football, fraternities, and religious organizations, and established free speech and academic freedom as some of those principles. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia:

Hutchins was notable as a defender of academic freedom. When the University was accused of fostering communism in 1935 (by Charles Rudolph Walgreen, who claimed his niece had been indoctrinated with communist ideas whilst studying there) and again in 1949, Hutchins defended the right of the University’s faculty to teach as they wished, arguing that the best way to defeat communism was through open debate and scrutiny, rather than suppression. “Hutchins stood behind his faculty and their right to teach and believe as they wished, insisting that communism could not withstand the scrutiny of public analysis and debate.”

  • 1911 – George Stigler, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1991)
  • 1922 – Betty White, American actress, game show panelist, television personality, and animal rights activist

Here are some of Betty White’s quips from her later television career:

Happy birthday, Betty! Everyone loves her.

  • 1931 – James Earl Jones, American actor
  • 1933 – Shari Lewis, American actress, puppeteer/ventriloquist, and television host (d. 1998)
  • 1949 – Andy Kaufman, American actor and comedian (d. 1984)
  • 1964 – Michelle Obama, American lawyer and activist, 46th First Lady of the United States

Those who “passed” on January 17 include:

Gilmore was the first person executed after a ten-year moratorium on executions. He chose the firing squad over hanging, the only two choices at the time.

Despite being born to a Jewish mother, Fisher wound up as a rabid anti-Semite and white supremacist. I didn’t know that until this morning, when I read the relevant section of his Wikipedia page.  He won his World Championship before he was thirty. This photo was about ten years before that:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a sociological question:

Hili: Is there any research about the level of poverty?
A: Of course, plenty.
Hili: But I’m asking about the level of poverty of cats.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy są badania nad poziomem ubóstwa?
Ja: Oczywiście, mnóstwo.
Hili: Ale ja pytam o badania nad poziomem ubóstwa kotów.

Szaron is resting, hoping that Hili won’t chase him:

From Woody: What we saw in the House last week:

From Donna:

From John:

A tweet from Barry: Cat pwns dog:

Tweets from Matthew. If you read the article, you’ll find out that forcing scientific lies on children is not limited to evangelical Christianity:

The pandemic drives people to strange extremes:

A wily kitten:

And a very noisy kitten:

Translation: “New popular person appeared.” Toy duck pwns toy otter:

I must go here some day:

Finally, this doesn’t look like a turkey but I have no idea what it is?

Two books I just finished

January 16, 2021 • 11:00 am

I’m back to reading a lot during the pandemic, as I’m simply tired of looking at the Internet as a distraction. And so I finished two books this week: one excellent and one so-so. Let’s start with the good one, which I read so long ago that it seemed new to me. Reading The Plague is especially apposite at the moment as it can be read the contest of the pandemic. Can it illuminate our current experience? The answer is yes and no.

And it was this old edition that I read (click to go to the Amazon site):

At about 280 small pages, those who shy away from big books will find this one doable. It’s one of the novels that won Camus the Nobel Prize in Literature, and deservedly so.  The Plague (La Peste in the original French) is considered an “existentialist” novel, and I suppose that’s because one could construe it as the fictional story of men laboring to fight a meaningless but fatal pestilence: a bubonic plague that struck the city of Oran in Algeria in the 1940s. The protagonist, Dr. Rieux, is an atheist, and realizes the senselessness of what is happening—despite the local priest’s attempt to find meaning in the epidemic—but still labors to exhaustion, seven days a week, to help the stricken. Rieux doesn’t do this because he sees it as the “moral” thing to do, but believes that relieving suffering is an aspect of human love, the only worthwhile thing he sees in our existence.

I won’t give away the plot or the spoiler (i.e., who the narrator is), but it’s worth rereading in light of the coronavirus pandemic. There are parallels (quarantines, lots of death), but also differences (no mask wearing, even though some of the plague is pneumonic, no lockdowns of businesses, and none of the peevishness that limns our behavior). But the big parallel is humanity being at the mercy of an invisible microbe, which takes lives randomly and senselessly. If that’s existentialism, so be it.

The novel rises to a climax with the narrator’s “analysis” at the end after the plague has lifted, which contains some of the book’s best writing. My favorite bit, which I’ve mentioned before, is the ending, which is wonderful even in translation. And it’s also about the futility of fighting the plague, which, though it can be temporarily conquered, will always return:

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled.

He knew what those jubilant crowds did no know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Lots of nice alliteration there, and the last bit, “when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city,” is sheer genius. Bane and enlightening indeed!

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

 

I read this one on—as I recall—the recommendation of a reader here. But perhaps not. At any rate, I was drawn by the topic: Daum’s disillusionment with wokeness and her discovery of “IDW” members like John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Bret Weinstein. This is journey that many of us have taken, and I wanted to see what Daum had to say about it.

I didn’t find the book absorbing, but perhaps that’s because I already share Daum’s intellectual criticism of wokeness and had undergone the political changes that describes at length, embroidering them with details about her crumbling marriage and her disillusionment with feminism. In my view, Daum provided too little meat and tried way too hard to be clever, throwing in personal information that didn’t enhance her thesis—if she has a thesis. Daum is a big fan of Joan Didion’s writing, but doesn’t have the chops to emulate her, nor Didion’s ability to make the personal sufficiently impersonal to be interesting to the reader.

It’s a solipsistic book that I don’t think would enlighten many of us. Read it at your own peril.

What next? Below a book that came highly recommended from an expert: literary critic James Wood of the New Yorker. Having met James in Cambridge MA (he teaches at Harvard) and discussed with him the idea of whether literature was a “way of knowing” (I won’t divulge his take), I wrote him asking if I should read a copy of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch that I found in a free book box.

The Goldfinsh won the Pulitzer prize in 2014, and I was about to start it when Wood replied and said that he much preferred a wonderful 2006 novel, translated from the German by Anthea Bell in 2015, that he had extolled several years ago in The New Yorker.  All for Nothing is clearly one of Wood’s favorite modern novels. He warned me not to read his review before I read the book, as he gave spoilers. So I haven’t, but will start this book today:

So that is my latest reading. Your turn: what books have you liked lately?

Caturday felid trifecta: Portraits of Maine Coon Cats; why cats knead; blissed-out lynxes (and lagniappe)

January 16, 2021 • 9:30 am

From My Modern Met, we have some awesome pictures of Maine Coon Cats, which are not only large, but have heads and faces that are more wolflike than catlike. Click on screen shot to see them all; I’ll show half a dozen:

They’re all photographed by one man on a mission from Ceiling Cat:

Photographer Robert Sijka took note of this majestic breed and decided to capture their big cat vibes in striking portraiture that showcases their budding beauty, from kittens to full-grown felines.

It comes as no surprise, but Sijka has two passions in life: photography and Maine Coon cats. The two, luckily, go hand in hand and are the result of a move to China he and his family made 14 years ago. “After a while,” he explains, “we started to miss the company of animals, they have always been in our lives. We fell in love with Maine Coons and my wife Izabella started a breeding program 8 years ago.”

After the first litter of kittens was born, Sijka knew they had to share the adorable creatures with the world. “I think my journey with photography started at this moment,” he recalled.“I decided that my pictures must be something special, just like Maine Coons are special. After several thousands of photos, I ended up with my current style and great pleasure from working with these amazing animals.”

It’s a challenge to photograph any animal, and cats provide an extra hurdle; they won’t sit still! Sijka has no magic formula, but rather he has two tried-and-true methods for capturing endearing images—lots of practice and much patience. There are plenty of opportunities for him to do so, especially since he and wife now have a cattery called OtiCami that houses 20 Maine Coon cats and kittens.

Sijka sells his work as prints, phone cases, blankets, and more in his online shop, the Felis Gallery.

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

If you own cats, you probably already know why they “knead”, working their paws in a motion also called “making biscuits”. But Pocket has the answer according to SCIENCE (click on screenshot):

The upshot:

“This kneading, also known as ‘making bread’ or ‘making biscuits,’ is an instinctive feline behavior kittens display shortly after they’re born,” Dr. Karen Becker, a veterinarian and creator of the Healthy Pets blog, writes on her site. “The reason for the movement in kittenhood is to stimulate the flow of milk from the mother’s mammary glands.” Cats who knead in adulthood could be “showing contentment,” according to Becker, or simply marking their territory since cat’s paws contain sweat glands.

While there’s always the chance that a kitty kneading is your cat’s attempt to claim you as their own — which, of course, you are — experts say kneading is probably as tender and adorable as it looks.

“If you do have a cat who kneads their bedding, or better yet you, it’s because they’re feeling very loved and comfortable,” Katie Armour, project coordinator at MSPCA Boston Adoption Center, tells The Dodo. “You should absolutely take this as a compliment!”

From the Dodo, videos of cats making biscuits. There’s enough catpower here to feed a dozen Southerners!

So says SCIENCE! But wait—there’s more!

“It is interesting to note that cats can produce a chemical for marking between their toes (interdigital semiochemical) that they can release when they flex their toes, so your cat could also be labeling you as a safe part of their territory,” Dr. Kathryn Primm, a veterinarian at Applebrook Animal Hospital in Ooltewah, Tennessee, writes in a blog for iHeartCats.

Well, SCIENCE is just speculating here. . . .

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

Finally, we have two tame lynxes that were presumably rescued and unable to return to the wild. They’re too wild to make good house cats, but they’re tame enough to pet and even rub their bellies! Notes are from YouTube:

Max Canada Lynx, the educational animal ambassador takes a moment to get some good scratchin’ before he sits down for his meal. He was born at a zoo in May 2011. Max is not domesticated but has been humanized. He still has wild tendencies. He educates the public locally on the endangered/threatened (in lower 48 states) Canada Lynx in hopes that people will be driven to conserve our environment and protect our wildlife. Technically, they are listed as “threatened” but in my state of NY they are considered “extirpated.” However, it’s legal to trap these beautiful animals in Canada and Alaska.

He is NOT declawed. During the winter he weighs 40 pounds and summer about 34. He has about 4 inches of fur in this video which makes him look fat….I mean fluffy!

This video is NOT taken in my home but where he has an indoor enclosure. This is Max’s rug with his fur, straw and other scents that he loves. He doesn’t like the vacuum. Max also has outdoor housing where he spends most of his time.

Wouldn’t you like to pet this guy? Listen to that purr!

Meet Yoki the Canadian Lynx at Big Run Wolf Ranch!

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

Lagniappe: Today’s New York Times has this lovely article about a woman who relieves her pandemic-induced loneliness by fostering kitten (click on screenshot).  But then they have to ruin it by dragging in social justice, for crying out loud:

It takes a certain level of privilege to foster animals at a time when many New Yorkers are struggling to take care of themselves and their families. The pandemic has underscored the vast disparities among New York’s human residents, which then trickle down to the city’s cats.

They can’t keep that stuff out of even human-interest articles on fostering cats. Well, ignore it and read the piece by clicking on the screenshot:

h/t: Jean, Divy, Peter

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 16, 2021 • 8:00 am

Reader Dave, whose photo gallery is here, sent some photos from various places, including semi-abstracts. His captions are indented, and you can click the photos to make them bigger.

Utahn Pines:

Cascades:

West Fjords, Iceland:

Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica):

Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea):

Monochrome Canopy:

Prismatic Dawn:

Saturday: Hili dialogue

January 16, 2021 • 6:30 am

It’s Caturday, January 16, 2021: National Hot and Spicy Food Day. I’m had some of these last night as a preprandial snack with leftover bubbly, which was just just the right libation. I discovered Trader Joe’s Jerk Style Plantain Chips while investigating what else I should look for up when i went to TJ’s to get my coffee beans (the cheapest source for good espresso beans in bulk). This site rated the plantain chips highly, and they were right. They are quite spicy, not too unhealthy, and only about two bucks per bag. You don’t need to eat many to get satisfied.

It’s also National Fig Newton Day, Prohibition Remembrance Day, celebrating (?) the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, Book Publishers Day, and National Religious Freedom Day. Remember that Fig Newtons were invented as a digestive aid and were named not after Isaac Newton, but after the town of Newton, Massachusetts, where they were once made. I love them (the UK equivalent is the “fig roll”). But I just learned that they are now called simply “Newtons”—not because they eliminate the fig paste, which remains in one version—but because there are other kinds of Newtons now, like strawberry. At least this isn’t duplicitious, like changing “Vanilla Wafers” to “Nilla Wafers” when they removed the vanilla:

Not duplicitous
Invidious name change due to decline in quality

News of the Day:

I think everyone’s heart skipped a beat when we hard that QShaman, aka Jacob Anthony Chansley, had provide the feds with information that led them to conclude that some of the Capitol rioters were bent on immobilizing and then assassinating people in Congress. But I wondered, given the clear insanity of QShaman, how anything he said, with his marination in conspiracy theories, could be credible. It turns out that it was not. According to CNN:

Justice Department prosecutors have formally walked back their assertion in a court filing that said Capitol rioters sought to “capture and assassinate elected officials.”

A federal prosecutor in Arizona asked a magistrate judge in a hearing on Friday to strike the line in a recent court filing about defendant Jacob Anthony Chansley, a man who is alleged to have led some in the crowd in the first wave into the Capitol with a bullhorn while carrying a spear and wearing a fur headdress.

The entire line the prosecutors want to omit from their court filing is: “Strong evidence, including Chansley’s own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States Government.”

The New York Times reported that some chucklehead had written “Trump” on a manatee (an endangered species); at first it looked as if the word had been carved into the skin, but now it seems “Trump” was written in algae (or rather, by scraping off algae). Still, it’s illegal to touch one of these wonderful creatures. Trumpies, keep your hands off the damn manatees!

Some relevant tweets (h/t Matthew):

I can’t help but think, cynical as I am, that if the word written was “Biden,” people wouldn’t be so incensed. Amirite?

At last India has started inoculating its population, which is a formidable task since that involves jabs for 1.3 billion people. The first people to get their shots, on Saturday, were healthcare workers. Unfortunately, they are using two Indian-manufactured vaccines, Covishield and Covaxin, that lack any clinical evidence that they work. I hope they do!  (“Puja” below is a Hindu act of worship. The doctor has had henna designs put on her hands and arms.)

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 392,529, a big increase of about 4,000 deaths from yesterday’s figure, or about 2.8 deaths per minute. In about two days we’ll pass 400,000 deaths: double what the most pessimistic pundits thought we’d have. The world death toll is 2,019,857, a big increase of about 15,400 deaths over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on January 16 includes:

Here’s the cover of the first edition:

  • 1707 – The Scottish Parliament ratifies the Act of Union, paving the way for the creation of Great Britain.
  • 1786 – Virginia enacts the Statute for Religious Freedom authored by Thomas Jefferson.
  • 1909 – Ernest Shackleton‘s expedition finds the magnetic South Pole.

Here are three members of the team, Douglas Mawson, Alistair MacKay and Edgeworth David, at what they thought was the South Magnetic Pole, but they didn’t really find the spot (read about it here). At any rate, the spot does change its position over time.

  • 1920 – The League of Nations holds its first council meeting in Paris, France.
  • 1945 – Adolf Hitler moves into his underground bunker, the so-called Führerbunker.

Here’s the bunker (foreground) in 1947 before it was razed by the Soviets. I’ve visited the site, now a grassy plot:

  • 1979 – The last Iranian Shah flees Iran with his family for good and relocates to Egypt.
  • 2003 – The Space Shuttle Columbia takes off for mission STS-107 which would be its final one. Columbia disintegrated 16 days later on re-entry.

And, one year ago today. Let’s hope the next impeachment results in a convication, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1900 – Edith Frank, German-Dutch mother of Anne Frank (d. 1945)
  • 1902 – Eric Liddell, Scottish runner, rugby player, and missionary (d. 1945)

You’ll remember Liddell as the “muscular Christian” depicted in the film Chariots of Fire. Here’s the real Liddell winning at the British Empire versus United States of America (Relays) meet held at Stamford Bridge, London on Sat 19 July 1924:

  • 1910 – Dizzy Dean, American baseball player and sportscaster (d. 1974)
  • 1933 – Susan Sontag, American novelist, essayist, and critic (d. 2004)
  • 1948 – Ruth Reichl, American journalist and critic
  • 1974 – Kate Moss, English model and fashion designer
  • 1980 – Lin-Manuel Miranda, American actor, playwright, and composer

Those who hopped the twig on January 16 include:

  • 1794 – Edward Gibbon, English historian and politician (b. 1737)
  • 1901 – Arnold Böcklin, Swiss painter and academic (b. 1827)

Here’s Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” (Die Toteninsel), one of many of his paintings drawn from mythology:

  • 1936 – Albert Fish, American serial killer, rapist and cannibal (b. 1870)
  • 1942 – Carole Lombard, American actress and comedian (b. 1908).

Lombard was married to Clark Gable, and when she died in a plane crash in 1942 at only 33, Gable was inconsolable. He soon joined the Air Force, something that Lombard had repeatedly asked him to do. .

(From Wikipedia): Clark Gable, Carole Lombard and Mrs. Elizabeth Peters, mother of Carole Lombard (1939)

You remember Wyeth’s famous painting “Christina’s World,” right? Well, here’s “Christina’s Bedroom” (1947), painted a year earlier, and it has a cat in it:

  • 2017 – Eugene Cernan, American captain, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1934)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili still dislikes Szaron (the only animals she’s ever gotten along with are d*gs):

A: What are you doing here?
Hili: I’m waiting for Szaron so I can jump on him.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tu robisz?
Hili: Czekam na Szarona, żeby na niego skoczyć.

And we have a picture of adorable Kulka in the snow:

Caption: “And a picture of Kulka (of course, taken by Paulina).”

In Polish: I jeszcze zdjęcie Kulki (oczywiście zrobione przez Paulinę)

From Facebook:

From Su:

From Jesus of the Day. How many of us get our dreams fulfilled so easily?

Titania’s busy erasing Trump:

From Barry: a puppy seeks a down comforter:

Tweets from Matthew. It’s a long video (6.5 minutes), and the cats are a handful, but they’ve given meaning to the staff’s life.

Loons are EVERYWHERE. Listen to this one!

Cat: “I approve of this post.”

I asked my friend Andrew, who spends a lot of time in Turkey, what this crazy housing development was about. Here’s his response:

I think it was an attempt by a Turkish developer to bring in Arab money.  Someone had presumably come to conclusion that the route to the Arab soul (well, wallet) is via fake mini Disney castles.  Seems a good idea to me.  But I seem to recall that the whole thing has been a bit of a disaster economically; either the market research on Arab preferences wasn’t entirely sound or other economic factors intervened.

A great correction!

Oy! The digger on the Mars rover is having trouble getting soil samples. They’ll miss all that life! (not)

 

The culture wars and the news: a high-toned discussion

January 15, 2021 • 1:00 pm

Here’s a discussion organized by, well, I’m not sure, but you can see the announcement here. It features several people you’ve heard of, and I listened to about half of it yesterday before tasks called me away. The whole thing is 1.5 hours long, and if you click on the screenshot below, it will take you to the video on YouTube.  The question at issue:

Are we watching freedom of speech slip away in service of political correctness, collective guilt and a fear of being bullied and canceled for expressing an opposing or different view?

And the YouTube notes:

The video of our first event is available for your viewing: “Are Culture Wars Co-opting the Mainstream Narrative?”

Should journalists live in fear of being canceled or bullied for expressing an opposing or different view from their colleagues? Are our media institutions being taken over by a deeply ideological “woke” cohort?

Three of our speakers, Bari Weiss, Katie Herzog and Suzanne Moore, shared deeply personal stories about this topic during our first event. They have been employed in newsrooms ranging from local newspapers to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. What they have in common is what they describe as increasing illiberal climate in newsrooms.

Our fourth speaker, Jonathan Haidt, is one of the world’s leading experts in moral psychology and he helped put all of this into a wider context.

Our Reflection Panel spoke to how their newsrooms address these challenges. In particular, they addressed the realities of managing newsrooms: e.g., trying to serve the wider audience, and the desire for more social activism in their newsrooms, especially among younger journalists. We had with us Phil Chetwynd (AFP), Mapi Mhlangu (previously eNCA) and Francesca Unsworth (BBC)

The topic will surely be of interest to many readers, so have a listen. Bari Weiss, the first panelist to speak, will get you hooked on the rest of the discussion. There is not much chaff here.

A woke Hippocratic Oath

January 15, 2021 • 11:30 am

It’s often assumed that medical students take the Hippocratic Oath when they graduate or during the “white coat ceremony“—when they get their Official Doctor Coats at orientation. In fact, there’s a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) that most medical students never take that famous oath, and many classes write their own. Although there are still some “standard” oaths, the AAMC notes this:

. . . it was only around 20 years ago that schools began to allow students to craft their own promises.

Nancy Angoff, MD, remembers the decision to discard Yale’s long-standing oath back in 2000. “Some students and I didn’t care for the language,” says Angoff, associate dean for student affairs. “It seemed very impersonal, cold, and too pat.” At first, they considered reverting to the Hippocratic Oath.

“We debated it,” recalls Angoff. “The students didn’t want to promise things they couldn’t deliver on” that the ancient oath included, so they opted to write their own pledge.

Now Yale is among the 17% of surveyed schools that have an annual process for writing, revising, or selecting an oath. At Yale, the oath is written during a pregraduation course, explains Angoff. Each year, she says, “the students end up with a really personal and beautiful oath.”

You can see why they’ve ditched the original Hippocratic Oath if you read it here. There are parts that are really outmoded, such as this bit, which rules out assisted suicide and abortion:

I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.

Now I’m not sure why the students write oaths rather than the faculty, for the faculty surely have a better idea of what good physicianship is all about. And of course the students, who are quite young, can go hog wild, as they apparently did at Pitt. And you know already what they did—and what’s probably happening all over the U.S. They pledged themselves as doctors to engage in social-justice activism.

From PittWire, a publication of the University of Pittsburgh, we have a report of one new oath  (click on screenshot to read):

There was a committee to write an oath (always a bad idea), and they produced an oath that was sent to me by reader Ginger K., who commented, “Some of this is quite reasonable, such as the commitment to research and mentoring, collegiality, and personal health. But the woke vocabulary dilutes the good stuff.” Indeed.  The titer of real physicianship is quite low here.

Read the oath for yourself. Right off the bat I was distressed by the ubiquitous ritual invocation of George Floyd, who has nothing to do with medical school or prospective doctors (The Floyd Invocation also initiates “antiracism” statements on some of the University of Chicago’s departmental websites that violate our University principles):

One gets the impression from this statement that medicine is more a social justice mission—fixing racial inequities, fostering allyship and so on—than a mission to bring health and save lives. There’s more about social justice here, including the au courant “self care”, than there is about caring for patients per se, or practicing ethical behavior towards all patients. (And where is the confidentiality clause that was in the Hippocratic oath?)

I’m not going to make too much of this, as students probably enjoy producing their own oaths. But in the end this seems to be an act of virtue signaling, for most of the physicians will be engaged in the quotidian duties of simply helping the afflicted rather than fixing racial inequality.

I do admire those who sacrifice a comfortable existence to help the oppressed and poor, but this is an individual choice, not something to be decreed with a pledge recited by everyone.  For surely not all students agree with this oath—just like not all professors at the University of Chicago agree with their departments’ “anti-racism” statements.

Take this as a sign of the times, and of the racialization of everything. For some students it may be a genuine pledge, but for many of the others it’s performative wokeness, something to be forgotten as soon as they pass their boards.

 

h/t Ginger K