Friday: Duck report

May 10, 2019 • 2:30 pm

The good news (there’s no bad news) is that all ten ducklings are fine and have survived their first two days of life. They also seem to be thriving, eating well and swimming around vigorously, sometimes diving underwater and popping up like a cork a few feet away. And we’ve named mom Katie Peck in honor of the new person in Facilities (also named Katie Peck) who has helped with the ducks. Here are some photos taken over the last several days:

A few days ago, right before the first duckling appeared, a Great Blue Heron invaded the pond. I admired it for a while and then chased it away, for they eat ducklings and I don’t want it hanging about.

The dad, Gregory Peck, purple of head and a vociferous quacker (with the muted quacks of males). Isn’t he handsome?

The first sign that ducklings had arrived was when I saw Katie on the shore, with her head peeking above the metal barrier. It turns out that she was guarding a single duckling on the shore. For a whole day I thought that the entire brood was just one individual. It turned out I was wrong—by a factor of ten:

For 24 hours this was the only duckling in the pond:

Note the quack:

The next morning there were two ducklings in the pond, but without Katie. I was puzzled, and then heard a bunch of peeps from above. It was the rest of the ducklings ready to jump from the third-floor windowsill to the pond. Sure enough, an hour later there were ten ducklings! (Sadly, I missed the Big Jump.)

As you can see in the video below, two of the ducklings hadn’t yet jumped in the water for their first swim. But they quickly joined their siblings, taking to the pond like, well, a duck to water.

They’ve learned the ropes quickly, following mom all about and jumping on and off the duck island. Gregory is an attentive father and doesn’t bother them.

The blotches here are from my old Panasonic Lumix, whose sensor is all dusty. I forgot my new camera yesterday.

They’ve learned to use the duckling ramp, but the turtles are using it for sunbathing, which caused a traffic jam yesterday:

Everybody loves ducklings, and the pond is crowded with people oohing and aahing at the babies. I have to keep them from feeding bread to mom and brood, but for the time being everything is copacetic.

Here’s a video from May 8, just hours after 9 of the 10 ducklings jumped off the windowsill where they hatched. This is their first swim, with mom looking on. Two of them haven’t yet jumped in the water.

HuffPost circling the drain

May 10, 2019 • 1:30 pm

Call me a bad person and shoot me, but what I found today affords me some true Schadenfreude. Here’s the traffic at HuffPost over the last six months as reported by SimilarWeb.

It looks as if views (monthly ones?) have dropped from 120 million to about 12 million, a decrease of about 90%, and the average time spent on the site is a scant 47 seconds. I guess people have gotten tired of their opinions masquerading as news, ads masquerading as news, and their effusive love of Chrissie Teigen, the Royals, Samantha Bee, AOC, and the site’s relentless obsession with identity politics and ideological purity.

Does this mean that Social Justice Warriorism is dead? I doubt it, but maybe people are sick a purely one-sided view of politics. HuffPo, after all, is the Breitbart of the Left.

Read and grin:

 

 

Desperate to retain readers and clicks, the site has started a new feature, HuffPost Plus, where you pay good money but get nothing except special newsletters. Nobody’s been fooled by this, judging from the vitriolic reader comments when the “offer” was first made.

Yes, I’m a bad person. As Hitchens said of Jerry Falwell, if you gave them an enema they could be buried in a matchbox.

Conversation with attorney Andrew Seidel on June 11 about the secular origins of the United States

May 10, 2019 • 11:30 am

If you’re in Chicago, mark your calendars for June 11. For on that evening I’ll be having a conversation in town with Andrew Seidel (sponsored by the Freedom from Religion Foundation [FFRF] and the End of the Line Humanists) about Andrew’s new book, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. To be released in four days, the book deals with the secular origins of America—neither the founders nor the founding “principles” were religious—and shows how those who promulgate that myth (mostly the Christian Nationalists) are dead wrong and ignorant of history. It’s a must-have book for secularists.

Andrew, with whom I’ve worked on a few cases as an evolution expert or “censorious person,” is a constitutional lawyer and the Director of Strategic Response at the FFRF. And the book is good: I’m nearly done with my first read.

The official announcement is below. The discussion is free, it’s at 7:30, and it’s held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with the address given in the flyer (click on screenshot to enlarge). Andrew’s book will be available at the venue and he’ll be signing it. If you’re in Chicago, we’ll be delighted to see you there. There will be lots to discuss and lots of myths to dispel.

Leeds University Union is unhappy with Israel Independence Day

May 10, 2019 • 10:30 am

I see the termites have dined well, and have finally reached Leeds University. Yes, the student union of that school saw fit to issue this tweet today on its Facebook Page (click on screenshot to go there and see replies):

The anti-Semitism here is clear. This is just a celebration of the anniversary of Israel’s founding, not a celebration of Israel’s politics. Nevertheless, the Leeds University Union saw fit to remind students that “some of our members will be unhappy that this event is taking place.” What does that mean? Well, the unhappiness is apparently a reason to “let students know in advance.” If the Union were the Mafia, this would read, “Nice celebration you want to have there. Too bad if something were to happen to it—or you.”

And, of course, there’s the requisite offer of help and therapy to those tender Jew haters students triggered by an Israel Independence Day celebration. I wonder if they’d issue the same statement for a celebration of Palestine? You know what the answer would be.

This—and the Leeds University Union—is reprehensible.

Southern states try to circumvent the First Amendment by teaching the Bible in public schools

May 10, 2019 • 9:15 am

I’ve always been wary of teaching “religious studies” below the college level, and for two reasons. First, as in the case discussed below, it’s too often an excuse to proselytize religion in public schools—a violation of the First Amendment. Second, even if you’re doing it to give children a sense of history and culture, there will be huge disputes about what history and culture should be taught. Ideally, you’d want to acquaint kids with not only Christianity and Judaism, but also the religions of the world, now amply represented in the U.S.: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on. But who decides what will be taught? If Islam, can you fairly represent Shia and Sunni? And of course there are the Mormons (with their completely bogus founding) as well as about 30,000 sects of Christianity, not to mention Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox church. How do you give kids an overview of Western and Eastern faiths without stinting some of them.

It’s just a mess, and I’d prefer to leave it to the college level.

One example of the trouble at issue is the new legislative push for bills allowing Bible studies in public schools as part of the regular curriculum. One has already passed in Kentucky, and, as this Washington Post article reports (click on screenshot below for e-reader version), laws are pending in 10 states. Georgia and Arkansas have already passed such bills, which are awaiting the signature of the governor to become law. All this is the result of Project Blitz: a right-wing, evangelical Christian initiative which lobbies for these laws as a way to get Jesus into the classroom. Given who’s pushing this, there’s not much doubt that “general education about religion” is not the goal.

The Supreme Court, as the article notes, has said that it’s okay to teach Bible classes in public schools so long as it’s “part of a secular program of education.” But this isn’t what’s happening, at least in Kentucky where the program is underway. Instead, teachers are imparting moral lessons from the Old and New Testaments, which constitutes Biblical exegesis and theology, and they’re also using it to diss evolution—a way around the legal prohibition of teaching creationism in public schools.  The ACLU has informed the states engaged in this legislation that they need to provide oversight of the classes, but no lawsuits appear to be pending.

A few bits of the article tells you what’s happening. Here’s the main anecdotal story used in the piece: Todd Steenbergen’s class at Barren County High School in Glasgow, Kentucky. Here he is teaching it:

Students describe Steenbergen’s Bible class as a chance to do something they enjoy during the school day — Cole Wilson, who took the class in a previous semester, likened reading the Bible in school to getting the chance to shoot hoops during gym class.

“I like studying the Bible anyway,” agreed Mattie Coomer, who also took the class. “As a Christian, I believe the Bible, it’s a living book — if God is a living God, he’s going to speak through his word every time you open up the Bible. It’s more important than any other book I could be reading.”

Coomer said she just finished reading the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, outside of school, and then started all over again. But that’s not what happens in the classroom. In Steenbergen’s Bible class, the students hardly read the Bible at all.

There is no classroom set of Bibles for every student, no encouragement to download a Bible app on their smartphones. He never assigns chapters or verses to read. Instead, he said, he summarizes biblical stories for them and focuses class time on highlighting connections between the Bible and modern life.

During one class this spring, he spent most of the hour-and-a-half period on a game in which students guessed which theme from the Gospel of Matthew or which blessing from the Beatitudes that Steenbergen meant to connect to when he played clips from country songs and Disney movies.

His consistent message throughout the game was that students should draw moral lessons from the Gospels.

“‘Pure in spirit’ is a good word to equate to humility, humble,” he said. “We see humility, a wise thing that could be applicable for us today. How many of us would like to be more humble about something?” And later: “Was there a time you helped provide some cheer for someone and it made you aware how good it was? . . . We can use wisdom and apply it in new ways today and help people be comforted.”

The drawing of moral lessons from such classes is clearly a violation of the First Amendment, because of course those lessons are always positive, and this is a promotion of Christianity over other faiths. Do you think they teach the genocide approved by Yahweh, or the stoning of the guy who collected sticks on the Sabbath, or Lot’s offer to the mob to let them rape his daughters? I doubt it. This is teaching “civilization and ethics” using the Bible as a framework.

But to me as a scientist, the worst part is how they’re using these laws in Kentucky to do an end-run around the prohibition of teaching creationism (a religious and not a scientific view):

Maggie Dowdy said she picked this course because she thought it would be easy. After all, she already knew the Bible from church.

When the class started with the very first Bible story — the story of creation — she was glad she had chosen it. Here at last was the story of human origins that she believed in — not the facts of evolution that she had been taught in her high school science class.

“When I started learning about [evolution], I thought: ‘That’s not true. Here’s what I believe,’ ” Dowdy said. “I just kind of push it aside now. I know what I believe in. It’s just something the teachers have to teach us, but, no, I believe in creation.”

Other students echoed her. “We’ve always in science learned that perspective, evolution and the big bang,” Morgan Guess said. “This is the class that allows us the other perspective.”

“Allows us the other perspective”? Well, yes, they can take whatever perspective she wants, but it’s a dereliction of duty for professor teaching this stuff to pretend that it’s real, rather than saying that science doesn’t support it. And note how the class is serving to buttress the children’s Christian faith: a sort of Confirmation Bias 101 class.

Lest you get depressed at this point, and you should be given the obdurate religiosity of the American South (there’s also a bill in North Dakota), there are still a few freethinkers. Here’s one:

Only Katie King, 17, expressed doubts about the Bible in a discussion one morning. “I took this class to see for myself if this is what I wanted to follow and believe,” she told classmates. “My parents are so religious. They push it a lot.”

“The Bible per se, some things I’m just like — I don’t know,” said King, who acknowledged that she is often an outlier among her peers because she supports abortion rights and likes reading New York Times articles about politics. “Like one thing — I don’t get that people who are good people, genuinely good, nice people, have good intentions, but because they don’t believe in God, they’re doomed to hell. I can’t accept that. I cannot accept that.”

I hope Katie leaves for college soon, as she’ll be demonized by her peers in Kentucky for saying something like this in the Washington Post. Imagine—she admits she supports abortion choice and reads the New York Times! Satan is licking his chops.

h/t: Bruce

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 10, 2019 • 7:45 am

Saloni Rose, a neurobiologist from India who has a sideline in nature photography, has contributed some pictures before, and today adds some lovely butterfly photos. Her new website, Obscurum Per Obscurious, can be found here, and her notes are indented:

Common Banded Peacock (Papilio crino, shot at Bhubaneswar, Orissa): They can be recognised by the green dust on their upper side wings and characteristic blue band on their hind wings.
Common Emigrant (Catopsilia pomona, shot at Thenmala, Kerala): They belong to the family Pieridae (Whites and Yellows). I spotted large groups of adults hovering around the host plant “The Golden Shower Tree” every morning.
Blue Tiger (Tirumala limniace; shot at Thenmala, Kerala)
Narrow-banded Bluebottle (Graphium teredon; shot at Bonaccaud, Kerala): Until recently, they were considered a subspecies of the Common Bluebottle(which are famous for their 15 different types of photoreceptors). This species is endemic to the Western Ghats. They are fast flyers and usually occupy the canopy. However, they come down to the ground to mud puddles(as seen in the photo).
Lime Swallowtail (Papilio demoleus; shot at Thenmala, Kerala): Don’t be fooled by their beauty! Lime swallowtails are pests, they create havoc in citrus cultivations.