Readers’ wildlife photos

June 8, 2017 • 10:00 am

I was busy this a.m. so this post is late, and oy! does it hurt typing with my mallet finger. More PT is needed!

Three days ago I posted some raccoon photos by reader Diane G, and she has an update (indented); it’s a bit sad as the “Fab Five” seem to have lost their mom. Note: I’m told that Diane should put out a big bowl of dry cat food and another huge bowl of water (for food washing) to keep the babies nourished.

What Happens When I Forget to Take The Feeders Inside, or, Further Adventures of the Fab Five

Around 10 PM last night I remember I’ve forgotten to take the feeders in, so out I run. Too late! Our mischievous quintet hasn’t missed their chance. In this shot four of the crew have retreated to the top of the pole, while # 5–I think we’ll call him Louis II–can’t really be bothered.  It almost looks like the topmost kit is extending a paw to the slowest climber.

In pic 2 that little guy has almost made the top, whilst Louis II analyzes the situation, decides I’m not much of a threat, and lets his mind wander back to the goodies below.

Priorities are priorities.

Must you keep flashing that light at me?!

Taking their cue from Louis II, the sibs also begin to remember the repast below…

Cute as they are, I really want them to abscond so I can rescue the feeders and take the dogs out.  I wave my hands and speak sternly but nothing happens.  I retreat to the garage and grab my late husband’s golf-ball retriever, as it extends into a fairly long pole, return to the feeder post, and give it a few whacks here and there.  This only serves to frighten them, at which point I give up.  Only after several subsequent check-ups do I find they’ve finally moved on…

Sadly, my neighbor and I are pretty sure they’re orphans. There’s no mother around as far as we can tell. The babes exhibit all the innocent curiosity of so many wild toddlers without any of the caution their mother would instill in them. They’re becoming far too obvious; the afternoon before these shots were taken I’d seen them traipsing across my front lawn in broad daylight. In the early evening as I drove home from shopping I found them right in the middle of the gravel road, and had to slow down while they retreated.  I’m afraid their survival chances are poor, and it’s very hard to accept that that’s how nature happens sometimes, but there’s really nothing we can do to intervene.

Wish them luck! 🙁

Compatibilism: a parable

June 8, 2017 • 7:30 am

I haven’t posted much on free will lately, and I’m sure that’s fine with the compatibilist readers who think my take on the issue is, as the Brits say, “badly wrong.” I stand by my views, and apparently so does Zack Weinersmith, who published “Compatibilism: a parable” on his SMBC comic site.  (Thanks to several readers who sent it to me.)

For new readers, compatibilism is the view that complete determinism of our acts by our genes and environments is still compatible with a view of humans having “free will.”

To wit (note that the purveyor of the semantic trickery about free will strongly resembles Dan Dennett, one of compatibilism’s chief exponents), a very sophisticated comic strip!:

As best I can see, and I’m prone to misinterpreting these things, the kid sees compatibilism in the second half of the strip as he saw his disappointment over the possibility of seeing “dinosaurs” in the first half: he was misled into thinking that he’d see something different from what he thought. “Free will” is the dinosaur here, and, like the bird, it turns out, under compatibilism, to be something other than what most people think.

At the Imagine No Religion meeting last weekend, Julien Musolino, in a fine talk on why we don’t have a “soul” as most people think of it, also spoke quite a bit about how we don’t have “free will” as most people think of it.

As one reader noted, if you press the red button at the bottom of the screen, you get this:

And if you hover your mouse over the second bit, you get this:

Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

June 8, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, June 8, 2017: National Jelly Donut Day. I occasionally have one, but my favorite is the double chocolate: a chocolate cake donut with chocolate icing on top. It’s also World Brain Tumor Day.

On this day in 632, Muhammad died in Medina, but again there are calendar problems. On June 8, 1789, James Madison introduced nine amendments to the U.S. Constitution in Congress; seven of these would eventually become part of the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights. On this day in 1949, the year of my birth, George Orwell published his famous Nineteen Eighty-Four. On June 8, 1972, AP photographer Nick Ut took an iconic picture of the Vietnam War, featuring the nine-year-old girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc,  burned on the arms and back by American napalm, running down a road. That photo won Ut a Pulitzer Prize:

Phúc, whose burns were so severe they didn’t think she would survive, underwent many surgeries, and her odyssey took her to Cuba and ultimately, as a refugee, to Ontario, where she now lives with her husband and two children. She’s 54 (I remember well when the picture came out!), and here she is with one child, showing the scars from the napalm burns:

Finally, in 1987 New Zealand established its country as a nuclear-free zone, which for one thing means that any ship carrying nuclear weapons, including those from the U.S., can’t dock in its harbours (see the spelling? Am I an honourary Kiwi now?)

Notables born on this day include Frank Lloyd Wright (1867), Francis Crick (1916), Barbara Bush (1925), mountaineer Jim Wickwire (1940), Boz Scaggs (1944), and Derek Trucks (1979). Those who died on this day include Andrew Jackson (1845), Cochise (1874), George Sand (1876; real name Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1889), mountaineer George Mallory (died on Everest on either June 8 or 9, 1924; it’s not clear whether he and Andrew Irvine, who also died, reached the summit), and Satchel Paige (1982).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, today’s Hili Dialogue is very opaque, and I asked Malgorzata for an explanation. Here it is:

There is a order of Friars Minor. In Polish it is called Order of Little Brothers but the wording is specific and Polish speakers know that here it is an allusion to this order and at the same time it means literally “little brothers”. Mice are Hili’s “little brothers”. I don’t know what are you going to do with this for your non-Polish speaking readers.

So. . .

Hili: It all looks very interesting.
A: What does?
Hili: The world of little brothers.
 In Polish:
Hili: To wszystko bardzo interesująco wygląda.
Ja: Co takiego?
Hili: Ten świat braci mniejszych.

In nearby Wloclawek (pronounced “Vote-Sva-Vek”), the Dark Tabby Leon is hankering for noms:

Leon: I think it’s time do go home for supper.

And from reader Ed Suominen, here’s a photo of Theresa May, with Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, ignoring her. Ed thought it was a “random cat”, but I think he was unaware of Larry’s official government status. Even a cat, given that it’s the Chief Mouser, can ignore a Prime Minister!

James Comey says that Trump asked him to drop the investigation into Flynn’s contact with Russians

June 7, 2017 • 2:15 pm

Is this obstruction of justice or not? CNN has printed former (and fired) FBI director James Comey’s opening testimony that he’ll proffer tomorrow to the Senate Intelligence Committee on the connection between former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russian officials. If you can’t hear it live, read it here.

A small part of what Comey will say before he’s interrogated:

The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a  good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied only that “he is a good guy.” (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at FBI.) I did not say I would “let this go.”

. . . The President returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Mr. Priebus and the Vice President. I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership. I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December. I did not understand the President to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign.

Read more of the CNN report here.

Since Trump denies he said that, one of these men is lying. It is surely the President.  Does this amount to obstruction of justice? I think it does, as Trump was pressuring the FBI director to drop an investigation. Will Trump be impeached for this? I’m guessing not because there’s no way of determining the truth for sure (absent the “tapes” that Trump once said existed).

Denying biology in favor of ideology

June 7, 2017 • 12:00 pm

Everyday Feminism, whose goal is to make progressives feel bad about themselves, no matter how progressive they are, has a new post by James St. James called “Here are 20 examples of cissexism that we’ve probably all committed at some point”.  (About 50% of their articles are listicles of this sort, and I have no idea why. Do people read something more readily if they know how many items it will cover?)

At any rate, the first “fallacy” in the piece disturbed me because it’s simply a denial of biology in service of an ideological view: the view there is no such thing as biologically-determined sex. But that’s completely bogus, and if you knew something about human biology, or animal biology in general, you’d see how ridiculous this claim really is. Pay attention to the last two paragraphs of the indented bit below (their emphasis):

1. Believing That XX and XY Actually Mean Something

Boom. Let’s start with one of my favorites, if only because it tends to ignite passions the fastest.

Now, to be fair, XX and XY chromosome pairs do mean something: a general idea of future conditions a person may or may not develop that are directly due to those chromosomal pairings.

They do not, however, concretely stand for any of the following: indicating a person’s intelligence, physical abilities, sexual orientation, development during puberty, appearance or make of genitals, or what level of bodily production of which sex hormones.

In short, XY does not indicate a biological man and XX does not indicate a biological woman.

Why not?

We simply have too many examples of when any of the above was untrue.

Transgenderism, intersexuality, and Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), to name a few. (Fun fact: That last one can sometimes give female-identified people the stereotypical look of a model. Just sayin’.)

Think about it: If one instance of a mathematical proof is shown to be wrong, then the entire proof has to be tossed on account of it being deemed inaccurate. Because it’s—you know—useless to the bettering and/or benefit of humankind.

Call me starry-eyed, but I’m preeeeetty sure we like to treat our science like our math as often as we can.

The author reluctantly admits this: “XX and XY chromosome pairs do mean something: general idea of future conditions a person may or may not develop that are directly due to those chromosomal pairings.” That’s about as weaselly as it gets!: “future conditions a person may or may not develop” (the “pairings, by the way, take place only during gamete formation).  In Drosophila and humans, the two species with which I’m most familiar, the behavior, appearance, and primary and secondary sex characteristics are determined almost completely by whether the chromosomal constitution is male (XY) or female (XX).  (In birds and butterflies, unlike mammals, it’s the female who has unlike sex chromosomes and the male has like sex chromosomes, but again, biological sex is determined by the nature of the sex chromosomes.) 

Yes, there are a few exceptions, like AIS, but the various forms of that syndrome occur between 1 in every 20,000 to 1 in only 130,000 births.  Is that “too many examples” to all0w us to say that biological sex is not connected with chromosomes? If you look at all cases of intersexuality that occur in people with XX or XY chromosomes (we’re not counting XOs or XXYs or other cases of abnormal chromosomal number), the frequency of exceptions is far less than 1%. That means that, in humans as in flies, there is almost a complete correlation between primary/secondary sex characteristics and chromosome constitution.  As for intelligence, no, I know of no correlation, but who’s claiming that the sexes differ in smarts? As for physical abilities, sexual orientation, appearance of genitalia, and hormone titer, the correlation between being XX or XY and those traits is very tight. Again, there are exceptions: some females are bigger, stronger, and have more muscles mass than some males, but there’s a biological reason why most Olympic events depending on physical traits are separated by sex. What we see is a bimodality of traits depending on sex-chromosome constitution, with a very low valley between those two XX and XY peaks. 

How does James St. James respond to these uncontestable correlations? By saying that we have to abandon the whole notion of biological sex because there is a small percentage of exceptions, as the correlation is not perfect. As he says (I’m assuming James St. James is a “he”):

“If one instance of a mathematical proof is shown to be wrong, then the entire proof has to be tossed on account of it being deemed inaccurate. [JAC: what he means is that “the proof is wrong”.] Because it’s—you know—useless to the bettering and/or benefit of humankind. Call me starry-eyed, but I’m preeeeetty sure we like to treat our science like our math as often as we can.”

I wouldn’t call him starry eyed, but arrantly ignorant of biology, and willfully so because he wants to believe that sex is a complete continuum, which fits his ideological agenda. I suppose that agenda comes from assuming that we have to shade the biological truth because those who don’t conform to the norms (intersexes, transgender people, and so on) will be marginalized or discriminated against.

And indeed, that can happen, and has happened. But the solution is not to lie about or distort biology, pretending that biological sex is a complete continuum with no modes. The solution is to accept the biological facts and realize that they say nothing about what’s moral or immoral, or about how we should treat people. A genuine bimodality of sexual traits does not mean that we should treat those who lie between the peaks as “inferior” or “wrong”.

And we don’t treat biology like math, ignoring a phenomenon if there are some exceptions.  Math is a system of logic; biology is the messy real world, where things can go awry and there are no absolute “laws” in the sense that physics has them. To use part of a famous quote by Richard Feynman, “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

Indeed. It’s a characteristic of the Regressive Left that they deny scientific truths when it’s convenient for them to do so—when they’re faced with Ideologically Inconvenient Truths. We all know the dangers of that route—Lysenko comes to mind. It’s far better to know what’s true, and deal with it, than make up stuff that fits your narrative. The latter is what theologians do, not rational people.

Evergreen State College asks student vigilantes to put away their baseball bats and stop patrolling the campus

June 7, 2017 • 10:15 am

This is something you’ll see only on right-wing websites, so I’m seeking confirmation elsewhere to assure those who automatically reject reports appearing on places like The College Fix. (Granted, some of their reports have been mistaken or exaggerated, which is why I check.)  As I reported yesterday—and this has now been confirmed by police—over the past few days some Regressive students at The Evergreen State College (TESC) in Olympia, Washington, have been patrolling the campus with baseball bats, and there has also been some damage to property, including graffiti and rocks thrown through the windows of science buildings. As the Fix reported on Monday:

An official at Evergreen State College sent a memo to students Sunday asking an apparent group of campus vigilantes who have taken to patrolling the grounds armed with bats or batons to end the practice, according to an email forwarded to The College Fix. 

The email was from Vice President for Student Affairs Wendy Endress, who in her memo addressed to “colleagues” included the message sent to students Sunday by Sharon Goodman, director of Evergreen’s Residential and Dining Service, or RAD, asking the “community patrol” to lay down its weapons.

The Olympia, Wash.-based campus is closed today due to an unspecified “external threat”; it was also closed for nearly two days last week due to a “direct threat to campus safety.”

Now comes word that students apparently took their safety into their own hands. The June 4 memo from Goodman to students states in part:

Dear RAD Students,

We are aware of a small group of students coordinating a community patrol of housing and campus. We acknowledge and understand the fear and concerns that are motivating these actions. We also understand that these students are seeking to provide an alternative source of safety from external entities as well as those community members who they distrust.

Community patrols can be a useful tool for helping people to feel safe, however the use of bats or similar instruments is not productive. Some members of this group have been observed carrying batons and/or bats. Carrying bats is causing many to feel unsafe and intimidated. The bats must be put away immediately in order to protect all involved. Non-students participating in this activity are advised to leave campus.

Goodman’s note goes on to invite students to workshops Monday with “trained restorative justice facilitators” to help them finish out their final week of school.

Goodman and Endress did not respond to several requests by The College Fix seeking comment Monday to confirm their emails or comment further on the matter. An email and phone call to campus spokesman Zach Powers on Monday afternoon was also not immediately addressed.

As always, Evergreen keeps its mouth shut, especially Zach Powers, who is supposed to field questions but apparently has decided that silence is the better part of information.

Note the osculation of the students’ rumps by the college: “Community patrols can be a useful tool”, and “We acknowledge and understand the fear and concerns that are motivating these actions.” Seriously? What are the bat-wielding students below afraid of? Who are they trying to protect? Are there any right-wing students who are intimidating people? No. Are there students who are endangered for their beliefs? No, except by the kind of goons you see in the picture below. No, the vigilantes aren’t trying to protect people; they’re trying to intimidate them.

This is from the Twitter page of Professor Bret Weinstein, who ignited protests at TESC by refusing to leave campus when white people were “encouraged” to do so by students. He says that people were actually struck by the thugs, but haven’t reported it. I can understand why!

Here’s graffiti posted by Weinstein:

And further reprisals against Weinstein, in the form of a fake Facebook page, to damage him for his single email.

It is interesting that YouTube videos showing the bullying students attacking Weinstein and the invertebrate President Bridges—videos that were taken by the students—are being removed. This can only be because the students realize that they don’t look so heroic after all, but rather like a vigilante gang, which is what they are. Their narrative is undermined by evidence they produced themselves.

As I’ve noted before, both Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying are biology professors at TESC, and both have superb teaching evaluations (see here and here).  A student I know took their courses as an undergraduate and sent me this evaluation:

They were my mentors in undergrad and are truly exceptional teachers — really, unparalleled; they taught me most of what I know about how to think. 

. . . they are phenomenal teachers — I doubt there are any like them in the world. 

I think it’s likely that Weinstein and Heying will part company with TESC, though I hope the University will create a way for them to stay in safety. And if that happens, it would be a terrible loss for Evergreen, but they’ll have only themselves to blame.