Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey

June 7, 2017 • 9:15 am

. . . actually, they’re mine or my dad’s, and I’ve put them in bold.

When I was young, my father used to pose me this task, “Jerry, imagine a face that you’ve never seen.” I couldn’t do it. Maybe some of you can, but when I try, it always resembles someone I know.

Second Deep Thought, which derives from the first. This morning I was drinking my coffee: I have only one cup per day, but it’s a latte I make on my Breville Cafe Roma espresso machine, a great deal on a pressure machine, and it’s lasted several years (the trick is using distilled deionized water, so it never needs cleaning).

This is what my morning java looks like; it’s in a cup I had made with a logo sent by a friend, featuring the LOLCat translation of Why Evolution is True:

But I digress. Here’s the second Deep Thought. Many of you, like me, are avid fans of good coffee. Even though my intake is limited, I love the taste and appreciate the wake-up buzz.  A world without coffee would be inconceivable to me, although that was what the ancient world is like, and what many places are like now. (How did the Spartans manage to fight without jave?)

Now think of this: what other things are even BETTER than coffee but don’t exist? Imagine the delicious beverages and foodstuffs that we’ll never know about because their ingredients don’t exist. Could you imagine a banana, or a roast goose, if neither that fruit nor fowl existed? No, you couldn’t. Sometimes stuff like this bothers me.

Nota bene: Just because one can imagine, say, a beverage that is greater than coffee is not proof that that beverage exists. I am not Anselm of Canterbury.

Lagniappe: My ducklings are growing, though the brood of five newborns is gone and I fear they are in the Great Pond in the Sky. But here’s the thriving brood of four, eating the Cheerios I gave them this morning (note: DO NOT give bread to ducks or ducklings: it has no nutritional value for them. Try instant oatmeal or Cheerios [not the sugary kind]).

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Matthew

June 7, 2017 • 8:15 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “rise2”, came with this note:

Time to make fun of the Bible, having picked on the Koran for the past few weeks. Here’s a 10-years-old strip about the funniest gospel, Matthew.

Here’s the relevant verse from the King James version:

Matthew 27:51-53

51 Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, 52 and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53 and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 7, 2017 • 7:30 am

What would a day be without at least one picture from Stephen Barnard in Idaho, who’s been a bit niggardly with his photos. Here’s a new one that must have been quite difficult to take:

Mating damselflies in flight. (unknown species):

Reader Roger Sorensen contributes some photos from St. Cloud, Minnesota.  His notes are indented:

First, here’s a Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) foraging for blooms and nectar in the Hedge Cotoneaster (Cotoneaster lucidus) that borders my patio. Later in the season, they will be eating the deep purple berries and leaving purple messes everywhere.

Following that is Mr. Gray Catbird (Dumetella carolinensis), who has been showing off and singing the song of his people nearly nonstop for days. The mating / nesting song is far, far more varied and melodious than the plaintive mewing they’re named for. They may be re-using the nest from last year in the large Euonymus next to my driveway.

I thought I might’ve had Mourning Doves (Zenaida macroura) nesting in the Cotoneaster too, but they moved on after spending a week perched in a plant pot on that patio.

And finally, my patch of Shastas (Leucanthemum × superbum) bloomed this past week and are now being tended to by dozens of Eastern Carpenter Bees (Xylocopa virginica) and several other species of bees and flies.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

June 7, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s Wednesday, June 7, 2017: National Chocolate Ice Cream Day, and here’s some information from that link: “The udder of a cow can hold between 25-50 lbs. of milk.” I weep for those cows! It’s also the first day of Vestalia (or was, in ancient Rome), but I doubt if the calendar is the same now.

On June 7, 1099 (again, possible calendar problems, the siege of Jerusalem begin during the First Crusade. On this day in 1654, Louis XIV was crowned as the King of France. On June 7, 1965, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, which declared the use of contraception by married couples legal. Connecticut’s state law had forbidden that, but the Court ruled that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s right of privacy. It was not until 1972 that the Court effectively legalized the use of contraception by unmarried couples. Go figure. On June 7, 1977, 40 years ago today, the biggest day of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee took place. Finally, on this day in 1982, Priscilla Presley opened Graceland as a public tourist attraction; Wikipedia adds that “the bathroom where Elvis Presley died five years earlier is kept off-limits.” As one site quotes:

“No fan has ever breached the security of the
2nd floor of Graceland.” — Bob Carlson, Graceland Museums.

But it also purports to give a secret photo of Elvis’s bathroom, and so, for you fans, here it is:

On this day in Paul Gauguin was born in 1848, as was Gwendolyn Brooks in 1917, Liam Neeson in 1952, and Prince in 1958.  Those who died on this day include Jean Harlow (1937; she was only 26), Jean Arp (1966), Dorothy Parker (1967), E. M. Forster (1970), and Henry Miller (1980). Here are two Gauguins for your delectation:

Gaugin: A little cat (1888)
Gaugin: Mimi and her cat (1890)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is beginning to infect Cyrus with solipsism:

Hili: Do you think we will look good in this picture?
Cyrus: We should.
In Polish:
Hili: Myślisz, że dobrze wyjdziemy na tym zdjęciu?
Cyrus: Powinniśmy.

And out in Pasadena, Sean Carroll and Jennifer Oullette’s newly adopted kittens are having a grand old time. This tw**t documents an adorable pounce. I’m glad Sean has discovered the joy of posting kitten pictures and videos.

 

The Barbarian of Seville

June 6, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Nearly everyone on my Facebook feed is posting anti-Trump stuff, and in response I post kitten videos, which counteract the Bad Vibes of the Prez. But here’s one anti-Trump opera I find hilarious. It’s five minutes of political music.

The credits:

Believe it or not, in an aria with so many words, we actually still did not manage to fit in everything we wanted to say about “45”!
Singers: Rebecca Nelsen (1st and 3rd) and Eric Stoklossa
https://www.facebook.com/rebeccanelse…

https://www.facebook.com/ericstokloss…

Special thanks to SNL and Adam Sandler’s “Operaman” for the inspiration.

h/t: Don B.

Seattle Times warns of Evergreen State’s future–and more updates on the situation

June 6, 2017 • 1:30 pm

I hadn’t realized that The Evergreen State College (ESC)  is “the only state four-year higher education institution to see enrollment drop steeply since 2011 despite wide-open admission standards.” (They accept about 98% of applicants, I believe). The statement in quotes comes from yesterday’s editorial in the Seattle Times, “The Evergreen State College: No safety, no learning, no future.”  The Times now joins many venues, including the New York Times and The Washington Post (see below) in publicizing and decrying what happened when Regressive Leftist inmates start running the asylum at Evergreen.

If Evergreen State’s enrollment has dropped steeply in the last 6 years, well, that’s nothing compared with what is to come. Students throwing rocks through windows, threats phoned in to shoot a lot of people, student “vigilantes” roaming the campus with baseball bats—what parent would want to send their kid to such a school, even if they did accept the po-mo and often ridiculous classes the students have to take? (Evolutionary biology seems to be a welcome exception.)

The fracas at ESC may not be, as I predicted, a turning point in the Left’s coddling of its regressive element, or of authoritarian students dominating the discourse on campuses, but it surely presages hard times for ESC—and that’s deserved. The trustees and President should apologize to Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, his wife who also teaches biology (and was also called a “racist”), and they should discipline the students who disrupted classes and carried baseball bats, fire the invertebrate President George Bridges, and get rid of its fluffy po-mo courses. I suspect that none of this will happen, but, as the Seattle Times editorial notes, if something isn’t done, the College is doomed:

Evergreen President George Bridges and his administration need to assure future students and their parents that academics come first — and not acquiesce to the 200-or-so student protesters at the expense of the 4,000-student campus. Without safety, there’s no learning, and without learning, Evergreen will wither into irrelevance.

. . . The situation at Evergreen is an amplified version of a story playing out at campuses across the state, including recently at Western Washington University, Seattle University and the University of Washington — and across the nation.

Since the corrosive 2016 presidential election, Americans increasingly comprise a nation with citizens sealed in ideological bubbles; college campuses are often the most hermetically sealed of bubbles. When Weinstein, the professor, asked a yelling mob of students if they wanted to hear his answer, they shouted “No!”

For Evergreen, the chaos of the 2016-17 school year should become a case study in the First Amendment and the aching need for better civil discourse. The funky, nontraditional college has a unique role in the state higher-education system. But for it to survive, Evergreen must impose consequences when a student protest hijacks other students’ learning.

Nobody has taken me up on my $50 bet that not a single student at ESC will be disciplined over what has happened in the last two weeks.

*******

The Washington Post has finally confirmed the rumors I’d heard about ESC; that bands of people (and I’m pretty sure they were students) were walking around campus with baseball bats  over the weekend:

Thurston County Sheriff John Snaza said school officials were responding to the threat from last week as well as an incident Sunday night. “They have had people walking around with sticks and baseball bats late at night causing property damage,” including graffiti and broken windows, he said Monday. “They asked us to come out and assist.”

He said campus police told him there was about $10,000 worth of property damage.

The Evergreen State College Police Department referred questions to a college spokesman, Zach Powers, who did not immediately have answers to questions about the property damage. [JAC: I suspect Powers is the Sean Spicer of Evergreen.]

This photo, from Instagram—provided by someone associated by ESC—purports to show ESC students wielding bats; I have no idea whether they were actually the vigilante mob or not. See here for a tw**t that gives another photo of this group and makes the claim that these are ESC students. They might just be posing theatrically. 

And a bit more from WaPo:

Student protest leaders did not respond to requests for comment.

An opinion piece in the student newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal, included these points: “Police are commissioned to maintain order, the current order of the world, and thus always inherently work in favor of the status quo. Police are peace keepers, but the kind of peace they keep is not peace as an end to structural violence, but a peace based in non disruption of the status quo. If you are a member of a group that the status quo does not favor, if you are among other things not white, not wealthy, not straight, or not cisgender, then the cops do not and can not work in your favor.

” … If the status quo at the Evergreen State College is institutional racism, and the police are here [to] protect the institution that shelters that form of institutional violence, they are a white supremacist threat.”

Snaza said he was concerned about the situation on campus. When 200 to 300 protesters confronted the president and other administrators last month, he said the people who were targeted did not feel they could leave. “When you barricade doors and windows so the staff can’t leave,” he said, “that’s not usually a good sign.”

Can science prove things to be false?

June 6, 2017 • 11:00 am

We hear this all the time: “Science can’t prove anything to be true, as there’s always a possibility that we’ve made a mistake or that there are other data that we don’t yet know, so all things that science says are “true” are provisional. But science can prove things to be false!”

When thinking about that this weekend, prompted by a talk at the Imagine No Religion Meetings, I felt that that statement is too glib. Bear with me for a minute, as these are just preliminary thoughts and have probably been discussed—and answered—by philosophers of science.

But the statement above seems wrong to me, and for a simple reason: if you can be wrong about finding things true, can’t you also be wrong about finding things untrue? That is, you reject something because it doesn’t seem to fit the facts, and yet that rejection may be wrong because you didn’t know all the facts.

Take creationism. As far as people know, it’s been “proven” wrong. The earth isn’t 6000 years old, animals and plants weren’t created all at once, and there was no great flood. Because it doesn’t fit what we know, we say it’s “proven wrong.” But look at the other side: evolution. It fits every fact we know—as far as we know. But we don’t say that evolution is “proven” right: we say it’s the “best explanation we have” for the data. Why? Because something might crop up to show that evolution is wrong: a passel of Precambrian rabbits, human fossils indubitably dated with dinosaurs, and so on.

But if something might crop up to show evolution to be wrong, why couldn’t something crop up to show that our rejection of creationism is wrong? Maybe there was a Great Worldwide Flood, and we haven’t found the evidence yet. Maybe there’s some flaw in dating that we don’t know about.

Now it’s inconceivable to me that all the evidence we have against creationism is wrong, and that that theory is right. The data are simply overwhelming. But my point is this: if we can’t regard evolution as “proven true”, by what lights can we say that creationism is “proven false”?

And so it goes, it seems to me, for all of science.  Nothing can be proven right or wrong in the absolute sense, though, as Anthony Grayling says, things can be proven or disproven in the vernacular sense—in the sense that you’d bet your house that evolution is true or that a molecule of benzene has six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms (well, I would). But sticking to the absolute sense, if nothing can be proven absolutely, how can something be disproven absolutely?

Or am I wrong?

Jeff Tayler on the Manchester bombing

June 6, 2017 • 9:15 am

One thing that really bothered me after the Manchester and London terrorist attacks was the tendency of some people to immediately express solidarity with Muslims rather than feel sadness for the victims and horror at the event. There’s nothing wrong with trying to prevent a terrorist attack from being used to demonize all Muslims, but to coddle the adherents of an odious religion before mourning the victims of its ideology—well, it rankles me. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about, sent out before the terrorists were even identified as Muslims:

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/871135279729561600

The other ones that bothered me were the calls to not become “Islamophobic” after the attacks. Well, if anything inspires “Islamophobia”, which I take to mean the fear of Islam and not bigotry against Muslims, it is such attacks. Each attack committed in the name of Islam makes me more Islamophobic.

The failure to face the implications of Islamic ideology that is taken seriously by its adherents is the topic of Jeff Tayler’s new piece in Quillette, “Manchester’s children and the Regressive Left“. Its theme is the refusal of the Regressive Left to take religious motivations seriously, and, indeed, to become more enamored of and defensive about Islam with each terrorist attack.

An example of this—and the main object of Tayler’s ire—is a piece by Islamophile Shaun King in New York’s Daily News, “We must never hate Islam, or Muslims, because of the violence of its fake followers.” Well, I disagree twice with just the headline: yes, I do hate Islam, as I hate all religions that have pernicious and oppressive doctrines; and the followers of those doctrines weren’t “fake”. Ask a member of ISIS, or those who slaughter apostates in Bangladesh, if they consider themselves “true” Muslims. After all, ISIS has said in its own magazine, Dabiq, that they are murdering primarily because Islam calls for the extinction of nonbelievers. After giving a list of reasons “Why we hate you and why we fight you” (of which the first four out of six are explicitly religious), ISIS says this—and read it carefully:

What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you.

Yet King, the Big Expert on Islam, chooses to ignore the terrorists’ own stated motivation. choosing to call them “fake Muslims”. Here’s his ridiculous claim:

We should all be upset at what happened in Manchester, but what happened there is no excuse to slide into Islamophobia. Whoever did this is no more a Muslim than those who lynched African Americans during Jim Crow were Christians. Wearing the garb of a faith no more makes you a follower of that faith than me wearing a Steph Curry jersey makes me a Golden State Warrior.

. . . we must always resist the urge to throw an entire race of people under the bus even if we truly despise whiteness or white privilege or white supremacy.

Taylor readily notes that most Muslims are neither violent nor approve of terrorism, but he does say this:

So adherents to an ideology constitute a race? Islam is a faith-based ideology, with nothing biologically inherent about it. How would King account for (white) Taliban-combatant John Walker Lindh, or the thwarted shoe-bomber Richard Reid? What would he say of the European converts who joined ISIS? What about Muslim-majority Albania and Kosovo? By King’s illogic, we should declare red-state Republicans a race, since they mostly share a skin color and dogmatically professed beliefs. Religions are thought systems—thought systems conceived in ages of ignorance, asserted without evidence, and deployed to control human behavior—above all, female behavior.

(In a similar vein, imagine the storm of popular outrage that would erupt if any modern-day political party wrote into its charter sex-slavery, wife-beating, and clitorectomies; declared said charter to be immutable and sacrosanct; announced its headquarters stood on sacred ground; and promised to kill anyone who dared leave the party. Even the reddest of red-state Republicans would never go this far.)

And let’s be clear: King urges us to look benignly upon an ideology that does endorse taking female captives as sex slaves, instructs husbands on how to beat their wives, values women’s testimony as half that of men, and sanctions the barbaric butchery that is female genital mutilation. These tenets are matters of scripture, not distortions concocted by a few renegades from the faith.

King then produces the “fake Muslim” argument, including the unctuous “some of my best friends are Muslims” claim, which, even though it may be true, is irrelevant to Tayler’s point.

King:

Of all the friends I have, none are more consistently warm, peaceful, supportive, and kind than my Muslim friends. They are actual Muslims, though. In a day and age of fake news and fake politicians, perhaps nothing is more dangerous than fake Muslims and Christians — who cloak themselves in the accouterments of religion but do so for the asinine and insincere reasons.

Tayler:

. . . Is there an Islam-apologist who does not trot out the “no true Scotsman” dodge? (Apparently not.) In any case, who granted King the right to impugn the piety of the Manchester attacker, Salman Abedi, and on what basis does he do so? A committed Muslim who did not hide his faith, Abedi, we have every reason to think, believed he was committing an act of jihad, for which he would be rewarded with instant access to paradise. Jihad and martyrdom are fundamental tenets of mainstream Islam.

. . . Of all the friends I have,” King tells us, “none are more consistently warm, peaceful, supportive, and kind than my Muslim friends.” This line is too transparently silly to be worth refuting; no one is contending that Muslims are not nice as people. At issue, we recall, is the motivation of the Manchester attacker and those like him. For King, “fake Muslims and Christians—who cloak themselves in the accoutrements of religion but do so for the asinine and insincere reasons” amount to a grave danger. An editor at the New York Daily News would have done well to ask King to state clearly these “asinine and insincere reasons” as well as the criteria by which he so reliably discerns “fake” followers of religions from “true” ones. In another era, this was the business of the Holy Inquisition’s murderous sleuths.

Tayler’s piece contains much more, but go read it for yourself.