Tuesday: Hili dialogue

April 30, 2019 • 6:45 am

It’s Tuesday, the last day of April (the 30th), 2019. It’s National Raisin Day, and perhaps I’ll have some in a steaming bowl of oatmeal. It’s also Honesty Day in the U.S., a day whose existence implies that, by and large, Americans are dishonest. It’s also International Jazz Day (a UNESCO holiday). In honor of that, let’s have some international jazz. How about the great Django Reinhardt, who played spectacular jazz guitar using only two fingers (his third and fourth fingers were injured in a fire)? His partner on violin, Stéphan Grappelli, also swings.

It was on April 30, 1492, that Christopher Columbus got his commission of exploration from Spain, and the rest is history (and infamy). On this day in 1789, George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States, taking the oath of office on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City. On this day in 1803, the U.S. bought the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million, which more than doubled the size of our country. The price worked out to be just 3 cents per acre.

On April 30, 1897, J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge announced, at a lecture at London’s Royal Institution, that he had discovered the electron.  Exactly eight years later, Albert Einstein finally finished his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Zurich.  In 1927, the first two celebrities so honored left their footprints in cement at Hollywood’s Grauman Chinese Theater. Can you recognize them?

And on this day in 1938, according to Wikipedia, “The animated cartoon short Porky’s Hare Hunt debuts in movie theaters, introducing Happy Rabbit, an early version of Bugs Bunny).”  Here’s the cartoon. Bugs, with long ears and face, hasn’t yet become neotenized, according to Stephen Jay Gould’s theory for Mickey Mouse.

It was on April 30, 1945, that Evan Braun and Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the Führerbunker as the Russians closed in, having raised the Soviet Victory Flag over the Reichstag:

Photo: Vladimir Grebnev/RIA Novosti

On this day in 1966, again according to Wikipedia, “The Church of Satan is formed in The Black House, San Francisco.”

Finally, on April 30, 2008, the Russians confirmed that two skeletons exhumed near Yekaterinburg, Russia, were those of Tsarevitch Alexei and his sister Anastasia, two of the Tsar’s children who were murdered, along with the family and its retainers, by the Bolsheviks. Here are the family’s graves in the wall of Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg; I took this in July of 2011, and you can see Alexei’s plaque on the left on the wall and Anastasia’s on the right, facing you:

Notables born on this day include Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777), Alice B. Toklas (1877), Johnny Horton (1925), Bobby Vee (1943), Mimi Fariña and Annie Dillard (1945), Wonder Mike (1957), and Gal Gadot (1985).

Those who died on April 29 include Robert FitzRoy (1865; Beagle commander), A. E. Houseman (1865), Édouard Manet (1883), A. E. Housman (1936), Muddy Waters (1983), and Harry Kroto (2016, Nobel Laureate).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili ponders the transience of life;

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: About fading of beauty.
In Polish:
Ja: Nad czym się zastanawiasz?
Hili: Nad przemijaniem piękna.

Diana MacPherson put this great photo up on Facebook:

A tweet from reader Dom:

And another cat, this time a jaguar, taking down a croc. I’ve posted this before, but it’s so amazing that it’s worth seeing again:

https://twitter.com/InterestingSci1/status/1122925764872146947

From reader Nilou, a guy who likes Canada geese and is trying to save one. I hope it was okay in the end.

From Heather Hastie, a cat on a hot slate roof. I love its pose.

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1122574214672687104

Speaking of cats on roofs, here’s one from Grania, who loves the photo in the first tweet:

More from Grania: a sign of the coming Apocalypse:

Don’t know what a Zoetrope is? Read here, but watch the video, too.

https://twitter.com/MichaelGalanin/status/1119243504440553472

From Matthew. First, a kitten rescue—a successful save of Archimedes:

These are, of course, Didga and Boomer (a Bengal):

There’s no sound as mournful as a distant train whistle in the night—a whistle like this one:

https://twitter.com/balticthe144/status/1122328384569212934

 

Sam Harris on ISIS: Why they hate us and why they fight us

April 29, 2019 • 3:00 pm

Here’s a just reissued “Waking Up” podcast from Sam Harris, discussing whether Islamist fighters, like those in ISIS, really believe what they say they do, and whether religion is really responsible—at least in large part—for their acts. We all know the “religion denialists” about Islamic terrorism: ostrich people like Robert Pape, Karen Armstrong, and Reza Aslan, who assert that the terrorism has purely political causes, is due to the disaffection of young men, and/or is the fault of the West. Anything but Islam, they say. (These folks remind me of those accommodationists who try to exculpate religion as the main cause of creationism.) In this episode Sam maintains that religion really is a major cause of Muslim terrorism, and he reads from an issue of the ISIS magazine Dabiq in which the organization explains “Why we hate you and why we fight you.” (Answer: It’s Islam, Jake.)

I wrote about the Dabiq article three years ago, but for some reason that magazine has gone offline. (Could it be because ISIS has come down a lot since then?) Nevertheless, the article is archived here, and I recommend that you read it. It’s not long, and says exactly what Sam says it does. Then listen to the podcast if you’re so inclined: Sam has a number of things to add to what the jihadists wrote. Unless you think ISIS was lying in this article, you’ll find it most enlightening.

Click on the screenshot to hear the podcast.

h/t: Fred

Monday: Duck report

April 29, 2019 • 1:00 pm

Things are quiet at Botany Pond, as the female duck (not Honey) rarely visits, and when she does she incites all the males in the pond to fight by flying over the pond and quacking loudly.  Inter-male carnage ensues. There is often more than one drake around, and although I’m feeding Gregory Peck because he’s a caring drake to his hen, I won’t feed the others. (I’m going to need a name for her.) If I can’t drive the other males away with my Super Soaker, nobody gets fed.

There was a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) by the pond a few days ago, and it returned the next day. I watched it for a while and then shooed it away. These birds eat ducklings, and I don’t want them hanging about. (By my calculations, we should have ducklings within two weeks). Last year, a heron appeared when Honey was in the pond with her ducklings, and she went nuts, quacking hysterically until I shooed it away. Still, these herons are magnificent creatures. (This is an iPhone shot taken early in the morning, so excuse the poor quality):

While walking around the pond to try to feed Gregory (he’s gotten skittish as he sometimes gets spooked when I squirt the other drakes), I saw that Facilities had, at my request, done something really nice: they put a layer of soft dirt directly below the third-floor window where the hen was nesting, covering the cement lip right up to the pond’s edge. This is to cushion the fall of the ducklings when the mother calls them to jump after hatching. I am immensely touched that these folks cared enough to do this:

Yesterday afternoon the hen made a rare appearance, for she rarely leaves the nest. I immediately fed her and Gregory, and they had a good snack. But then an errant drake flew into the pond, and the hen immediately flew off, quacking, while Gregory engaged the interloper and drove him onto the grass. I squirted him away. (I don’t even have to hit the ducks with water; they just see the stream, which doesn’t reach them, and take to the air.)

As much of a domestic scene as you’ll see in the Pond: Gregory and his unnamed mate. They are eating Mazuri Waterfowl Starter Chow (it’s suitable for both adults and ducklings, it floats, and the pellets are small enough that ducklings can take them).

Gregory: the Dude abides. (He waits 24/7 for the female to finally enter the pond with her brood.)

The lovely hen. You can tell it’s not Honey as she doesn’t have speckles on her bill. I still have hopes that Honey is nesting nearby, but that might mean there would be two broods of ducklings in the pond at once, not a scenario that I like to contemplate.

And look who showed up yesterday afternoon: two Eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus)! One had the normal wild coloration, while the other had a brown head and white body—surely a hybrid between someone’s domesticated rabbit and a wild one:

This guy wasn’t too spooked so I was able to get quite close to him (or her):

Cleaning:

The half-white one. I saw it the other day; it was easy to spot in the pre-dawn darkness. I hope it doesn’t get spotted by predators and eaten:

Can you spot the rabbit? This is dead easy!

And a short and mediocre video of the brown bunny. Look at his nose twitching!

 

Once again: should Trump be impeached?

April 29, 2019 • 10:30 am

Here’s a short video on CNN by the always sensible Fareed Zakaria on the possibility (and desirability) of Trump being impeached. He’s also put the text of this talk in a Washington Post piece called, “Democrats, there’s a better strategy than impeachment.” Listen (click on the screenshot to access the video) and/or read:

What is “Fareed’s take”?  It’s that the Democrats should “pursue legitimate investigations of Trump” that will educate the nation about what he did (certainly a lot of malfeasance), but not pursue a full impeachment trial. Remember, the House can impeach, which means just bringing charges, by a simple majority, while the trial itself, determining whether Trump should be removed from office, takes place in the Senate, where a 2/3 majority is required to convict. That won’t happen—not given what we know so far about the Mueller report.

Instead, says Zakaria—and here I agree with him—right now the Democrats need to be putting forth policies, and trying to unite around those policies, instead of trying to punish Trump with an impeachment trial. Remember, even if Trump is successfully impeached and convicted, that makes Pence the President. Perhaps, too, a removal from office could help the Democrats in 2020, but the likelihood of a successful impeachment is so small that, as Zakaria and others have noted, the specter of a Democrat-dominated trial of Trump may actually help the President get re-elected.

A short excerpt of Fareed’s Take (my emphasis):

Consider, for a moment, what the growing talk of impeachment among Democrats sounds like to the tens of millions of people who voted for President Trump. Many of them supported him because they felt ignored, mocked and condescended to by the country’s urban, educated and cosmopolitan elites — especially lawyers and journalists. So what happens when their guy gets elected? These same elites pursue a series of maneuvers to try to overturn the results of the 2016 election. It would massively increase the class resentment that feeds support for the president. It would turn the topic away from his misdeeds and toward the Democrats’ overreach and obsessions. And ultimately, of course, it would fail — two-thirds of this Republican-controlled Senate would not vote to convict him — allowing Trump to brandish his “acquittal” as though it were a gold medal.

. . .For some Democrats, impeachment talk might be a smart, if cynical, short-term calculation. If you are running for the Democratic nomination and languishing in the polls, it is a way to get attention. If you are consolidating your support with the party’s base, the more fiercely anti-Trump you are, the better. But all these moves work only as long as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) slow-rolls the process and stops it from getting out of hand. Others can be irresponsible on the assumption that Pelosi will be responsible. But what if things snowball, as they often do in politics?

The Democrats have a much better path in front of them. They should pursue legitimate investigations of Trump, bring in witnesses and release documentary proof of wrongdoing, providing a national education about the way Trump has operated as president. But they should, at the same time, show the public that they would be a refreshing contrast to Trump — substantive, policy-oriented, civil and focused on the country, not on their narrow base. America is tired of the circus of Trump. That doesn’t mean they want the circus of the House Democrats.

The president is vulnerable. With strong economic numbers, he has astonishingly low approval ratings. He will likely run his 2020 campaign on cultural nationalism, as he did in 2016. Democrats need to decide what their vision will be. That should be their focus, not the unfounded hope that if they pursue impeachment, somehow a series of miracles will take place — a deeply divided country will coalesce around them, and Republicans will finally abandon their president.

The real challenge the Democrats face goes beyond Trump. It is Trumpism — a right-wing populism that has swelled in the United States over the past decade. Surely the best way to take it on is to combat it ideologically and defeat it electorally. That is the only way to give the Democrats the real prize, which is not Trump’s scalp but the power and legitimacy to forge a governing majority.

I think he’s right here, but the animus of House Democrats against Trump is so strong, and the country so divided, that I wonder if any Democratic coalescence is possible. For even the Dems are divided, with the centrists or more moderate Democrats fighting the Democratic socialists and “progressive” Democrats. Those progressives will do anything they can, I think, to bring down Trump, even at the expense of their own party. It’s times like these that I think it was a good thing that Nancy Pelosi remained Speaker of the House. In my view, she still has her eyes on the prize. And imagine what would happen if a “Progressive” were in charge!

And a vote:

 

From Rob Rogers via reader Linda

h/t: Paul

The supposedly anti-Semitic New York Times cartoon

April 29, 2019 • 9:00 am

I was alerted to The Cartoon by this tweet from Bari Weiss, a Jewish op-ed columnist for the NYT, and someone I much admire. However, in this case I don’t agree with her.

She’s referring to this cartoon, and to the op-ed by NYT columnist Bret Stephens below it. The political cartoon appeared in the print version of the NYT’s international edition, not in the U.S. edition or online.

Stephens has no doubt that the cartoon’s publication was ignorant, playing into the hands of anti-Semites:

Here was an image that, in another age, might have been published in the pages of Der Stürmer. The Jew in the form of a dog. The small but wily Jew leading the dumb and trusting American. The hated Trump being Judaized with a skullcap. The nominal servant acting as the true master. The cartoon checked so many anti-Semitic boxes that the only thing missing was a dollar sign.

Wily? I don’t see that. Dumb and overly trusting of Israel? Well, that is Trump, isn’t it? Bibi, regardless of what you think of him, is certainly smarter and savvier than Trump. In fact, had the cartoon had depicted Kim Jong-un as a dachshund leading a blind trump waving a DPRK flag, nobody would have batted an eyelash. The point would have been similar.

Stephens continues:

The image also had an obvious political message: Namely, that in the current administration, the United States follows wherever Israel wants to go. This is false — consider Israel’s horrified reaction to Trump’s announcement last year that he intended to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria — but it’s beside the point. There are legitimate ways to criticize Trump’s approach to Israel, in pictures as well as words. But there was nothing legitimate about this cartoon.

. . .The problem with the cartoon isn’t that its publication was a willful act of anti-Semitism. It wasn’t. The problem is that its publication was an astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism — and that, at a publication that is otherwise hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice, from mansplaining to racial microaggressions to transphobia.

Imagine, for instance, if the dog on a leash in the image hadn’t been the Israeli prime minister but instead a prominent woman such as Nancy Pelosi, a person of color such as John Lewis, or a Muslim such as Ilhan Omar. Would that have gone unnoticed by either the wire service that provides the Times with images or the editor who, even if he were working in haste, selected it?

The question answers itself. And it raises a follow-on: How have even the most blatant expressions of anti-Semitism become almost undetectable to editors who think it’s part of their job to stand up to bigotry?

The Times of Israel adds this:

The cartoon was drawn by António Moreira Antunes, 66, a well-known and sometimes controversial Portuguese political cartoonist for the Lisbon-based Expresso weekly who has published caricatures critical of Israel in the past.

. . . The cartoon, carried in the paper’s international edition, showed Netanyahu as a guide dog wearing a Star of David on his collar leading a blind US President Donald Trump seen wearing a skullcap.

“The anti-Semitic caricature published by the New York Times is shocking and reminiscent of Nazi propaganda during the Holocaust,” Erdan said. [Gilad Erdan is Public Security Minister and a member of the Likud]

But now there has been an explicit apology by the NYT:

My take? Although I’m often accused of being reflexively pro-Israel and too quick to call out anti-Semitism (I maintain, for instance, that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and that the BDS movement is almost overtly anti-Semitic), I am not as quick as Weiss, Stephens and others to claim that this is a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon. In fact, when I first saw it—and I like to think I’m as sensitive as anyone to Der Stürmer-like tropes—I didn’t see it as anti-Semitic. I saw it as anti-Trump and anti-Netanyahu: the point was that Netanyahu, like a guide dog for the blind, was leading around a blind Trump, getting the President on board with all of Bibi’s policies. It seems in line with how many political cartoons are drawn.

Now there are aspects of the cartoon that could be seen as anti-Semitic if you squint hard, like the Star of David and Netanyahu’s big nose, as well as Trump’s yarmulke. But the Star of David could be taken to show that this was indeed Netanyahu, the nose may be simply part of the normal caricature of such cartoons (let’s face it: Bibi’s proboscis isn’t small), and the yarmulke represents Trump’s claimed unthinking support of Israel. In short, while I find the cartoon misguided and somewhat offensive, I don’t see it as explicitly anti-Semitic. Had I been an editor, I’m not sure I would have approved its publication. Yet now that it’s published, I can’t really join the offense brigade on this one.

That said, I do think that the New York Times has bent over backwards to criticize Israel and extol the Palestinians, and that this cartoon is part of the paper’s growing Wokeness and Authoritarian Leftism. Its long and tendentious article from last year dissecting the errant path of a bullet that killed a Palestinian medic seemed a gratuitous way to demonize Israel by implying it was deliberately killing civilians. In my view, the article didn’t show that, but its length and the amount of money spent on the research bespoke the paper’s animus against Israel. So if the cartoon shows anything, it’s the Times‘s (or rather, an overseas editor’s) annoying and kneejerk dislike of Israel, which goes along with the Time’s history of biased and laudatory articles on Palestine.

Offensive, yes, and certainly biased. But not anti-Semitic. Or so I think, and I already know that some people will disagree with me vehemently. But if an editor didn’t spot it as anti-Semitic, and I didn’t either, does that make me, a secular Jew, blind to one of the “most blatant expressions of anti-Semitism”?

For opinions opposed to mine, arguing that the cartoon was indeed blatantly anti-Semitic, see The Jerusalem Post, CAMERA, the Spectator, and Elder of Ziyon, which claims that the dog is a dachshund because it has been used as a symbol of Germany.

As always, you’re invited to give your opinion below, whether or not you agree with me.

h/t: Malgorzata

Reader’s wildlife video and photo

April 29, 2019 • 7:30 am

Tara Tanaka (Vimeo site here, and Flickr site here) is back with a lovely video of inter-sibling rivalry between two Great Egret (Ardea alba) chicks. Her description of this avian Frog Fight is below.

Six days after videoing three young Great Egrets in this nest, I returned to find only two. The feeding process is brutal, and it’s a wonder that there aren’t a lot of one-eyed egrets. For a brief moment the chick with its back to the camera had the frog – but his joy was short-lived as the chick facing the camera immediately grabbed it from him, feet first. It was probably the backwards orientation that kept him from being able to quickly swallow it, and once again, when opportunity presented itself, the original chick quickly snatched it out of the beak and throat of his sibling. It’s not over until it’s over.

Watch on full screen and be sure to listen all the way to the end. See if you can figure out what’s supposed to be happening at the end.

And here’s an astronomy photo from reader Tim Anderson.

This is NGC5139 – the Omega Centauri globular star cluster. It is one of the glories of the Southern Hemisphere skies and is easily visible to the naked eye on a dark night. This image was compiled from eighty 60-second exposures taken with a 100mm refracting telescope and a colour astronomical camera.

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

April 29, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s the work week again: Monday, April 29, 2019, and National Shrimp Scampi Day, honoring a dish I’ve never eaten. It’s also the double remembrance: Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare (a UN holiday) and  International Dance Day (a UNESCO holiday).

On this day in 1429, Joan of Arc, a peasant girl, arrived at Orléans on a Mission from God to lift the siege by the British. She and the French succeeded. Here’s a painting depicting her entry into the city:

Joan of Arc enters Orléans (painting by Jean-Jacques Scherrer, 1887)

On April 29, 1770, James Cook arrived in Botany Bay in Australia, a place that he named on the spot.  In 1916, this was the day of the end of the Easter Rising, when the Irish rebels surrendered to the British in Dublin. Fourteen of the leaders were executed by firing squad. On this day in 1945, there were two events in Nazi German: Hitler married Eva Braun in the Führerbunker, designating Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor. The next day Hitler and Braun both committed suicide. On the same day, Dachau concentration camp was liberated by American troops.

On this day in 1967, after having refused induction into the Army the previous day, Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing title. But he fought (in the ring) again.  On April 29, 1967, as Wikipedia notes, “The controversial musical Hair, a product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, opens at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, with some of its songs becoming anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement.” On this day in 1974, besieged by the courts and Congress, President Nixon released an “edited transcript” of the White House “Watergate tapes.” It wasn’t enough, and the S.O.B. was forced to resign.

Exactly eight years ago (was it that long?), Prince William and Catherine Middleton got married at Westminster Abbey in London.  For you Royal watchers, and also Kiwis—since William will one day be your King—here’s a short clip of the moment of the nuptials:

Finally, as Wikipedia again reports, “A baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox sets the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball. Zero fans were in attendance for the game, as the stadium was officially closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests.”

Notables born on this day include Henri Poincaré (1854), William Randolph Hearst (1863), Harold Urey (1893, Nobel Laureate), Duke Ellington (1899), Hirohito (1901), Rod McKuen (1933), Zubin Mehta (1936), Bernie Madoff (1938), Brian Charlesworth (1945, my erstwhile colleague and chairman at Chicago), Jerry Seinfeld (1954), Daniel Day-Lewis (1957), and Uma Thurman (1970).

Those who bought the farm on April 29 include Ludwig Wittgenstein (1951), Alfred Hitchcock (1980), Mike Royko (1997), John Kenneth Galbraith (2006), and Albert Hofmann (2008).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hli is taking advantage of the rights conferred on her (remotely) by the American Declaration of Independence:

A: Are you asleep?
Hili: No, I’m resting. I got tired in the pursuit of happiness.
(Photo: Zuzanna Frydrych)
In Polish:
Ja: Śpisz?
Hili: Nie, odpoczywam, zmęczyłam się pogonią za szczęściem.
(Zdjęcie: Zuzanna Frydrych)

Pi got a lion cut, which he needs in the Hawaiian heat:

This is splendiferous!

Useful SFW words from Facebook:

Tweets from Heather Hastie. The tweeter here assures us that this floating pigeon is fine:

https://twitter.com/SlenderSherbet/status/1121844728469782528

It’s a bumper crop of kakapos this year, and a good thing, too, given their rarity and low reproductive rate. Here are three in one nest!

From reader Barry. I think Dr. Goodall is being a bit too Pecksniffish here. I’d be curious how a chimp reacts to a cellphone.

Tweets from Grania. Say the name of this dinosaur out loud:

A chilling sea turtle. This looks like a young one:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1119439728317566976

This should interest you. Remember, this is not bone but cartilage:

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1119315510393356288

Bucket cats. Translation: “Would you care for an egg?”

Tweets from Matthew. This first fact was news to me:

This carnivorous plant is really cool:

It’s hard to see platypuses (platypi?) in the wild. Here are some: