Killer sea lion nabs little girl (she’s okay)

May 22, 2017 • 2:30 pm

This video of a girl being dragged into the ocean by a sea lion (and then saved by her father) has gone viral, but perhaps there are a few people who haven’t seen it. According to The Global News, the incident occurred at Steveston Wharf in Richmond, British Columbia:

The video, captured by Vancouver resident Michael Fujiwara, shows the large marine mammal slowly circling the area before it suddenly lunges from the water, nipping at the girl’s dress and pulling her into the water.

Fujiwara said he was at Steveston Wharf around 6:30 p.m. when he spotted a sea lion in the water and pulled out his cellphone.

“A young girl came around with her family and they just started to feed it bread crumbs,” he said. “They were getting a little too close to it, for sure.

“The sea lion seemed pretty friendly at first. It jumped up to the girl, gave her a little greeting, but seconds after when she tried to sit down on the dock, it just came back up … and dragged her in the water.”

As screams erupt from the crowd, a family member immediately leaps into the water, grabs the child and takes her to safety.

I’ve heard intimations that these people were feeding the sea lions before this occurred, but I can’t find a record of that. At any rate, after it took place, the Harbour Authority put up signs saying, “Do not feed the sea lions.”

Of course this made me curious about whether there was any record of a human killed by a seal or sea lion. The only thing I found were several reports of a leopard seal killing a woman scientist who was skin diving in Antarctica fourteen years ago. There are several other reports of leopard seals going after inflatable boats or other people, but nobody succumbed. As for other seals or sea lions. . . nada.

Leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx), are fearsome predators, and the adults eat penguins and other species of seals. Their canine teeth are an inch long. Here’s an epic battle between a hungry leopard seal and a group of large emperor penguins. The cinematography is amazing.  Remember, though, that pinnipeds are wild animals, and that means they’re unpredictable. Enjoy them, but keep your distance:

 

h/t: P.

“You’re an embarrassment to this religion”: Muslim Maajid Nawaz rips apart a Muslim who thinks women should be stoned for adultery

May 22, 2017 • 11:45 am

From LBC Radio (“Leading Britain’s Conversation”), we have a two-minute segment of Maajid Nawaz taking apart a coreligionist who can’t bring himself to consider whether stoning a woman to death for adultery might be, well, a wee bit harsh. The site’s notes:

The LBC presenter, himself a Muslim, insisted that elements of the Quran are simply not fit for modern life and should be ignored.

And when Joe insisted on consulting a scholar on whether stoning a woman for adultery should be allowed, Maajid couldn’t hold back any longer.

Joe asked Maajid his thoughts on those elements of the Quran and he responded: “I’m saying that we can’t implement them, we have to suspend them, we have nothing to do with those attitudes in this day and age, that is an out-of-date notion.

“What do you say? In an ideal Islamic state, when all the Sharia conditions are met and it’s allShariacompliant, is it still wrong to stone an adulterous woman to death?”

When Joe responded: “I’m not in a position to answer that. I’m not a scholar to answer that,” Maajid hit back hard.

He boomed: “There we are. You need a scholar to tell you that it’s wrong to stone a woman to death?

“Joe, you have just exposed yourself to the nation as the apologist that I suspected you were from the beginning of this call.

“The reason you are taking offense at me exposing some of this is because deep down inside you you can’t even bring yourself as a human being to condemn the notion of stoning a woman to death, just because some man who’s got a medieval scripture stuck in his head, hasn’t told you that it’s wrong?

“How would you react if you asked me ‘Is it wrong to torture a baby?’ and I said to you ‘I don’t know because the Pope hasn’t told me yet‘?

“You’d think I’m subhuman. You’d think I’m inhuman, Joe.“

 

Now nobody on this site (I hope!) favors this kind of barbarism, but I note again that those feminists and Regressive Leftists who refused to criticize Muslims because they are brown, and therefore oppressed, rarely say anything about stoning, which is part of sharia law in some countries, and never say anything about forced veiling, morality police, and the general denigration of women in Muslim countries—all of this based on Islam.

Frankly, I’m amazied that a single non-insane person in this world thinks a woman should be killed by being pelted with rocks for copulating with a man who’s not her husband—but it’s not that rare. Here are the data from the 2013 Pew Report on the world’s Muslims showing the percentage of those Muslims who believe sharia should be the law of the land—a high proportion of all Muslims in these Muslim-majority lands—who think women should be stoned for adultery. Read and weep!

And here are the proportion of Muslims in each country that favor sharia as the law of the land. These proportions can be roughly multiplied by the ones above to get the proportions of all Muslims in a country who favor stoning an adulterous woman to death:

Linda Sarsour, the nasty piece of work idolized by many feminists and regessives, also publicly favors sharia law. If pressed, she’d probably say she favors a milder version of sharia than the one above, but she has given approbation for Saudi sharia law, which stipulates the death penalty for adultery, with the preferred method of execution being stoning. It hasn’t been done for several years, but is still on the books, and I suspect is done in rural areas.   Here are the tweets from a feminist hero:

We need a word

May 22, 2017 • 10:30 am

The contest is in the last paragraph.

An increasing number of articles on websites, even respectable ones, seem to consist largely of a collection of people’s tweets. Here’s an example from a non-respectable site. (Click on screenshot to go to articles. The tweets given in the piece go on beyond the screenshot; nearly the whole piece is tweets!)

Now think about what this sort of journalism means. First, it abnegates reporting by journalists, whose jobs now can consist of trawling Twitter for reactions. Second, it makes those reactions the focus of the piece; but the story is not about social media. In the case above,. it’s about a walkout of students during Pence’s graduation address at Notre Dame. Finally, twitter-trawling is often associated with biased reporting (picking those tweets that you find ideologically convenient) and is simply LAZY.

Now we already have a word for website articles that consist of lists, like the one below: they’re listicles. 

How about a word for articles that consist of Tw**ts? I will pick a winner, though there’s no material prize.

Theresa May scraps Tory pledge to ban sales of ivory in the UK

May 22, 2017 • 9:00 am

I’ve had people defend Prime Minister Theresa May on this site when I called her “odious”. That was in reference to her plan to bring back the filthy sport of fox hunting in Britain.

Okay, if you don’t think that’s odious, how about her new scrapping of a Tory pledge to ban ivory trade in the UK? As you know, the ivory trade, especially in China, is the main reason why African elephants are slaughtered by poachers, many of whom kill a magnificent elephant just to saw off its tusks, which are very valuable.

In 2010, Cameron’s Tory government pledged to honor the ban on ivory sales mentioned below, a pledge reiterated five years later, but so far the government has dragged its feet. As the Guardian reported in February of this year;

Last year countries reached a historic international agreement to shut down domestic ivory markets that contribute to poaching or illegal trade. The recommendation applies to parties to the convention on the international trade in endangered species (Cites), which includes the UK, the EU, China, the US and 29 African countries, calling themselves the African Elephant Coalition (AEC), along with Botswana, formerly a major ivory trading nation.

“But,” warns Patrick Ormondi, chair of the AEC, “it will be meaningless if countries ignore it.”

Outside Africa only China, India, the US and France – the lone standout European country – have responded by implementing measures to close their domestic markets. On the 30 December China’s announcement that it will stop its ivory trade by 2017 effectively closed down the world’s largest domestic market.

Meanwhile, back in the UK:

The UK and Europe’s domestic ivory markets are thriving and the bloc is the world’s largest exporter of antique ivory. International trade in ivory is permitted under Cites regulations, but may only involve ivory acquired before the convention came into being in 1975, and only as long as a certificate proving each item’s age is provided. In the case of the UK, antique ivory is classified as ivory acquired before 1947, which some have said goes further than internationally agreed regulations.

However, the antique trade is said to contribute directly to illegal trade, providing the opportunity for illegal ivory to be laundered. According to Conservative Party MP, Luke Hall, who introduced the debate: “It is difficult for our law enforcement officers to tell the difference between pre and post-1947 ivory, especially as newer ivory is frequently and deliberately disguised as antique.”

An EU document issued in February 2016 states that: “Between 2011 and 2014, EU member states reported seizures of around 4,500 ivory items reported as specimens and an additional 780kg as reported by weight.” Most was destined for Asia, particularly China, Hong Kong and Vietnam.

The report notes that: “it is often difficult to distinguish pre-convention specimens”, and points out there are many cases of buyers purchasing ivory using forged pre-convention certificates with the intention of exporting them illegally to Asia.

The UK is by far the largest exporter of ivory items by number among EU member states with declared exports of 25,351 ivory items, 54% of the EU total, between 2006-2015.

. . . The UK seems to be doing little too. This is the second time that the domestic ivory has been debated in the house in the past two months, following a debate on 8 December, when minister of environment Therese Coffey minister promised a consultation, something that has yet to occur.

Labour MP, John Mann, summed up the public mood: “If I were a minister, I would ban the lot and stop any trade in or movement of ivory. The survival of the elephant is far more important than a museum. It is about time we were bold and said that there should be no half-measures, mixed messages, little promises or small steps forwards. A total ban is what I want.”

Sadly, in spite of overwhelming cross-party support from MPs and strong public support for action on this issue, Coffey’s response was simply that consultation on whether or not to close down the domestic ivory trade would begin “shortly” and that she “really hope[s] it will be as soon as possible” – a claim that had already been made in December.

Now, according to several sources (e.g., here, here, and here), the Tories have quietly dropped their commitment—reaffirmed to years ago—to a ban on ivory trading, a ban favored by, among others, Prince William. According to several reports, that’s probably due to pressure on the government from antique dealers, who want to continue selling ivory items without the often hard to get documentation that it’s older, pre-ban ivory.

Between 2012 and 2015, 100,000 African elephants were slaughtered: that’s a quarter of the present population of 400,000, which is half of what it was in 1990.

Even the U.S. has signed the ivory ban and is enforcing it, but May and her Tories can’t be arsed to bother: they in fact want foxes to be slaughtered and don’t care much about the killing of elephants. Signing the ban is the right thing to do, and will help (although not as much as did China) in curbing the slaughter of elephants. Yes, Teresa May is odious.

This is what happens when bans aren’t enforced:

 

My podcast with Radio Live

May 22, 2017 • 8:15 am

When I was in New Zealand I was unable to do a podcast with reader Graeme Hill for the podcast Radio Live, but I did it from my home in Chicago a few days ago. I was on my landline, so the sound quality on my end isn’t optimal. The interview is about 40 minutes long; click on the screenshot below (taken in February 2016) to go to the podcast. I like the photo as it brings back pleasant memories of Darwin Day last year, when I spoke to the British Humanists. My hair is a bit unkempt, but at least I have a tie.  Behind me you can see the well known anatomist and science presenter Alice Roberts, who was the moderator that night.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

May 22, 2017 • 7:30 am

Because it’s World Biodiversity Day, I thought I’d show a diversity of photographs, each from a different reader. Most of them, of course, will be birds! Readers’ notes are indented.

Oh, and keep those photos coming in, folks. I can never have too many.

First up is by Brianna Ernst, daughter of Darrell Ernst:

This is a portrait of a boat-tailed grackle (Quiscalus major). Very serious! Though the males are black, in good lighting you can see all sorts of shade variations from purples to blues and more, changing as the lighting angle changes. A clue that the color is a result of scattering, diffraction and refraction affects due to surface structure rather than pigments. The photo was taken within 25 miles of where we live and this was taken by my daughter Brianna with a Nikon D3200.

From Divy Figueroa, a starfish of unknown species, photographed in Parguera, Puerto Rico [JAC: This now appears to be a “cushion star,” Oreaster reticulatus; h/t Christopher Mah.]

From Don Bredes:

Thought you’d like to see an indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea) and an  American goldfinch (Spinus tristis) together; not sharp, alas, as it was 6:30 am so the light was low, but the colors are striking.

From Joe Dickinson:

This rather chubby California ground squirrel (Citellus beecheyi) was expertly working tourists visiting Morro Rock [California]:

From Stephen Barnard in Idaho, sent on Saturday:

Here’s yet another Wilson’s Snipe (Gallinago delicata) photo from this morning. He’s almost tame. His name is Willie.

From Mark Sturtevant, a mantid snapped in Michigan:

Late in the summer, one can fairly regularly find the European mantis (Mantis religiosa) out in the fields. This picture is of picture is a female, taken on the day that I released her after a couple days of being pampered and generally fussed over while in captivity. The same mantises were seen before in WEIT for some of the ‘Spot the mantis’ challenges.

Monday: Hili dialogue

May 22, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Monday, May 22, 2017. It’s National Vanilla Pudding Day, but they left out the vanilla wafers, an essential accompaniment. It’s also a UN holiday: World Biodiversity Day. I’ll try to find some diverse photos for the next post.

I’ll be heading to Washington D.C. tomorrow for an onstage chat with Richard Dawkins on Wednesday, so posting will be light.  If you’re there and buy one of my books (Richard’s books will be the main draw), meow like a cat and I’ll draw you one along with a signature.

On this day in 1804, the The Lewis and Clark Expedition got underway as the group left for the West from St. Charles, Missouri. And on May 22, 1849, Abraham Lincoln was granted a patent for an invention to lift boats; he was the only U.S. President to ever have a patent. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the invention, a model, and the tag. It was never used on real boats:

Abraham Lincoln’s patent is a patent for an invention to lift boats over shoals and obstructions in a river. It is the only United States patent ever registered to a President of the United States. Lincoln conceived the idea of inventing a mechanism that would lift a boat over shoals and obstructions when on two different occasions the boat on which he traveled got hung up on obstructions. Documentation of this patent was discovered in 1997.

This device was composed of large bellows attached to the sides of a boat that was expandable due to air chambers. His successful patent application led to his drafting and delivering two lectures on the subject of patents while he was President.

The tag:

On May 22, 1906, the Wright brothers were also granted a patent, this time for their airplane, called a “Flying-Machine”. In Auckland New Zealand on this day in 1987, the first Rugby World Cup began; the host nation of course won it. Finally, just two years ago on this day, The Republic of Ireland became the world’s first country to legalize gay marriage in a public referendum.

Notables born on this day include Richard Wagner (1813), Mary Cassatt (1844), Arthur Conan Doyle (1859), Hergé (1907), Laurence Olivier (1907), and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski (1942). Those who died on this day include Victor Hugo (1885), Lefty Grove (1975), geneticist and Nobel Laureate Alfred Hershey (1997), and Martin Gardner (2010).

Here are three paintings by Mary Cassatt, a rare woman Impressionist:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, everybody is having walkies, and you can see the shadow of the staff taking photos:

Hili: I like it.
Cyrus: What do you like?
Hili: Finally a normal communing of all animals.
In Polish:
Hili: To lubię.
Cyrus: Co lubisz?
Hili: Nareszcie jakieś normalne wszystkich zwierząt obcowanie.

Lagniappe: Lion hugs, sent by reader Barry

The Three Stooges speak Yiddish

May 21, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Wikipedia explains the Yiddish phrase “Hakn a tshaynik”  (you can pronounce it as “Hawk-en ah chainig”) like this:

. . . (literally “to knock a teakettle”; Yiddish: האַקן אַ טשײַניק), meaning to rattle on loudly and insistently, but without any meaning, is a widely used Yiddish idiomatic phrase. It is most often used in the negative imperative sense: Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik! (literally “Don’t knock a teakettle at me!”; Yiddish: !האַק מיר נישט קיין טשײַניק), in the sense of “Stop bothering me!”

The article adds this:

The phrase became familiar to many Americans without contact with Yiddish speakers by appearing in popular Three Stooges short films. In the 1936 film A Pain in the Pullman, when caught sneaking out of their rooms without paying rent, Moe tries to explain to the landlord by saying, “Well, we were just on our way to hock the truck so we could pay you,” to which Larry kicks in, “Hey, hock a chynick for me too, will ya?”, earning himself a swift kick in the shin. In 1938’s Mutts to You, Larry, disguised as a Chinese laundryman, pretending to speak Chinese, utters a stream of Yiddish doubletalk, ending with “Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik, and I don’t mean efsher (maybe)!”.

I sometimes use the negative imperative phrase, but here’s that bit from Mutt’s to You showing Curly saying it. Talk about cultural appropriation—we have a white guy pretending to be Chinese and speaking Yiddish! Is that kosher?

Here’s what Larry says, as given in the YouTube notes:

“Ikh bin ah China boychik fun Slobodka un Ikh bet dir ‘hak mir nit ah chaynik’ and I don’t mean efsher”. The phrase is Yiddish for “I am a Chinese kid from Slobodka and I beg you don’t hassle me and I don’t mean maybe.”

Moe then says, “He’s from China—East Side.” The Lower East Side was, of course, the area of Manhattan where, decades ago, an area where you’d hear Yiddish:

“Moe Howard”‘s real name was Moses Harry Horwitz, and “Larry Fine”‘s real name was Louis Feinberg. They were, of course, both Jewish. (So was Curly, who was Moe’s real-life brother and named Jerome Lester Horwitz.) They changed their names to make it in show business, but you can’t take take the Yiddish out of the boy.

It is surprising that they used the phrase in their comedy shorts.