Thursday: Hili dialogue

August 18, 2016 • 6:30 am

A week ago I was in Dobrzyn with my friends, eating cherry pie and having a good petting session with Hili. Today I’m in Chicago, catless, and will have peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. So it goes on August 18, 2016.  In Thailand, it’s National Sciences Day, commemorating, according to Wikipedia, “King Mongkut’s prediction and observation of a total solar eclipse in 1868.”

On this day in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the requisite 36 states (3/4 of the 48 states), finally guaranteeing women the right to vote. (It was ultimately ratified by all 48 states existing then, with Mississippi, the Backward State, ratifying as late at 1984!). It amazes me that it took so long, but of course Switzerland granted women suffrage only in 1971! How did Swiss women tolerate that?

Notables born on this day include Robert Redford, who, born in 1936, turns 80 today. Hard to believe. As I’ve said frequently, if I could have looked like any man, it would be either Steve Stills in his early 20s or Robert Redford in his early 30s. The handsomest living actor! On this day in 1990, B. F. Skinner died at the age of 86. He was buried in a Skinner Box LOL. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili have a dialogue that nobody–including Malgorzata–understands. I apologize for its opacity!

A: What are you musing about?
Hili: About the problem of freedom and responsibility.
A: Meaning?
Hili: If I went there I wouldn’t be here and I’m fine here.
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In Polish:
Ja: Nad czym dumasz?
Hili: Nad problemem wolności i odpowiedzialności.
Ja: To znaczy?
Hili: Jak pójdę tam, to mnie nie będzie tu, a tu mi dobrze.
And, as respite and lagniappe, I present you with The Peace of the Sleeping Gus:
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The world’s most expensive BBQ

August 17, 2016 • 2:30 pm

Here, on The Meat Show (a great name), Nick Solares tries a unique idea: BBQ made from dry-aged beef. It costs $47 per pound.

Of course this “dry-aged” BBQ is in New York City, as true Texans wouldn’t have anything to do with this.  Now I love dry-aged beef in a steak (preferably aged 30 days or longer), and wouldn’t be opposed to trying some of this pricey barbecue, but I was dubious about whether the added rub and smoke would obscure the pure gamey meat flavor of a dry-aged steak.  However, Solares seems to think otherwise.

Oh hell, I’d probably buy it. There’s nothing like the flavor of a good steak made from dry-aged beef, and life is short.

What’s up with the NASA grant to study theology?

August 17, 2016 • 1:30 pm

This post is to bring you up to date on the the battle over the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) giving over $1 million dollars to a theological organization to study the implications of extraterrestrial life for theology. The Freedom from Religion Foundation is trying to get NASA to rescind the grant on First Amendment grounds, but NASA is fighting back, avoiding disclosing what the grant actually said. I’ve posted three times about this.

First, NASA gave a $1.1 million dollar grant to the Center for Theological Inquiry, an organization at Princeton that emphasizes Christian theology. The CTI’s director crowed about it, but revealed a seemingly illegal entanglement of religion with government (NASA is a government organization):

Announcing the NASA grant, CTI’s director William Storrar said, “The aim of this inquiry is to foster theology’s dialogue with astrobiology on its societal implications, enriched by the contribution of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. We are grateful to the NASA Astrobiology Program for making this pioneering conversation possible.”

I brought this to the FFRF’s attention, and they wrote to NASA, also filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all materials related to the grant. (See the FFRF’s letter at the link.)

Then NASA largely stonewalled, refusing to provide much information unless the FFRF specified authors, dates, and so on—things that the FFRF couldn’t possibly know. It was at this point that I began to suspect that NASA had something to hide.

Now I suspect that even more. Here are the latest developments:

  • NASA did cough up some information: the notice of the grant award and the contract between NASA and the CTI about the grant. The grant itself was not provided, nor were any emails about it. They also provided an uninformative evaluation of the grant, only two pages long and given it an “E” for excellent.
  • NASA also provided a five-page discussion of how the proposal was evaluated, emphasizing its social aspects and downplaying its religious aspects. (All these documents are publicly available and I can send them, but please don’t ask unless you intend to do something with them.)
  • NASA provided CTI’s ongoing “progress report” of the grant’s accomplishments, which, to me at least, are not impressive. (How could they be? It’s theology, Jake!) The “fellows” arrived at CTI and had some seminars, and now are supposed to disseminate their results. Here’s an excerpt of what has been done so far (my emphasis)

The writing projects undertaken by the CTI fellows this year are book-length projects that will be completed in the coming year or two. Also Lucas Mix has published an article in the June 2016 edition of the journal Zygon; the article is titled “Life-Value Narratives and the Impact of Astrobiology on Christian Ethics.” Zygon, vol. 51, no. 2 (June 2016): 520- 535.

Many of the fellows are planning to incorporate their immersion in astrobiology into their teaching at their home institutions. For example, Ulrike Auga will run a seminar on astrobiology and visual culture at the Humboldt University, Berlin, summer 2016. Others have proposed panels on astrobiology and society at various scholarly conferences.

The results of this project have already been disseminated through the CTI Blog (blog.ctinquiry.org) and through CTI’s Fresh Thinking Podcast, which has featured conversations with Mary Voytek, Edwin Turner, Frank Rosenzweig, and Caleb Sharf, along with the CTI fellows. The podcast was created in October 2015 and since that time it has been listened to more than 1,300 times. 12 episodes have already been published and 4 more episodes will be released this summer. A link to the CTI podcast with Frank Rozensweig and Robin Lovin was also posted on the NASA Astrobiology Program website. The Kluge Center, Library of Congress, webpage also referenced CTI’s Inquiry.

 I read the one tangible result: the Zygon article, which I’ll make available if you want it. The interesting thing about it is that although it’s said to be the fruit of this NASA/CTI collaboration, it neither mentions nor cites the grant or NASA for its support. And its explicit Christian nature can be seen in its abstract:

Abstract. “Pale Blue Dot” and “Anthropocene” are common tropes in astrobiology and often appear in ethical arguments. Both support a decentering of human life relative to biological life in terms of value. This article introduces a typology of life-value narratives: hierarchical narratives with human life above other life and holistic narratives with human life among other life. Astrobiology, through the two tropes, supports holistic narratives, but this should not be viewed as opposed to Christianity. Rather, Christian scriptures provide seeds of both hierarchical and holistic narratives, each of which may flourish in different environments. By attending to which aspects of human life are valued—or disvalued—relative to biological life, we can better understand how life-concepts do work in ethics, anthropology, and soteriology in secular as well as theological contexts.

I’ve never seen any paper that didn’t acknowledge the organization that provided financial support.

Finally, NASA simply refused to provide two important things: the internal and external email communications about the grant, and, most important, the CTI grant proposal (my emphasis). Here’s NASA’s reason for refusal:

A total of 25 pages are being released in full while Center of Theological Inquiry proposal, totaling 14 pages, is being withheld in full pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(3), “. . . specifically exempted from disclosure by statute, (other than section 552b of this title), provided that such statute (A) requires that the matters be withheld from the public in such a manner as to leave no discretion on the issue, or (B) establishes particular criteria for withholding or refers to particular types matters to be withheld.” Statute 10 U.S.C. § 2305(g), “Prohibition on the Release of Contractor Proposals – (1) Except as provided in paragraph (2), a proposal in the possession or control of an agency named in section 2303 of this title may not be made available to any person under section 552 of title 5. (2) Section (1) does not apply to any proposal that is set forth or incorporated by reference in a contract entered into between the Department and the contractor that submitted the proposal. (3) In this subsection, the term “proposal” means any proposal, including a technical, management, or cost proposal, submitted by a contractor in response to the requirements of a solicitation for a competitive proposal.”

Their excuse is that the CTI is in effect a “contractor”, and contractor proposals can by law be kept secret. For proposals to the Departments of Defense, and the four armed forces, that makes some sense as a matter of national security, and these departments are specified. So is NASA, and in some cases that’s justifiable too. But, as Andrew Seidel, the FFRF lawyer handling this case, wrote me, “The problem is that the government was trying to protect defense contractors from certain FOIA provisions, which makes a certain amount of sense given what they do, but lumped NASA in because of some of its sensitive work. CTI’s proposal clearly doesn’t fall within the ambit of that original purpose, it could not be less sensitive either technologically or militarily, but it got swept in anyway.”

Now NASA is arguing that the phrase “may not” means it lacks discretion in releasing the CTI proposal; that it’s prohibited by law from doing so.  The FFRF disagrees, and has appealed NASA’s refusal to release the grant in a letter to NASA that’s highlighted in this press release (the letter is too long to put here).

This is a big chunk of change, and I don’t want money earmarked for space research to be involved in furthering theology. Have a look at Lucas Mix’s paper if you want to see the enormous and ludicrous waste of time and effort involved in pondering the effects of astrobiology on Jesus. What can we do?

It’s not clear if NASA will release the theology grant, as they have some legal standing to withhold it.

But even if NASA won’t release that grant proposal, there’s no reason why the Center for Theological Inquiry can’t. In fact, if they want to be transparent about things, and think they’re doing a public service, they SHOULD release it. I for one will be writing the CTI asking them to release the grant, and perhaps some public pressure will help with this.  If you want the Center for Theological Inquiry to make its grant from NASA public, you can write to Dr. William Storrar, head of the Center for Theological Inquiry. You can send it to him via the address cti@ctinquiry.org

Are the constellations sexist? The Atlantic goes the way of Salon; Grania responds

August 17, 2016 • 10:30 am

More and more, The Atlantic, once a bastion of sober and liberal thought, is going the way of Salon; that is, it’s becoming both clickbait and Authoritarian Leftist, devoted to sniffing out anything that could exude even the merest whiff of social offense. One example is a yesterday’s online piece by Leila McNeill, “The constellations are sexist.” Yes, you got the title right. But how can an arrangement of stars be sexist? In fact, McNeill just doesn’t call them sexist, but “misogynistic”.

McNeill’s piece (which apparently came from Aeon), makes a pretty lame argument, and I quote:

To this day, astronomy remains one of the only scientific fields that relies so heavily on ancient Greek and Roman mythology for its naming conventions. Cosmology and mythology have been interwoven throughout human history, so it’s not surprising that modern-day astronomers have inherited this tradition. But classical mythology is deeply misogynistic, and using it to identify celestial bodies contributes to a scientific culture that diminishes the achievements of women like Caroline. Male deities and figures reign with nearly unlimited power, while their female counterparts suffer violence and humiliation.

Among the myths we have used to name and claim the heavens is Cassiopeia, a constellation in the northern hemisphere. It is named for a mythical queen of Aethiopia, whom Poseidon punished for her vanity by lashing her to her throne. Cassiopeia’s daughter, Andromeda, was also made to suffer for her mother’s sins by being chained naked to a rock, where she waited for the sea monster Cetus to rape her. In the myth, Perseus saved Andromeda and took her as his wife, but as a constellation, she still waits chained to her rock.

The Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters, is a cluster of stars in the Taurus constellation. The Seven Sisters were once women who danced together under the night sky, but Orion desired them, so he hunted them for seven years. To help the sisters escape, Zeus turned them all into stars—but Orion, another constellation, still chases them night after night.

And get this about “coded male names”:

Male astronomers, when they look at the sky, can find more uplifting role models. The constellations named after men tell stories of heroism and conquest, not submission and subjugation. Even today, NASA continues to recycle the names of mythological figures and great men of history when naming spacecraft and missions. Orion, a crewed spacecraft meant to facilitate travel to Mars, is named for the same Orion that hunted the Seven Sisters. Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, and Cassini—names pulled from the scientific establishment that excluded women like Caroline—are all unmanned spacecraft sent to explore the cosmos. Even spacecraft with seemingly gender-neutral names are coded male: Voyager and Pioneer evoke the men who heroically left home and hearth on voyages of exploration.

McNeill goes on to womansplain how even astronomical objects or probes associated with women or minorities are really tools of oppression. Her contorted take on the seemingly progressive names Sojourner, Artemis, and Juno shows you how deep McNeill’s confirmation bias runs: she can find offense in literally anything. And, of course, most of the misogynistic constellations cited by McNeill were not named by modern sexist astronomers, but by ancient Romans and Greeks!

Her final paragraph is a pathetic wail that once again conflates largely nonexistent sexism with misogyny, which, of course, is the hatred of women:

Today, the skies are still filtered through this tradition of mythic misogyny. Naming conventions for spacecraft and constellations are a subtle but significant way that the discipline of astronomy perpetuates a male-dominated culture. Simply giving more celestial bodies female names is not the solution. Rather, change must begin with the recognition that astronomy’s self-image is built upon an age-old habit of telling stories about the abuse of women.

To get a feminist woman’s point of view, I sent the article to Grania without any editorial comment, and asked for her take. I reproduce it below (with permission):

It’s tendentious claptrap.

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in society today who tries to glean and  internalise life lessons and societal norms from the names of stars and planets.  People who look at the Pleiades constellation are interested in the night skies. I’d wager that almost none of them are familiar with the ancient mythology behind the name. But even if every single person who studies astronomy is intimately acquainted with Ancient Mythology, I bet none of them looks at the stars and thinks wow, now I realise that’s what women are : the prey of psychopathic rapists.

Instead of recounting the story of a depressed and under-acknowledged woman from 1876—an era that hardly marked the pinnacle of modern enlightenment and female emancipation—as “evidence” of her hypothesis, perhaps McNeill could have mentioned actual women in astronomy like Valentina Tereshkova, Sally Ride, Caroline Porco, or add that now there is a whole PAGE on Wikipedia devoted to the names of notable women astronomers. (JAC: Brian Cox has named his cat after one of them.)

Society hasn’t managed to solve all the problems of misogyny or racism or bigotry or inequality yet. But Jesus, things have gotten better; and they got better without re-naming Orion as Gloria Steinem (Peace Be Upon Her).

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JAC addendum: Equally offensive is what happened to one cat-named constellations. I quote from Space.com:

Another faint star pattern now no longer recognized is Felis, the Cat, which was the creation of an 18th century Frenchman, Joseph Jerome Le Francais de Lalande (1732-1807).

“I am very fond of cats,” he said, explaining his choice. “I will let this figure scratch on the chart. The starry sky has worried me quite enough in my life, so that now I can have my joke with it.”

Although this celestial feline does not exist today, cat fanciers will be consoled by the fact that there are three other members of the cat family — Leo (the Lion), Leo Minor (the Smaller Lion) and Lynx — that are well situated and close together in our current evening sky.

h/t: Cindy

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Moe

August 17, 2016 • 8:30 am

Today’s new Jesus and Mo strip, “policy,” is timely, and came with a note that “Moses is still hanging around.” And in this case he’s acting like a Regressive Leftist.

I’ll add one note: the Leftist claim that Islamist terrorism has very little to do with religion, and in fact is due far more to Western “colonialism” (as if the original Caliphates weren’t imperialist!), has puzzled me more than anything else in the last few years (Except, of course, the behavior of religious people who worry about whether or not dogs go to heaven.) The answer, which took me unconscionably long to realize, is that it’s a double form of racism against Muslims—who, of course, aren’t even a “race” in any sense of the word.  First, because Muslims are, on average, browner than Europeans, they can be considered “oppressed”, and thus we have to give them a break, even when they toss gays off of buildings, kill atheist bloggers and Yazidis, and turn women into sex slaves or the contents of cloth sacks.

Second, because, on average, Muslims are browner than Europeans, we shouldn’t hold them to as high a standard of behavior as, say, those horrible white Israelis (many of whom are Arabs). Mix that in with excessive respect for the religion of people of color (but not so much for religions of people of no color, like Catholicism), and you get the toxic behavior that Moe discusses below.

One of the most distressing and hypocritical things I’ve seen in the online atheist and Leftist literature is how much of it has gone silent on bad behavior attached to Muslim doctrine. We see Western hijabis touted as heroes for flaunting a sign of a misogynistic religion that, a few years ago, was as mocked and derided for being more repressive, sexist, and homophobic than the oft-criticized Catholicism. (Far better to criticize those Islamic regimes that forbid women from taking part in sports.) Now we get silence, except from liberal or ex-Mulsims themselves—people like Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali—or those who speak the truth, like Dave Rubin, and are thus doomed to be Leftist Apostates. The Left itself has fallen victim to the pernicious fallacy that criticism of religious doctrine is equivalent to bigotry—but only when that doctrine is Islamic.

Of course the behavior of the West certainly destabilized the Middle East, as a piece in Sunday’s New York Times emphasizes, but that doesn’t excuse for a minute what Islamist terrorists are doing now. Not for a millisecond. We wouldn’t excuse blacks and Native Americans in America, historically our most oppressed groups, if all of a sudden they began stabbing civilians, murdering gays, or beheading civilian members of the groups that historically oppressed them.

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Readers’ wildlife photographs

August 17, 2016 • 7:30 am

Don’t worry: I have all the photos people sent me when I was in Poland (I’m back now).  They will appear in time—at least the good photos—but today we must have some photos of Stephen Barnard from Idaho. He has a backlog, too, but these just came, and are lovely. His notes are indented:

There were more than thirty Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis) in the newly cut alfalfa field today and they were making quite a racket. They gather into large groups before migration.

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As a lagniappe, one of the Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) fledglings was hanging out by the ponds.

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And a landscape:

Smoke from the Pioneer Fire, over 100 miles away, looking north to the Wood River Valley.

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Wednesday: Hili dialogue

August 17, 2016 • 6:30 am

It’s August 17, and at last I can post correctly what I misposted on August 11.  The highlight of today is that it’s officially Black Cat Appreciation Day. If you have one, as I did for 17 years, give it some extra kindness.  We have dozens of readers with black cats, so do right by your moggie. Don’t send me photos, but do put them in the comments (black cats ONLY please!)

On this day in 1908, Fantasmagorie by Émile Cohl, considered the world’s first animated cartoon, was released. I’ve put the very short video below; Wikipedia notes that;

The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph”, a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.

On this day in 1932, author V.S. Naipal (now a Nobel Laureate) was born. I find his work uneven, but A House for Mr. Biswas is a true classic. And on this day in 1983, Ira Gershwin, who with his brother George composed some of the finest songs in “the American songbook,” died at 86. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Cyrus had a bit of an enigmatic statement that Malgorzata explained to me:

Look at his tongue on the picture. He is salivating at the thought of a pheasant but he knows that the bird is not in his reach so he even refuses to look at it. He most probably was a hunter’s dog so he must have tasted the pheasants. And there really was a pheasant on the other side of the fence. We have quite a lot of them here and sometimes Cyrus is chasing them if we meet with one on our walks. He never got one though.

And the dialogue:

Hili: There is a pheasant on the other side of the fence.
Cyrus: I don’t even want to look at him.
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In Polish:
Hili: Za płotem chodzi bażant.
Cyrus: Nie chcę nawet na niego patrzeć.

And out in Winnipeg, Gus sleeps softly, with a smile:

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