Wednesday: Hili dialogue

July 4, 2018 • 7:15 am

It’s Independence Day: Wednesday, July 4, 2018: the day in 1776 that the Continental Congress approved the wording of the Declaration of Independence, whose issuance had been approved on July 2. It’s also National Barbecue Day as well. It’s also the birthday of Queen Sonja of Norway (see below). But let us Americans celebrate our holiday, including me. That means posting will be light today, and Yanks should enjoy their barbecue and fireworks instead of reading this site.

Today’s news, courtesy of Kevin and the BBC:  There are only two early parchment copies of the American Declaration of Independence: the “original” document that rests in the National Archives, and another, just recently rediscovered in—of all places—the archives of the West Sussex County Council in Chichester, England. The British copy dates to a few years later than the American one. Click on the screenshot to go to the story.

Heather Hastie found a modern version of the Declaration: a text dialogue between the U.S. and Britain discussing their breakup:

On July 4, 1802, the United States Military Academy opened at West Point, New York. Exactly one year later, the Louisiana Purchase was announced to the American people.  On this day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin in Concord, Massachusetts situated by Walden Pond. This, of course, led to his account of two years in that cabin in Walden, an iconic book for environmentalists and hippies.  On July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman’s book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, was published in Brooklyn. Exactly 7 years later, Lewis Carroll told 10-year-old Alice Liddell the story that would inspire Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequels. Here’s Alice at seven:

On July 4, 1910, the black boxer Jack Johnson knocked out the white boxer Jim Jeffries in a heavyweight boxing match in Reno, Nevada. It was called “The Match of the Century”, and Jeffries, a representative of the “superior race” was supposed to win. He withdrew after 15 rounds. Angry whites attacked jubilant blacks in 50 cities and 25 states: a scattering of race riots.

On this day in 1939, baseball great Lou Gehrig, forced to retire from the New York Yankees at age 36 after a diagnosis of ALS, gave a famous farewell talk at Yankee Stadium in which he said he considered himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Here’s that speech, and it still brings tears to my eyes. He was both a great player and a great man—a modest man who didn’t want to be honored. He died two years after he uttered these words:

Notables born on this day include George Everest (1790, the mountain is named after him), Calvin Coolidge (1872), Ulysses S. Grant (1881), Rube Goldberg (1883), Lionel Trilling (1905), Eppie Lederer (aka “Ann Landers”, 1918) and Queen Sonja of Norway (1937; see above). Those who died on this day included both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (both 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of the Independence), Marie Curie (1934), and Barry White (2003).

Have a walk down memory lane with Barry White performing his most famous song. What a mellow voice he had; I wonder how many babies were conceived to it!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants a snooze:

Hili: Something is chirping in the grass.
A: Do you know what it is?
Hili: No, but now is my siesta time.
In Polish:
Hili: Coś piszczy w trawie.
Ja: Już wiesz co?
Hili: Nie, ale teraz mam sjestę.

Some tweets from Grania. She says the first one is “strangely appropriate”:

Mark Hamill has a good tweet:

Yes, a cat wrote a message on a computer. What does it mean??

Some jaw-dropping biology:

xx

 

 

A kitten and its toy:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1013856091170537474

Tweets from Matthew. This baby bird already shows its sex:

An example of a type of cryptic painting that I didn’t know existed (be sure to watch the video):

A bizarre but nice interspecies friendship:

Bees hatching!

. . . and a giant milliped (watch the video):

Finally, a theft that must have confused some scientists:

A duck traffic jam (from a parody David Attenborough account) sent by reader Charleen:

https://twitter.com/Attenboroughs_D/status/1012591232458117120

From reader Amy, Happy Fourth of July!

Belgium, down two goals, gets three to beat Japan

July 3, 2018 • 5:28 pm

This was a squeaker: after being down two goals against Japan, Belgium scored three—one in the four minutes of added 90+ time, to save a spot in the World Cup. Japan goes home, and now Belgium faces Brazil in the quarter finals on Friday. An exciting game, and my condolences to the Japanese, who played some game matches.

Tuesday: Duck report (with bonus video)

July 3, 2018 • 2:00 pm

Well, the gang’s all here. This is the line for breakfast yesterday, with Honey, as usual, bringing up the rear. Comparing her photo to pictures from last year, she looks considerably slimmer this year and I need to feed her up. It’s hard, though, as she lets the ducklings eat first and then they all swim off to for bathtime. When they finally migrate away and she’s alone, I’m going to give her tons of good food.

Yep, the ducklings are very large now, and their wings are getting bigger (see pictures below):

Anna took a nice video of yesterday’s bathtime. Lots of ducking, preening, and splashing in the tub. At one point all of them manage to get into the small circular tub. Notice the “duckling race” at 46 seconds in, when one duck, and then the others, take off swimming as fast as they can. I have no idea why they do this!

Here are pictures from yesterday’s noon bathtime:

They do enjoy their splashing:

Big wings!

And. . . ladies and gentlemen, our first view of the speculum (blue/violet wing band) on a duckling!

Today’s bathtime, with more wing flapping:

Still more wing flapping. Soon they’ll be flying.

Their wings aren’t full-sized yet, but they’re getting there:

And my perennial girlfriend (with turtles):

 

Scott Pruitt publicly shamed at a restaurant

July 3, 2018 • 11:30 am

I despise Scott Pruitt, for as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he’s enacting odious policies that despoil the environment; he rejects the fact of anthropogenic climate change; and he’s been charged with misspending government money and other dereliction of duty. He’s about the worst possible person to hold his job. Under Pruitt, the agency should be renamed the Environmental Destruction Agency.

Still, doesn’t the man have a right to eat in peace in a restaurant? In this video, a woman confronts Pruitt and his companion and reads out a laundry list of his misdeeds. As Politico reports:

Another member of President Trump’s administration was confronted by a member of the public, this time in a tea shop in Washington, D.C.

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt was having lunch at Teaism on Monday when a woman confronted him and urged him to resign.

In a video posted to Facebook Monday, Kristin Mink is seen introducing her toddler son to Pruitt and telling him to resign. Occasionally appearing to refer to notes and speaking calmly, she cites his actions on water and air quality protection and tells him his policies have benefitted corporations over the environment.

“This is my son. He loves animals, he loves clean air, he loves clean water,” Mink said in the video to Pruitt and his lunch companion.

“We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment. Somebody who believes in climate change and takes it seriously for the benefit of all of us, including our children,” she said.

“I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out,” she says before the video ends.

Although the video does not show it, Mink said in her video that Pruitt quickly left the restaurant after she confronted him.

[JAC: Pruitt’s office says he listens respectfully, which seems to be the case, and that he left because he finished his meal.]

The thing is, I agree completely with her views—just not with her tactics. Again, while this woman has every right to write to Pruitt, engage in demonstrations, make appointments at the EPA, lobby them, and do everything she can to bring Pruitt down—and surely has the legal right to encounter him this way—I don’t think this tactic is useful. It won’t change his mind; it won’t change the mind of centrists, and it makes the Left look petty.  Can we just leave these people to go out in public in peace without harassing them?

Apparently not to some Control-Leftists. P. Z. Myers, for instance, posted that video and gleefully approved of the confrontation:

Polite, honest, and accurate. She didn’t punch him, throw his table over, or kick him in the balls, even though he deserves all of that. It was an effective protest.

If you see one of Trump’s lackeys in public, and you don’t lean over and tell them, “Resign!”, you aren’t as brave as Kristin Mink.

Make ’em cringe a bit when they’re out in public. It’s the least you can do.

Really? Now he deserves to be kicked in the balls, too? (That, of course, is illegal.)

 

NYT legal columnist: Let’s rethink the First Amendment now that it’s being used by conservatives

July 3, 2018 • 10:00 am

My title may be exaggerated a tad, but not that much, for the point of Adam Liptak’s article (click on screenshot below) is that conservatives are starting to use the First Amendment to defend or buttress legal decisions that liberals don’t like, and therefore the First Amendment is outdated or should be reexamined. The title of the piece comes from Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal who decried her courts’ recent decisions against public unions and in favor of religious abortion “crisis centers” on freedom-of-speech grounds. Further, the Citizens United case, in which corporations were allowed unlimited spending on political campaigns, was also deemed by the Court to be a free speech issue. (Here I disagree on the grounds that corporations are not individuals.)

Liptak is a New York Times reporter whose beat is the US Supreme Court; he also writes the legal column “Sidebar” for the paper. Have a look at his piece.

Liptak is distraught that the free-speech issue, once used to defend liberal cases, is now being used to defend conservative cases. Some of his points (I use quotation marks for direct quotes):

  • Free speech was once used to protect the powerless and dispossessed, as in civil rights cases or protests against the Vietnam war. Liptak, using other people to justify his words, says “some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo.”

“When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” said Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.”

“To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a collection of essays to be published this year.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” she wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”

  •  “A new analysis prepared for The New York Times found that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been far more likely to embrace free-speech arguments concerning conservative speech than liberal speech. That is a sharp break from earlier eras. . . As a result, liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them.”

    “The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.”

Here is an analysis of the data, showing that as courts became more conservative, the cases involving conservative speech have increased, the win rate hasn’t changed much, but the win rate for liberal speech cases has dropped. Well, what do you expect given that the Supremes are always ideological and now the Court is becoming increasingly (and to my mind, dangerously) conservative?

Seriously, “free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice”? It is used against the dispossessed? Excuse me, but we hear loudly and frequently from the dispossessed and minorities and the Left, especially in liberal newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, and in Control-Left publications like HuffPost.

The reason why free-speech considerations are increasingly used to buttress conservative decisions is, as I said, because the Supreme Court has always been politicized (as in the Burger and especially the Warren Courts), but now that conservatives are ascendant, they are using the same arguments to prop up their own ideologies. The problem is not with the First Amendment, or with free speech, but the fact that the country has become more conservative in recent years, and with it the justices on the Supreme Court.

In fact, as the article notes, Leftists and progressives like Ralph Nader used a free-speech defense to protect advertising and commercial “speech,” in a successful attempt to overturn state laws banning advertising or providing information about prescription drug prices. Now Nader and other say that they regret supporting that attempt, since such defenses are now being used (largely unsuccessfully) to attack cigarette-label warnings, prohibitions of giving alcohol content on beer cans, and so on.

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. While you may disagree with the courts’ arguments, liberals used the First Amendment to get their agenda passed, but now that conservatives have learned from that tactic, liberals are now saying that free speech is overrated, or is used to buttress the powerful against the oppressed. And it’s ironic that a free press, in the form of Liptak’s article, is being used to make this point. Liberals don’t like the results, but again—it’s not the fault of the First Amendment, the best tool we have to protect our democracy—but the American public, who elected conservatives to Congress and the Presidency.

I’m not sure how I feel about the recent conservative decisions overturning the requirement for abortion-opposing health clinics to tell their patients about alternatives like abortion, although I tend to think that the decision about unions had some justification. In effect, it forced people to join public unions that represented their group, and to pay dues to those unions, even if those forced to join disagreed with the unions’ aims and tactics. One can make a case that that is forcing people to espouse a certain point of view when they don’t want to—a free speech issue. An alternative and reasonable solution is to allow people to opt out of such unions, but then to prohibit them from getting any of the benefits that the union negotiates for their members.

In that case, I have to agree with Samuel Alito’s statement in the union case judgment:

“Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned,” he wrote. “Suppose, for example, that the State of Illinois required all residents to sign a document expressing support for a particular set of positions on controversial public issues — say, the platform of one of the major political parties. No one, we trust, would seriously argue that the First Amendment permits this.”

Justice Kagan’s response—that everything involves speech and thus could be decided on the basis of speech law—is not convincing.

I’m sorry, but jettisoning the most powerful buttress to American democracy, and a bedrock of the moral and legal progress we’ve made in the last century, just because conservatives use it, too, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. For if the First Amendment is deemed useless, what protection does anyone have against government censorship?

This article is part of the Times’s new emphasis on Control-Leftism, as instantiated by the opprobrium leveled against Bari Weiss by her fellow reporters. It’s sad to see the good gray Times go this route, but I think it is. I have another wonky article they just published, and may discuss it in my next post.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 3, 2018 • 7:30 am

Reader Andrée Sanborn sent another batch of her photos, this one called “no moths”. But I’m adding a moth. Andrée’s caption are indented. Her sites are these:

Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii); Northeast Vermont; August 11, 2017.  Lucy the Yellow Lab and I returned to May Pond one evening to retake some plant photos. On our way down May Pond Road, we saw this hawk sitting in the road, near the ditch. The car didn’t bother it. Worried that it was injured, I stopped, locked up Lucy, grabbed the camera, and approached it. It still didn’t move and obviously was not hurt. It had its kill under it. The birds in the woods were grieving. I got even closer and still it didn’t move, simply posed for me. Finally, another car came by and it flew off with its kill.

Woodland jumping mouse (Napaeozapus insignis), northeast Vermont; August 29, 2017. My students, on a bug hunt, found this baby jumping mouse in the woods at school, and I made sure they returned it where they found it. It was close to the size of the jumping mice my cats bring home. [JAC note: Wikipedia says this tiny critter can jump up to 3 meters!]

American black bear (Ursus americanus) probably male, northeast Vermont; 7:30 AM; August 3, 2017. The bear we had on this morning last August was not small. Husband John never gave me a weight estimate but he did say it stood about 7 feet tall on two legs. And the paws and head were huge. It was snuffling up all the chokecherries on our favorite chokecherry tree. It is always a highly productive cherry tree and the perfect height for picking. Every year we find bear scat under it, but they usually come at night. This bear,  sitting on its rump, pulled branches down with both paws and then literally vacuumed the cherries all off. I had to keep a close eye on Lucy the Yellow Lab (she totally and completely hates bears, won’t chase them, but will try to run them off), we did not go for a walk far from the house, and stayed away from fruit and water. Staying away from fruit and water is like impossible here. There are dozens of black, pin, and choke cherry trees and 3 brooks.

Mustard White (Pieris oleracea), northeast Vermont; May 21, 2017.  This is special; it is a declining species in most of its range except for Vermont; it is rated uncommon. I am so fortunate to be in a spot where they are abundant. They are beautiful fliers that look like apple blossoms in the air. This day we persuaded them to puddle in some dirt we had wet down. Their decline may be because of invasive plants and also because of an invasive butterfly, the cabbage white. They coexist here on our land. If you are interested in this, you may want to read the Vermont Atlas of Life post about their status. In the top photo, I managed to get an upside down one.

And here we do have a moth, from reader Winnie in Hong Kong. These two individuals, with slightly different markings, landed on her window, and her attempts to identify them by looking at photos of local moths have failed. Can readers help?

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

July 3, 2018 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Tuesday, July 3, 2018, National Chocolate Wafer Day. And, according to Wikipedia, it’s “the start of the Dog Days according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac but not according to established meaning in most European cultures.” Well when do Dog Days start in Europe?

The Fourth of July holiday in America starts tomorrow (with many leaving early today), celebrating our independence from Great Britain. Had that not happened, we’d have better soccer but we’d all be eating paper-thin sandwiches and curtseying to the King. In honor of tomorrow’s holiday, today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) highlights culinary specialities (and recipes) from all fifty states. The comestible for Illinois is below:

In honor of the holiday, here’s the shirt I’m wearing today:

Make America Cat Again!

On this day in 987,  Hugh Capet was crowned King of France, the first ruler of the Capetian Dynasty that would be in charge of France until the French Revolution 805 years later. On July 3, 1035, William the Conquerer became the Duke of Normandy, later becoming the first Norman King of England in 1066 and ruling for 21 years. On this date in 1775, George Washington took command of the Continental Army in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the army that beat the scarlet coats off the British.  On July 3, 1863, the famous Battle of Gettysburg ended with the fatal Pickett’s Charge. The Confederates then retreated after having reached their farthest incursion into the north. On this day in 1952, the passenger liner SS United States began her maiden voyage to Southampton. During that voyage the ship snatched the Blue Riband away from the RMS Queen Mary (the award for the fastest transatlantic crossing by such a liner), going from Ambrose Light in New York to Bishop Rock on the Isles of Scilly in 3 days, 10 hours, and 40 minutes. That record beat the Queen Mary by ten whole hours and still stands. And it was on the SS United States that a very young Professor Ceiling Cat and his staff traveled across the Atlantic on our way to my father’s duty station in Athens, Greece in the 1950s.

On July 3, 1962, Jackie Robinson became the first African America player to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. On this day in 1996, the stolen Stone of Scone was returned to Scotland. Finally, on July 3, 2013, the military overthrew Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.

Notables born on July 3 include George M. Cohan (1878), Franz Kafka (1883), M. F. K Fisher (1908), Tom Stoppard (1937), Dave Barry (1947), Betty Buckley (1947), and Tom Cruise (1962).

Bragging time: here’s a photo of me with future Nobel Laureate (to be awarded some day) Stoppard eight years ago at the Hay Literary Festival. We’d been on a panel together and then discussed evolution privately. He showed a weakness for teleology in evolution, which was surprising. But he was a lovely guy, and even autographed one of his books for a friend of mine who was ill and admired Stoppard greatly.  Having been added to the panel at the last moment, I borrowed geneticist Steve Jones’s jacket, which fit me poorly. But I was with STOPPARD! (The roses were a gift from the Festival.)

More commonality: we both had unruly hair:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is up a tree:

A: And why did you climb up there?
Hili: Probably in order to climb down now.
In Polish:
Ja: I po co się tam wdrapałaś?
Hili: Pewnie po to, żeby teraz zejść.

Some tweets from Grania. This one shows a brave tuxedo kitten:

Russian ballerinas watching their team at the World Cup:

Grania also found a tweet showing the Chicago skyline, which is close to a farther view I get when the sunset is right:

Cat reciprocity: You scratch my back, and I’ll get pleasure.

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1013740658237075457

Another contented moggie (listen to the meowy purr):

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1013086088443908096

Yet more kittens playing (and fearing) an awesome cat toy:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1013226297529651200

From Matthew; turn the sound on to hear the repertoire of this awesome courting lyrebird:

This was part of a tweet by Michael Siva-Jothy that said “Ever wonder how staphilinids fold and unfold their wings?” Watch the video and see:

Ah, the Russians and their cats! Translate the tweet below:

“Translate tweet” is right above the cat photo to the left if you go to the site:

I’ve posted this before, but you can’t see it too often. The British Underground staff can be wags:

For Heather Hastie, who loves hedgehogs:

Finally, a big Thank You! to reader Su, who had a special custom Professor Ceiling Cat lunch bag made for me by a woman in Riga, Latvia after I expressed a desire on this site for one that was unavailable. Much appreciated, Su. And the package came with her own artwork referring to Botany Pond:

and the box: