Readers’ wildlife photos

April 5, 2018 • 7:45 am

Stephen Barnard is back with some great bird shots from Idaho. His IDs and captions are indented:

Northern Harriers (Circus cyaneus) like to hunt in the wind, and yesterday was very windy, with gusts up to 45 mph. This female was using the wind to hover over one spot, but she was buffeted erratically by turbulence. I was buffeted, too, with my long hand-held lens. Getting focus was difficult, especially with the willows in the background confusing the autofocus. I took over 20 shots in bursts and only one was sharp.

Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens):

A pair of American Kestrels (Falco sparverius) is hanging around a nest box I built to their specifications.

I believe this is the male. I saw the pair close together this morning but failed to get a photo when my dogs spooked them. Thanks a lot, Deets and Hitch.

And one shot of a snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) from reader Christopher Moss (see his earlier photos here):

It’s quite amazing how quickly these hares are changing colour – it must mean a lot of rapid growth of new hair, as hair colour can’t be changed (save for dye) once grown. This guy was white when I sent you his photo about a week ago. Fortunately for me he is sticking to his usual plan of sitting perfectly still when faced with a possible threat, so he just sits there when I point a camera at him.

I asked him if it was the same hare that I put up recently, and he replied:

Given that I’ve never seen a hare (technically, not a rabbit) in the garden until last week, it’s probably the same one. I hear there have been reports of hares failing to change colour completely as a result of global warming, but I’ve also read that the change occurs in response to the changing light/dark periods of each day through the seasons and can be induced deliberately by changing the light exposure of captive animals, so I doubt warmer temperatures have anything to do with it! I must confess he or she fills me with a strong desire to scatter carrots until I get to give him, or her, a scratch on the ears!

Of course I importuned Christopher to start putting out the carrots immediately!

Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 5, 2018 • 6:45 am

It’s already Thursday, April 5, 2018, also National Raisin and Spice Bar Day, which I’ll gladly eschew. Right now the temperature in Chicago is below freezing: 25° F or -4°C, and it’s opening day for the White Sox at (I hate to write this) Guaranteed Rate Field. It may be the coldest opening day in White Sox history. And there’s no sign the weather will warm up for a week or so.  Sadly, this cold weather also drives my ducks away, so I didn’t see Norton or Trixie yesterday. Wherever they are, I hope they’re warm—and cooking up a brood of ducklings.

It is a fasting day for me, so I am grumpy. I will not fast on my upcoming trips that begin next week.

On April 5, 1242, the Russians, led by Alexander Nevsky, defeated the Teutonic Knights at Lake Peipus, on the border of present-day Estonia and Russia. The Knights were on a crusade against Eastern Orthodox “infidels.”

Here’s the famous (but unrealistic) “Ice Battle” scene from Sergei Eisenstein’s eponymous film (his first to use sound), a very famous movie:

On this day in 1614 English colonist John Rolfe married the Native American woman Pocohontas. Two years later they went to England, where Pocohontas died at age 20 or 21.  On April 5, 1900, archaeologists, excavating Minoan ruins at Knossos, Crete, discovered clay tablets with the form of hieroglyphic that became known as “Linear B“: Mycenaean Greek, the earliest known form of Greek writing.  On this day 4 years thereafter, the first international rugby match took place between England on the one hand and “Other Nationalities” (Welsh and Scots) on the other, played in Wigan, England. I can’t find out who won. On April 5, 1922, the precursor of Planned Parenthood, The American Birth Control League, was incorporated. Finally, on April 5, 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of spying for Russia, were sentenced to death.

Notables born on this day include Elihu Yale (1649), Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732), Booker T. Washington (1856), Spencer Tracy (1900), Bette Davis (1908) and Gregory Peck (1916)—what a trio of actors! Also born on April 5 were Janet Rowley, my former genetics colleague (1925, died 2013), Colin Powell (1937), Jane Asher (1946), and every Jewish lad’s favorite astronaut, Judith Resnik (1949, first Jewish woman in space, died in the Challenger disaster).  Notables who died on April 5 include Douglas MacArthur (1964), geneticist Hermann J. Muller (1967) and geneticist Alfred Sturtevant (1970), Chian Kai-shek (1975), Abe Fortas (1982), Molly Picon (1992), Kurt Cobain (1994; shotgun), Allen ginsberg (1997), Saul Bellow (2005), Gene Pitney (2006) and Charlton Heston (2008).

Here’s a lovely painting by Fragonard and his colleague and studio pal Marguerite Gérard: “The Angora Cat” (1783). At least they painted cats realistically (except for that left paw)!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is looking about for prey:

Hili: Not a living soul.
A: And Cyrus?
Hili: Wrong size.
In Polish:

Hili: Ani żywej duszy.
Ja: A Cyrus?
Hili: Niewłaściwy rozmiar.

Grania says this is a “totally non-guilty kitteh”. And I would totes eat one of those dumplings:

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/981206776157753345

A non-bad kitty, ready for its closeup:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/981159433211465728

And a kitten at rest:

https://twitter.com/landpsychology/status/981785787657310208

Yes, the post-Millennials have their own argot:

Matthew: Playing dead; are these mongeese?

The Birth of a Kitten, sent by Heather Hastie:

https://twitter.com/StefanodocSM/status/981127220889563136

Finally, reader Barry sent the isolated vocal of Marvin Gaye’s great song, “I heard it through the grapevine“. I don’t know how they isolate the vocals from the music, unless they’re on completely different tracks, but this is quite interesting:

Cunk on Britain, part I

April 4, 2018 • 3:00 pm

I’m truly surprised that this is still up, as the BBC relentlessly removes most of its purloined videos from YouTube. So far, this one—the first of Cunk’s five-part BBC Two series—is still up. I mentioned it this morning, but you might have missed it. Have a look at this 30-minute show, which is classic Cunk, before it’s gone.

You’ll be amused at King Arthur of Come-A-Lot and the Baywatch Tapestry.

TRIGGER WARNING: Profanity!!

Poll results prove Chris Stedman wrong

April 4, 2018 • 2:00 pm

Now I won’t pretend that the poll I put up yesterday—responding to Chris Stedman’s VICE article about how atheists are becoming alt-righters, ridden with misogyny, bigotry, homophobia, and racism—is in any way scientific. On the other hand, the answers were anonymous, and the responders, as I asked, were supposed to be atheists. So if atheists fail to decry these forms of alt-right behavior, it should show up as a big “meh” if I asked them to decry.

It didn’t. Here are the results in just a day:

In other words, 96% of atheists on this site decry. (And it’s possible that a few trolls tried to make us look bad by answering “no”.)

So I’ll tweet this to the Great Humanist just for fun. Of course he’ll say it’s bogus, and at any rate he doesn’t care about atheists in general, but about atheist LEADERS (who, of course, never asked to be leaders). So be it.

I was right: the NYT is going SJW

April 4, 2018 • 1:15 pm

Reader Eli Vilker sent me the link to Joe Pompeo’s new article in Vanity Fair, which you can get by clicking on the screenshot below.  And Eli added these words with his email:

This is an excellent riposte to people who always argue about regressive Leftists on campus as “just kids who’ll grow out of it”. Now these “woke” kids are entering the workforce and undermining traditional journalistic standards of neutrality and objectivity. As quoted in the article, “this other generation has an expectation that the institution will change to accommodate them”

Now Grania and I always have the argument that Eli referred to: whether the kids will grow out of their Control-Leftism when they enter the work force. Grania’s assumption is that their elders, or the Real World, will disabuse them of some of their fantasies, as well as of their constant demands for “wokeness” and cries of being offended. But I think she’s wrong on two counts. First, much of the media actually tracks the Zeitgeist determined in colleges, because that Zeitgeist has itself filtered upwards from the students to university administrations, who are —except for mine, of course—behaving like censors, helicopter parents, or craven osculators to those who pay tuition.  Further, it’s largely those who go to college who become leaders of the next generation, and those most likely to be America’s leaders are those who agitate for change in college.

Now some of that agitation is good, of course, and #NotAllColleges are what Jon Haidt calls “Social Justice Universities” like Middlebury College, Harvard, Brown, or Amherst. But believe me, our future Presidents, tech giants, and newspaper editors are more likely to be drawn from one of these schools than from Liberty University or some forlorn ag school on the prairie.

It’s been evident to me for about a year that the New York Times is becoming more and more aligned with the Regressive Left. This likely reflects the election of Trump, but also the currents in universities that were moving even during Obama’s time.  Just look at any front page online, and you’ll see articles conditioned and prompted by intersectionalist Leftism.

So, for example, they’ve hired Lindy West as a columnist, who, to my mind, is not only absolutely predictable in what she says, but can’t write, either. True, they did hire Bari Weiss, a Leftist who condemns the Regressive Left, but she’s been demonized not just by the RL, but by her own colleagues at The Times, as I described in a recent post. The other reporters and editors, it appears, are just looking for a way to get Weiss’s tuchas fired, as she speaks uncomfortable truths about the Left, as when she called out the Chicago Dyke March for banning the Jewish (Gay) Pride flag (a sign of anti-Semitism), and—horrors—actually said some good things about cultural appropriation. The last straw was when Weiss, a young journalist, got to go on Bill Maher’s show twice, giving her a higher profile than other Times writers. You can just sense the jealousy seething among the editors who, on a backchannel discussion site, were ripping Weiss apart for an innocuous tweet about an American skater being an immigrant.

To my mind, the New York Times is converging, ever so slowly, on The Huffington Post.  You may say that’s needless alarmism on my part, but read Pompeo’s piece and see if I’m wrong. The main issue described in the piece is the tension between news reporters and op-ed writers like Weiss (described in his piece as a “conservative,” which isn’t true). The former can’t express political opinions in public or on social media, and the latter can. This has caused the schism that, to my mind, threatens to bring down the NYT as America’s best newspaper. Some quotes.

Re Trump’s election:

 The new story, after all, was more fascinating, more chaotic—utterly unprecedented. And Trump’s election was the kind of Earth-shattering event that only comes around once or twice in a newsperson’s career. So for someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic. But it didn’t go unnoticed that, for some in the newsroom, the journalistic mission was not exactly front of mind. “I just remember younger people with sad faces,” a person who was there told me, describing those employees as generally being in roles that are adjacent to reporting and editing. Baquet remarked to colleagues in the coming days about how surprised he was by that. “He’s thinking, We’ve got a great story on our hands,” my source said. “That was the first indication that a unified newsroom in the age of Trump was going to be a very difficult thing to achieve or maintain.”

Indeed. Journalists have to report the news, regardless of how sad it makes them. If they’re at the HuffPo, they can editorialize with the news like this (by the way, they’re right about Pruitt, but this is not news but editorializing):

or

Take the Watergate affair. While the editorial page of The Washington Post was calling out the administration’s perfidy, those who ultimately brought it down, Woodward and Bernstein, were just reporting the facts. You didn’t see either of those two going on the television to call for Nixon’s impeachment. And that’s the way it should be. Journalists give the facts (granted, they can be slanted a tad; we all know the Times has a Leftist tilt), while the op-eds give us fact-based opinions. But the younger reporters and editors at the Times don’t like that; they really want the paper to be like HuffPo. They want to merge opinion and news, and it has to be anti-Republican.

Much of this schism, as noted above, came from Trump’s election, which I think drove many liberals almost insane:

As with most hot-button topics these days, all roads seem to lead back to the real-estate mogul and erstwhile reality-television fixture who now resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “I would agree that the question of a generational divide is made more complicated by the fact that it’s happening during the presidency of Donald Trump,” said Times managing editor Joe Kahn in an interview. “If this had been the first term of Hillary Clinton, or a less divisive, less polarizing figure for many members of our own staff, some of the issues that have arisen might not have taken on quite the level of importance or urgency or alarm that they have.” At the same time, said Kahn, the Times“has made it really clear that we consider it crucial to our future that we not become an opposition-news organization. We do not see ourselves, and we do not wish to be seen, as partisan media. That means that the news and opinion divide, and things like social-media guidelines and some of our traditional restrictions on political activity by employees, may feel cumbersome to some people at this point in our evolution.”

To Kahn’s point, the country is in the midst of a unique and restive moment—not least of all for the ever-ubiquitous millennial population—characterized by empowerment and anger and, yes, “wokeness.” Against this backdrop, the Times is arguably changing more rapidly and radically than any other period in its 167-year history, including the ascension earlier this year of its first digital-native publisher, 37-year-old A.G. Sulzberger. Put simply, the Times is working through a complex and fraught makeover in order to become a place that can survive—even if there were no print edition in another 5 or 10 or 20 years. “I have been here a long time,” one veteran editor told me. “The tensions you’re referring to are not just generational. We are all trying to figure out what the Times is in the digital era.”

Given that most people read the paper digitally, and probably spend a lot less time online than on the paper edition, this is a dangerous situation. Ideally, the Times should somehow remain what it was before: a repository of thoughtful and accurate journalism. But can a newspaper keep that when everyone’s attention span is minuscule, and click-bait is what draws the eyes?

Just two more quotes and I’ll leave you to read the piece yourself:

One of the younger, newer Times employees I spoke with boiled down the conflict as follows, with the obvious caveat that there are, of course, “woke” people in the old guard and traditionalists in the younger set. “The olds,” my source said, “feel like the youngs are insufficiently respectful of long-standing journalistic norms, or don’t get that things are the way they are for a reason. The youngs feel like the olds are insufficiently willing to acknowledge the ways in which the world and media landscape have changed, and that our standards and mores should evolve to reflect that.” (Several Times sources emphasized that this dynamic has been around for decades. As Gay Talese once wrote of the 1950s-era Times: “There were philosophical differences dividing older Timesmen who feared that the paper was losing touch with its tradition and younger men who felt trapped by tradition.”)

Similarly, an institutional Times person said, “I think a lot of this younger generation were brought up to believe that it’s very important that their voices be heard, and so I think it’s a bit harder to fit into an institution where it’s less than democratic in some ways. One generation came of age where they entered this esteemed institution and tried to find a way to fit into it, and this other generation has an expectation that the institution will change to accommodate them. That’s the essence of the tension.”

Yes, call me a curmudgeon (well, not in the comments!), and get off my lawn, but I doubt that the NYT will survive if, in its attempt to enter the digital era, it becomes the HuffPo of the intellectual set. Or perhaps it will survive, but it won’t be the same paper that garnered a reputation as “the good gray Times“—one of the world’s best papers. Perhaps this is inevitable given the way people now approach reading (online, no books, nothing too long), but I mourn it. And so, apparently, does managing editor Joe Kahn, who articulates values that are the direct opposite of sites like HuffPo, Salon, BuzzFeed, and VICE (my emphasis):

As Kahn sees it, there’s no “magic-bullet solution,” and he said the Times is making progress on becoming more responsive to the concerns of a much more multi-textured staff than it had 10 years ago. But in terms of how any single employee may be processing the many difficult ramifications of the current era, there was one thing Kahn held firm on. “If you’re a media company, journalism is not about creating safe spaces for people,” he said. “It’s not about democratically reflecting the consensus of the staff about what we say on certain issues. We’re not crowd-sourcing, from our employees, a collective institutional position on Donald Trump.”

Amen!

Amanda Marcotte: “Free speech” is code for “white nationalism”

April 4, 2018 • 9:15 am

I see the termites have again munched on Amanda Marcotte, who, as a writer for Salon, holds down one of the most reprehensible jobs in journalism.  She’s perhaps best known for her erroneous rush to judgment on the Duke lacrosse team rape case as well as her firing as John Edwards’s social media maven, incidents described in her Wikipedia profile:

In January 2007, Marcotte made several controversial statements about the Duke lacrosse case including calling people who defended the accused “rape-loving scum”[6][7][8][9] and writing on her blog “Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.” The post, which Marcotte later deleted, attracted criticism, was mentioned in The New York Times.[10][11] The Duke lacrosse players were eventually found to have been falsely accused. Their accuser, Crystal Mangum, was later convicted of an unrelated murder, and the prosecuting attorney, Mike Nifong, was disbarred.

On January 30, 2007, the John Edwards 2008 presidential campaign hired Marcotte to act as the campaign’s blogmaster despite the criticism,[12][13][14][15][16] responding that while Edwards was “personally offended” by some of Marcotte’s remarks, her job as their blogmaster was secure.[17]

Further controversy resulted on February 12, 2007, when the Catholic League criticized Marcotte’s review of the film Children of Men as “anti-Christian.”[18] Following the criticism Marcotte announced her resignation from the Edwards campaign. In an article for Salon a few days later, she said the reaction to her comments on the Duke lacrosse case was the first in a series of “shitstorms” that prompted her resignation.[19]

At Real Clear Politics, Cathy Young writes this in her piece “A Feminist Flare Up“:

Marcotte sarcastically asserts that one of the major “victories” of “independent feminism” was “maintaining a cultural and legal framework that made it difficult to prosecute rape.” What does this mean? Her previous writings on the subject provide some context. In 2006-2007, Marcotte emerged as a leader of the cyber-lynch mob in the Duke University rape hoax. On her blog, anyone questioning the guilt of the three lacrosse players charged with sexually assaulting an exotic dancer at a team party was branded a “rape apologist.” In a particularly vicious broadside, she sneered at syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker for arguing that “unless the victim is 9 years old and a virgin and white and blonde … rape isn’t so much a crime as a feminist plot to put all men in jail.” This wasn’t so much hyperbole as outright distortion: while Parker had deplored the “rush to judgment” in the Duke case, she had explicitly condemned the notion that the alleged victim was less deserving of sympathy because she was a stripper. (Parker is one of the “independent feminists” on Marcotte’s Slate blacklist.)

The true extent of Marcotte’s hate-filled zealotry is evident in a profanity-laced rant she posted about a CNN special report on the Duke case aired after the rape charges were dismissed. (She later deleted the post when it became an issue in the controversy over her short-lived appointment as blog coordinator for the John Edwards presidential campaign.) Slamming CNN as “pure evil,” Marcotte vented her outrage at having to “listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and f***ed her against her will,” and concluded sarcastically, “Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.”

It seems that, in Marcotte’s eyes, the real crime of the “independent feminists'” is helping preserve the idea that the presumption of innocence applies even in cases of rape and sexual assault. If so, that is indeed a victory. Depriving men of their civil rights is no victory for women — both as a matter of principle and because most women have men in their lives whom they would not want to see face a false charge of rape under Marcotte-style standards of justice.

Note that several of the Wikipedia links go nowhere; but the last one, “Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign”, can be found at this site. I’ve looked for a while for any admission by Marcotte that she was wrong or acted precipitately in the Duke matter, but nothing can found. The closest she got for whipping up false judgment was accusing prosecutor Nifong of “fumbling the ball.” For Marcotte is an Authoritarian Leftist, and one of their dictums is “Never apologize or admit you were wrong.” What she did is simply delete her tweets and gung-ho coverage of the rape case. I don’t think it’s unique to the Left to admit when they made a mistake, though: that’s just human nature. But to the targets of Authoritarian Leftists, admitting a mistake does not soothe their rage; as in the case of Matt Damon, they simply double down with the invective.

Don’t get me wrong, as a Leftist, I’ve often agreed with Marcotte’s published criticism of Trump and Republicans. But I don’t consider myself her “ally” in the sense that gender feminists use that word. Her tendency to get unhinged makes me wary.

This is all a long prelude to her having jumped the rails once again, so that she’s starting to become the equivalent of a female Dan Arel. Here you go:

https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/980928683438432257

No, Ms. Marcotte, “Free speech” is not even primarily, much less “exclusively” used as a right wing code for white nationalism. The very idea is absurd. Yes, white nationalists may use the mantra of free speech to assert a right to promulgate their odious views, but they’re right: even white supremacy is protected under the First Amendment.  And her expansion of the term “free speech” as a synonym for “racism” is another Authoritarian tactic: the stretching of words like “violence” or “safety” to encompass mental attitudes rather than physical situations. I’d love to see her lecture the American Civil Liberties Union on the new meaning of “free speech”!

What do we do when Authoritarian Leftists start denigrating free speech because it’s a code word for racism? We push back.  And so, like defense attorney Scott Greenfield (who write the website “Simple Justice“), I once again call out Marcotte for her stupidity in defense of extremism. And do I need to remind her that, as a journalist, Marcotte depends on freedom speech to promulgate her palaver?

h/t: Grania