Caddisfly hatching (and parrot lagniappe)

March 1, 2018 • 1:45 pm

This video was just posted yesterday, and it’s amazing—like the alien coming out of the guy’s stomach. It’s a caddisfly. These aren’t what entomologists call “flies,” which are in the order Diptera; rather, they’re in the order Trichoptera. As for what is happening here, I’ll let Matthew (who sent me the video) explain:

Its a hemimetabolous insect, so they just go through a series of moults, the final being the most dramatic. They are nymphs, this is the imago. Same as in dragonflies. And who worked it out and described it first? Swammerdam.

Jan Swammerdam is one of Matthew’s science heroes, and figures largely in Matthew’s first book, The Egg and Sperm Race.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Yep! Little Black Caddisflies hatch on nice days even in winter. This one is about 4mm long, so hatches in minutes compared to larger aquatic insects which can take up to an hour to eclose.

Now think of the evolution required to built such a complex developmental program (which of course includes behavior):

Here’s a African gray parrot named Einstein (Psittacus erithacus), celebrating her 30th birthday at the Knoxville Zoo:

Three out of four Women’s March leaders suck up to anti-Semitic loon Louis Farrakhan

March 1, 2018 • 12:30 pm

If you follow or participate in the Women’s March, whose goals are admirable, be aware that you’re getting in bed with some very unsavory characters—the March’s leaders.

Last Sunday, as reported by CNN, Louis Farrakhan, the bigoted and unhinged leader of the National of Islam (the “Black Muslims”) gave a blatantly anti-Semitic speech. Click on the screenshot to see the details:

 

Minister Louis Farrakhan engaged in a series of anti-Semitic remarks on Sunday.

Farrakhan has led the black nationalist group Nation of Islam since 1977 and is known for hyperbolic hate speech aimed at the Jewish community.

During the speech in Chicago, Farrakhan made several anti-Semitic comments, including, “the powerful Jews are my enemy.”

“White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through,” he later said.

The CNN article contains a lot of tweets from CNN anchor (and liberal) Jake Tapper recounting Farrakhan’s remarks with embedded videos, like this one:

Tapper goes on, but you can see Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic bile at the CNN site.

The Forward adds more:

Farrakhan made multiple inflammatory comments during his three-hour speech. He claimed that “the powerful Jews are my enemy,” that “the Jews have control over agencies of those agencies of government” like the FBI, that Jews are “the mother and father of apartheid,” and that Jews are responsible for “degenerate behavior in Hollywood turning men into women and women into men.”

Farrakhan has been known to make anti-Semitic comments for decades, including calling Adolf Hitler “a very great man” and claiming that Jews were behind the 9/11 terror attacks.

Even the dubious Southern Poverty Law Center, itself too eager to demonize Muslim reformers or apostates like Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has denounced Farrkhan and the Nation of Islam as producing “deeply racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay rhetoric”, stating that such behavior “earned the NOI a prominent position in the ranks of organized hate.”

Now, who was at Farrakhan’s speech but Tamika Mallory, one of the four co-chairs of the Women’s March? (They include, as Wikipedia notes: “Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York; Tamika Mallory, a political organizer and former executive director of the National Action Network; Carmen Perez, an executive director of the political action group The Gathering for Justice; and Bob Bland [a woman], a fashion designer who focuses on ethical manufacturing.”) And it turns out that three of these four women—all save Bland—have sucked up to Louis Farrakhan.

CNN reports on Mallory, who has a history of osculating Farrkahan (see also my post here):

Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory was in attendance, CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out on Twitter after she shared an image from the event on Instagram.

Mallory has posted on social media about Farrakhan in the past — on February 21, 2016, she posted an image of him from a stage at the Joe Louis Arena with the caption: “The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan just stepped to the mic for #SD16DET… I’m super ready for this message! #JUSTICEORELSE #ForTheLoveOfFlint.”

Mallory did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on Sunday’s speech.

Mallory, and Perez as well, both have firm connections to Farrakhan, expressing approval for the man and his ideas, as documented in an article in The Algemeiner. This picture, from Perz’s Instagram account, shows their approbation (Perez on left, Mallory on right):

I should add that, as I posted last year, Perez is a big fan of other dubious characters. As NYT writer Bari Weiss noted in a column called “When progressives embrace hate” (and I’ve checked on these statements):

Ms. Mallory, in addition to applauding Assata Shakur [JAC: characterized by Tapper, truthfully, as “a cop-killer fugitive in Cuba”]  as a feminist emblem, also admires Fidel Castro, who sheltered Ms. Shakur in Cuba. She put up a flurry of posts when Mr. Castro died last year. “R.I.P. Comandante! Your legacy lives on!” she wrote in one. She does not have similar respect for American police officers. “When you throw a brick in a pile of hogs, the one that hollers is the one you hit,” she posted on Nov. 20.

Ms. Perez also expressed her admiration for a Black Panther convicted of trying to kill six police officers: “Love learning from and sharing space with Baba Sekou Odinga.”

And here’s Linda Sarsour weighing in on a Perez Instagram post, noting that “the brother does not age” and “God bless him”.  Indeed!

You might construe this as just a factual assertion, but I think it’s darker than that:

So Perez and Mallory are big supporters of Farrakhan (and terrorist killers) and I suspect Sarsour is, too, given her “God bless him” weigh-in above. As reader BJ—who called the speech, Mallory’s attendance, and some links to my attention—noted: “This would be all over the media if it was about the leaders of a huge right-wing march following Richard Spencer, and since Farrakhan is just as hateful as Spencer, the only difference between the two is that Farrakhan has far more followers and, apparently, influence over respected organizers.”

You’d expect progressives to call out Perez, Mallory, and Sarsour for their association with an unrepentent Jew-hater like Farrakhan, who is the black equivalent of Richard Spencer. But no, some liberals make excuses for it, so eager are they to overlook anti-Semitism in the cause of being woke. Just have a look at this defense of the Women’s March leaders on the feminist site Jezebel (my emphasis):

Of course, neither Sarsour, nor any of the other Women’s March co-founders, is immune to criticism (and Weiss raises a few valid points in her op-ed [JAC: here], particularly around Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory’s association with Louis Farrakhan, a black activist who has been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Semitic and homophobic extremist; neither Perez nor Mallory have responded to our request for comment on the affiliation or Weiss’s piece). But progressives should understand who these criticisms serve, especially when they originate from Islamophobic arguments—and understand that, as a Palestinian-American Muslim woman, Sarsour’s very identity and existence is considered controversial in a country that continues to support policies that discriminate against one of the most oppressed people in the world.

Transation: “It’s okay for Sarsour, Perez, and Mallory to hang around with a rabid anti-Semite, because the critics of that can be fobbed off as simple Islamophobes. Besides, Sarsour is supporting the oppressed feminists, so it’s okay for her and her cronies to express anti-Semitism.”

Like others who endorse the Woman’s March, Jezebel is so enamored at the March’s well-meant aims that they’ll either overlook or defend the viper at the breast of the Women’s March organizers.  I am mystified at this. Perez and Mallory associate with a bigoted loon, Sarsour says “god bless him”; and all three are dubious characters, characters who hang around with and praise bigots and killers. Is this the best the Women’s March can do? Can’t they find leaders who aren’t in bed with bigots? And why does the liberal press ignore this? (We already know the answer.)

New York Times editorial page editor makes the “Little People” argument for religion

March 1, 2018 • 10:30 am

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

—Karl Marx  A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. 

As “mainstream” publications like the New York Times and New Yorker become increasingly regressive, we can expect to see more osculation of religion, even though the tenets of religion are false and the U.S. is becoming more secular. (One characteristic of Authoritarian Leftists is their refusal to criticize faith.)  In an op-ed yesterday, David Leonhardt, a columnist and the associate editorial page editor for the New York Times, not only praises a pro-religion column by conservative Ross Douthat, but cites a study purporting to show that religion is a net good in the world (click on the screenshot to read the piece):

An excerpt:

The benefits of faith. In his Sunday column this week, Ross Douthat issued something of a challenge to secular liberals. They think of themselves as empiricists, Ross wrote, but they’re actually close-minded about several powerful forces for good, starting with religion.

“When people and societies are genuinely curious,” he continued, “they are very reasonably curious about everything, including things happening in their bodies and their consciousness and more speculative realms.”

If you read Douthat’s column, you’ll see it’s a critique of Steve Pinker’s thesis, described in his new book Enlightenment Now, that the world is getting better, and that a big reason for that improvement is the rejection of dogma and superstition pushed by religion and faith. In fact, Douthat claims that, contrary to all reason, being irrational—whether that’s manifested in astrology, spiritualism, or religion—actually promotes the curiosity that pushes science forward. As Douthat argues:

. . . in many instances the interests that Pinker dismisses as irrational hugger-mugger, everything from astrology to spiritualism, have tended to strengthen during periods of real scientific ferment. It’s why Isaac Newton loved alchemy and the Victorians loved séances; it’s why charismatic Christianity has spread very naturally with economic development in Africa and Latin America and why the Space Age coincided with the spread of all those health food stores.

Which is why if Pinker and others are genuinely worried about a waning appreciation of the inquiring scientific spirit, they should consider the possibility that some of their own smug secular certainties might be part of the problem — that they might, indeed, be stifling the more comprehensive kind of curiosity upon which the scientific enterprise ultimately depends.

Smug secular certainties, indeed? Has he read Pinker’s book, which is based on data? As usual, what issues from Douthat’s pie-hole is nonsense:  religion in the West is waning strongly, regardless of the spread of “charistmatic Christianity” in Africa and Latin America. Douthat fails to realize that the economic development in places like Africa and Latin America depends largely on science produced in more secular countries, and that correlation between scientific ferment and superstition (even if it’s real, and I Douthat) is not causation. Read Douthat’s column if you want to see an Orwellian conviction that superstition actually increases our respect for empirical data.

Back to Leonhardt’s, who then cites data that I find a bit dubious (see below):

The column reminded me of a pattern that, as a secular liberal myself, I’ve long found inconvenient: Religion is correlated with a lot of healthy behaviors and positive outcomes. All else equal, religious people have higher educational attainment, earn more money, use drugs and alcohol less and commit fewer crimes, according to a long line of social-science studies (that have frequently been done by secular liberals).

The question about these findings is the old correlation-causation question: Does religious faith lead to these healthy behaviors? Or is something else, independent of faith, causing them?

He then cites a 78-page study—and I haven’t yet read it—but the link is in the column’s excerpt below (my emphasis):

A clever new study tries to offer some answers. It’s not anywhere near the last word on the matter, obviously, but it is intriguing.

. . . The group taught 15 weeks of classes to more than 6,000 very poor Filipinos. Some of the students received a version that combined religious teachings with advice on health and employment. Others received only the nonreligious parts. By comparing the different batches of students, the economists hoped to isolate the effect of religion.

The results: Six months later, those who received the religious education indeed reported feeling more guided by religion. They were also earning more money, largely by shifting from agricultural work to higher-paying jobs, such as fishing or self-employment. And even small pay increases can be a big deal for people living in extreme poverty.

. . . No study is definitive. But I do find the overall evidence of religion’s ancillary benefits to be strong. That evidence hasn’t made me personally religious. I’m still quite comfortable with my secularism. But the evidence has made me more humble and open-minded about how the world can go about solving some of its problems.

Does this convince you that religiosity has “strong ancillary benefits”? Of course I’m biased against that, but let’s look at the description. The subjects were “very poor Filipinos”, not reasonably well-off Westerners, which, after all, is whom Leonhardt is addressing. Even taking these results at face value, remember that the most religious people in both the U.S. and across nations are those with the lowest well being, and thus tend to look to a heavenly being for succor rather than their governments. This might explain the “feeling more guided by religion” part. After all, if you get a religious education, why wouldn’t you feel more guided by religion?

As for earning more money, I’d want to see the effects of four treatments: “religion alone”, “religion combined with advice on health and employment”, “advice on health and employment alone” and “no treatment.”  Perhaps a reader can have a look at the survey, and see if “religion alone” has a bigger effect than “advice on health and employment”, or if the combined treatment had a bigger effect than “religion alone.”

At any rate, this one study in the Philippines, showing that religion combined with secular advice is better than secular advice alone (I’m presuming here), flies in the face of other data that Leonhardt doesn’t mention. As I’ve discussed before, in both Faith Versus Fact and a 2012 paper in Evolution (free access with Unpaywall), the most religious countries in the world are those with the lowest well being. Conversely, countries with the highest well-being (and, according to a UN survey, the happiest inhabitants) are the most secular countries: countries like Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, and so on. (That includes the U.S., which using sociological measures doesn’t have such a “successful society”.)

This holds true among states of the U.S. as well, though I don’t have the correlation at hand. The “red states”, which are highly religious, tend to have lower well being than “blue states”, with more secularist and liberals. Here are two figures from a post I did in 2012, showing data from a Gallup poll”. First, the degree of religiosity in American states:

And overall well being:

 

There’s a striking correlation, at least visually: those states with the lowest well being have the highest religiosity. (I’m willing to be that this is statistically significant.) That, and the data among countries, does not suggest that religion motivates people to better their lot. Of course these are just correlations, but sociologists such as Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have theorized that religiosity is a response to low well being: if your society is not taking care of you, you look for solace and help to gods. An alternative hypothesis is that believing in God makes you create worse societies.  The first explanation (first adumbrated by Marx in his famous quote) makes more sense to me, but the second may carry a lick of sense as well. If you’re hopeless and think that either god will help you or that your lot will be better in the next life, you have less impetus to improve your society.

Either way, the data from everyplace outside the small group of poor Filipinos discussed by Leonhardt refutes his thesis on the effect of religion on material well being. Of course, he doesn’t mention that.

What bothers me about Leonhardt’s article is the fact that, as he admits, he himself is a nonbeliever—or at least a “secularist” who isn’t religious.  Presumably, then, he thinks religion is good for the “little people”, as it inspires them to work harder and make more money, even if the tenets of religion aren’t true. Good for thee but not for me!  How incredibly condescending and patronizing can one be? Does he seriously think that teaching religion to people is one way “the world can go about solving some of its problems”?

And remember, this patronizing git, who pretends to be “humble,” is largely in charge of the entire op-ed section of the country’s best newspaper.

h/t: Greg

The AR-15 blessing in Pennsylvania

March 1, 2018 • 8:30 am

Two days ago I reported that a church in Pennsylvania was holding a Blessing of the AR-15s. That took place yesterday. Reuters reports:

Hundreds of couples toting AR-15 rifles packed a Unification church in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to have their marriages blessed and their weapons celebrated as “rods of iron” that could have saved lives in a recent Florida school shooting.

Women dressed in white and men in dark suits gripped the guns, which they had been urged to bring unloaded to the church in the rural Pocono Mountains, about 100 miles (160 km) north of Philadelphia. Many celebrants wore crowns – some made of bullets – while church officials dressed in flowing bright pink and white garments to go with their armaments.

Reverend Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, leader of the church after the death of his father and church founder, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, blessed the roughly 250 couples at the service, a church spokesman said.

Students in a nearby school were “relocated” for the day. The ceremony went off without a hitch—or rather, without a death.

Here is a video and some photos of the ceremony, conducted at the Sanctuary Church (a Moonie church) in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania. I can’t think of a better documentation of two forms of lunacy that dominate America: love of God and love of guns.

Why does that older woman in front need an assault rifle? And why are they wearing crowns?

Both photos: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

 

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 1, 2018 • 7:30 am

As I’m home during the early morning, and thus limited to photos that just arrived. Today we have a short but sweet set of two from Stephen Barnard, who’s been AWOL for a while.

First, a House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus):

And then Deets, one of Stephen’s two Border Collies (the other is Hitch). As he says, the fresh snow “amps them up”. This is an “almost all black dog”, but doesn’t count as such for my purposes.

Thursday, Hili dialogue

March 1, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s MARCH! Thursday, March 1, 2018. March is said to “come in like a lion and go out like a lamb”, but in Chicago it’s coming in pretty much like a lamb, with highs of 39° F ( 4° C) today, and perhaps a bit of rain.  That’s tropical for our area!  But it’s snowing in England, and you can be sure that, snow or sun, Matthew is out on Manchester Uni’s picket line.

It’s also “National Peanut Butter Lover’s Day“, with the placement of the apostrophe suggesting that there’s only one person who loves peanut butter—or at least only one being honored for that love. And it’s National Pig Day in the U.S.!

National Pig Day is an event held annually on March 1 in the United States to celebrate the pig. The holiday celebration was started in 1972 by sisters Ellen Stanley, a teacher in Lubbock, Texas, and Mary Lynne Rave of Beaufort, North Carolina. According to Rave the purpose of National Pig Day is “to accord the pig its rightful, though generally unrecognized, place as one of man’s most intellectual and domesticated animals.” The holiday is most often celebrated in the Midwest.

I asked Grania to find me a pig tweet in honor of NPD, and she found a good one: Pigcasso, the Artistic Pig.

On March 1, 1564, the French Wars of Religion began with the massacre of 63 Huguenots in Wassy, France.  Further superstition on this day in 1692: three women, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the slave Tituba, were accused of witchcraft in Salem Village, Massachusetts, kicking off the Salem Witch Trials. On this day in 1815, Napoleon returned to France after being banished to Elba. After the Hundred Days, he was deposed and sent to St. Helena, where he died. On March 1, 1872, the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, was established in the U.S. Exactly 11 years later, Henri Becquerel discovered the phenomenon of radioactive decay.

On this day in 1932, Charles Lindbergh reported the kidnapping of his son, found dead two months later. Bruno Hauptmann was convicted and executed for the crime, one of the biggest news stories of the era. In 1950, Klaus Fuchs was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union when it was discovered that he’d passed on data on the atomic bomb. He served nine years in prison in England. On March 1, 1964, President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps. Exactly ten years later, seven men—H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John N. Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson—were indicted for obstructing justice in the Watergate break-in, the first of many “-gates”.  Seven years later, IRA member Bobby Sands began his hunger strike in Maze Prison, ending with his death on May 5. On March 1, 1998, the movie Titanic became the first film to gross over a billion dollars worldwide. And on this day in 2006, Wikipedia published its one millionth article, on the Jordanhill railway station.

Here’s perhaps the most famous scene from Titanic:

Notables born on this day include Frédéric Chopin (1810), William Dean Howells (1837), Lytton Strachey (1880), Oskar Kokoschka (1886), Glenn Miller (1904), David Niven (1910), Harry “Holy Cow” Carey (1914), Robert Lowell (1914). Harry Belafonte (1927; he’s 89 today), and Catherine Bach and Ron Howard (both 1954).

Here’s Kokoschka’s “Lovers With Cat”: can you spot the moggie?:

Those who died on March 1 include Paul Scott (1978; read his Raj Quartet, one of the best works of fiction of our time), Edwin H. Land (1991), Andrew Breitbart (2012), Bonnie Franklin (2013), Alain Resnais (2014), and Minnie Miñoso (2015).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a bit of hilarity took place. I have to say that this is one of the best Hilis yet!

Hili: How big are angels?
A: LIke humans or a bit bigger.
Hili: That means that I’ve eaten a sparrow.
 In Polish:
Hili: Jakiej wielkości są anioły?
Ja: Takie jak ludzie, albo troszkę większe.
Hili: To znaczy, że zjadłam wróbla.

Reader Dave Andrews sent a tweet with a story about Steve Gould and Isaac Asimov:

And some tweets from Grania, the first showing a deer parade in Scotland:

A sleepy kitten tucked in:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/968889843974656001

Four tweets of cats in the snow! (Four of them don’t like it.)

https://twitter.com/RSSS_CSI_Gina/status/968804901953384449

This one likes it, though, and tries to catch snowballs (sent by Matthew):