Democratic Senators call on Al Franken to resign (and a poll)

December 6, 2017 • 1:45 pm

According to many sources, including the New York Times, a sixth woman has come forward to accuse Al Franken of sexual harassment.  Deciding that they’ve had enough, several Democrats in the Senate, including ten women and seven men, have issued statements calling for Franken to resign his seat (the women are Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Patty Murray of Washington, Kamala Harris of California, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire; the men are Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, also called for Franken to resign.

The details of the accusation, from Politico, are these:

A former Democratic congressional aide said Al Franken tried to forcibly kiss her after a taping of his radio show in 2006, three years before he became a U.S. senator.

The aide, whose name POLITICO is withholding to protect her identity, said Franken (D-Minn.) pursued her after her boss had left the studio. She said she was gathering her belongings to follow her boss out of the room. When she turned around, Franken was in her face.

The former staffer ducked to avoid Franken’s lips. As she hastily left the room, she said, Franken told her: “It’s my right as an entertainer.”

“He was between me and the door and he was coming at me to kiss me. It was very quick and I think my brain had to work really hard to be like ‘Wait, what is happening?’ But I knew whatever was happening was not right and I ducked,” the aide said in an interview. “I was really startled by it and I just sort of booked it towards the door and he said, ‘It’s my right as an entertainer.’”

Franken categorically denies that this happened:

“This allegation is categorically not true and the idea that I would claim this as my right as an entertainer is preposterous. I look forward to fully cooperating with the ongoing ethics committee investigation,” Franken said in a statement to POLITICO.

There appears to be some corroboration, though it’s not clearly “independent”:

Two former colleagues of the woman independently corroborated her version of events, including Franken telling her he had the right to try to kiss her because he was “an entertainer.” The first former colleague interviewed by POLITICO said she was told of the incident in 2006, shortly after it happened. The second former co-worker said she was made aware of the encounter sometime in 2009 or 2010.

Although these aren’t truly independent witnesses, they were informed of the accusation years ago, increasing the probability that it really happened. This last accusation, though the accuser is anonymous, was enough to finally get the Democrats to call for Franken’s resignation. I’m guessing he won’t be around much longer.

I’m taking a poll here, so please answer, and add any comments below:

 

 

Mantis fly has a walking pupa that climbs trees before hatching

December 6, 2017 • 12:45 pm

Although this observation and video don’t revolutionize science, they do provide some information that was missing about the life cycle of an insect, and, importantly, they allow the lucky finder to see something that presumably no other human had seen before.

In this case it’s a substantial part of the lifecycle of a “mantidfly“, Ditaxis biseriata. Mantidflies aren’t “true” flies, which are in the order Diptera, but fit within the order Neuroptera along with lacewings, antlions, and various relatives.  Here’s the species at issue, and you can see from its forelegs why it’s called a “mantidfly”. It’s obviously a predator, and eats other insects:

Ditaxis biseriata, adult

Within the order Neuroptera, this species is in the superfamily Mantispoidea and the family Mantispidae. And in that family there are four subfamilies. The immature life stages of one of them, the Drepanicinae (of which D. biseriata is a member) wasn’t known or seen until now. The German Wikipedia entry (the only one) says this: “Die adulten Tiere leben räuberisch von anderen Insekten, über die Präimaginalstadien ist bisher nichts bekannt”, which I take translate as “the adult insects are predators on other insects, but the pre-imaginal stages aren’t yet known.”

But now they are. The discovery is reported a new paper in Biodiversity Data Journal by James B. Dorey and David J. Merritt (reference and free link below) and summarized in EurekAlert!   The latter article says that Dorey is an entomology student at the University of Queensland, who saw a mass emergence of these creatures in his father’s macadamia nut orchard in northern New South Wales. Not knowing what they were, Dorey took a video and obtained some eggs from a female that produced larvae that could be identified. His mentor and lecturer, Merritt, helped identity them as D. bitaxa.

So the life cycle is this: the eggs are laid by mated females who live aboveground, which are presumably laid on trees and then hatch, with the larvae heading underground. What they do under there, how long they’re underground (remember, cicadas can live underground as preadults for 17 years), and what they eat, is still unknown: the relatives in the family eat spider eggs as larvae, but we don’t know about this family. The larvae probably molt several times, producing successively larger individuals (the stages are called “instars”), and then at some stage they form a pupa.

The remarkable thing about the pupa, unlike a butterfly cocoon or a Drosophila pupa, is that they’re mobile: the late pupa, which contains an adult insect that hasn’t yet hatched, is called a “pharate”, and in the case of D. biseriata it can move!  This freaks me out, but here’s the video that shows a pupa who has already climbed a tree hatching (“eclosing”) into an adult. This is fricking amazing, at least to someone like me who studies insects that have immobile pupae. The pharate you see that hatches into an adult has walked about two meters up the tree, become static for a while, and then eclosedfrom its pupal case. This, taken in the wild, is a remarkable video as well as a first observation.

Be sure to watch this enlarged for full wonderment!

Here are some pictures from the paper. First, a pharate that’s walked up the tree and is ready to hatch:

And the eggs and then the larvae that go underground (caption from paper):

Ditaxis biseriata eggs and larvae. Top Left. Egg batch before eclosion; Top Right: egg cluster after eclosion of first instars, seen clustered on the egg batch; Middle: dorsal view of preserved first instar; Bottom: dorsal view of live first instar during locomotion.

So that’s what’s new, besides the fact that mass eclosion of the type seen by Dorey is also new: this phenomenon has never been reported in the family.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

___________

Dorey JB, Merritt DJ (2017) First observations on the life cycle and mass eclosion events in a mantis fly (Family Mantispidae) in the subfamily Drepanicinae. Biodiversity Data Journal 5: e21206. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.5.e21206

Harvard turns even more authoritarian, imposing sanctions on students who belong to off-campus, single-sex social clubs

December 6, 2017 • 10:00 am

Back in May I reported (see also here:1, 2, 3) how Harvard University, under the aegis and urging of President Drew Faust, had proposed punishing students who join single-sex (or rather, single-“gender”) social organizations that aren’t affiliated with the University. These include the famous “finals clubs,” which include all-male and all-female as well as co-ed versions.  And these punishments can be quite severe. As I wrote in May:

Beginning with the class of 2017 [now with students entering in 2018; see below], any Harvard student found belonging to a gender-exclusive group will experience these sanctions (taken from the Post article):

  • Those students won’t be able to hold any leadership position in Harvard’s undergraduate organizations, including sports teams. That means that if you belong to an off-campus fraternity, you can’t be captain of the all-male football team. Or if you belong to a sorority, you can’t be president of the women’s crew team. Ironic, isn’t it?
  • Those students will not be able to apply for prestigious fellowships, like the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, that require endorsements from Harvard. Harvard will not support the students by sending the required university recommendation and endorsement.

I thought, and continue to think, that this is a terrible idea, for it violates Harvard’s own policy of allowing students freedom of association. Why should they be punished for what they do off campus so long as they adhere to the student code of conduct on campus? And I’m not the only one who thinks this; Steve Pinker weighed in here, agreeing with many Harvard faculty as well as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which sent a letter of protest to Harvard.

Under Drew Faust, Harvard hasn’t done much to burnish its image, but rather has descended into a form of authoritarian leftism increasingly afflicting Ivy League schools (see, for instance, here and here). I don’t think Faust’s been a particularly visionary President, and I’m not unhappy that she’ll be retiring next June after a decade on the job. Because I got my Ph.D. at Harvard, really enjoyed my time there, and am a bit protective of its academic reputation, I do care what happens to the school. And of course I’m always monitoring the attempts of colleges everywhere to erode student freedoms.

When I wrote Faust as a Harvard alumnus, I got this tepid response, but it was all I expected.

Dear Mr. Coyne,

Thank you very much for taking the time to write.  I appreciate having your perspective on this important set of issues, and I have taken the liberty of sharing your concerns with Dean Khurana.

Sincerely,
Drew Faust

It’s ironic that Faust, who has pushed these punishments for single-sex association to a faculty vote, is a member of Board of Trustees for her own alma mater, Bryn Mawr College, a college that does not accept men as undergraduates, even transgender men.

Nevertheless, as Harvard Magazine reported, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted on November 7 to impose the sanctions (rejecting a motion to derail them by a vote of 130 against, 90 in favor). And yesterday the same magazine reported that imposition of the sanctions will begin very soon: in May of 2018, before this year’s class of new students enters. The report quotes a statement by Faust and Harvard Corporation fellow William F. Lee that was read to the FAS meeting yesterday. All the sanctions above will be applied, and students who want postgraduate fellowships or hope to have a leadership role on a sports team will have to quit their clubs. And that, of course, may kill the clubs, which is surely a goal of the new policy.

Not that I like these clubs: I wouldn’t be a member (I didn’t participate in fraternity rush in college), and I object to their exclusionary policies. But that’s irrelevant to the principle of freedom of association. Further, Faust and Lee deny that they’re “punishing” the students; rather, they are simply controlling their behavior and defining their identity:

The policy does not discipline or punish the students; it instead recognizes that students who serve as leaders of our community should exemplify the characteristics of non-discrimination and inclusivity that are so important to our campus. Ultimately, students have the freedom to decide which is more important to them: membership in a gender-discriminatory organization or access to those privileges and resources. The process of making those types of judgments, the struggle of defining oneself, one’s identity, and one’s responsibilities to a broader community, is a valuable part of the personal growth and self-exploration we seek for our undergraduates. The USGSOs, in turn, have the choice to become gender-neutral and thus permit their members full access to all institutional privileges.

This is really disingenuous, because of course the new rule punishes and disciplines students who belong to off campus single-sex clubs (remember, several of these prohibit men from joining): it forbids them from getting certain positions on College teams and from applying for scholarships. You simply can’t get a Rhodes or Marshall scholarship, for instance, without a letter of endorsement from your college.

It’s perfectly acceptable (and laudable) for the College to prohibit sex discrimination in its own organizations, but I see no right they have to enforce such behavior for organizations that are private. It’s as if sexist, racist, or anti-religious epithets were also punished when uttered in students’ private homes or apartments—on the grounds that they don’t contribute to the “Harvard identity”. But that violates freedom of speech, and such a rule wouldn’t stand in court.

As Faust and Lee issued their statement, Dean Khurana (see above) also issued a statement to the incoming class—the first class subject to the new policy. While the goals outlined by the Dean are laudable, the sanctions they’ll impose smack of Big-Brotherism. Here’s an excerpt (see more documents and statements at the Harvard Magazine piece); noet the allusion to Trumpian America:

Because we are a diverse community, we will not always agree —on our priorities, on the right solutions to our problems, or even on what a Harvard education means and should be.  But we have much common ground. As applicants to Harvard, each of you inspired us with your plans to make a difference in the world and your hopes to inspire those around you. Each of you sought out this unique opportunity to learn from your peers who come from different backgrounds and from all over the world. Now, as Harvard students, you each play a part in helping Harvard College create this diverse, multi-generational, and inclusive community of learning. Our debates about how to create our community may be intense, but we must continue to see each other as fellow members of one community, with obligations to each other.

Changes here at Harvard are occurring against the backdrop of so much division and anger in the United States. Those divisions will not be easily repaired, and the community we create here on campus matters more than ever. . .

How will the University find out who belongs to single-sex clubs? A statement from another dean notes darkly that “enforcing any regulatory policy relies on self-reporting (or perhaps reports from other students.)” In other words, ratting is encouraged. Don’t like one of your classmates? If he or she is a member of a finals club, just tell the dean!

In the end, this is a black mark on Harvard, on the faculty who voted for the measure, and on the legacy of Drew Faust, which, I think, will not be a good one. I agree with what Professor of English Helen Vender said at the November 7 faculty meeting (Vender, like me, doesn’t like finals clubs). This is one of her five reasons for voting against the measure:

Punishing a student for having joined an unrecognized single-sex group by ruling out his or her access, on that account, to overseas fellowships and leadership positions on campus is to confuse two distinct areas of college life by making access to intellectual progress or leadership consequent on private behavior.

h/t: Greg Mayer

 

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ feminism

December 6, 2017 • 8:30 am

The new Jesus and Mo strip is called “altar”, with the artist commenting, “And there have been lots of cover versions.” It’s not just religionists, of course, who “sacrifice the rights of women” because of religious beliefs. Many feminists do, so long as it’s Islam that abrogates those rights. And among them are atheists, who in their osculation of Islam have given up not just their concern for women’s welfare, but also their disdain for faith.

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 6, 2017 • 7:45 am

Tony Eales from Queensland sent us three insect photos, likely showing mimicry. His notes are indented.

One of my favourite finds for a while. A newly hatched Stick Insect nymph (Podacanthus sp.). When I first saw it, I was struck by how much it looked like and carried itself like a Red Spider Ant. I could tell it wasn’t but it took a minute or two to work out exactly what I was looking at. After I’d harassed it a bit by shoving a lens in its face and flashing my camera it froze and assumed that weird asterisk shape.

 

The putative model: a red spider ant (Leptomyrmex rufipes):

Winter is coming, and reader Snowy Owl sent some photos of its harbinger:

A seagull from reader Liz Strahle:

 

A muscovy duck (Cairina moschata) from reader Bonnie. I love ducks, but have to say that this isn’t one of the more aesthetic ones. . . .

 

 

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

December 6, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning; it’s Wednesday, December 6, 2017. It’s also National Gazpacho Day, which is plain weird since gazpacho is a summer soup drunk in the northern hemisphere. It should be National Gazpacho Day in New Zealand!

And oy, my kishkes! Trump has unilaterally decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, breaking a precedent the U.S. has maintained since the state was founded. Expect violence (and perhaps another Intifada) not only in Israel, but against Americans everywhere in the world. Now our policy shouldn’t be guided by fears of Muslim reprisals, but there is no upside to this decision that we can see, and it further estranges us from our European allies, who begged us not to do this. Chalk another dunderheaded decision up to the Drumpenmeister (with the cooperation of Netanyahu). I’m hoping my prediction is wrong.

Down in Alabama, Roy Moore shows signs of being another Trump on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MooreSenate/status/936315009424031746

It’s another lame day in history. On December 6, 1534, the city of Quito, Ecuador was founded by Spanish settlers headed by Sebastián de Belalcázar. On this day in 1768, the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published, and in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, banning slavery.  On December 6, 1897, London became the first city in the world to have licensed taxicabs (we’re at the bottom of the barrel here), and in 1917 Finland declared independence from Russia. On December 6, 1933, U.S. federal judge John Woolsey ruled that James Joyce’s Ulysses was not obscene. But the battle remains, as we saw yesterday. Speaking of controversial novels, it was on this day in 1953 that Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita was finished (but not yet published). Finally, on this day nineteen years ago, Venezuela elected Hugo Chavez as President.

As it’s exactly 100 years since Finland became independent, here’s a shoutout to the land whose language nobody can understand. May I visit it some day!

 

Notables born on December 6 include Joyce Kilmer (1886), Ira Gerswin (1896), photographer Alfred Eissenstaedt (1898), Gunnar Myrdal (1898), Baby Face Nelson (1908; died in 1936 in a gun battle with the feds near Chicago), and Dave Brubeck (1920). Those who began pushing up daisies on this day include Anthony Trollope (1882), Jefferson Davis (1889), Harold Ross (1951), Honus Wagner (1955), B. R. Ambedkar (1956), and Roy Orbison (1988).

Eisenstaedt took many great pictures, the most famous being a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-J Day, but I like this one of Katherine Hepburn on the set of The Philadelphia Story in 1939:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being sexually harassed by Cyrus (one of the readers of the Polish version in Listy commented “#HiliToo”!

Hili: Are you asleep?
Cyrus: No, why do you ask?
Hili: Because in case you are not asleep you could keep your paws to yourself.
In Polish:
Hili: Śpisz?
Cyrus: Nie, czemu pytasz?
Hili: Bo jak nie śpisz, to trzymaj łapy przy sobie.

Here are some nature tw**ts found by Matthew Cobb.

Look at these huddling birds!

I used to teach this example in my “mimicry” lecture in introductory evolutionary biology. The left end is NOT the head! Why do you suppose it has a false head on its butt?

https://twitter.com/Strange_Animals/status/938045482793881601

One of my favorite big cats, Panthera uncia:

https://twitter.com/welcomet0nature/status/937441323979886592

This is sort of satisfying, but not terribly so:

And amazing frozen waves in Russia (turn on the audio for the weird sound):

https://twitter.com/iamsuev/status/810487482068373505

The British courts are lenient. . .

Johnny Hallyday died

December 5, 2017 • 9:15 pm

If you’re not European you probably haven’t heard of Johnny Hallyday, but think of him as the French Elvis with a decidedly French romantic strain. Having lived in France for a year in total, I know of him, though I wasn’t a huge fan. But many, many people were, and I’m saddened to report that he passed away this evening at the young age of 74. Reports are scanty since it just happened, but you can read the BBC report here.

A sample:

And even if you can’t read French you can probably understand this:

https://twitter.com/celinedion/status/938237303658631168