Monday: Hili dialogue

October 9, 2017 • 7:00 am

It’s Monday, October 9, 2017, and I’ve decided to go to Cambridge (Mass.) for a little R&R next week. I see in the news that the sexual predator Harvey Weinstein has been fired from his company (one of those who fired him was his brother), and that Donald Trump has proposed a ridiculous DACA (“Dreamer”) emendation that won’t stand up in Congress because it’s not filibuster-proof.  One piece of good news; one piece of bad. It’s National Dessert Day, which, sadly, falls on one of my fast days, but I have some ice cream in the freezer that I can nom tomorrow. It’s also World Post Day, celebrating the formation of the Universal Postal Union on this day in 1874. Think about it: without that, you couldn’t easily write to someone in another country (each pair of countries had to have their own postal treaty!).

On this day in 1604, “Supernova 1604” appeared—the most recent supernova visible to the naked eye in the Milky Way. Since the star was 20,000 light years away, the explosion actually happened about 18,400 B.C.C. (before Ceiling Cat). On this day in 1874, the Universal Postal Union was formed according to the Treaty of Bern (see above). On October 9, 1967, Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia, shot nine times at close range with a rifle. His last words were reportedly, ” “I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!”  Here’s a famous picture of Guevara taken after his death in the laundry room of a local hospital; it was released to prove to the world he was dead:

Photo by Freddy Alborta

Exactly two years later, the National Guard was called out in Chicago to control demonstrations about the trial of the “Chicago Eight“. On October 9, 1981, France abolished capital punishment. And exactly five years ago, the Pakistani Taliban tried to assassinate the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai. Two years later, at age 17, she was a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize—the youngest Nobelist ever.

Those born on this day include Camille Saint-Saëns (1835), Alfred Dreyfus, French colonel (1859), Max von Laue (1879), Jil Ker Conway (1934), John Lennon (1940), Jackson Browne (1948), and Sean Lennon, John’s son (1975). Notables who died on this day are few: Oskar Schindler (1974), and Clare Boothe Luce (1987).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the animals are hungry, which is not news:

Hili: What would we like to eat now?
Cyrus: Let me think.
In Polish:
Hili: Co byśmy zjedli?
Cyrus: Daj się zastanowić.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving in Canada, and Gus got some special noms. His staff reported and sent a video:

Gus is getting a bite of leftover turkey. I wasn’t sure if he would eat it, but as you can see, it went over pretty well.

And here are tweets pinched from Heather Hastie, who has a bunch of nice gun-control tweets up on her site. In this one, a 13 year old boy tries to buy cigarettes, porno magazines, lottery tickets, and a rifle at a gun show. He succeeds at only one task—guess which!

This is a baby caracal (Caracal caracal); I’m not sure if their voices become different as they age. (See one catch a bird here.)

https://twitter.com/planetepics/status/916775138150047745

This video perfectly captures the joys of kittenhood:

https://twitter.com/planetepics/status/916820437971230721

“The Game of Love”

October 9, 2017 • 6:00 am

All is dolorous this morning: the world is going to hell, I’m cranky, Matthew is cranky, I have no duck, I can’t eat food today, and so on. As the old joke “Jewish telegram” goes: start worrying: details follow. So, to cheer myself up, I’m posting this song, written by Gregg Alexander and Rick Nowels and featuring Michelle Branch on vocals and Santana on guitar. It was a huge hit in September and October of 2002 (15 years ago!), and shows that good music is still being made in this millennium, even if it requires the help of old folks. I heard it on my iPod while walking to work this morning, and it put a spring in my step.

Branch’s voice is off a bit, but that’s compensated by Santana’s licks on the guitar, including a terrific solo. Note how well he accompanies the vocals, too.

I quote Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker* (my emphasis):

If atheists underestimate the fudginess in faith, believers underestimate the soupiness of doubt. My own favorite atheist blogger, Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, regularly offers unanswerable philippics against the idiocies of intelligent design. But a historian looking at his blog years from now would note that he varies the philippics with a tender stream of images of cats—into whose limited cognition, this dog-lover notes, he projects intelligence and personality quite as blithely as his enemies project design into seashells—and samples of old Motown songs. The articulation of humanism demands something humane, and its signal is disproportionate pleasure placed in some frankly irrational love.

What he means, of course, is “atheism is like religion, too.” But what he doesn’t realize is that preferences for things like cats and Motown songs are not—and cannot be—irrational. They are preferences, which are not subject to the strictures of rationality. Now if I thought that Michelle Branch loved me back, that would be irrational.

Isn’t it curious that those who are soft on religion, or believers themselves, denigrate science and atheism by saying “it’s just like religion.” Don’t they realize that by saying that they’re denigrating religion?

______

*See rebuttal by Isaac Chotiner in the New Republic

A net-casting spider

October 8, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Net-casting spiders hang down near the ground, and their web has become, through evolution of the spider’s behavior, a “net” held in the four front legs. These sit-and-wait predators simply bide their time until a prey item walks underneath, and then cast their net like a fisherman.

These are in the family Deinopidae, and, of course, are adapted to seeing well. They have the eight eyes possessed by nearly all spiders (remember, “eight legs; eight eyes”), but two of the eyes have become enormously enlarged (see picture at bottom). Most species live south of the equator, and on all continents save Europe and Antarctica. Also, as Wikipedia notes:

Their excellent night-vision adapted posterior median eyes allow them to cast this net over potential prey items. These eyes are so large in comparison to the other six eyes that the spider seems to have only two eyes. . . Its eyes are able to gather available light more efficiently than the eyes of cats and owls, and are able to do this despite the lack of a tapetum lucidum; instead, each night a large area of light sensitive membrane is manufactured within the eyes, and since arachnid eyes do not have irises, it is rapidly destroyed again at dawn.

This video, by Attenborough of course, shows the amazing talents of this spider. It’s interesting to contemplate how this derived behavior might have evolved, step by step, from the web of an ancestral spider. The earliest spiders probably used silk only to line their burrows or wrap up prey, and later developed adaptations to spin a web that could catch prey. It is from these web-building spiders that net-casters probably evolved. (I know there are spider experts reading here, so correct me if I’m wrong, and by all means refer us to relevant literature or theories.) I can imagine step-by-step adaptive scenarios for that, but I’ll leave it to you.

Here’s another one catching a fly:

Look at these eyes! (The species is Deinopsis subrufa, and the photo is from Spiders of Australia). You can barely make out the six tiny eyes.

Helen Pluckrose on fat-shaming and fat-phobia

October 8, 2017 • 12:45 pm

Helen Pluckrose has featured a fair amount on this site lately (e.g., here, here, here, and here), as she’s found a niche that I like: trying to forge a true progressivism that gives people the rights and respect they deserve rather than catering to the excesses and censoriousness of the Regressive Left. It’s a tough time for liberals, for we’re forced to negotiate an ideology that preserves the traditional Leftist values of free speech, empathy for minorities, and disdain for oppression, while at the same time fighting with other Leftists who want to redefine free speech so it excludes “hate speech,” to limn a hierarchy of intersectional oppression that claims that many of us (especially white males) have nothing to add to Leftist discourse, and to fetishize the oppression of gays and women by ideologies like Islam. (Pluckrose, by the way, is identified as “a researcher in the humanities who focuses on late medieval/early modern religious writing for and about women. She is critical of postmodernism and cultural constructivism which she sees as currently dominating the humanities.”)

Over at Conatus News, Pluckrose takes on the issue of obesity in a piece called “The dangerous problem with the concepts of fatshaming and fatphobia“, and, as usual, arrives at a sensible take.

I’ve long wanted to write about this issue, for we all know that obesity is dangerous to health, and most of us (like me) refrain from criticizing overweight people directly. Yet the Regressive Left have turned obese people into an oppressed minority whose defining characteristic, an unhealthy avoirdupois, is not just to be defended but to be celebrated—or at least palliated by assurances that it’s perfectly healthy. This movement goes under the name of “body positivity”, and is celebrated at places like HuffPo, where their section on this issue (called “body positivity and acceptance”—note the last word) has plenty of righteous articles decrying the criticism of degradation of overweight people, including ones who are morbidly obese. I agree with the mean-spiritedness of fat-shaming, which can be a form of oppression, but you’ll rarely see HuffPo or other “body positivity” pieces mention that being obese is a serious health risk. Avoidance of fat-shaming should never be accompanied by reassurance that obesity isn’t dangerous.

So how do we avoid fat-shaming while trying to help people get healthier? I don’t believe in forcing weight reduction through interventions like soda taxes, but neither should we trumpet that you can be “healthy at any size.” Yes, some really obese people can live fairly healthy lives, but those are not the norms but the outliers.

Pluckrose first defines the issue, as there are some who might say that obesity is simply another form of marginalization, and not inherently dangerous:

In the past decade, however, we have seen a change in intersectional feminist discourses around obesity and the rise of ‘fatness’ as a marginalised identity. The term ‘fatphobia’ has been coined, ‘fat-shaming’ is frequently identified and condemned, and there are even journals and courses for ‘fat studies’ and  ‘fat activists’ who say things like:

If people want to work out and eat only salad, go for it. Do what makes you feel good. The problem comes when people are posting “before and after” images, which inherently champions being smaller as better. If that’s how you feel, fine, but do not call yourself body-positive. In order to be body-positive, you have to acknowledge that people truly deserve respect and autonomy over their bodies without judgement. Fat people aren’t “before” photos. We need to stop centring conversations about body-positivity around health in general.

She then presents the statistics, both in words and figures, that show, as we all know, that obesity is associated with a large number of health risks. Her words have extra credibility because she herself is overweight and trying to slim down, and has personally experienced “body positivity” intrusions:

In the past, I have been accused of speaking out of turn for saying that we should not be accepting of obesity as a norm. I have been told that, as a naturally slim person, I was merely being self-righteous and judgemental and that if I were fat, I would understand that fatness can be natural, beautiful and healthy.  However, when I returned to address the issue as a fat person after doubling my weight during an illness that left me with limited mobility and needing to take centrally-acting medication which made me permanently ravenous, I found that my fatness granted me no right to speak on the issue at all. Instead, I have been informed that I do not merit a fat identity and am, in fact, a fake fat person because I regard my weight gain as part of a medical problem and intend to lose it all again and am, in fact, doing so and celebrating it.

I am told that my own experience of becoming easily tired and breathless, having difficulty getting up off the floor, being unable to ride a bike or run, suffering knee and hip pain if I walk too far, being more prone to chest infections, not to mention developing polycystic ovary syndrome and prediabetes as a result of weight gain, should be kept to myself if I want to be body-positive. Thanks, but I will feel much more positive about my body when it works properly again. My experiences of obesity have been rebuffed angrily with ‘Your experience isn’t everybody’s!’ This is a marked departure from the usual SocJus attitude in which we are to take the worst experiences as representative.  In this case, we are to take the best experiences as representative to support the body-positivity narrative, no matter the cost.

I find the claim that there could be such a thing as a ‘fat identity’ as troubling as the idea of an identity based around treatable mental illness. It seems thoroughly psychologically harmful to take on a problem as an identity even if it is a problem that is very difficult or impossible to fully overcome. To define oneself by depression or OCD or obesity is to resign oneself to it and allow it to detract from every other more positive aspect of an individual. If mental illness or obesity becomes one’s identity, there is no motivation to overcome or improve either. An identity is something we become attached to and feel lost without and when it’s obesity, this can be fatal.

Finally, she offers her suggestions, which, save one, seem eminently rational.  Her statements are indented:

  • In public life: We should be guided by the consensus that obesity is unhealthy and a major cause of early death and serious life-limiting illness, and resist any attempts to normalise or glorify obesity. Whilst concerns about the fashion industry using models who are dangerously underweight are justified for the same reasons that glorifying obesity is, there is no justifications for protesting the employment of models with a healthy BMI. Attempts to equate thinness with white supremacy or argue health to be a social construct are, frankly, ludicrous. Instead, we can promote health and fitness by posting helpful articles from reputable sources on social media without targeting any individuals.

 

  • In dealings with strangers and acquaintances: Mind your own business. There is almost never any reason to refer to a stranger’s or casual acquaintance’s weight. Studies have shown that genuine fat-shaming – unkind comments about an individual’s weight – actually makes people’s health worse.

She goes on to say that you can compliment somebody by saying, “Hey, you’ve lost weight,” or “You look great.” That, too, seems sensible; otherwise, keep your thoughts to yourself.

  • In dealing with friends and loved ones: Raise the issue of their weight if necessary and do so kindly and show it to be motivated by your love for them. You might well receive a defensive reaction and, if you know you will, you could find ways to reduce this; . . . .

I do have an issue with this. Of course it’s good to be concerned with your friends’ well being, but for obesity and alcoholism, I’ve found, confronting the person, however gently, is nonproductive.  For both conditions a person will seek help only when they themselves realize they have a problem, and a one-on-one conversation (or so I’ve found, and I’ve done this only with drinking) won’t accomplish that. Perhaps an “intervention” with several friends might. As for obesity, I’ve been told by overweight people that you needn’t tell them that they’re overweight and it’s unhealthy: they already know this. If a doctor can’t persuade someone of the benefits of losing weight, what chance does a friend have? But perhaps my efforts have simply been ham-handed. At any rate, the difference between obesity and alcoholism is that there’s no “alcoholism positivity” movement, though now I’m wondering why. “Healthy at any stage of inebriation!”

Finally, Pluckrose advises, in “dealing with yourself”, to confront the problem of your obesity and neither ignore it nor seek out confirmation—which can be found on many websites—that you’re beautiful and healthy. You may be attractive, but you’re not healthy.  And most of those who seek such confirmation rather than shedding pounds, well, they’re not on great path to either health or happiness.

As for me, I’m fasting twice a week under a doctor’s supervision, and it’s working. It’s also easier than the low-carb diet, but that’s just me (I’ve never particularly suffered from missing meals, but I do like my wine and bread).

Reactions and experiences welcome in the comments below.

Kristof visits North Korea and is alarmed

October 8, 2017 • 10:30 am

Nicholas Kristof has a column in today’s New York Times, “Inside North Korea, and feeling the drums of war,” based on a trip he just made to the DPRK. (The U.S. gave him and a few journalists special exemption from the new travel ban.) Kristof was especially concerned with the fate of college student Otto Warmbier, who visited the country on a tour, was accused of stealing a poster, and then, after being arrested on January 2, 2016 at Pyongyang airport, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. After 17 months in prison, he was returned to the U.S. on June 2 of this year in a comatose state, and died on June 19. He was 22.

North Korean officials say that Warmbier contracted botulism shortly after his arrest, and then fell into a coma after taking a sleeping pill. Unfortunately, his parents didn’t allow an autopsy, so we don’t know what killed him, but the fact is that even according to the DPRK he’d been comatose for about a year and a half before he was returned to the U.S. Yes, the DPRK is evil, but this plumbs the depths of depravity. If the DPRK didn’t kill him through mistreatment or torture, they certainly kept him away from his family. My own view is that they killed him, but that’s just a hypothesis.

Click on the video below to see the dissimulation of a senior ministry official of the DPRK, Choe Kang-il, who insists that America killed Warmbier as a propaganda move. Kang-il also makes a few disparaging comments about Trump, with which I can’t disagree, but the lies that pervade this regime are frightening. Millions of people live under an oppressive totalitarianism, starved, worked to death, and subject to endless propaganda and threats of death and imprisonment. Without doubt, North Korea is the most evil country on Earth, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I weep for its people who will never know a life of freedom, or experience a belly that is full.

 Kristof detected a distinct change from his previous visits to the DPRK, and not a good one:

I’ve been covering North Korea on and off since the 1980s, and this five-day trip has left me more alarmed than ever about the risks of a catastrophic confrontation.

I was given a visa to North Korea, as were three other New York Times journalists. The U.S. State Department promptly gave us an exemption from the travel ban to North Korea and issued special passports good for a single trip here.

Far more than when I previously visited, North Korea is galvanizing its people to expect a nuclear war with the United States. High school students march in the streets in military uniform every day to denounce America. Posters and billboards along the public roads show missiles destroying the U.S. Capitol and shredding the American flag. In fact, images of missiles are everywhere — in a kindergarten playground, at a dolphin show, on state television. This military mobilization is accompanied by the ubiquitous assumption that North Korea could not only survive a nuclear conflict, but also win it.

. . . On past trips (my last was in 2005), we journalists stayed at hotels in the capital and were free to walk around on our own, but this time the Foreign Ministry housed us at its own guarded Kobangsan Guest House east of the capital. At first I thought this was simply to restrict us, but increasingly I saw signs of something more interesting and menacing: The Foreign Ministry was also protecting us from hard-liners in the military or in the security services.

“Someone might hear you are from America,” and there could be trouble, one official explained.

When Trump said this week, at a dinner with military officials and their families, that “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm”, the first thing I thought of was North Korea (the second was Iran). But the DPRK is already a storm, and it seems more likely that Trump was just blowing words out of his nether parts. Still, Kristof is worried, and so am I:

“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is on the eve of the breakout of nuclear war,” Choe, the Foreign Ministry official, told me. “We can survive” such a war, he added, and he and other officials said that it was not the right time for talks with the U.S.

The North Koreans insist that the U.S. make the first move and drop its sanctions and “hostile attitude” — which won’t happen. And the U.S. is equally unrealistic in insisting that North Korea give up its entire nuclear program.

. . . What makes this moment so perilous is that North Koreans are steeped in the idea that they have repeatedly defeated the U.S. — and can do so again. Every single person we spoke to, from officials to students, voiced certainty that if war breaks out, America will end up in ashes and the Kim regime will emerge victorious.

I’m not worried about Kim Jong-un starting a war, though there’s the possibility that a misfired missile could trigger U.S. and South Korean military action. Kim Jon-un is not suicidal. I’m more worried that Trump will order a preemptive strike, which would be disastrous, resulting in the destruction of North Korea and its people, as well as much of South Korea. I’m confident that Trump’s military advisors would counsel against this, but of course Trump is Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military and has the legal authority to order such a strike. All I can hope for is that the man has at least a soupçon of sense. I’m counting on that, as I don’t want to see a nuclear war in my lifetime, nor millions of innocent people killed. As Kristof says, “One recent study suggested that if North Korea detonated nuclear weapons over Tokyo and Seoul, deaths in those two cities alone could exceed two million.”

The best we can hope for is to tolerate a nuclear North Korea. It’s not pleasant but it beats the alternative. At any rate, this is nothing I haven’t said before. Read Kristof’s piece to see how deeply weird both the situation and the DPRK itself is, and to see his suggestion (talks) to defuse the crisis.

California downgrades the act of knowingly exposing someone to HIV from a felony to a misdemeanor

October 8, 2017 • 9:00 am

Suppose you’re infected with a sexually transmitted disease that, unless treated, is deadly. When treated, you have a good chance of living a normal life, so you’re getting treated. But you want to have sex with other people, and if they know you’re infected, they might not want to engage. So you don’t tell them your condition.

That’s clearly immoral, and even a crime, but what kind of crime? When the infection was with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), it used to be a felony, at least in California. When the virus overwhelms the immune system, you get AIDS, and while that’s no longer a death sentence, it can kill you.

Up until now, knowingly exposing someone to HIV without telling them was a felony, at least in California. That seems to me appropriate, and a good incentive to tell your potential sex partners. You are, after all, infecting them with a deadly virus that, if untreated, stands a good chance of killing them. (Of course having unprotected sex these days with someone who hasn’t been declared STD-free is a real crapshoot, but if you know you’re infected, it’s your obligation to tell your partners.)

Now, however, withholding your HIV status from exposed partners is no longer a felony in California: thanks to governor Jerry Brown, it’s become a misdemeanor. According to the Los Angeles Times, this also goes for giving blood, though I think all donated blood is screened for HIV these days. From the article:

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill Friday that lowers from a felony to a misdemeanor the crime of knowingly exposing a sexual partner to HIV without disclosing the infection.

The measure also applies to those who give blood without telling the blood bank that they are HIV-positive.

Modern medicine allows those with HIV to live longer lives and nearly eliminates the possibility of transmission, according to state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Assemblyman Todd Gloria (D-San Diego), authors of the bill.

“Today California took a major step toward treating HIV as a public health issue, instead of treating people living with HIV as criminals,” Wiener said in a statement. “HIV should be treated like all other serious infectious diseases, and that’s what SB 239 does.”

But HIV isn’t like flu or even syphilis or gonorrhea. The latter STDs have early symptoms that will drive you to the doctor at a point when the disease can be cured. HIV can linger undetected in the body for years before it erupts into full-blown AIDS. And if you get those STDs, you can be cured with a round of antibiotics; with HIV you have to go on an expensive regimen of drugs that lasts the rest of your life.

Now there’s one other justification that the lawmakers gave:

The current law, Wiener argued, may convince people not to be tested for HIV, because without a test they cannot be charged with a felony if they expose a partner to the infection.

“We are going to end new HIV infections, and we will do so not by threatening people with state prison time, but rather by getting people to test and providing them access to care,” Wiener said.

In other words, if you suspect you have HIV, they claim, you’re more likely to get tested if you realize that infecting someone whom you don’t tell is just a misdemeanor. To me that makes little sense. If you suspect you have HIV, you get yourself tested and go on the pills—unless you want to die. I doubt that the ability to have unprotected sex with anyone will outweigh your fear of death.

Further, not everybody who is infected gets tested or diagnosed, and even fewer of those go on the necessary medication regimen, which is expensive and sometimes hard to stick to.

But are people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS really living normal lives? The U.S. government’s stats suggest otherwise:

In 2015, 18,303 people were diagnosed with AIDS. Since the epidemic began in the early 1980s, 1,216,917 people have been diagnosed with AIDS.

In 2014, there were 12,333 deaths (due to any cause) of people with diagnosed HIV infection ever classified as AIDS, and 6,721 deaths were attributed directly to HIV.

And this:

Brown declined to comment on his action.

As best I can determine, about 30 people die annually from congenital syphilis: about 0.4% the frequency of deaths from HIV.  That means that infection with HIV is far more likely to kill you, and remember that some of those who died of HIV were probably being treated.

I think most of you will agree that the degree of punishment for knowingly exposing someone to a disease should be proportional to the severity of that disease. Given the statistics, and the unconvincing claim that downgrading exposure to HIV from a felony to a misdemeanor will promote more HIV testing, I’d say that California has made a mistake. (This, of course, could change as the statistics change.)

Do you agree?

h/t: Cindy

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 8, 2017 • 7:45 am

Comments on the photo posts have been few, and I’m not sure whether that means people aren’t looking at them. But I’d urge you to say something if you like a photo, for the contributors surely like their work to be appreciated, and that’s the only way they’ll know. If you see something, say something. And remember to send in your good photos!

Today we have a potpourri of photos and a video.  The photographers’ notes are indented.

The first few are from reader Damon:

Attached are some photos of Diamondback Water Snakes (Nerodia rhombifera) from South Texas that I took earlier in spring.

From reader Tim Anderson in Australia:

This is an Apostle bird (Struthidea cinerea). Its name derives from the fact that it generally goes about in groups of about a dozen. They are constantly fussing and nattering away, even when they are on their own. They have a black band across their face, which makes them look like bandits. Just about my favourite bird.

Reader Michael Glenister sent in two damselfly photos, and I regret that I lost the email that may have identified them. Perhaps readers can help:

A squirrel from Randy Schenck in Iowa:

Time for a Fox squirrel (Sciurus niger) close up.  The nails might need a trim but you can count the whiskers if you want.

And a movie from reader Ben Dreidel showing that cats aren’t the only beasts who can train their staff:

This is a video from our recent family vacation. The bald eagle has trained the tour boat to give him a fish when they come by so he can fly down and grab it for the tourists’ cameras.