One duck left

July 23, 2017 • 3:15 pm

Several days ago, two of the three drakes in my brood of four left the pond for good, and yesterday the mother and other drake flew the coop. That leaves me with one duck—the lonely (and lately bullied) hen. The good news is that I can feed her without worrying about the others beating her up or chasing her away. But she seems wary and, I suspect, is lonely and bereft. Sometimes she emits a mournful quack that breaks my heart.

I sort of hope she’ll fly away soon and find some friends, but I’ll miss her. After all, she’s made largely of the oatmeal, peas, corn, mealworms, and Cheerios I gave her since she was a yellow fluffball at the end of May. I’m glad, though, that all four ducklings have made it.

Here she is, alone except for the ubiquitous red-eared sliders, who have learned to follow her around to nab the food that sinks too deep for her to dabble:

The evolution of the Strandbeest

July 23, 2017 • 2:15 pm

Six years ago I put up a video of a walking sculpture called a “Strandbeest” (“beach creature”), built by a physicist turned sculptor named Theo Jansen, who’s been building these for 17 years.

I urge you to peruse his website, as they’re getting increasingly more complicated. There’s no motor involved; they’re all propelled by the wind. And he’s designed a method to store the wind with a bicycle pump, creating a “stomach” that can be used to move the Beest when it’s calm. The main struts are plastic tubes.

Reader Bruce sent me this amazing video with a comment, “Very clever engineer and builder makes these beach wind machines that look like marine polychaetes and other inverts. These are much larger than those he did several years ago.”

This video shows a panoply of Strandbeests; they’re all fantastic.

Britain’s National Health Service about to ban homeopathy

July 23, 2017 • 1:15 pm

Reader Barrie called my attention to an article in The Independent  that offers some good news: Britan’s NHS, based on a 48-page document about items that shouldn’t be prescribed in primary care medicine, seems set to stop prescribing Magic Water, otherwise known as homeopathic medicine.

The motivation for the whole document was to eliminate, as a cost-cutting measure, those prescribed items that were of low clinical effectiveness. So there are many drugs listed, but on page 14 you’ll find this:

Actually, given Prince Charles’s fondness for this quackery (he even uses it own his own farm animals), I’m surprised the expenditure by the NHS is less than £100,000 per year, but it sends an important signal to people that the government health agency sees homeopathy as ineffective. Now I’m sure that patients who want Magic Water can still buy it themselves, but at least doctors can’t prescribe it.

Here’s a tw**t from Simon Enright, the Director of Communications for NHS Britain, laying out some of the conclusions and problems with eliminating homeopathy.

I’m not sure where his seven points come from (they’re not in the big document), but one struck me: “As well as primary care prescribing, there are two homeopathic hospitals affiliated to NHS Trusts in Bristol and at University College London Hospitals (UCLH).”

Seriously—government-funded homeopathic hospitals? I have no idea what they are, but perhaps a British reader can describe them. What kind of treatment do they offer? Is there anything besides Magic Water on tap?

What is Zionism?

July 23, 2017 • 11:45 am

After I wrote the previous post, I was curious to see how “Zionism” was defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, which I use as my standard source of definitions. Here’s the total entry from the online version from the University of Chicago Library (I’ve left out the examples of usage, which don’t add anything):

But the term is not being used in this way by people like the Dyke March organizers. Rather, it’s being used to mean “approval of all of modern Israel’s actions and policies”. By changing the term’s meaning, they conflate those who simply favor the continued existence of the state of Israel with those who are seen as approving of or enabling the mistreatment and oppression of Palestinians. I favor a two-state solution to the issue, which, sadly, looks increasingly unlikely; but I’m regularly called a “Zionist”.

But in reality, “Zionist” has a third meaning, one used by Regressives and those who favor the BDS movement, as “those who want the Israeli state to continue existing.”  In that sense, “anti-Zionism” is anti-Semitism, and it’s hard not to see that this is often how it’s meant. It’s a euphemism, just like “states’ rights” was used as a euphemism for “segregation” in the South. In other words,  to many regressives “Zionist” simply means “Jew.”

That, in fact, is the usage among Muslims and hard-core anti-Semites: simply “Jews”– the ones depicted in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (notice the word “Zion”!)

If you’re going to throw around the terms “Zionism” or “Zionist,” why not explicitly say what you mean by them? Many Jews oppose some of Israel’s policies but still favor the nation’s existence. It’s unfair to label these people with a perjorative term used in the non-OED sense.

h/t: Malgorzata

Upcoming Chicago SlutWalk bans “Zionist displays” (but not pro-Palestinian or Iranian ones)

July 23, 2017 • 10:30 am

Not too long ago, some Jewish lesbians who were carrying a “Jewish pride” flag—the gay flag with a Star of David on it—were kicked out of Chicago’s Dyke March. When questioned, the organizers couldn’t get their story straight: one said that the booting was in response to Jews’ chanting “no walls anywhere” in response to the marchers’ chant “No walls from Mexico to Palestine.”  (See my posts here and here). Now the Dyke March, which got really bad publicity (even from the New York Times) over this apparently anti-Semitic act, is claiming that the flag-wavers were promulgating an explicitly “Zionist agenda”, though it’s not clear how they were doing that.

What’s clear is that the Dyke March had an explicitly anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian ideology (they said so), and so they allowed Palestinian flags to be flown at the same time they prohibited Jewish Pride flags. Here’s a photo of the Dyke March:

A Palestinian flag flies at Chicago’s 2017 Dyke March, where Jewish participants were excluded. Photo: Screenshot.

One other development: Gretchen Rachel Hammond, the reporter who broke this story for Chicago’s LGBT paper the Windy City Times, has been removed from her reporting job and assigned to the sales department. This seems like retribution, but the paper won’t comment.

JTA adds this, noting that the Dyke March has used anti-Semitic language:

Hammond, who is Jewish, told JTA that in the wake of her article, she received dozens of threatening anonymous phone calls. She said one caller called her a “kike,” while others told her she should lose her job or said she “betrayed” the LGBT community.

“One of them said, ‘I’m going to get your bitch ass fired,’” Hammond told JTA of calls and text messages she received. “It was vicious. It wasn’t even a request for dialogue. It was, ‘You f**ked with us. We’re going to f**k with you.’ They pretty much blamed me for the whole thing blowing up at them.”

The Dyke March itself has fielded criticism for using an anti-Semitic slur, tweeting on July 13 that “Zio tears replenish my electrolytes.” White supremacists, including former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, have used the term “Zio,” derived from Zionist, as a slur for Jews.

On July 14, the Dyke March deleted the tweet and apologized, saying it “didn’t know the violent history of the term.”

And Hammond sent out this tweet, implying her reassignment (she wants a reporting job) was retributive:

But back to the SlutWalk, scheduled for August 12 in Chicago. The Algemeiner reports (and it’s verified by other sources, as well as by the SlutWalk organizers themselves), that they’ve banned all “Zionist displays” from their own march: 

After the scandal involving the ejection of Jewish women carrying Star of David pride flags at Chicago’s Dyke March on June 28, a sister organization in the city has announced that it will follow suit by banning “Zionist displays” from its upcoming protest against sexual violence and “rape culture.”

The ban was announced this week on social media by the organizers of SlutWalk Chicago — part of an international protest movement that “fights rape culture, victim blaming, and slut shaming.” The Chicago event is set to take place on August 12.

“We still stand behind Dyke March Chicago’s decision to remove the Zionist contingent from their event, & we won’t allow Zionist displays at ours,” the organizers tweeted last Sunday — beginning several days of exchanges with other users over the policy. These were distinguished by the organizers’ continued insistence that anti-Zionism is a legitimate progressive belief, and that any linkage with antisemitism should be dismissed as a discrediting tactic.

In one exchange defending the Dyke March decision to exclude the Jewish women, the SlutWalk organizers aggressively justified the action, declaring: “They were kicked out after a discussion where they made their Zionist beliefs known and refused to back down.”

The Star of David flag was banned, they continued, “because its connections to the oppression enacted by Israel is too strong for it to be neutral & IN CONTEXT it was used as a Zionist symbol.”

Yet they say they’ll allow the Star of David to be displayed. But what “context” would allow that, since the SlutWalk organizers are apparently pro-Palestinan and anti-Zionist? Here are two of their tweets:

https://twitter.com/slutwalkchi/status/888827983921905664

I predict that anyone carrying the Jewish Pride flag will be kicked out, even if they keep their mouths shut. But maybe not, since the Dyke March came off looking pretty dreadful after its anti-Semitic machinations and unconvincing explanations for expelling the gay Jews.

What’s sad about all this is that here again American gays align themselves with repressive Muslim states that would kill or imprison them if they tried to have a SlutWalk or Dyke March there. Can you imagine a Dyke March in Gaza? In contrast, Israel is full of gays, all having full rights, and there are regular gay pride parades. (Regressives, who have to somehow comport this with their defense of homophobic Islam, say that it’s Israeli “pinkwashing” and that gay rights are given and proclaimed only to whitewash Israel’s supposed “apartheid” policies.)

Regardless, the SlutWalk and Dyke March would do well to remember that all ten nations where homosexuality can be punished by death are Muslim-majority countries, and that homosexuality is illegal in most Muslim-majority lands:

It’s ineffably sad that LGBT organizations like the Dyke March and SlutWalk still support Islamic countries—the enforcers of some of the most homophobic laws in the world. But of course Muslims are considered people of color, and that trumps any laws or dictates that allow gays to be hanged or thrown from buildings. How dare they say they abhor discrimination and oppression when they say nothing about (or even extol) Islamic countries that would kill them or throw them in jail?

And I haven’t even mentioned Islamic oppression of women.

https://twitter.com/slutwalkchi/status/887042632391806977

Two comments: “injustice” is one word. More important, no, they don’t abhor discrimination and oppression—not when it’s practiced by Muslims.

Andrew Sullivan on the gender-and-sex morass—and the persistence of Obamacare

July 23, 2017 • 9:00 am

I have to admit that I haven’t read much from Andrew Sullivan since he left The Dish and ultimately wound up writing for New York Magazine. And perhaps that’s my loss, for at least his recent column, “The triumph of Obama’s long game,” shows an intelligence and thoughtfulness that I should have followed. Back in the old days, I was critical of Sullivan’s Catholicism, and of his adherence to the Church despite its retrograde stand on gays (Sullivan is of course gay). We had our contretemps, most notably when he cursed at me for claiming that many people (including those in the Vatican) took the Adam and Eve story literally. That story was, he said, clearly metaphorical, and Catholics had always seen it that way. Wrong, wrong, wrong!  But I haven’t wavered in my respect for the man.

Or is Sullivan a man? In his Friday column, he takes up the convoluted issue of sex, gender, and their connection to biology. I’ve always been willing to accept gender as a “social construct”, since people can, without changing their DNA, assume the identity and phenotype of a man if they were born a woman, or vice versa, or assume one or the other if they were one of those rare individuals born with intermediate sexual characteristics.

But I’ve never agreed that “sex”, as some Leftists maintain, is a social construct as well. Yes, there are individuals born as intersexuals, but that doesn’t mean that biological sex is a continuous “spectrum” having no discernible modes. It is in fact bimodal, with the vast majority of people born as men or women, identifiable by their appearance, chromosomal constitution (XX or XY) and the gametes they produce—with a few people in the middle. If you plot indices of sex versus frequency of individuals, you get a U-shaped curve with two big modes at “woman” and “man”, and a deep valley between those peaks. So it is with humans, and so it is with virtually all animals (yes, I know there are hermaphroditic species). After all, the very concept of “transgender” people assumes that there are identifiable modes between which people can transition.

In his latest column (there are actually three topics discussed), Sullivan agrees. I’ll give some excerpts from his take and then a few from another issue he discusses: the failure of Republicans to dismantle Obamacare. Sullivan’s comments seem eminently sensible, though they’ll anger those misguided people who think that in our species the concepts of “male” and “female” are purely subjective social constructs. This bit follows his discussion (see below) of how the Republican failure to pass a healthcare bill is a triumph of reality—inexorable moral progress—over ideology:

Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology. This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.

. . . we have constant admonitions against those who actually conform, as most human beings always have, to the general gender rule. Boys who behave like boys have always behaved are suddenly displaying “toxic masculinity” and must be reprogrammed from the get-go. Girls who like pink and play with Barbies are somehow not fully female until they’ve seen the recent Wonder Woman movie or absorbed the stunning and brave decision to make Doctor Who a woman. We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, “annoying.”

I say this as someone happily in the minority — and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles. It’s a free country, after all. But you can’t subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesn’t exist. And this strikes me as the core contradiction of ideological transgenderism. By severing the link between sex and gender completely, it abolishes the core natural framework without which the transgender experience makes no sense at all. It’s also a subtle, if unintentional, attack on homosexuality. Most homosexuals are strongly attached to their own gender and attracted to traditional, natural expressions of it. That’s what makes us gay, for heaven’s sake. And that’s one reason the entire notion of a common “LGBT” identity is so misleading. How can a single identity comprise both the abolition of gender and at the same time its celebration?

Exceptions, in other words, need a rule to exist. Abolish gender’s roots in biology and sex — and you abolish gay people and transgender people as well. Yes, there’s a range of gender expression among those of the same sex. But it’s still tethered among most to the forces of chromosomes and hormones that make us irreducibly male and female. Nature can be interpreted; it can even be played with; but it cannot be abolished. After all, how can you be “queer” if there is no such thing as “normal”?

Transgender people exist and should be treated with absolutely the same human respect, decency, and civil equality as anyone else. But they don’t disprove traditional notions of gender as such — which have existed in all times, places, and cultures in human history and prehistory, and are rooted deeply in evolutionary biology and reproductive strategy. Intersex people exist and, in my view, should not be genitally altered or “fixed” without their adult consent. But they do not somehow negate the overwhelming majority who have no such gender or sexual ambiguity. Gay people exist and should not be coerced into behaving in ways they find alien to their being. But the entire society does not need to be overhauled in order to make gay or trans experience central to it. Inclusion, yes. Revolution, no.

Before Sullivan discusses this, which as a biologist I found the most interesting bit, he argues why the failure of Republicans to deep-six Obamacare is a triumph for morality, and, Sullivan thinks, for conservatism, as he considers conservatism to be the victory of reality over ideology. In this case, though he doesn’t say it explicitly, reality is the kind of irreversible moral progress limned by Steve Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: a ratcheted improvement of society from which there’s no return. Calling Trump a “monstrous, ridiculous fool”, Sullivan lambastes the Republicans for Trumpcare and celebrates its demise:

And if universal coverage was unstoppable, the most conservative response to that change was … something very much like Obamacare. It was an incremental reform, it kept the private insurance market, and it attempted to create as big a risk pool as possible. No one argued it was perfect. But it adapted ideas from left and right into a plausible, workable synthesis. And yet the GOP — still fixated on abstract ideology — pretended none of this had happened. Caught in the vortex of their own talk-radio fantasies, they opted to repeal and replace 21st-century reality. And — surprise! — reality won.

Maybe if they’d made a case that this was essential unless we wanted the country to go bankrupt, they might have had a chance. But when they combined it with massive tax cuts for the rich, they were never going to win, except by diktat. So they tried diktat. They lied about their bill; they attempted to ram it through quickly; they suppressed public hearings and any semblance of a deliberative process; they all but ended senatorial debate; they made no compelling public case for the bill (because there was none); they passed it in the House before even scoring it; they tried to force it through by a reconciliation process that was never designed for such a thing.

They tried everything, in other words — led by one of the wiliest Senate Majority Leaders in modern times, and a president with a cultlike hold on his own voters. They controlled the House and Senate and had a chief executive willing to sign literally anything he could call a victory. And they still failed. Rejoice!

Amen, brother.

h/t: Simon