Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I don’t know how this happened, but for many readers my tweets, most (but not all) of which are simply links to the posts here, are being flagged by Twitter as “sensitive material”. Reader Paul reported that he saw this with 24 of my last 50 tweets; here are a few examples.
There doesn’t seem to be any pattern of what is “sensitive” and what is not, and I have no idea what’s behind this. I’ve called this to Twitter’s attention on both their own Twitter feed and on their Facebook page. We’ll see what happens.
Even my innocuous tweet on the Canadian treat poutine was flagged! Here’s the “sensitive” content trigger warning and then what you see if you click “view”:
Is that “sensitive”? I think not!
SOLUTION: If you’re having this problem, it’s easy to fix by adjusting your Twitter settings. Paul said to do this:
The option to turn off the feature is in the menu obtained by clicking on your user icon in the top right corner of the page: select “Settings and privacy”, then “Privacy and safety”. JAC: Then uncheck the “hide sensitive content” box:
Paul sent me an example of the kind of content allowed on Twitter and then his response to the censoring of my poutine post:
Reader Joe Dickinson sent some photos from California:
Most of the following photos were taken at the base of Morro Rock, a prominent feature at Morro Bay that anchors a very long sandbar, providing excellent wildlife habitat.
This rather chubby California ground squirrel (Citellus beecheyi) was expertly working tourists visiting the rock.
A whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus) was forging in the shallows inside the sandbar.
A pair of marbled godwits (Limosa fedoa) arrived to check out the same area.
Here are those two species next to each other. It would be interesting to know how bill length and shape affect food selection and/or foraging strategies for two species of similar body size utilizing the same habitat. Perhaps one of your readers can tell us.
This great blue heron (Ardea herodias) landed on a ledge up on the rock. He/she looks as if engaged in some sort of display, but I did not see a potential recipient.
This western gull (Larus occidentalis) has the prominent red spot that, famously, prompts chicks to beg by pecking at the parent’s beak.
As is common at this location, we spotted some sea otters (Enhydra lutris), but they kept their distance, so I will “cheat” with a shot at the same location a few years ago.
Our base for this trip was our favorite d*g-friendly motel in Cambria. It provides spectacular views of the sunset. Here, also from a few years ago, is a brown pelican [Pelecanus occidentalis] flying into the sunset. I’m particularly proud of this photo because, if you look carefully just above the top edge of the sun, you can see a somewhat wispy “green flash”.
Finally, arriving home, I spotted this elegant garter snake (probably Thamnophis sintalis) in our front yard. Ignore the weeds: I’ll get to it.
Is it Friday already? Yes it is: Friday, June 8, 2017. The good news is that although the results aren’t all in, Britain’s conservatives, though leading in votes, appear to have lost their >50% representation in Parliament; and that’s a problem for Theresa May. As the New York Times reports this morning:
LONDON — Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain suffered a major setback in a tumultuous election on Thursday, losing her overall majority in Parliament and throwing her government into uncertainty less than two weeks before it is scheduled to begin negotiations over withdrawing from the European Union.
Mrs. May, the Conservative leader, called the snap election three years early, expecting to cruise to a smashing victory that would win her a mandate to see Britain through the long and difficult negotiations with European leaders over the terms of leaving the union.
But according to results reported early Friday morning, the extraordinary gamble Mrs. May made in calling the election backfired. She could no longer command enough seats to avoid a hung Parliament, meaning that no party has enough lawmakers to establish outright control.
With all but one of the 650 seats in the House of Commons accounted for, the BBC reported that Mrs. May’s Conservatives would remain the largest party. But they were projected to win only 318 seats, down from the 331 they won in 2015, and eight seats short of a majority.
Now I know you’re asking yourself, ‘What about the cats?” Grania reports this, and sent a photo:
Pets at the polling booth has been a Thing; mostly dogs of course, but also a horse, a rat and some cats. Kitteh don’t care none. 🙂
And it’s National Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Day. Now I know some readers like that comestible, but I cannot abide rhubarb in any form, especially in a pie. Why not just make a delicious strawberry pie without defiling it with a bitter vegetable? Why add the rhubarb, when strawberry pie by itself is so good? But I fulminate; this holiday is probably a conspiracy by Big Rhubarb. It’s Coral Triangle Day as well, calling attention to the loss of biodiversity in the world’s epicenter for marine biodiversity:
On this day in 1934, Donald Duck first appeared in a Disney Cartoon—The Wise Little Hen. Here it is, with Donald appearing at 1:59. He’s pretty much as he was later, though his beak was longer and hadn’t yet undergone neoteny:
And it was on June 9, 1954, that this famous exchange occurred between Senator Joseph McCarthy and counsel for the Army Joseph Welch. It was the beginning of McCarthy’s downfall and the end of his Communist-hunting in the government. N0te Roy Cohn’s appearance.
On this day in 1973, the magnificent horse Secretariat the won the Belmont Stakes and thus the Triple Crown. Look at this horse run—he won by about 25 lengths!
Notables born on this day include Cole Porter (1891) and Michael J. Fox (1961). One notable who died on this day was geneticist and Nobel Laureate George Beadle (1989) wh0 was once President of the University of Chicago. Meanwhile in D0brzyn, Hili is borrowing from the playbook of the social justice warriors:
Hili: I’m spotting a microaggression.
A: Where?
Hili: On the horizon.
In Polish:
Hili: Dostrzegam mikroagresję.
Ja: Gdzie?
Hili: Na horyzoncie.
In Winnipeg, Gus is lolling in the sun, probably stoned on catnip again:
And a short tw**t video from reader Barry, who doesn’t understand the cat’s behavior at the end of this encounter.
Reader Darrell sent me this sign, and a quick search shows lots of copies of it on the Internet, but I can’t be arsed to find out where it was, or if it’s genuine. A helpful reader might do that. Regardless, it’s funny, and if you don’t know where the lines came from, or what the last word means, you don’t get out enough—or aren’t old enough!
The Gasht-e-Ershad, or Iranian “morality police”, have wide latitude to arrest women for inappropriate dress or behavior (covering themselves insufficiently, showing too much hair, being with a boyfriend on the street, and so on). As The Observers France 24 reported in May, a lot of women get arrested:
Part of the regular police force, its male and female officers are charged with enforcing Islamic codes in Iranian society, and have the power to arrest people they think are violating them. While the total number of its officers is unknown, a spokesman said the force made 207,000 arrests between March 2013 and March 2014, and notified a total of 2 million women that their hijab (Islamic dress) was not correct.
Under Iran’s Islamic law, women are supposed to cover everything except their face and hands. Conservative women wear the chador – a black garment that covers the head and goes down to the ankles. But other women choose to wear a scarf that covers their hair, a knee-length “manteau”, or coat, with sleeves to the wrist, and a skirt or trousers.
In recent weeks, a series of videos has emerged on social media showing what happens when women are arrested by the morality police. Many of the videos – filmed surreptitiously inside the patrols’ white and green vans, and inside police stations where women are questioned – have been posted to a Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom”. [See also here.]
The Observers link gives some disturbing cellphone videos taken surreptitiously by brave and “uppity” women in custody, in vans, and in the police station. One woman who was apprehended said this:
The problem is we’re never sure what’s forbidden and what’s not. Women are arrested because their sleeves are too short, or their manteaux are a bright colour like red or yellow. Or they’re wearing torn jeans, or a hat instead of a scarf or chador. Or they dye their hair a colour like blue or pink. Or they have a tattoo. Or long boots. Or heavy makeup. Or leggings.
The arrest is not going to change the way I dress. But one thing has changed: I don’t feel safe in the streets anymore, because of the patrols. I feel suffocated. How can I be arrested in my own country, humiliated and treated like a criminal when I’ve done nothing wrong? Just because they don’t like the way I look. The next time it happens, I’ll resist – I won’t get in the van even if they beat me up.
Click on the screenshot below to go to a brief history of covering in Iran, which began by order of the government after the revolution in 1979. Not many women covered their hair then, and there were huge demonstrations by women against it. So much for it being a “choice” in Iran—it’s not only the law, but the evidence is that without that law and the attendant social coercion, most women wouldn’t cover themselves. A few brave women defy that law, and are also shown in the video below.
A criminal—and a brave woman.
A BBC report shows more arrests in a distressing video; click on the screenshot to go there:
Make no mistake about it: this is not a natural aspect of Iranian “traditional culture”, as some apologists claim. If that were the case, why did the “culture” change all of a sudden in 1979, just when Iran became a theocracy? Nor can it be explained by Western “colonialism”, as it is clearly involuntary and was imposed on women by men adhering to Islamic doctrine. No, this is the “culture of religion” pure and simple, and not primarily culture, as Anita Sarkeesian maintains in her new Islam-apologist video on the site “Feminist Frequency”. The clip below is starts at 14:50 in that video, and I’ve transcribed the relevant bit (my emphasis):
“Now I can already hear the army of Richard-Dawkins-parroting, anti-feminist Twitter users typing up their responses about how Islam is a religion dedicated to oppressing women. It’s amazing how suddenly everyone’s a feminist when it lets them perpetuate hate against brown people [JAC: n.b.—Not all Muslims are “brown”] or dismiss concerns about how women are oppressed in their own culture. So let’s be clear: misogyny is not a problem with Islam; misogyny is a problem that some cultures which happen to be Muslim use the religion to perpetuate and justify. Christianity has been used a tool that has been used to oppress women around the world for millennia.”
This is how an ideologically blinkered feminist explains things like the Islamic morality police, the stoning and the covering of women, and so on. It’s the culture, Jake! Remarkable, isn’t it, that the culture happens to be coincident in both space and time (see above) with the imposition of Islamic theocracy? And we all know why people like Sarkeesian keep making these unconvincing arguments: they don’t want to be seen as racists who oppress “brown people”.
This is from an email that research administrators at my University sent to our faculty, academic appointees, and staff a short while ago; I offer it to show you what the Trump administration is doing to research in this country (emphasis is mine):
On May 23, the Trump Administration released its detailed budget proposal for FY18. Though Congress has the ultimate authority for federal funding decisions, the administration’s proposal points to potential impending challenges for research funding. The proposal includes cuts to a number of areas relevant to the University’s academic programs and the science programs of our affiliated laboratories, including NIH (21% proposed cut from FY17), NSF (11% proposed cut), NEA and NEH (both proposed for elimination), the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (17% proposed cut), and Medicaid funding under the ACA (over $800 billion proposed cut over 10 years). This detailed budget was a follow-up to the “skinny” budget released in March, which included only a basic overview of proposed spending for major agencies.
These are draconian cuts: 21% in the National Institutes of Health, 11% in the National Science Foundation, and 17% in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Many investigators will be unable to do their research, and graduate student funding has already been cut, with NSF Dissertation Improvement Grants just eliminated entirely.
And let us not forget the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which are being cut completely. That’s also a disaster for artists and my colleagues in the humanities?
Where will the money go? Defense, of course, and that infernal WALL. . .
Former FBI director James Comey is tesifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee at this moment. Click on the screenshot to see what he says (you’ll go to the CNN front page where you can watch this):
