Readers’ wildlife photographs

November 22, 2014 • 5:07 am

First I have two photos from the reader known as “the shorteared owl,” but sadly I’ve lost the IDs and notes. But readers (or the photographer) can help identify these lepidopterans:

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Two birds from Stephen Barnard in Idaho:

Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) with landing gear retracted. I was photographing some mallards when he flew over the flock looking for cripples. (It’s hunting season.) I’m thinking that the photo I sent you of a Northern Harrier attacking a merganser was a case of mistaken identity on the part of the hawk. Megansers ride low in the water, and I think the harrier mistook it for a mallard cripple. It was in the middle of a bunch of mallards. Mallards are very strong fliers. I’ve never seen  a hawk attack a healthy one.

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Also, a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) living up to its nickname of shitepoke.

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And two flies (yay!) from reader Dom:

The dipterans are Empididae – ‘dance’ flies, whose males give insect gifts to get females to mate with them – no dead insect, no union!  I would guess that these are females from the pointed abdomen but I really am not sure.  The species is probably Empis opaca, but it is I think only the red femur is all that distinguishes it from Empis tessellata.  Dipteran experts can correct me!

Empid 1

Extra points for knowing what species the flowers are – I thought field scabious – Knautia arvensis – but I am not terribly good with flowers…

Empid 2

 

 

Extra points for knowing what species the flowers are – I thought field scabious – Knautia arvensis – but I am not terribly good with flowers…

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

November 22, 2014 • 3:28 am

I think Hili is messing with Andrzej, but you have to admit she’s cute:

Hili: Ceiling Cat appeared on the window pane!
A: I don’t see anything from this side.
Hili: Your faith is not strong enough.

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In Polish:
Hili: Ceiling Cat pokazał się na szybie!
Ja: Z tej strony nic nie widzę.
Hili: Twoja wiara nie jest dość mocna.

Giant panda plays in the snow

November 21, 2014 • 2:38 pm

I guess I always end the work week with a cute animal video. That’s for me, as I need it.  Here’s a good one from the Toronto Zoo via VetSTREET, showing what they describe as “bear bogganing”. The scientific name of the giant panda is Ailuropoda melanoleuca, which I translate as “black and white cat-footed animal.” There’s not much felinity in this lumbering beast, though.

As heavy, wet snow began to come down Monday morning, security cameras caught the 6-year-old giant panda romping, playing and sliding down hills in the white stuff. He made a snack out of it, too. The bear, who arrived at the zoo with his partner, Er Shun, in March 2013, showed his love for snow last winter, too. The zoo has dubbed his antics “bear-bogganing.”

Perhaps this isn’t play, but just a bear that can’t keep its footing. Whaddya think?

h/t: Diane G

A distinction without a difference: Montgomery County schools keep Jewish and Christian holidays, but remove their names

November 21, 2014 • 1:16 pm

Religiously-based holidays like Christmas and Easter are too deeply ingrained in the American school system to remove the breaks they offer for students; it would be daft to try to eliminate them, even though, I suppose, you could make a legal case that it’s favoring religion.  Those holidays also offend some of those of other faiths, like Jews and Muslims. (Some schools now let students off on Jewish holidays like Yom Kippur.)

Muslims, though, don’t get a break. They asked the Montgomery County, Maryland school board to give time off (and highlight) their own religious holiday of Eid al-Adha, the “Feast of Sacrifice” that, bizarrely, honors Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac on orders of Yahweh (or Allah). In other words, this is a holiday celebrating the brutality and solipsism of the Old Testament God, and humans’ submission to insane divine orders.

But that wasn’t a concern for Montgomery County, for the school board had to deal with the problem of religious equality and Muslim anger.

The solution: they just kept the holidays but struck the religious names off the calendar. According to the Washington Post:

Montgomery’s Board of Education voted 7 to 1 Tuesday to eliminate references to all religious holidays on the published calendar for 2015-2016, a decision that followed a request from Muslim community leaders to give equal billing to the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha.

In practical terms, Montgomery schools will still be closed for the Christian and Jewish holidays, as in previous years, and students will still get the same days off, as planned.

Board members said Tuesday that the new calendar will reflect days the state requires the system to be closed and that it will close on other days that have shown a high level of student and staff absenteeism. Though those days happen to coincide with major Christian and Jewish holidays, board members made clear that the days off are not meant to observe those religious holidays, which they say is not legally permitted.

Here are the new names:

School officials said the time off in December would become “winter break,” while the time off around the Easter holiday would be called “spring break.” Other days, such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, would be simply listed as a day when there is “no school for students and teachers.”

That, of course, is meaningless. For the holidays will always fall within the break. Yom Kippur and Easter move from year to year, and the “breaks” will always move with the movable holidays.

Of course the Muslims are peeved: they still get no days off for their holidays, only “excused absences.” As one Muslim leader observed, correctly,

“They would remove the Christian holidays and they would remove the Jewish holidays from the calendar before they would consider adding the Muslim holiday to the calendar,” she said.

And Christians are angry, too: how dare the county “cancel Christmas”? Of course, the kids will still be home for Christmas, but the holiday won’t be officially named “Christmas.” There are over 2600 comments on the Post piece. The Post took a poll asking readers “Do you support the decision to remove religious holiday names from the calendar.” The results as of today (I had to vote “yes” to see the results):

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God bless America!

I don’t have a solution, nor do I want to offer one, but the problem will become more pressing as our nation becomes more multicultural. Right now I just want to snicker at Montgomery County’s perspicacious solution to the problem.

h/t: Stephen Muth

John Loftus’s recent book on the Outsider Test for Faith

November 21, 2014 • 11:11 am

I’ve finally finished reading theology, though I suspect I’ll dip into it now and again when my stomach feels strong enough. Now I can cleanse my brain by reading some heathen literature, and have just finished John Loftus’s book, The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion is Really True (Prometheus, published March, 2013).  I recommend it to readers, particularly those who haven’t followed John’s scattered writings about this idea:

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I’ve written about the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) before, and you can read an early version of John’s idea here. It’s a simple idea, but one that nobody had formally proposed as a way to gauge whether one’s religious beliefs are “correct.” In this book, John present the theory in extenso and discusses (and rebuts) some of the criticisms offered by religionists like Alvin Plantinga.

As Thomas Henry Huxley remarked when hearing about Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the idea of natural selection, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.” That’s the way I felt when I heard about the OTF. Loftus first notes that the vast majority of believers get their religion from their geographic location, for that’s where one’s parents, peers, and clerics are. If you’re born in Saudi Arabia, chances are high you’ll be a Sunni Muslim; if you’re born in Brazil, in all likelihood you’ll be a Catholic (see the map below).

That means that virtually no people choose their religion after weighing all possible religions or even more than one religion (in fact, in some Muslim countries you can be killed for choosing anything but Islam). Rather, people assume a faith by simply inheriting their beliefs, largely through indoctrination.  Is that any way to choose something that people consider of the greatest import? After all, if you choose wrongly, many religions say you’ll be consigned to the pit of Hell. Other religions maintain that only their adherents (and not all of them) will go to Paradise, while others simply vanish into nothingness after death. Very few religions claim that they’re no truer than any other religion.

So isn’t it the rational thing to do to scrutinize existing faiths before you choose one? That’s the basis for John’s OTF, which is summarized below, from pp. 16-17 of his book:

It is highly likely that any given religious faith is false and quite possibly that they could all be false. At best there can only be one religious faith that is true. At worst they could all be false.

. . . So I propose that: . . . The only way to rationally test one’s culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of reasonable skepticism believers already use to examine the other religious faiths they reject. This expresses the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF).

Of course, if you do that properly, you’re going to wind up an atheist, for every believer dismisses all other faiths as lacking evidence. If you take that attitude towards your own faith, you should abandon that, too. And that is the point. The beliefs most important to people are, as we know, not only irrational in content, but irrational in how they were chosen.

A lot of the book is occupied by John’s discussion of challenges from believers, including those who think the OTF shows that their religion really is best (Plantinga is one of these) and those who claim that there should be an “outsider test for atheism” (that’s ridiculous given that atheism is based on the view that one requires evidence for belief).

The book ends with two cute maps, showing the difference between disparate and divisive religious beliefs and the unifying nature of scientific inquiry. The colored maps below come from John’s website, Debunking Christianity:

Modern Distribution of World Religions

World Distribution of Modern Science

 

 

 

The Republican punishment of Obama begins

November 21, 2014 • 9:16 am

Actually, this has surely been in the works for a while, but was just announced this last hour on CNN. House Speaker John Boehner says that House Republicans have filed a lawsuit against Obamacare, in particular faulting Obama’s “unilateral actions” in pushing it.  I know nothing about the allegations that would lead to a real lawsuit, but presumably they’re claiming that the President somehow violated the law.

The rest of the short report:

“Time after time, the president has chosen to ignore the will of the American people and re-write federal law on his own without a vote of Congress. That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. If this president can get away with making his own laws, future presidents will have the ability to as well. The House has an obligation to stand up for the Constitution, and that is exactly why we are pursuing this course of action,” Boehner said in a statement.

The news came just minutes after Boehner spoke at press conference in Washington on Obama’s executive orders on immigration.

Boehner said he “will not stand idle as the President undermines the rule of law, ” but gave no specifics on how congressional Republicans would respond to the president’s executive action on immigration.

Let me rewrite Boehner’s last words. “Boehner said he ‘will not stand idle as the President allows brown people into this country and tries to get medical care for everyone, including the poor.'”

Lord, what a blight on this land Republicans are.

Immigration reform at last!

November 21, 2014 • 6:43 am

I know some readers think Obama is equivalent to Stalin in his policies and actions, but I think that’s completely nuts. In general, he’s been a good President, has gotten the economy moving, gotten health care enacted, and is pulling the U.S. out of our futile entanglements in the Middle East. And really, would you have preferred Romney?

But if he has one overweening failure, it’s his confidence that he could work with the Republicans in Congress to enact bipartisan reform, particularly of immigration.  That was dumb: the Republican agenda consists of four words: Defeat Anything Obama Wants.  It took a while for Obama to realize this, and then he stalled his own action on immigration reform until after the mid-term elections, hoping that this cowardly delay would help the Democrats.

Well, we know how that worked out. So, yesterday, Obama announced a fairly comprehensive plan of immigration reform, to be implemented by executive order. I didn’t watch his speech since the details had already been released, but here are a few provisions as reported in today’s New York Times and CNN:

  • Five million illegal immigrant will be protected from deportation.
  • Four million of those can apply for legal status and receive Social Security cards, so long as they are parents of legal U.S. citizen (children born here or their children who received legal status already), have been in the U.S. five years or longer. and pass background checks. They will be required to pay U.S. taxes but will not (I think) be eligible for “Obamacare”.
  • Children who were brought here illegally (the “dreamers”) will be allowed to stay.
  • A federal program that allowed document checks of people stopped for small offenses like traffic violations will be ended.
  • On the enforcement side, gang members and criminals will be increasingly targeted for prosecution or deportation, and there will be new provisions and funding to stem the flow of illegal immigrants (good luck with that!)

This was the right thing to do.  These immigrants, though often characterized as parasites on the U.S. economy, do many of the necessary but onerous jobs that Americans don’t want. Many busboys and dishwashers in Chicago, for example, are undocumented Hispanics. This gives them a chance to work their way out of poverty and to fulfill something I still believe in: the “American dream.”  There’s no way we can simply prosecute and deport every one of the millions of people who are here illegally.

So chalk one up for the President, even if this action was deferred too long.  He learned his lesson about Republicans the hard way: they have no interest in ruling by consensus with the executive branch.

Two problems remain. First, there’s the goddam Republicans, who, incensed that Obama is letting brown people stay in the country, are threatening reprisal—either further pushback of Democratic legislation or even a shutdown of the government.  That is the action of a petulant child. The only immigration “reform” most Republicans want is to keep all non-white people out of the country.

Second, it will be nearly impossible to stem the tide of immigrants, or so I think. Walls don’t stop them, police don’t stop them; nothing, it seems, will stop them. Life is simply better here—even as a low-wage undocumented worker with a crummy job—than in places like Honduras or much of Mexico. So the flow of immigrants is a problem deferred, not a problem solved.

One thing I noticed in all this debate: “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” has been replaced with the term “undocumented immigrant.” I wasn’t aware of this transformation, but I found one report saying that “illegal” is offensive to such people.  I find that bizarre, for they truly did come into this country illegally, and, after all, “undocumented” means “a worker without legal documents.” This is the kind of euphemism, propagated by immigration reformers, that is supposed to defuse the illegality of what happened.  (Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” gives many examples.) But let us make no mistake; these people came here illegally. Nevertheless, the fact that they broke the law (many out of sheer desperation) is irrelevant to the justice that Obama meted out yesterday.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

November 21, 2014 • 5:26 am

Reader Ed Kroc sends some photographs from rainy British Columbia:

I wanted to send some pictures from a very rainy Thanksgiving trip last month to BC’s lower Sunshine Coast.  I am quite a mycological illiterate, so unfortunately the fungus comes unidentified.  Nevertheless, they are quite impressive specimens!  The first fungus grows like a shelf perpendicular to the trunk of a tree, with a weird concentric colouration.  The second fungus looks just like a stack of pancakes sitting on the forest floor (my hand is in the shot to give a sense of scale).

Readers can help identify these:

Shelf fungus

Stack of pancakes fungus
One thing you need to be on constant watch for hiking anywhere in the forests of BC is the ubiquitous and painfully slow Pacific Banana Slug (Ariolimax columbianus). [JAC: Wikipedia says this is the second largest terrestrial slug on Earth.) These guys come in various shades of yellow, tan, green, and black, and it’s hard to go more than fifteen or twenty minutes along a trail without nearly crushing one.  The one pictured here was relatively easy to spot as he/she was feasting on some broken piece of other unknown fungus.  With all the mushrooms bursting from the forest floor, the autumn months must be good times to be a slug.

Banana Slug with feast

Banana Slug with feast close-up

And a bird or two.  This Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis) is a young juvenile, digging through the mosses and the pebbles on the beach at Davis Bay.

Savannah Sparrow juvenile

The Horned Grebe (Podiceps auritus) was found fishing alone at dusk at Francis Point Provincial Park.  This one is in his/her winter plumage, which lacks the eponymous “horns” of summer that usually flare up from the sides of the head.  Still, the red eye commands a good amount of attention.

Horned Grebe at dusk