Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 5, 2023 • 6:45 am

We’re visiting the Old City today, including the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, the Via Dolorosa, and other sites of touristic and mythical interest, so I have no time to prepare a Hili dialogue for today, and perhaps not even a picture-and-text account of our trip.  So just enjoy the Hili dialogue, and I’ll catch up when I can.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili puts in a bid for some raw meat:

Hili: Do you want to spoil all this meat in the oven?
A: No, I cut out a piece for you.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy to całe mięso chcesz zniszczyć w piekarniku?
A: Nie, odkroiłem kawałek dla ciebie.
One photo from today: a soldier praying at the Western Wall:

Israel: Days 2 and 3

September 4, 2023 • 10:00 am

Note: click the photos to enlarge them.

I spent most of yesterday with a man who works with a private agency that translates documents from the Arab world (also Russia, China, and other countries) into English and Hebrew, so that we (and other government agencies) know what is being said in mosques and in Arab state media.

If you know where to look, all the stuff to be translated is online, including sermons in mosques.  Lots of horrific things have been revealed, but I’m not sure how much of what I heard is for public consumption. Suffice it to say that the day was very interesting, and I learned a lot about how Israeli security works.

On the way to meet my friend, I passed the “Kippa Man” stall, a place that sells only kippas, the Hebrew word for the Yiddish “yarmulke”. These are the skullcaps or beanies worn by observant Jews. There are many stores selling them in the center city, some (like this one) selling only kippas, while others sell them along with other souvenirs, like the tee-shirt below.

You can find a kippa to fit your style and taste. The prices below are 20-25 shekels, about 5-6 American dollars.

But you can also buy other souvenirs. Here’s one that caught my eye, but I didn’t buy it. (Wearing it on an American campus would get you demonized!)

You can get burgers at his McDonald’s but no milkshakes (or even milk). It’s kosher, Jake!

At my friend’s office, he showed me a rare document: Mahmoud Abbas‘s Ph.D. thesis, for which he paid a thousand bucks. Abbas, of course, is the president of the Palestinian Authority, apparently for life. (He was elected in 2005 for a four-year term, but extended it indefinitely, and is sill in office.} He’s also chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Abbas is 87, and apparently will leave office only in a box.

Abbas doesn’t read or write Russian, so it’s weird that he has a thesis written in Russian and conferred by a Russian university (it’s about the dangers of Zionism with an addendum that denies the Holocaust).

Tablet has an article about it, saying that although a 19-page abstract is available publicly, this document isn’t:

Abbas’ dissertation has been a subject of considerable interest over the years. The thesis isn’t publicly available: By all accounts, it is kept in an IOS special storage facility requiring special authorization to access.

Well, no, because I saw it. But I can’t read Russian so I can’t shed  any light on it.  It appears to be Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda, and I don’t know who translated it into Russian, or even if Abbas even wrote it (his signature is at the bottom).

Lunch at a nearby restaurant: hummus and falafel at last! It was very good hummus, thick and creamy, mixed with hot, crispy falafel balls and served with good fresh pita bread, but my host old me that there is far better hummus to be had in Jerusalem. Ergo my search continues. He also demanded more olive oil from the waiter for me to pour atop the dish. I was still full from he huge breakfast at the hotel, so this is all I ate.

The next three photos are by Jay Tanzman, whose captions are indented.

Public toilets (read the red sign):

“Information for Shabbath [Sabbath] keepers. The toilets are activated by pressing an electric button.”

JAC: Since pressing a button seems to involve forbidden “work” on the Sabbath (which is why my hotel has a “Sabbath elevator” in which you don’t have to press buttons, as it stops on every floor), why is it not considered “work” to flush by pressing a button in a public toilet? This must have been the result of a fierce rabbinical discussion. Later, I was told that perhaps the Orthodox are being warned that they would have to press a button if they flushed, and that might deter them from doing their business.

But why not use the system they have in U.S. airports: when you stand up, the toilet automatically detects that and flushes. Standing up after using the john cannot possibly constitute work! As for urinals, they can flush sporadically without pressing buttons or pulling levers.

Jay says of the photo below: “Speaks for itself.”

[JAC: The Gazans were firing missiles at Tel Aviv just in the last two weeks. Fortunately, the Iron Dome knocks out nearly all of them. I have been told what to do if I hear the “incoming missile” siren: run, following everyone on the street.]

A group of young soldiers on their way somewhere. I surreptitiously took their picture from behind. I cold have gotten a picture from the front earlier, but I didn’t know how well that would go over.
Note that there are both men and women in the group. In Israel, everyone except the Orthodox Jews must serve two to three years in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces). Even Gal “Wonder Woman” Gadot did her stint. The exemption of the Orthodox from military service constitutes, in my view, an unwarranted coddling of religion, one of the things that makes Israel a partial theocracy.

This is a photo Gadot put on her Instagram showing her reporting for duty at the IDF for the first time. She served two years, from age 18-20, as a combat fitness instructor. This is after she was crowned Miss Israel in 2004.

Gadot in uniform. I love Jewish girls! (And don’t dare criticize her for doing her mandatory military service for Israel. She’s already taken a lot of heat for that from those who hate Israel, simply because she was born here.)

This afternoon we went scouting for good hummus again. On the way we saw what looked for all the world like an Orthodox Jew playing electric guiar for money in the streets. That can’t be rue (for one thing, the hat is wrong, and it’s culturally inappropriate. You be the judge:

And for lunch we went to a well known hummus joint in the center city, Hummus Ben Sira. The hummus plate came with lots of fresh pita bread, a big plate of hummus topped with whole chickpeas and olive oil, salad, and tomatoes, pickles. and sliced onions. It was a lot of food!

The hummus was creamy and delicious, beating yesterday’s selection (see above) by a long shot.

Jay had shakshouka, described by Wikipedia as

a Maghrebi dish of eggs poached in a sauce of tomatoes, olive oil, peppers, onion, and garlic, commonly spiced with cumin, paprika and cayenne pepper. According to Joan Nathan, shakshouka originated in Ottoman North Africa in the mid-16th century after tomatoes were introduced to the region by Hernán Cortés as part of the Columbian exchange.

This spicy dish is common for breakfast in Israel; in fact, it was on this morning’s breakfast buffet:

A hungry customer waiting for his hummus:

Jay (Tanzman) and Anna (Krylov) in front of the hummus joint. If you’re in the Center City, I recommend this place, but the most famous ones in Jerusalem are in the Old City, where we’re planning to go tomorrow.

A panoramic view of the walls around the old city:

. . . and more shelters. The area near where I took the photo above is a gorgeous residential area, but houses are hideously expensive in Jerusalem:

One of the quiet and lovely streets nearby:

A house sign, which I’m told shows the family name:

And of course no matter where you are, there are always bomb shelters nearby:

Jay found a friendly and meowing tabby street cat to pet. Jay and Anna own two kitties, including a gorgeous gray British Shorthair named Mishka (see here; their other kitty is Geddi).

This has got to be the world’s fanciest YMCA: the Jerusalem International YMCA, whose construction began in 1926 and took 7 years.

Across the street is the King David Hotel, the most prestigious place to park your carcass in the city.The hotel, which partly housed British military before Israeli independence, was site of an infamous Jewish bombing in 1946, when the Brits were fighting the Jews.  From Wikipedia:

The British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, were bombed in a terrorist attack on 22 July 1946 by the militant right-wing Zionist underground organization the Irgun during the Jewish insurgency. 91 people of various nationalities were killed, including Arabs, Britons and Jews, and 46 were injured.

The hotel was the site of the central offices of the British Mandatory authorities of Palestine, principally the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine and the Headquarters of the British Armed Forces in Palestine and Transjordan. When planned, the attack had the approval of the Haganah, the principal Jewish paramilitary group in Palestine, though, unbeknownst to the Irgun, this had been cancelled by the time the operation was carried out. The main motive of the bombing was to destroy documents incriminating the Jewish Agency in attacks against the British, which were obtained during Operation Agatha, a series of raids by mandate authorities. It was the deadliest attack directed at the British during the Mandate era (1920–1948)

The King David Hotel:

From Wikipedia, the hotel after the bombing:

A colorful kitty statue nearby:

. . . and a fancy and very expensive pottery shop, which had lovely handmade stuff:

We saw a lot of security today, with heavily armed cops stopping people on the street (we didn’t know why) and asking for their ID. Across the street from our hotel as we returned, two guys were getting badly hassled by the cops.Again, I have no idea why:

Thus endeth Day Three of the Trip to Israel.

Monday: Hili dialogue

September 4, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning on Monday, September 4, 2023, and National Macademia Nut Day, celebrating what I think is the world’s best nut (cashews and pistachios tie for second place). Two fun macadamia facts: although now grown widely, it was indigenous to Australia. Second, it has a very hard shell: the hardest of all nuts. Wikipedia says this:

The shell material is five times harder than hazelnut shells and has mechanical properties similar to aluminum. It has a Vickers hardness of 35. [That’s not too far from iron.]

It’s also Labor Day, a federal holiday in the U.S., Eat an Extra Dessert Day (yes!), National Wildlife Day, Newspaper Carrier Day, and, in South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Toothfish Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the September 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The annual Burning Man festival in Nevada should be called “Drowning Man” this year. The weather is abysmal, and somebody died.

More than 70,000 Burning Man attendees are unable to drive to or leave the event in Black Rock City, Nev., after hours of wind and rain turned the festival’s desert campgrounds into sticky mud.

“Due to heavy rain, the gate and airport in and out of Black Rock City at the Burning Man event will remain closed,” the Burning Man Project said in a statement Saturday morning. “No driving is permitted until the playa surface dries up, with the exception of emergency vehicles. Participants are encouraged to conserve food, water, and fuel, and shelter in a warm, safe space. We will keep the community informed on a regular basis.” The gate was still shut early Sunday morning, organizers said.

Local authorities are also looking into a death at the event. In an emailed statement late Saturday, Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen said the sheriff’s office was “investigating a death which occurred during this rain event,” adding that the family had been notified.

. . . Each year since 1986, tens of thousands of Burning Man participants, called Burners, gather in Black Rock City, a temporary desert city that is built and torn down on a dry lake bed that was once Lake Lahontan in northern Nevada. Burners are expected to be self-sustaining, which means they must supply their own food, water and shelter for the event.

And an escapee tweeted below. Burning Man is this generation’s Woodstock, and though I have no desire to go, I don’t criticize it, either. It’s a pity that it was rained out. There was rain at Woodstock, too, but it wasn’t in the desert and so wasn’t canceled.

*The overly capitalistic Wall Street Journal discusses whether you need to buy the new iPhone 15 (I have a 13, which I got only because my old 5S didn’t support my network). Apparently some misguided souls buy a new iPhone each year, which is ludicrous. They last for YEARS, especially if you get the batteries replaced–far cheaper than buying a new phone.

Their advice is if your phone supports IOS17 and just needs a new battery, just get the battery changed. Mine does support IOS17 but I haven’t downloaded it yet. I don’t see the need.

Whether or not you buy one of the new iPhone 15 models expected at Apple’s Sept. 12 event depends on three factors: the condition of your current phone, the compatibility of the imminent iOS 17 update, and the next phone’s new features. If your iPhone is two or three years old and works fine, you can probably get another year or two out of it.

Don’t upgrade if…

You just need a fresh battery. The iPhone’s lithium-ion batteries decay over time. After about two years—technically 500 complete charge cycles, though temperature can also affect longevity—your battery life won’t last as long and performance may slow. Apps might take longer to launch. The screen might seem laggy while scrolling.

My phone is about two years old and still has 95% of its battery power. Learn how to conserve battery life (various websites will tell you how to charge it optimally). Of course, if you’re on the phone 24/7, you’ll need a new battery sooner. But they’re not expensive!

If this is you, a fresh battery, not a new phone, may do the trick. It could keep the phone running longer and speed things up.

If your battery’s maximum capacity is below 80%, Apple says it should be replaced. An Apple-certified replacement costs much less than a new phone, usually $89. If you bought AppleCare+ coverage, battery replacements are included. To assess, check battery health in Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging.

Only the screen needs repair. Cracked screens are not OK. But if your iPhone is otherwise fully functional, check the price of a replacement display. It might be a better deal than a replacement phone, and it can increase your current phone’s trade-in value. The iPhone XR is the oldest model that supports iOS 17. Apple values one with a cracked screen at $55, while one with a good screen fetches $150.

Upgrade only if your device needs serious repairs or your phone doesn’t support IOS 17 (nearly all models around do.)

*The NYT claims in an op-ed called “Yiddish is having a moment“, by Ilan Stavans, that the Eastern European hybrid language is undergoing some kind of resurgence. (Stavans is an consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary and a Yiddish expert.) But I read the piece more as Yiddish having a death rattle:

Yiddish has been experiencing something of a revival. Online courses mean that anyone from Buenos Aires to Melbourne might learn to speak it. There are new translations of long-forgotten works and literary classics. A Broadway staging of “Fiddler on the Roof” was performed in Yiddish. And streaming platforms like Netflix have released series, including “Shtisel,” “Unorthodox” and “Rough Diamonds,” fully or partially in Yiddish.

Before World War II, approximately 13 million Jews, both secular and religious, spoke Yiddish. Today it is estimated that there are about a quarter of a million speakers in the United States, about the same number in Israel and roughly another 100,000 in the rest of the world. Nowadays the vast majority of those who speak the language are ultra-Orthodox. They aren’t multilingual, as secular Yiddish speakers always were.

This next part is like New Yorker writing: it sounds good but it’s hogwash:

Hebrew, which officially became the national language of the state of Israel in 1948, is spoken by about nine million people around the world. For some, the language symbolizes far-right Israeli militarism.

Give me a break! He had to throw that in there, didn’t he, ignoring the fact that many Hebrew-speaking Israelis are left wing and opposed to the present government (as this week’s rioting demonstrates)?

In contrast, Yiddish represents exile — a longing for home. It was the backbone of the Jewish labor movement in the United States, and the feminist Emma Goldman championed women’s equality and free love in Yiddish. Abraham Cahan, the feisty, commanding editor in chief of Forverts — The Forward, the left-leaning Yiddish daily in New York at the turn of the century — saw the language as a tool for educating Jewish immigrants about their rights.

That’s because the most of the immigrants at that time were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews.

Given everything Yiddish has gone through — how it was a tool of cross-border continuity, how it was pushed to the crematories by the Nazis, how after the Shoah it thrived in some diasporas but was pushed aside in others — its sheer endurance is nothing short of miraculous.

Yet nostalgia alone cannot push a revival beyond its narrow means. It continues to be a language without a homeland, without an army, a flag, a post office or a central bank, the language of a small, dispersed people. Its speakers may be few, but as my maternal grandmother used to say, words should be weighted, not counted.

More hogwash. I find Yiddish far more colorful and interesting than Hebrew, but that’s my opinion. And I don’t know what he means by words being “weighed”. Does that mean that writing in Yiddish (and I don’t mean literature) has been far more important than writing in Hebrew?

But I would go so far as to say that every educated American should have an armamentarium of Yiddish words in their vocabulary, just because they’re fun to use (Wikipedia has a very good list of Yiddish words used in English). You probably already do, for the word “glitch,” meaning a foul-up or small mistake, comes from Yiddish.

*I’m heading to Tel Aviv on Friday, and CNN reports that there have been violent riots there involving, of all things, the Eritrean government. That’s because most of the Africans seeking asylum in Israel are from Eritrea. An excerpt:

Dozens of people were injured in Tel Aviv on Saturday as hundreds of Eritrean government supporters and opponents clashed with each other and with Israeli police, authorities in Israel said.

Israel’s Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency service said more than 114 people had been treated for injuries, including dozens of police officers. Eight of the injuries were serious, MDA said in a statement.

Israeli Police later said 49 officers had been injured and 39 people were arrested. Police who felt threatened fired live ammunition while extricating themselves from crowds, they said. It was not immediately clear if any of the day’s injuries were from the police live fire.

Videos on social media showed Eritrean government supporters clashing with anti-government protesters.

Eritreans make up the majority of African asylum seekers in Israel.

Israeli police fired stun grenades in an attempt to disperse the crowd, while some protesters hurled stones at police and set fire to trash bins.

According to the BBC, Netanyahu now wants all Eritreans seeking asylum sent back to their dysfunctional country:

Israel is considering tough steps including the immediate deportation of Eritrean asylum seekers involved in riots in Tel Aviv on Saturday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “a red line” had been crossed.

He also ordered a new plan to remove all African migrants that he described as “illegal infiltrators”.

Saturday’s unprecedented disorder began after activists opposed to the Eritrean government said that they had asked Israeli authorities to cancel an event organised by their country’s embassy.

They broke through a police barricade around the venue, which was then vandalised.

I hoped to see some peaceful antigovernment demonstrations here, just to get a sense of what’s going on in Israel. But I have no appetite for violent demonstrations, and hope that they’re over by Friday.

*Norway has built a monument to and unfortunate walrus named Freya, who was seen swimming along the coasts of several European countries last year until, after jumping on (and sinking) several moored boats, and attracting huge crowds, was deliberately shot by Norwegian marksmen on the grounds of “public safety”. That decision was cruel and unconscionable, as she never hurt any human.

It’s been just over a year since an orphaned walrus who swam into the hearts of thousands of Norwegians last summer ended up being killed by Norwegian authorities. A new, privately financed memorial to the walrus called Freya has helped fill her absence this summer.

The large bronze replica of Freya rests at the end of a breakwater at Frognerkilen in Oslo, just across the harbour from some of Norway’s monuments to Arctic exploration at Bygdøy (far left). The scupture was unveiled late last spring and steadily draws small groups of Freya’s fans, often paying tribute by laying down flowers or handwritten messages.

. . .The memorial created by sculptor Astri Tonoian also includes a message of its own that refers to “the sins” tied to how humans confront something new or unknown. The plaque notes how Freya’s death at the hands of Norway’s fisheries directorate “raised important ethical questions” about human relations to, and knowledge of, nature.

Experts believe Freya was separated from her mother in the Arctic waters off Northern Norway, forcing the young but large walrus to try to find her own way. She first started appearing in boat harbours along the Norwegian coast, then as far south as the Netherlands before making a major splash in the popular coastal town of Kragerø. Then she continued swimming up the coast to Oslo.

The monument to Freya:

Poor walrus! I still get steamed when I think about their shooting her.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili mourns the end of summer:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m analysing the coming end of summer.
In Polish:
A: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Analizuję zbliżający się koniec lata.

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From Merilee: a worthy cat charity and a cartoon by Scott Metzger:

From reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe, a cartoon called “Probate”:

From reader David, a grammar Nazi cartoon by Mike Osresh:

A tweet from Masih. The Iranian theocracy just can’t stop blinding protestors. And yet they are extraordinarily sanguine about their loss of sight.

From Malcolm: Kitten tries to catch a sunbeam

From Simon, a new twist on an old meme. Note, the material is NOT sensitive!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, the most iconic people to die in the camp:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a palindrome of the Loch Ness Monster, which reads the same backwards and forwards:

Cat reverses direction on a narrow ledge:

The Nature paper suggests that the population of modern H. sapiens went through a bottleneck of nearly 1300 individuals.  This tweeter (a human evolutionary geneticist suggests that one shouldn’t accept that conclusion, and in the thread gives some reasons why:

Israel: The morning of Day 1

September 3, 2023 • 11:30 am

I slept like a log, wrote a couple of posts this morning, and then met Anna Krylov for a lovely breakfast (her partner Jay was sleeping in). You wouldn’t think that a place like the Ibis, known as a budget hotel, would have such a great breakfast spread, but it did, and I must have eaten four plates of food (I didn’t eat at all yesterday). Here’s my cozy little room at the Ibis (click all photos to enlarge them):

Below are a few photos from my trip to breakfast, served on the eighth floor.

First, there are two elevators in the Ibis: a regular one and one to use on the Sabbath, which starts at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday.

In the Sabbath elevator, you don’t push buttons or touch the door, for the elevator goes up and down continuously, stopping at every floor with the door opening automatically. This conforms to the Orthodox Jewish habit of people prohibited from doing manual work on the Sabbath. (You’re supposed to go to the synagogue and spend the day contemplating the divine and reading the Torah.

But of course the Orthodox are constantly debating about what constitutes “work” on the Sabbath, and they have clever ways of getting around it (check out this quantum light switch, still subject to hot rabbinical debate).

The shabbos elevator. DO NOT TOUCH THE DOORS!

The breakfast room at the Ibis is large, with big windows overlooking the city. And the spread of comestibles is impressive. There’s Western food, which I ignored, and Israeli and Middle Eastern stuff, which is what I seized on.

Here’s the breakfast room, with the goodies lined up at the left. There are four stations, plus two coffee machines that make regular coffee and drinks like espresso and cappuccino. I didn’t see any meat, and I suspect the buffet is kosher.

The bread station, which includes pizza (remember, pizza, especially cold pizza, is one of the finest breakfast foods). The triangular sesame rolls at upper left were fantastic, but I can’t remember what they’re called. They went well with the cheese or dairy spreads (there’s also fruit as well as chocolate croissants and sweet rolls to the side).

This sweet pastry, which I loved, is called knafeh, and I was told it’s found all over the Middle East. It’s like a deconstructed version of the Greek pastry kataifi, but this one also has cheese in it. Wikipedia notes that there are several versions. This a good dessert to finish off breakfast, accompanied by strong espresso. I had two helpings.

Below: the heart of the meal: dairy spreads, cheeses, olives, salads, vegetables, and spreads like baba ghanoush. an eggplant puree. I had these with the triangular sesame breads, though I discovered bagels later (I saw neither cream cheese nor lox). But this was absolutely delicious and filling. The dairy spreads on the right were particularly toothsome, especially when mixed with the salads:

Cheeses and more salads:

The Western food, including eggs and potatoes. I didn’t touch it, for we had plenty of this for breakfast on the Galápagos cruise, and who wants eggs when you can have all the stuff above?

I didn’t understand these placemats. Why is the guy feeding a crow?

On the way from the airport to Jerusalem, I noticed a lot of very weird statues of creatures in parks and playgrounds:

Two examples of wokeness: cancer care and moccasins

September 3, 2023 • 9:30 am

CANCER CARE

This first link below was sent by my partner in crime Luana, and is from John Lucas’s Substack site “Bravo Blue”. (Lucas was any Army ranger who became an attorney.)

Lucas is decrying the “woke propaganda” to which he was exposed when he checked into the hospital for cancer care. Click below to read, and subscribe if you read often:

An excerpt:

I recently experienced my own personal encounter with this propaganda when filling out a pre-surgery questionnaire at my hospital. This is the story.

I am a cancer patient. Since last January I have been diagnosed with two types of cancer that have necessitated three surgeries so far. For my most recent surgery, I was referred to an oncological surgeon at the VCU Medical Center, which is associated with Virginia Commonwealth University.

At this point, I must add a personal advisory note: The VCU Medical Center enjoys a superb national reputation. Other members of my family have been treated there and have received superb care. Nothing I say here is intended to disparage any of the individual care-givers at the hospital in any way. All, from my surgeon to the kind lady who escorted me to my car after my overnight stay, were uniformly kind and professional. Any criticism I may have is directed at the government-sponsored infection of the medical system with the WOKE virus, not at any individual physician or other medical or support staff.

The forms:

When I checked in at the hospital for my pre-surgery consultation, because I was a new patient for them, they gave me the usual medical history form to complete. After completing it, I turned to a second two-page form. I printed my name at the top and, rather unthinkingly, began to fill it out. I was in a bit of a hurry to complete it before I was called back to see my surgeon, so at first I did not pay a great deal of attention to it. So, I dutifully answered the first question, which asked, “What is your “Sexual Orientation?” That should, however, have been an immediate red flag, causing me to wonder, “What on earth does this have to do with cancer surgery?” But out of habit and without thinking, I checked the block for “Straight (Not lesbian or gay).” Had I read it closer and given it a moment’s thought, I would have been nonplussed by the other answers on the menu: “Lesbian,” “Gay,” “Bisexual,” “Something else,” or “Don’t know.”

The first page:

The next question roused me out of my inattentiveness: “How do you describe your gender?” It then gave a menu of six possible answers: “Male,” “Female,” “Transgender male,” “Transgender female,” “Other” and – again – “Unknown.” Like the other questions it also included an option “not to disclose.” My surgeon’s notes from our consult include the notation that I was a “79 year old male.” In view of that rather obvious observation, how or why I was given an option to refuse to disclose my gender is unclear.

At that point I knew something was very wrong.

For me, the final straw was the third question: “What was your sex assigned at birth?” The options were “Male,” “Female,” “Unknown” (again), or “X.  I was left to guess what “X” is; it was not defined.

The woke questions, avers Lucas, are irrelevant to cancer care, though they could have been relevant if, say, he was there for treatment in urology or gynecology. “Sex assigned at birth”, of course, is a phrase that really angers me, because it’s not accurate. Even if doctors use secondary sexual characteristics like genitalia to diagnose sex, sex is not “assigned at birth”, as if it were something arbitrary that doctors decide. It is observed at birth, even if what you really want to observe is whether a newborn has the biological equipment that evolved to make either small and mobile or large and immobile gametes. But genitalia show an almost perfect correlation with biological sex, so they’re a useful surrogate way to determine it.

But “sex assigned at birth” is becoming more frequent despite its inaccuracy. Why? Because it plays right into gender activism. One’s gender is, of course, often self-assigned, though the vast majority of people bear a social role of gender that corresponds to their biological sex.  But you don’t have to distort the biological definition of sex to placate gender activists. And it also misleads people about science. The gender activists answer: “Forget the science; we’re making sex conform to gender.”

But I digress; here’s page 1 of the form:

But wait! There’s more!

The questions continued on a second page with more inanities.

It asked, for example, what pronouns I use, and – again – the option to say that I what pronouns I use is “unknown.” It occurred to me that a person who is unaware of what pronouns they use may belong in a hospital ward other than the cancer ward. A separate question inquired whether I “presently have” breasts, a vagina, a penis and “prostate/testes,” (They apparently think a man cannot have one without the other.) with instructions to check off all that you have. The most unintentionally hilarious part of the form was the instruction to “write in the space beside the organs listed if there is another word you would like your healthcare provider to use to refer to that body part.” Had I been thinking more clearly at the time, I could have had a lot of fun with that one.

I answered all the questions after the first one by only a single printed “I am a man.” Enough said.

Lucas found that these forms are widespread, and are apparently pushed by the government: the Centers for Disease Control:

Later when I had returned home to complete my recovery, I began to investigate the origins of this form. I quickly found that a very large number of hospitals and medical schools use this or a similar form. For example, the University of Utah health care system has a similar set of questions that it says it will ask each patient every six months.

After all, you may be genderfluid and your pronouns could change.

I discovered that this agenda is being pushed by the federal government. The CDC’s web site lists the questions that medical providers should ask. Its recommended questions are substantially the same as those on the VCU Medical’s questionnaire. However, there are some differences. In addition to the options provided by VCU Medical for “Gender identity,” the CDC recommends an option to specify “Genderqueer/gender nonconforming neither exclusively male nor female.” For “Sexual orientation” it adds, “Queer, pansexual, and/or questioning.” The CDC also suggests other possible pronouns such as “Ze,” “Zim,” and “Zirs.”

But they left out “leaf”!

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MOCCASIN ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Reader Gregory called my attention to this Eddie Bauer ad:

Here’s another view. These look just like the work boots that were de rigueur when I was in college, along with Army fatigue jackets and jeans. (It was the proletarian look.)

Although to me this looks like a conventional work boot, Eddie Bauer claims that it incorporates features of the moccasin, a form of Native American footwear.  I swear I can’t see any resemblance (see below to compare) but Eddie Bauer apparently feels it has to acknowledge it to show its commitment to social justice.

The blue link in the box goes to this site, where Eddie Bauer promises to investigate which products have features that have been appropriated from indigenous peoples.

Here, however, are three pair of genuine Native American moccasins shown on Wikipedia. (They were often beaded.) They bear NO resemblance to the Eddie Bauer “Moc Toe boots,” even in the toes:

Osage:

Kiowa:

Cheyenne:

But why stop at Native Americans? I’m sure there are many products with features adopted from cultures throughout the world.  Below is an Eddie Bauer woman’s dress that is clearly culturally appropriated from the culture of Rajasthan in India, known for its block prints very similar to the ones on this dress. This is blatant and unacknowledged appropriation from people of color:.

To be fair, the Eddie Bauer site also notes they’re starting a partnership with a Native American collective, which is great, but do they have to flaunt this? Of course they do, or they’ll get slammed on social media: the kiss of death for a company.

That said, at least the partnership accomplishes something.

New posters: read Da Roolz (and how to send photos)

September 3, 2023 • 8:15 am

Lately there’s been an influx of rather toxic new posters, people whose first posts are nasty, rude, clueless, or call other posters names. If you’re going to make your first post on this site, please read “Da Roolz”—the guidelines for posting on this site. You can find them here or on the site’s left sidebar. I’ve been rejecting comments that don’t follow these guidelines, and, if the comments are sufficiently obtuse (e.g., taking me to task for not accepting the “overwhelming evidence for God”), I’ll just ban the commenter.

I have no idea why this is happening; is it “post-pandemic meanness”? I’ll remind posters of rules 7 and 8:

7.) Do not insult your host. Pretend that you’re speaking to me in my living room which is, in a sense, what this website is.

8.) Most important, please try to refrain from insulting other posters, no matter how misguided you think they are.  I don’t like name-calling, for it lessens whatever class this site has and certainly doesn’t foster discussion.  I will often warn people about this behavior either on the site, or in a private email. About 70% of those who are warned respond with truculence, either insulting me or saying that their behavior is fully justified. That’s a good way to get blacklisted—almost as good as telling me to stop posting on cats or cowboy boots. If I ask you to apologize to a commenter whom you insulted, please do so.

Also, I’m delighted to get readers’ wildlife photos (but please hold off until Sept. 23), and there’s another link that shows you how to send then to me.  Please send good photos of the quality that usually appears here.