Tuesday: Hili dialogue

June 20, 2023 • 6:45 am

Well, it’s back to work on the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, June 20, 2023, and tomorrow at 9:57 a.m. is the Summer Solstice. Today’s food holiday is National Vanilla Milkshake Day, the blandest of all shakes. If you must have one, gussy it up like this:

From Layers of Happiness

It’s also American Eagle Day, National Kouign Amann Day, Plain Yogurt Day, National Cherry Tart Day, World Productivity Day, National Ice Cream Soda Day, West Virginia Day and World Refugee Day. 

But what is Kouign Amann? It’s this:

. . . a sweet Breton cake, made with laminated dough. It is a round multi-layered cake, originally made with bread dough (nowadays sometimes viennoiserie dough), containing layers of butter and incorporated sugar, similar in fashion to puff pastry, albeit with fewer layers. The cake is slowly baked until the sugar caramelizes and the butter (in fact the steam from the 20 percent water in the butter) expands the dough, resulting in its layered structure. A smaller version, kouignette, is similar to a muffin-shaped, caramelized croissant.

The name comes from the Breton language words for cake (kouign) and butter (amann), and in 2011 the New York Times described the kouign-amann as “the fattiest pastry in all of Europe.

That’s it! I want one now! How well it would go with my latte. Here’s the full-sized cake:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 20 Wikipedia page.

There’s a Google Doodle again today; if you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to the search page honoring Magdalena Abakanowicz, a Polish artist born on this day in 1930 (died April 20, 2017).

Here’s one of her last projects, which sits in our city’s Grant Park. Wikipedia notes:

Abakanowicz’s final round of work includes a project called Agora, which is a permanent installation located at the southern end of Chicago’s Grant Park, next to the Roosevelt Road Metra station. It consists of 106 cast iron figures, each about nine feet tall. All the figures are similar in shape, but different in details. The artist and her three assistants created models for each figure by hand, and the casting took place from 2004 to 2006. The surface of each figure resembles a tree bark or wrinkled skin. The work creates a feeling of crowdedness, hence the name “agora”. Furthermore, all the bodies end at the torso, giving them an eerie, anonymous look.

Here it is:

And the artist:

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Wine of the Day:  Ah, when I first started getting into wine around 1981, German Rieslings, even of world class, were dirt cheap (so were good Bordeaux). As Don Henley wrote, “Those days are gone forever; I should just let ’em go.”

German wines of distinction are graded by sweetness, from the driest, Kabinetts (this one), through grapes pressed with increasing ripeness and hence sugar: Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, and the sweet rarity Trockenbeerenauslese. But even within a grade the sweetness can vary.

This $24 beauty was sweeter than most Kabinetts: not distinctly sweet, but certainly off-dry. And that complemented perfectly a healthy meal of tangy goat cheese, a baguette, ripe tomatoes, and brined, wrinkled black olives in olive oil. (This is my go-to dinner when I don’t want to cook.)  The wine, four years old, was at peak drinkability, starting to get darker but not yellow, with a floral perfume of lime blossoms, and very fresh, best when it was right out of the fridge. It was light in alcohol (see below) but long on flavor, and I get to have the other half-bottle tonight (I’m writing on Monday afternoon.

It wasn’t cheap but it was worth every penny. Investigate German rieslings if you want a change, and realize that their sweetness can sometimes be a perfect match for food.

There aren’t many reviews online. One of them, on the site of my old wine guru Robert Parker, gave it a 94/100 and said this:

“The 2019 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Kabinett is bright, precise and elegant on the complex, refined, beautifully clear and flinty nose. Lush, refined and salty-piquant on the palate, this is a salty, crunchy and stimulating Kabinett with a long and intense finish. Bottled with 9.5% alcohol and 60 grams of residual sugar. Tasted at the domain in September 2020. (Stephan Reinhardt)”

Da Nooz:

*According to The Washington Post, the FBI and other agents of The Law didn’t decide to start investigating the January 6, 2001 insurrection as a crime until a year after it took place.

Hours after he was sworn in as attorney general, Merrick Garland and his deputies gathered in a wood-paneled conference room in the Justice Department for a private briefing on the investigation he had promised to make his highest priority: bringing to justice those responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In the two months since the siege, federal agents had conducted 709 searches, charged 278 rioters and identified 885 likely suspects, said Michael R. Sherwin, then-acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, ticking through a slide presentation. Garland and some of his deputies nodded approvingly at the stats, and the new attorney general called the progress “remarkable,” according to people in the room.

A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.

A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.

. . . Whether a decision about Trump’s culpability for Jan. 6 could have come any earlier is unclear. The delays in examining that question began before Garland was even confirmed. Sherwin, senior Justice Department officials and Paul Abbate, the top deputy to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature, according to five individuals familiar with the decision. Instead, they insisted on a methodical approach — focusing first on rioters and going up the ladder.

Well, I think they’ve reached the top of the ladder now.

*William Barr, former Attorney General under Bush père and Trump, and who said that the Florida document charges would make Trump “toast,” has a new piece in the Free Press called “The truth about the Trump indictment.” (Its subtitle is “This time the president is not a victim of a witch hunt. The situation is entirely of his own making.”)

For the sake of the country, our party, and a basic respect for the truth, it is time that Republicans come to grips with the hard truths about President Trump’s conduct and its implications. Chief among them: Trump’s indictment is not the result of unfair government persecution. This is a situation entirely of his own making. The effort to present Trump as a victim in the Mar-a-Lago document affair is cynical political propaganda.

Barr then gives the “plain facts,” which include these:

Some have tried to frame this affair as a simple custody dispute over documents. Trump’s apologists have conjured up bizarre arguments that the Presidential Records Act, a statute meant to prohibit former presidents from removing official documents from the White House, should be interpreted as giving Trump carte blanche to remove whatever he wants, even if it is unquestionably an official document.

These justifications are not only farcical, they are beside the point. They ignore the central reason the former president was indicted: his calculated and deceitful obstruction of a grand jury subpoena.

That Trump had no right to remove national defense documents from the White House is beyond debate. These documents are the very quintessence of the materials that the law expressly forbids an outgoing president from taking with him.

. . . All the razzle-dazzle about Trump’s supposed rights under the Presidential Records Act is a sideshow. At its core, this is an obstruction case. Trump would not have been indicted just for taking the documents in the first place. Nor would he have been indicted even if he delayed returning them for a period while arguing about it.

What got Trump criminally charged was his deceit and obstruction in responding to the grand jury subpoena served in May 2022 after he had stymied the government for a year.

. . .Even if you buy the double standard argument, at most it justifies not holding Trump accountable criminally. It does not mean that his conduct was any less outrageous. And here is where I think too many Republicans are falling down.

It is one thing to argue that Trump should not face criminal liability. Fine. But the next obvious question is whether, given his conduct, the GOP should continue to promote him for the highest office in the land. Many Republicans are avoiding this question and thus implicitly endorsing Trump for the presidency despite his egregious conduct. This posture is untenable.

. . . Many loyal Republicans have instinctively rushed to the ramparts to defend Trump. I understand that impulse. But with each new revelation, they look more and more foolish. Remember when news first broke of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago? The roars of Trump supporters were deafening. “Why didn’t the government simply ask for the documents back?” Well, as it turns out, they did ask, politely, for about a year, and they were jerked around. Trump’s supporters then shifted tack. “Well, why didn’t they use a subpoena first before conducting a search?” Well, as it turns out, they did issue a subpoena, quietly and discreetly, three months before the search, and the search was done only after the government got surveillance video suggesting that, in responding to the subpoena, documents had been illegally withheld. And on and on and on.

Whenever defending Trump is concerned, it is always prudent not to get too far out on a limb until the facts are known. It would be wise to consider that the DOJ has held back a lot of information, and it will be coming out in the weeks ahead. But what we already know about Trump’s behavior is indefensible.

I can’t do anything but agree.

*A submersible vehicle that carries passengers down to look at the wreck of the Titanic has vanished.

A submersible craft carrying five people in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic has been missing since Sunday, setting off a search-and-rescue operation by the U.S. Coast Guard, the agency said.

The Coast Guard confirmed Monday that it was searching for the vessel after the Canadian research ship MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning.

The submersible is operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a company that offers tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons. It said on its website that an expedition was “currently underway.”

“Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families,” a statement said. “We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible.”

Hamish Harding, the chairman of the aviation company Action Aviation, is among those aboard the missing submersible, according to Mark Butler, the company’s managing director. Mr. Harding wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that a dive had been planned for Sunday: “A weather window has just opened up,” he wrote.

Given that the Coast Guard doesn’t have the right equipment for a proper search in this area, and that the ship is 12,500 feet down, it’s a dire situation. But it’s self-propelled and could just be lost. It’s just a day since the loss, so cross your fingers. By the way, passengers pay $250,000 for the dive.

*The Associated Press recounts all the carnage that occurred during this holiday weekend (it’s Juneteenth), and it’s especially bad. The greatest number of victims (all but one will survive) was in a suburb of Chicago. And the weekend isn’t over yet (it’s late Monday afternoon):

CHICAGO

Five people were shot, two fatally on the city’s South Side on Sunday evening when someone opened fire from a car that pulled up to a gathering, according to police.

Another four men were shot, one fatally, during an altercation in a garage in the West Side neighborhood of Austin around 3 a.m. Sunday, police said. Five others including a teenage girl were shot early Saturday near Lincoln Park Zoo, and two dozen more were shot in other incidents since Friday evening, city data shows.

Meanwhile in the suburbs, at least 23 people were shot, one fatally, early Sunday in a parking lot where hundreds of people had gathered to celebrate Juneteenth, authorities said.

The DuPage County sheriff’s office described a “peaceful gathering” that suddenly turned violent as multiple people fired shots into the crowd in Willowbrook, Illinois, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) southwest of Chicago.

A motive wasn’t immediately known. Sheriff’s spokesman Robert Carroll said authorities were interviewing “persons of interest,” the Daily Herald reported.

That’s 4 dead and 28 wounded in our area, and probably a few more to go. And this is just over two days.  The summary? Here’s our “celebration,” but they don’t give a nationwide total.

 Mass shootings and violence killed and wounded people across the United States this weekend, including at least 60 shot in the Chicago area alone. Four people were found shot to death in a small Idaho town, a Pennsylvania state trooper was killed in an ambush, and bullets struck 11 teenagers, killing one, at a party in Missouri.

The shootings happened in cities and rural areas alike, following a surge in homicides and other violence over the past several years that accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. Officers responded to mass shootings in Washington state, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Southern California and Baltimore.

“There’s no question there’s been a spike in violence,” said Daniel Nagin, a professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. “Some of these cases seem to be just disputes, often among adolescents, and those disputes are played out with firearms, not with fists.”

Researchers disagree over the cause. Theories include the possibility that violence is driven by the prevalence of guns in America, or by less aggressive police tactics or a decline in prosecutions for misdemeanor weapon offenses, Nagin said.

Only the Idaho killings fit the definition of a mass killing in which four or more people die, not including the shooter. However, the number of injured in most of the weekend cases matches the widely accepted definition for mass shootings.

I don’t know where they got the “at least 60 shot in Chicago” part, but so it goes. Other countries are aghast at this carnage, and of course everybody says nothing can be done about it, even if we take away all the handguns.

*An Ecuadorian woman came back to life after she was declared dead, and the discovery that she wasn’t dead occurred during her wake. Sadly, she died again

Bella Montoya was initially hospitalized on June 9 at Martín Icaza Hospital, in the central Ecuadoran city of Babahoyo, about 200 miles southwest of the capital, Quito, after a suspected stroke. She went into cardiorespiratory arrest and was declared dead by a doctor.

About five hours into the wake, which was held the same day, her son started to hear noises coming from the coffin.

“The coffin started to make sounds,” Gilberto Barbera told the Associated Press. He said his mother was “wrapped in sheets and hitting the coffin.”

. . .But the apparent resurrection did not mean the 76-year-old former nurse had suddenly made a miraculous recovery. Video of the episode showed Montoya being lifted out of the coffin onto a stretcher, with her hospital bracelet still looped around her arm. She was transported back to the hospital in critical condition.

After a week in an intensive care unit, Montoya was declared dead Friday, Ecuador’s Public Health Ministry said in a statement. She experienced an “ischemic cerebrovascular event,” the ministry said, which involves the restriction of blood flow to the brain.

This is a nightmare on top of another nightmare. The dead coming back to life in their coffins! It would have been better had she stayed alive after she was taken back to the hospital. Ceiling Cat works in mysterious ways.

Finally, to cheer you up, here’s a short but mirthful video:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili left a cool spot to go roaming:

Hili: I’m leaving this shady place to move to another one.
A: It’s cooler onside.
Hili: But it’s nicer here.
In Polish:
Hili: Wyszłam z cienia, ale chyba poszukam innego.
Ja: W domu jest chłodno.
Hili: Ale tu jest milej.

********************

From the Aburd Sign Project:

From Pet Jokes and Puns:

Thank Ceiling Cat I don’t need this (it appears to be real)! From Jesus of the Day:

 

More heartening video from Masih (there’s sound, including what seems like duck noise!)

From Barry, a new religious app:

From Bsrry, a good one:

From Elon Musk. Oy, that stings!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a Czech woman who died in the camp at 48.

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who’s finally back in Manchester, and feeling low:

Yes, this is a worm, seen in a deep-sea dive:

From Ziya Tong via Matthew. Much animal sex is fascinating: check out the way that bedbugs have sex in the video below:

Bedbug sex:

DuckCam upgrade

June 19, 2023 • 1:12 pm

Amy, the duck nesting on a ledge at Regenstein library, now has an upgraded cam and a new website. It’s worth watching her, as all kinds of stuff can be seen.  For example:

a. Two days ago, someone saw a squirrel encounter the duck, supposedly trying to steal an egg (I don’t think it’s possible for a squirrel to run off with a duck egg). The duck pecked it, and the squirrel DIVED UNDERNEATH THE DUCK, so that the duck was plopped down on a belly-up squirrel. Apparently the squirrel ran off.

b. Someone saw at least five eggs in the nest. That means there are more buried in the leaves and feathers.

c. Yesterday someone watched her fly off for about 1.5 hours (they do this every few days for a drink and a bath). She probably went to a nearby pond or lake. But before leaving the nest, she carefully covered up all the eggs with her bill. This not only keeps them warm, but hides them from potential predators.  When she returned, she shuffled the leaf-father covering off the eggs, but using her feet.

If you click the picture below, you can go to the new duckcam. Say hi to Amy! Right now the sun is on the nest, so it’s not all that easy to see. At other times she’s clear as a bell. And you might get to see her cover or uncover her eggs. (She also turns them from time to time to ensure even incubation.)

Be sure to click the triangle to start the video (you can also scroll backwards).  There may be an annoying buzz that you’ll have to silence by muting the screen.

She’s always futzing with her nest, too.

Leakey Foundation scientist: orangutan bones tell us that biological sex is a spectrum, not a binary

June 19, 2023 • 11:00 am

Any YouTube video with the title “Orangutan skeltons bust the sex binary” is guaranteed to draw me in, and the very title makes me wary. How can skeletons bust the sex binary of any mammal, given that the definition of sex in mammals involves features (reproductive systems evolved to produce two very different kinds of gametes) that can’t be seen in a skeleton? Sure, you can often identify skeletons (especially of sexually dimorphic species like humans) by various bone traits, like hip-and-leg configuration, but such dimorphism is not 100% diagnostic, nor, more important, the definition of the sex binary.

What Alexandra Kralick has done in the video below, released three days ago,  is show that in orangutans, which have two morphs of males in the wild, give a more or less continuous distribution of bone-size measurements, since one morph of males is intermediate in size between males and females. But a continuous distribution of bone sizes does NOT “bust the sex binary.” What it does do is “break the bone binary”, but that says absolutely nothing about whether sex itself is binary. It’s like showing that the distribution of human heights is not binary and therefore human sexes are not binary!

The video is not only misguided, but is also an embarrassment to the Leakey Foundation, named after Louis Leakey, which sponsors research on human origins and evolution. The Foundation is, in fact, putting its imprimatur on work that purports to show that, in primates (and presumably in humans, since Kralick generalizes her results beyond orangs), sex is not binary. I doubt the Foundation would really agree with that, unless they’re terminally woke (and anti-science).

At any rate, here’s the YouTube introduction to the 48-minute video, which includes Q&A at the end.

Meet Leakey Foundation scientist Alexandra Kralick and learn how orangutan skeletons bust the sex binary in this rebroadcast episode.

Kralick declares that the theme of her work is “casting light on problematic assumptions that permeate scientific narratives of biological sex,” and adds that she’s bringing “a feminist and queer approach to this work to show how biological sex is more complicated than either ‘male’ or ‘female’ but in fact sits on a spectrum.”

One might sense that there’s an ideological motivation behind this work and its conclusion, a motivation that leads to misleading conclusions. One would be right.

Click to listen:

I’ve taken a few screenshots of the slides. The one below argues that “biological sex is not dichotomous” (i.e. “binary”), but she leaves out the one trait that defines sex and shows that it is binary: the reproductive system and the gametes that it makes. To repeat myself, males have a reproductive system evolved to produce small, mobile gametes (sperm), while females have a system evolved to produce large, immobile gametes (eggs). There is no third type of reproductive system, and no other type of gamete. This is the definition of biological sex, not the traits listed on the slide. (Note that the slide depicts humans, not orangutans, showing that Kralick is making a general statement, not one limited to orangs (which of course also fit the sex binary).

In the wild (though Kralick says “not in zoos”), the male orangs have two morphs, “flanged”, with big cheek pads, big vocal sacs, and large body size; and “unflanged”, males who are smaller, though not as small as females, and also lack vocal sacs and don’t have big cheek pads.  Flanged males are behaviorally and sexually dominant over unflanged males.  The two classes of males, of course, are still both male, for both can produce sperm and mate with egg-producing females (the unflanged males in nature may be “female mimics” that deceive females to get mates, but we don’t know).  There are three species of orangs (genus Pongo) that live in different places, and all three have the male size/feature dimorphism. This is what Wikipedia says about them:

Males become sexually mature at around age 15. They may exhibit arrested development by not developing the distinctive cheek pads, pronounced throat pouches, long fur, or long calls until a resident dominant male is absent. The transformation from unflanged to flanged can occur quickly. Flanged males attract females in oestrous with their characteristic long calls, which may also suppress development in younger males.

Unflanged males wander widely in search of oestrous females and upon finding one, will force copulation on her, the occurrence of which is unusually high among mammals. Females prefer to mate with the fitter flanged males, forming pairs with them and benefiting from their protection. Non-ovulating females do not usually resist copulation with unflanged males, as the chance of conception is low.Homosexual behaviour has been recorded in the context of both affiliative and aggressive interactions.

This suggests that the unflanged males are indeed either female mimics or males that are non-dominant or of lower fertility, and have to use force to get offspring. Regardless, they’re still called “males”: they are clearly not a third sex!

Here’s a picture of the two morphs of males taken from Wikipedia. First flanged, then unflanged; the differences in vocal sacs and cheek pads are clear. The unflanged male was at the San Diego Zoo, though Kralick says that unflanged males can’t be found in zoos (27:11).

Flanged male
Unflanged male

Below is a plot of the “long bone length” of adult (A) and juvenile (J) orangs: flanged male (FL), unflanged male (UFL), and female (F). Note that in each of the five long bones, the unflanged males are intermediate in length between big males and smaller females. Importantly, note that the orangs are classified as either MALE or FEMALE, which Kralick apparently got from the museum specimens that she studied. (The sample sizes were quite small: there were, for example, only three specimens of unflanged males.)

Here are data for the ulna (arm bone), again clearly showing the intermediacy of the unflanged MALES between flanged MALES and normal FEMALES.  But if sex is not a binary, how did they identify the specimens? No doubt the collectors used the presence of a penis or vagina (almost 100% correlated with biological sex in humans) as the identifer of males vs. females, though presence or size of penis is not the definition of “a male”.

You get the same kind of distribution from cross-sectional area of the long bones. Kralick says “These are the results that support the notion that biological sex is a spectrum.” (32:44).

Now where does all this come from? Whence the conflation of sexual dimorphism with the definition and dichotomy of sex itself? You might have already guessed based on the lecture and the fact that at the beginning it’s announced that the Leakey Foundation is collaborating on this with “the American Association for Biological Anthropologists LGBTQIAA group.”

Below is a slide from the talk asserting that these data “subvert the idea of the sex binary as natural and biological, thus altering the discourse that places value on biological causes for gendered social order.” Well, I get the part about subverting the sex binary, but to say that the sex binary is not “natural and biological” is simply wrong.  You know this from the immense irony that although Kralick finds a “spectrum” using bone dimensions, she sees this only by dividing the data by sex: males (two types) and females.  Here she recognizes that there are two classes, and not an intersex. As for its connection with gender, it’s opaque.

Note, though that in the talk Kralick does quote the outdated figure that “17 our of 1000 babies born are intersex” (1.7%), “the same proportion of individuals with red hair”. The intersex figure came from a flawed claim by Anne Fausto-Sterling in 2000, who used a very wonky way to decide who was “intersex.”  (Fausto-Sterling later retracted this claim, but you still see it everywhere).

In fact, developmental variants are very rare, constituting only about one in 5,600 people (0.018 percent), and also don’t represent “other sexes.” This is the same proportion of the time that a tossed nickel will land on its edge rather than on “heads” or “tails”, yet nobody thinks that the results of coin-tossing are “non-binary.” Further, just like coins that land on edge are neither heads nor tails, so an intersex individual, rare as they are, are not “other sexes”, but the results of development gone awry. After all, natural selection has created two endpoints for animal sexes, male and female, though the developmental paths to those endpoints can involve chromosomes, temperature (in turtles), the social environment (yes, clownfish) , or genes. Indeed, the paths are many but there are only two endpoints (males and females); and a deviation from those two goals represents a very rare straying from the path.

Towards the end, Kralick says explicitly that one of her aims is to deconstruct the narrative that unflanged males are “deviant,” which I guess a couple of anthropologists have said (but I bet few would say that today!). The language of “deconstructing”, “subverting”, “undermining”, and “busting” supposedly conventional science is straight out of postmodern discourse.

This slide, which conflates sex and gender again, supposedly gives us lessons about humans, the only species, Kralick asserts, that do have gender.

The goal in this research is apparently to read into nature the spectrum of gender we see in human society, another example of what I call the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”—the idea that “what we consider good in humans must be observed in nature.” It’s a logically unsound way to valorize human identities. The double irony, though, is that Kralick not only affirms the sex binary, or at least accepts it, but also studies something in orangs that has nothing to do with gender.  Unflanged males are variants, apparently frequent, and may represent an evolved reproductive strategy.  Their existence raises a number of interesting and unanswered questions, but this study doesn’t go after any of them. Instead, it tells us what we already know from humans: males and females are of different but overlapping size, i.e., human height falls along a spectrum.

But human sex doesn’t.

h/t: Christopher

Newly elected majority-Muslim city council in Michigan bans Pride flags

June 19, 2023 • 9:30 am

I’d normally call this “you get what you vote for,” but not all Muslims are as authoritarian and Puritanical as those on the city council of Hamtramck, Michigan. Actually, the Guardian story, while displaying the homophobia of a group of Muslim-Americans, also has me a bit conflicted, for the law they passed does impose a general ideological neutrality on the city, and I can’t say I disagree with that. Click to read:

Here are the facts:

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: “I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.”

Oy.

CNN says this about the resolution:

Hamtramck’s city council members voted unanimously Tuesday to approve the controversial resolution, which restricts the city from flying any “religious, ethnic, racial, political, or sexual orientation group flags” on public grounds, according to meeting minutes.

The resolution stipulates that along with the American flag, the city also flies flags “that represent the international character” of the area. It says that “each religious, ethnic, racial, political, or sexually oriented group is already represented by the country it belongs to.”

Thus national flags are permitted to be flown, along with the city flag (if there is one).

Now shouting “Fagless City” is clearly homophobia, and is reprehensible. And its source is clearly religion: the council appears to consist entirely of Muslim males, and the vote was unanimous.  Liberals felt betrayed, as they were proud of having elected a city council made up of people of color, who then turned on them and dumped on gay people.

Back to the Guardian:

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

She’s referring to this:

But Majewski said the majority is now disrespecting the minority. She noted that a white, Christian-majority city council in 2005 created an ordinance to allow the Muslim call to prayer to be broadcast from the city’s mosques five times daily. It did so over objections of white city residents, and Majewski said she didn’t see the same reciprocity with roles reversed.

Well, the council hasn’t done anything to threaten gay rights yet (the absence of a flag is not a threat), but the Council blamed gays for this law!

Their talking points mirror those made elsewhere: some Hamtramck Muslims say they simply want to protect children, and gay people should “keep it in their home”.

But that sentiment is “an erasure of the queer community and an attempt to shove queer people back in the closet”, said Gracie Cadieux, a queer Hamtramck resident who is part of the Anti-Transphobic Action group.

Mayor Amer Ghalib, 43, who was elected in 2021 with 67% of the vote to become the nation’s first Yemeni American mayor, told the Guardian on Thursday he tries to govern fairly for everyone, but said LGBTQ+ supporters had stoked tension by “forcing their agendas on others”.

“There is an overreaction to the situation, and some people are not willing to accept the fact that they lost,” he said, referring to Majewski and recent elections that resulted in full control of the council by Muslim politicians.

I’m not sure what “agenda” was being forced on the council save civil rights that gays already enjoy. No other “agenda” is mentioned.   But there’s is a backstory of divisiveness here.

On one level, the discord that has flared between Muslim and non-Muslim populations in recent years has its root in a culture clash that is unique to a partly liberal small US city now under conservative Muslim leadership, residents say. Last year, the council approved an ordinance allowing backyard animal sacrifices, shocking some non-Muslim residents even though animal sacrifice is protected under the first amendment in the US as a form of religious expression.

I’m a hard-line First Amendment person, but I don’t think that killing sentient mammals to propitiate one’s god is a valid form of religious expression.  Do the goats get a choice? It’s okay, I think, to take peyote if that’s part of your religion, and has been for a while; and that’s what the courts have ruled. But my approbation stops at killing animals who don’t have a say in the process, and I don’t care if animal sacrifice is part of religious rites in some Muslim cultures.

Speaking of legalized substances, Hamtramck tried to ban marijuana use, too, but legalized weed had already passed as a state law, and so Hamtramck was too late:

When Michigan legalized marijuana, it gave municipalities a late 2020 deadline to enact a prohibition of dispensaries. Hamtramck council missed the deadline and a dispensary opened, drawing outrage from conservative Muslims who demanded city leadership shut it down. That ignited counterprotests from many liberal residents, and the council only relented when it became clear it had no legal recourse.

But here’s where my opinion about the homophobia evinced by the Muslim council gets a bit confused (my bolding):

The resolution, which also prohibits the display of flags with ethnic, racist and political views, comes at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under assault worldwide. . . .

First, the ban is only for flags on city property, which constitute an official government statement.  I am of course for total gay rights identical to normal civil rights,  but putting pro-gay flags on city property is a political statement, much as you may disagree. If you allow that, then you allow all kinds of displays on city property that people might disagree with. What about putting up flags of Christian organizations, or the Confederate flag, or a display of the Ten Commandments? Surely you’d object to those, but free speech demands that if you allow one expression of political sentiments on city property, you must allow them all. (Yes, I know that some U.S. courts have allowed privately-funded displays of Ten Commandments on public property, often on grounds that it’s a “historical and not a religious” statement, but I think they’re dead wrong. Just read the Bible!)

And in fact the resolution could be interpreted, whatever its motivations, as mandating viewpoint neutrality. Again:

The resolution, which also prohibits the display of flags with ethnic, racist and political views, comes at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under assault worldwide,

So, much as we may deplore the homophobia instantiated by this vote, the ban was extended to all flags expressing political and ideological views. It’s really no different from the institutional neutrality of the University of Chicago. It’s one thing to have a statement in the law or in University rules saying the organization doesn’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, which is a good thing to declare, but another thing entirely to publicly celebrate gay rights with flags.

If you allow such celebrations, that you must allow celebrations of all sentiments, and, depending who’s in charge of flags, you might not like some of the stuff being celebrated.  Remember that the Confederate flag used to fly over the dome of the Capitol Building of South Carolina, until governor Nikki Haley declared in 2015 that it should be removed, and signed a bill to that effect. It was, of course, celebrating segregation. There are still bad feelings about the flag’s removal, of course.

A Hamtramck councilman expressed this sentiment, though he may well be dissimulating:

The resolution, brought by city council member Mohammed Hassan, says that the city will not provide special treatment to any group of people. City council members shared that flying a Pride flag could potentially lead to other “radical or racist groups” asking for their flags to be flown.

So while I do approve of a resolution that limits flags conveying political or ideological sentiments, I also disapprove of the timing of this resolution, which was clearly meant to convey a homophobic message during Pride Month.  And it’s clear that this resolution was at bottom motivated by religious beliefs. But in the end, state governments, like universities, should show political, ideological, and moral neutrality in their public displays. An American and a state or city flag is sufficient.

However, a resolution that demonizes gays, damns Gay Pride Month, or tries to curb LGBTQ+ rights, well, that’s another thing, for that is discrimination.

Feel free to agree or disagree below.

 

h/t:Peter

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 19, 2023 • 8:15 am

These photos came from Emilio d’Alise nearly two years ago, but weren’t posted as he couldn’t identify them. However, I saved them with the tentative IDs because they’re lovely photos of lovely birds. Click on the photos to enlarge them, and remember that these are guesses (the adults may be okay; I don’t have the records).

Emilio:

Identifying females and juveniles of various species is difficult. All the resources I know are sketchy on female/immature/juvenile identifications. There are some markings that can be used, but if you look at a photo twice, you’ll convince yourself of two different answers.
The immature males are easier, and some of the female have distinctive markings when in flight or the tail is splayed. When perched, it’s a best-guess (why I originally didn’t try).
However, I took another look and I’m attaching one file with my guesses.
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Immature rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus), males:

Adult rufous hummingbirds:

2014 Flowers,

Monday: Hili dialogue

June 19, 2023 • 6:45 am

It’s Monday, June 19, 2023, and therefore the U.S. national holiday of Juneteenth, There’s a celebratory Google Doodle today, click on the photo below to go to a search as well as an animated search page with confetti and celebrants.

In case you don’t remember the origins of the holiday, here’s what Wikipedia says:

Deriving its name from combining June and nineteenth, it is celebrated on the anniversary of the order by Major General Gordon Granger proclaiming freedom for enslaved people in Texas on June 19, 1865 (two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued).

They had already been freed and apparently didn’t know it!  In honor of the holiday, the contractor who cleans the building here is making its employees, most of whom are black, go to work!  The rest of us white academics get to celebrate on their behalf.

It’s also National Martini Day a drink I’m not that fond of, but will drink if it’s put in front of me (I prefer a Gibson: the version with a pickled onion instead of an olive. This one has a little too much vermouth, and could use a couple more onions (I love gin-soaked marinated cocktail onions). 

It’s also Take Your Cat to Work Day, World Albatross Day, National Eat an Oreo Day (see if you can find a green tea Oreo), Ride to Work Day and World Sickle Cell Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 19 Wikipedia page.

There will be no readers’ wildlife feature tomorrow as I have only a couple more groups of photos and must conserve them. It’s clear that this website and its readers are running out of steam.

Da Nooz:

*The WaPo explains how Trump could use the rules to delay his trial until after the election next year. It’s not pretty.

As former president Donald Trump prepares for trial on charges that he repeatedly violated government rules for handling classified information, his legal team may get a tactical timing advantage from an unlikely source: government rules for handling such secrets.

Trump’s indictment on dozens of charges, including mishandling classified documents and trying to obstruct investigators’ efforts to recover that material, means his case will be tried under the rules of the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA — a law that could, in theory, delay any trial until after the 2024 presidential election.

. . .Passed in 1980, CIPA was designed to fix what government lawyers call the “graymail” problem in national security cases — a tactic in which defendants raise the possibility that damaging classified information could be revealed at trial. In some cases, prosecutors have dropped charges or entire cases rather than risk the disclosure of the very secrets the government was trying to protect.

While the law has enabled the government to pursue cases involving classified documents that itmight otherwise drop, it has also meant that these trials legally require more precautions and tend to take more time to get to trial than a typical criminal case.

The law created a series of pretrial steps that must be taken to decide exactly what classified information will be used in court, and how. Lawyers who have worked such cases view the law as a time-consuming and difficult set of procedures that can be extremely beneficial to any defendant seeking to delay a trial.

FOR EXAMPLE:

For starters, Trump needs at least one lawyer, and probably more than one, with a security clearance to examine the evidence, as he is accused of illegally retaining 31 separate classified documents, some dealing with highly sensitive nuclear and foreign secrets, at his Mar-a-Lago home and private club.

It can take weeks or sometimes months for a defense lawyer without a security clearance to get one, and over the years Trump has proved to be a difficult client, one who frequently hires, fires or sidelines lawyers.

Thus we face the possibility that a sitting President could have to face criminal charges. Would they then drop the charges because you can’t interrupt the governance of the nation without a Trial.  It seems that Trump gets a lot of lucky breaks on his race to get elected again.

*Intense fighting during Ukraine’s counteroffensive has left high casualties on both sides, but nobody yet has a clear advantage.

Russia and Ukraine are suffering high numbers of military casualties as Ukraine fights to dislodge the Kremlin’s forces from occupied areas in the early stages of its counteroffensive, British officials said Sunday.

Russian losses are probably at their highest level since the peak of the battle for Bakhmut in March, U.K. military officials said in their regular assessment.

According to British intelligence, the most intense fighting has centered on the southeastern Zaporizhzhia province, around Bakhmut and further west in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk province. While the update reported that Ukraine was on the offensive in these areas and had “made small advances,” it said that Russian forces were conducting “relatively effective defensive operations” in Ukraine’s south.

The Ukrainian military said in a regular update Sunday morning that over the previous 24 hours Russia had carried out 43 airstrikes, four missile strikes and 51 attacks from multiple rocket launchers. According to the statement by the General Staff, Russia continues to concentrate its efforts on offensive operations in Ukraine’s industrial east, focusing attacks around Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Marinka and Lyman in Donetsk province, with 26 combat clashes taking place.

. . . Western analysts and military officials have cautioned that Ukraine’s counteroffensive to dislodge the Kremlin’s forces from occupied areas, using Western-supplied advanced weapons in attacks along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, could last a long time.

*Remember the big dam in Ukraine that blew up, and nobody knew who did it? Now the NYT has a piece called “Why the evidence suggests Russia blew up the Kakhova Dam.”

Here’s the logic:

Deep inside the dam was an Achilles’ heel. And because the dam was built during Soviet times, Moscow had every page of the engineering drawings and knew where it was.

The dam was built with an enormous concrete block at its base. A small passageway runs through it, reachable from the dam’s machine room. It was in this passageway, the evidence suggests, that an explosive charge detonated and destroyed the dam.

. . . In the chaotic aftermath, with each side blaming the other for the collapse, multiple explanations are theoretically possible. But the evidence clearly suggests the dam was crippled by an explosion set off by the side that controls it: Russia.

. . .But multiple lines of evidence reviewed by The New York Times, from original engineering plans to interviews with engineers who study dam failures, support a different explanation: that the collapse of the dam was no accident. The catastrophic failure of its underlying concrete foundation was very unlikely to occur on its own.

Given the satellite and seismic detections of explosions in the area, by far the most likely cause of the collapse was an explosive charge placed in the maintenance passageway, or gallery, that runs through the concrete heart of the structure, according to two American engineers, an expert in explosives and a Ukrainian engineer with extensive experience with the dam’s operations.

“If your objective is to destroy the dam itself, a large explosion would be required,” said Michael W. West, a geotechnical engineer and expert in dam safety and failure analysis, who is a retired principal at the engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner. “The gallery is an ideal place to put that explosive charge.”

Further evidence of an explosion:

. . . seismic signals were picked up on two sensors, one in Romania and one in Ukraine, and occurred at 2:35 a.m. and 2:54 a.m. Ukraine time, said Ben Dando, a seismologist at Norsar, a Norwegian organization that specializes in seismology and seismic monitoring. The signals were both consistent with an explosion, Dr. Dando said — and not, say, the collapse of the dam on its own.

Judge for yourself. I lean towards this narrative as Ukraine had no clear reason to flood their own people or to make attacks against the Russians in that region more difficult.

*Given that California has a law, Proposition 209, that bans affirmative action in colleges, how do they manage to retain ethnic diversity? Reuters tells us how one school, UC Berkeley, has tried.

California has pioneered race-blind efforts in college admissions by using factors such as socio-economic status and location to identify disadvantaged students, many of whom are from immigrant or diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Those efforts helped the state’s top public colleges make up much of the ground lost in diversity in the years right after California voters passed the ban on affirmative action in 1996.

Black and Hispanic student enrollment at many U.C. campuses still lags the state’s general population, however.

Berkeley, the system’s most elite school based on high school GPA, offers the starkest example of the struggle to boost their numbers, particularly for Black students. In the fall 2022 freshman class, just 228 out of nearly 7,000 students – about 3% – identified as Black.

. . .With diversity still allowed as a goal, the universities focused on expanding the pool of applicants and on recruitment efforts aimed at enrolling minority students once they were admitted. Top students often have many choices of where to attend.

Outreach programs were set up to help prepare public school students for college and guide them toward applying, with particular focus on schools with high numbers of pupils of color.

At Berkeley, the state-funded bridges Multicultural Resource Center has worked to increase applicants from under-represented backgrounds and then offer food, counseling and other support once they arrive.

Financial aid is also an issue. Berkeley is competing with top private schools like Stanford or Harvard, which have large endowments and can offer more in scholarships, while also using affirmative action to admit students of varied ethnic backgrounds.

Berkeley is way below other schools because of the absence of affirmative action: only 3% of the students are black, less than half the black proportion of the state population (6.5%). When the Court deep-sixes affirmative action, all schools will struggle with getting the diversity they want:

Shereem Herndon-Brown, a college counselor and co-author of the book “The Black Family’s Guide to College Admissions,” said Berkeley’s experience should serve as a warning to other schools of how they will struggle without affirmative action.

“They’re trying their hand at equity, but it’s failing,” he said.

Maybe they shouldn’t be trying their hand at equity.

*Joanna Stern, the WSJ’s computer maven tells us “The Apple device you shouldn’t buy now—and the ones you should.” As you’ll see, the season is also important.

These seem like obvious life rules and yet every year around this time people ask: Should I wait for the new iPhone? And every year I repeat my iPhone No-Buy Rule™: No buying when school’s out—wait until September.

A change coming to the phone’s charging port makes this advice especially timely. The next iPhone—presumably called the iPhone 15—is expected to ship with a USB-C connector, marking the end of the Lightning port’s 11-year run.

. . .I know what you’re thinking: Why wait? This stuff doesn’t even get that much better year after year. You’ve said it yourself! 

True, but with all the product categories, there are two S’s at play: savings and software. Apple and other retailers typically drop prices on the older models when the new ones hit. That’s also when trade-in deals can get crazy good. And if you go with the latest and greatest, it means an additional year—or more—of software updates ahead.

. . . Maybe you’re wondering if it’s OK to buy a used or refurbished iPhone now. They do tend to sell below market price all year long, according to Ben Edwards, chief executive of Swappa, an electronics resale marketplace. So yeah, if you just want a basic iPhone 12 or 13, go for it. Just bear in mind that prices on the older Pro models tend to drop when a new iPhone is announced. If you want a discounted iPhone 14 Pro, it’s still best to wait.

Finally, wait to get new airpods (earpieces), it’s ok to buy the new MacBook Air, but wait on the iMac, since it hasn’t been updated in two years and a new version is coming.

As for the iPad and Apple watches, she gives advice, but I always ignore those products.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili must be reading Proust:

A: What are you doing over there?
Hili: I’m in search of lost time.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tam robisz?
Hili: Szukam straconego czasu.

. . . and a photo of the lovable Szaron:

********************

From Gregory:

From the Absurd Sign Project:

From Merilee:

From Masih, two more young protestors with eyes shot out by the Iranian cops:

From Barry, who wonders whether this is a failure or a comedy act. I think it’s the latter:

From Malcolm, cultivating kittens:

I found this—a kitten who doesn’t know how to drink:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a survivor turns 100 today. Happy birthday, David!

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, an enhanced early color photo:

Matthew and Greg identify a reptile skeleton:

Go to the link so you can see what might be a fake “head” on this reptile’s back:

Māori reject a giant New Zealand ocean sanctuary proposed by the government

June 18, 2023 • 11:10 am

The Māori are the indigenous people of New Zealand, the descendants of Polynesians who made it to the island in the 13th century. After conflict with the Europeans who arrived in the early 19th century, some (but not all) of the Māori tribes (“iwi”) signed the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (“te Tiriti o Waitangi”). That treaty, whose interpretation is in parts ambiguous (partly because there’s an English and Māori version that aren’t 100% interchangeable), nevertheless has three provisions that are clear. Here’s how Wikipedia describes them.

  • Article one of the Māori text grants governance rights to the Crown while the English text cedes “all rights and powers of sovereignty” to the Crown.
  • Article two of the Māori text establishes that Māori will retain full chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures while the English text establishes the continued ownership of the Māori over their lands and establishes the exclusive right of pre-emption of the Crown.
  • Article three gives Māori people full rights and protections as British subjects.

In general, while making Māori subject to British governance, then, it also grants them rights over their land and property and civil rights equal to those of the British subjects in New Zealand.

This last part, the “full rights and protections”, is the part that’s at issue today, for it’s being seen as granting Māori not just legal or moral rights identical to that of “Europeans,” but giving them equal access to and resources of science and natural resources.  I’ve written many times, for example, how the Māori and their supporters are insisting that Maori “ways of knowing” (“Mātauranga Māori”, or MM), be taught as coequal to modern science in school science classes, even though MM has only a small bit of empirical practical knowledge, and largely comprises myth, legend, morality, customs, and religion.

And so it goes with other subjects. The Treaty is interpreted as meaning that Māori get equal say in what kind of science will be done and should get as much money as non-Māori for science projects, even though the people with some or mostly indigenous heritage make up only about 17% of the population. Further, to extend the Treaty to the idea of “equal teaching of science” or “equal grant funding” forces it apply to realms that weren’t even in existence in 1840.

A lot of the fighting about applying the Treaty involves who gets the power to run New Zealand, and because the indigenous people are seen as oppressed “people of color”, there is little pushback to their claims. Teachers objecting to MM being taught in science class, for example, risk their jobs. The epithet of “racism” chills all discourse about how to deal with Māori claims; the group truly has, in New Zealand, what’s been called “the authority of the sacred victim”.

A recent and prime example of misapplication of the Treaty (and of fishing rights negotiated between Māori and the “Crown”), is the overturning of a huge and essential ocean sanctuary proposed and approved by the New Zealand government. Now this sanctuary will not be created because the iwi not only claim fishing rights (which are meager: about $100,000 U.S. per year), but want majority or even full power over the governance of this sanctuary.

What I’ll report here is what I’ve gleaned from several articles, the main ones being below (click to read).

The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, discussed in Parliament since about 2015 (and heavily promoted by former PM Jacinda Ardern), is a proposed 620,000 km² (about 240,000 mi²) sanctuary extending far around New Zealand’s largely uninhabited Kermadec Islands, shown below. The archipelago is located about 1000 km (600 miles) northeast of New Zealand’s North Island, and the islands are where the red marker is:

 

Here’s a pdf of the 17-page proposal from the Minister of the Environment about establishing the Kermadec Sanctuary; and a pdf of the bill is here.

The sanctuary is being established to enlarge by nearly 100-fold the existing Kermadec Marine Reserve, and, at twice the size of New Zealand, would be one of the world’s largest marine reserves. As the Kiwi site Stuff notes:

It supports life not found anywhere else on the planet: home to 431 fish species, six million seabirds, three types of endangered sea turtles, and more than 250 species of coral and aquatic invertebrates.

It is geologically significant, with the world’s longest chain of submerged volcanoes and the second-deepest ocean trench, plunging to depths of 10km – deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

Remote and largely uninhabited, most will never get the chance to visit this subtropic island arc, around 1000 km north-east of the North Island. And that’s what makes it so special – for millennia, it has thrived untouched by human activity.

The Sanctuary is seen as helping fulfill a UN program to protect more of the oceans (one reason being their value as a buffer to climate change). If established, this reserve would, together with ones established by the US, UK, and Australia, protect 3.5 million km² of ocean.

But the Kermadec Sanctuary is not going to happen. Why? Because the Māori commercial fishing interests voiced opposition, and the iwi voted almost unanimously to reject the proposal. Since their assent is essential, the sanctuary is an ex-sanctuary, singing with the Choir Invisible.

The pathetic thing about this objection is that “the Māori commercial fishing interests” are almost nil given that the sanctuary is so far away from the mainland.

[The iwi] argued Māori would no longer be able to source commercial quota from that area. (Officials calculated the catch was small – about 20 tonnes, worth roughly $165,000 a year.) Believing this would override fishing rights enshrined in the ‘Sealord Deal’ – a 1992 commercial fisheries settlement – Māori fisheries trust Te Ohu Kaimoana (TOKM) took legal action.

I’m assuming those are New Zealand dollars since this is a New Zealand site, so the value of the catch is about $102,000 US per year. And THAT is preventing this sanctuary from coming into being? Hell, the government could pay it off easily, and in fact they offered to do so, along with other concessions to the Māori. When it became clear that the Māori weren’t keen on an earlier proposal, the government’s Environment Minister David Parker put this on the table:

Parker, who had hoped to get it over the line before the election, said he had been working on the revised proposal since 2017 to try to get the sanctuary established. His changes included renaming the sanctuary the Ngā Whatu-a-Māui Ocean Sanctuary and setting up a co-governance entity Te Kāhui to manage it. Te Kāhui was to get a $40 million research fund to do that.

The proposed legislation also required it be managed in a way that recognised Māori rights and interests. Te Kāhui was also to be tasked with considering whether the sanctuary could be given legal personhood, as happened with the Whānganui River. It also allowed for a review of the fishing total allowable catch in 10 years’ time, and rights to compensation.

Te Kāhui would consist of four government ministers, four Te Ohu Kaimoana representatives and one representative each for Te Aupōuri and Ngāti Kuri – mana whenua in the area.

You can’t come up with a better deal than that: a cool 40 million in research, co-governance between the “Crown” (the government) and the Māori, renaming the sanctuary, management recognizing Māori rights and interests, and a council with 60% Māori members. Did that fly?

No. The Māori want more. As they made clear, they are “the original conservationists” and don’t want to share any control by the UN or the New Zealand government:

Peter-Lucas Jones of Te Aupōuri said it was never going to support what was proposed – because of the impact on rights and the structure of the proposal.

“We were never going to agree to the Crown extinguishing our indigenous rights and interests in the moana [area of water] that has been identified for the sanctuary.

“[However], we are the original conservationists and we want to see more happen in that space in the interests of the future of our mokopuna [descendants]. But we want to lead that, not be added onto somebody’s relationship strategy with Unesco and the Americans. We want to be part of an idea that looks much further into the future than the next 20 years.”

Parker said iwi had indicated they were not interested in compensation, but the Government had been clear it was willing to consider compensation for fishing rights that would be suspended, saying the cost would be modest because little commercial fishing took place in the area concerned due to its remoteness.

It seems clear that this is not about money or commercial fishing at all; it is a gesture by the Māori to show that, as “the original conservationists” (who killed all the moa and burnt a huge section of the islands), they aren’t getting enough power. They want to LEAD the project, not just be one of a team that include the UN and the NZ government, not to mention the horrible Americans.

This is what conferring authority on a “sacred victim” yields: a huge amount of protection to a fragile ocean environment must give way so that the iwi of the Māori can have power and respect. They don’t want to just be on a team, they want to RUN the team, and in a way beneficial to future Māori.  (As the old saying goes, though, “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team’.”)  That is a selfish inversion of priorities that can endanger not just marine life, but the whole planet.

As usual, I got this tip from an anonymous Kiwi scientist who is angry not just at what happened, but at the fact that other Kiwi scientists aren’t objecting to the unconscionable usurpation of power based on the “sacred victim” narrative. As the scientist told me:

I don’t know why iwi rejected it, but it looks as if the iwi want to control the whole process. What interested me was the lack of comment from marine conservationists. Normally when an MPA [“Marine Protected Area”] proposal is rejected there is a lot of protest. This time – crickets.
This lack of protest, of course, is because those who object to the Māori’s demands will be called racists.