Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 18, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning on Sunday, June 18, 2023, and International Picnic Day; here’s a Gary Larson Far Side celebration:

It’s Father’s Day, though I doubt my step-ducklings will celebrate me.  There’s a special Google Doodle with drawings father frogs, lions, and penguins; click below to see them:

Rick Bannister sent a birthday thought from Roger Ebert:

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren’t you halfway there?
-Roger Ebert, film critic (18 Jun 1942-2013)

It’s also National Splurge Day, International Panic Day (every day for me!), National Turkey Lovers’ Day (note that the apostrophe is placed properly), International Sushi Day, Go Fishing Day, and, in the UK, Waterloo Day. the day in 1815 when Napoleon’s forces were defeated by a coalition of soldiers from the UK, Netherlands, and Prussia.  After the French loss, Napoleon abdicated. Here’s a painting of the fight, “The Battle of Waterloo, by William Sadler II” (click to enlarge):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In a WaPo article called “Trump’s indictment plus candidacy could endanger democracy and the rule of law“, authors Dan Balz, Ann E. Marimow, and Perry Stein argue (convincingly, I think) that Trump’s candidacy for President could wreck both the political and legal system of America.

The indictment in the case involving Trump’s retention of classified government documents coming in the midst of a presidential campaign raises legal questions about what might happen if he were to be convicted and elected. Could Trump pardon himself? Could he serve as president after a conviction? Could he run for office from a prison cell? Depending on events, those could become ripe for adjudication.

On top of those legal questions are big issues confronting the country. With other investigations continuing — one into Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and in the fake electors scheme, and the other looking at his efforts to overturn the Georgia results of the 2020 presidential election — more damage might be inflicted on these democratic institutions by the battering likely to take place between now and the inauguration in 2025.

“It seems obvious and clear that it’s going to be worse and probably much worse, but the form it might take and what that extreme reaction looks like is very hard to predict,” said Jack Goldsmith, who served in the Justice Department and at the Pentagon during the administration of George W. Bush and now is a professor at Harvard Law School. “Convicted or not, nominee or not, we can assume [Trump] is going to inflame this to the maximum and his supporters will inflame this to the maximum.”

. . .For the past three years, Trump has sought to shred long-standing trust in the country’s electoral process, claiming falsely that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. With no supporting evidence to buttress those claims, public opinion surveys suggest that Trump nonetheless has persuaded millions of Republican voters that President Biden was not legitimately elected. Election denialism now infects a large portion of the Republican Party.

With the new indictment, Trump is again taking direct aim at the integrity of law enforcement agencies, the judicial system and, ultimately, public faith in the rule of law. He did this as president, and now, in the aftermath of his 37 charges in the documents case — to which he pleaded not guilty — he has escalated those attacks in an effort to discredit the Justice Department and the FBI, claiming he is a victim of a politicized “witch hunt.”

This is not the first time the political and legal systems have been tested together. But past comparisons are imperfect because the state of the country has changed. As a result, institutions of government are more fragile. That heightens the risks to the country this time.

Trump’s election next year would be my worst nightmare (actually, second to being given a terminal medical diagnosis, which in effect is what America would get if he becomes President.)

*The NYT reports that Russia is getting its military act in order, changing tactics to avoid the missteps of the first year of its war with Ukraine.

Russia won ground early in the war with sheer firepower. Interviews with 17 Ukrainian soldiers, a Russian prisoner of war, officers, foreign fighters and Western officials, as well as a review of documents and videos, show that, in recent months, the Kremlin’s gains, especially in Bakhmut, have come in part because of a series of adaptations.

Russian armored columns, for instance, no longer rush into areas where they can be quickly damaged or destroyed. Troops are more often using drones and probing attacks — and sometimes just shouting — to find Ukrainian trenches before striking. And the mercenary Wagner Group has shown an ability to outpace Ukrainian defenders with a combination of improved tactics and disposable ranks.

. . . As it begins its long-awaited counteroffensive, Ukraine is well armed, backed by improved communication technology and American and European weaponry.

But Moscow’s forces have improved their defenses, artillery coordination and air support, setting up a campaign that could look very different from the war’s early days. These improvements, Western officials say, will most likely make Russia a tougher opponent, particularly as it fights defensively, playing to its battlefield strengths. This defensive turn is a far cry from Russia’s initial plan for a full-scale invasion and Ukrainian defeat.

Ceiling Cat forbid, what would happen if Russia achieved total victory and took over the whole country? There’s nothing we could do save levy more ineffectual sanctions. Putin is now claiming the Belarus is part of Russia, and Ukraine would become that, too.

*This is amazing: the governor of Pennsylvania announced that the stretch of Interstate 95 (the major N-S road in the eastern U.S.) destroyed after a tanker truck burst into flames and collapsed several sections of the road, will reopen within only two weeks. When it first happened, all the news was saying it would be “many weeks, perhaps months,” until the road opened again.

The stretch of the East Coast’s main north-south highway collapsed early last Sunday after a tractor-trailer hauling gasoline flipped over on an off-ramp and caught fire. State transportation officials said the driver was trying to navigate a curve and lost control.

“I’ve directed my team … to move heaven and earth to get this done as soon as humanly possible,” Biden said. He said he told the governor, “There’s no more important project right now in the country as far as I’m concerned.” The president described it as an “all hands on deck” project to address a “crisis.”

“We’re with you. We’re going to stay with you until this is rebuilt, until it’s totally finished,” he said at the briefing.

Pennsylvania’s plan for the work involves trucking in 2,000 tons of lightweight glass nuggets for the quick rebuilding, with crews working around the clock until the interstate is open to traffic. Instead of rebuilding the overpass right away, crews will use the recycled glass to fill in the collapsed area to avoid supply-chain delays for other materials, Shapiro has said.

After that, a replacement bridge will be built next to it to reroute traffic while crews excavate the fill to restore the exit ramp, officials have said.

Biden said the design was “incredibly innovative in order to get this work done in record time.”

The use of glass nuggets underlying the asphalt, a new technology, is going to save a lot of time—and a lot of commuter griping. NPR noted today that traffic delays around the damaged spot can vary between five minutes to well over an hour.

*At 75, Carlos Santana (do the young folk appreciate him?) is still touring. The AP describes that and also has an absorbing interview with the Associated Press. There will also be a documentary about him, “Carlos“, released in the fall.

The interview is called “Carlos Santana: ‘My guitar is my best lover, ever.'”, and you can see from the video below why he’d say that. He really does look as if he’s making love to his axe.

One excerpt from the interview:

AP: There are many enduring relationships you have in “Carlos” but how would you characterize your relationship to the guitar?

SANTANA: My guitar is my best lover, ever. Lovers come and go, but your relationship with the guitar — any brand or anything — stays. But it’s your relationship with that sound. When you put your fingers on that note, you get chills. That’s the best lover. You discover the sensation of getting the first French kiss. I’ll stop there because this should be PG. But it all deals with the same thing. It all deals with “Oh my God.” The big G-spot, which is God. When you hit that, they all go, “Oh my God.” When you play music like that, it’s more than just clever notes. It becomes emotion, feelings, passion. That’s music to me. Music without emotion, passion or feelings is just clever noise. This is what’s missing from the planet right now. People forgot how to feel. Stop, take a deep breathe and feel what your feeling.

This is the famous version of “Soul Sacrifice” from 1969’s Woodstock, a performance that brought Santana’s group to national renown. The fantastic drumwork was by Michael Shrieve, only 20 at the time.  As Santana admits below, he was tripping on mescaline during the song. The interview also sounds like Santana is tripping as he speaks!

AP: In the film, you recount how Jerry Garcia gave you mescaline shortly before you took the stage at Woodstock, thinking you had hours before you performed. In arguably the most celebrated set of Woodstock, you were tripping and praying…

SANTANA: “God, please let me stay on tune and in time.” I could have laid a big egg in front of everybody. It was scary to look at the audience. But what came through was my mother’s confidence: God is by your side. How can you go wrong?

*Biologists are still going nuts trying to impose human social phenomena on nature—this time on BEES!  Yes, as Colin Wright reports,  Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues, in an article in Compact, that worker bees are bisexual, and, indeed, transsexual.  We all know, of course, they’re sterile female, with rudimentary female reproductive systems (only the queen reproduces). Workers have no trace of any male reproductive system.

The quote from befuddled philosopher Žižek:

Today’s gender ideology, by contrast, achieves no such thing. Its operations are rather more like the world of bees, the large majority of which are desexualized “workers” (with their reproductive organs vestigial but remaining well within the biological matrix of sexual reproduction). A corporate honeymaker tells us that

only the queen bee and the drones have a fully developed reproductive system. The worker bees have an atrophic reproductive system. Seven days after her incubation, the queen bee flies outside the beehive, where drones gather, and she mates usually with eight-to-12 drones in midair in the afternoon hours—true love in the afternoon, as the title of a movie says. During mating, the drone’s genitals are reversed and come out of his body, and with his abdominal muscles contracting, he ejaculates. Then his genitals are cut from his body by the queen, causing his death, and the next drone enters…. The queen stores the entire spermatozoon in the spermatheca, and her gland excretes nutrients for the survival of almost 7,000,000 spermatozoa, which are adequate for the rest of her life. During the egg-laying, the queen bee chooses whether she will fertilize every egg that passes through her oviduct; she lays two kinds of eggs, fertilized and non-fertilized. The non-fertilized ones develop into drones, while the fertilized grow into female individuals—this determination is called gender determination. Afterwards, the female individuals can develop into queens or workers, depending on their nutrition during their larva stage—this determination is called caste determination.

If we read this description from our human standpoint, does it not render a weird matriarchal caste society? All the work is done by bees appropriately named workers: They are feminine, with their reproductive organs remaining undeveloped, so they aren’t sexualized, but literally trans-sexual. The sexual intercourse (impregnation) between a queen bee and the drones happens only once in their lifetime: After intercourse, drones die, while the queen gathers enough sperm to last for her entire life. So if the queen is a she and a drone a he, what are the workers? To use today’s nonbinary parlance, are the workers not precisely they? Bees thus form the only known society in which the large majority are “they,” while the worst fate awaits the masculine drones.

Then Wright sets him straight:

Regardless, Žižek’s claim that honeybee workers are “literally trans-sexual” and neither a “she” nor a “he” is wildly inaccurate. As someone who studied social insects as a scientist for nearly seven years and published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers on them, including the most comprehensive review of collective personalities in eusocial insects and arachnids to date, I can say with confidence that he has no idea what he’s talking about.

I suppose tending the hive is supposed to be a MAN’S job, and if a sterile female does it, she’s transsexual. (Likewise, I suppose, one could argue that female lions, who do most of the hunting, are also transsexual, though their ovaries are functional!)

Colin goes on to show how workers are not binary, they are not “theys”, and of course they cannot be transsexual.  As Wright shows, Žižek’s is someone reading a very confused gender ideology into science. The lesson is that nobody should let ideological philosophers anywhere near biology.

A drawing from Colin’s Substack piece with the proper pronouns

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili pines for a d*g.  Malgorzata explains: “Hili loves dogs. She was raised with Darwin and Emma and later Cyrus was her great friend. Andrzej suspects that she thinks she is a dog and that’s why it took her so many years to accept Szaron and why she still dislikes Kulka.”

Hili: I may have the house and many servants but something is missing.
A: What?
Hili: A big dog, maybe a St Bernard.
In Polish:
Hili: Niby mam dom i liczną służbę, ale czegoś mi brakuje.
Ja: Czego?
Hili: Dużego psa, może być bernardyn.

And a picture of Kulka:

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From Beth, a great tee-shirt:

From The Absurd Sign Project:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Masih; they’re burning portraits of the Ayatollah! Sound up.

From Emma Hilton. Be sure to read the “context” material that Twitter users added. (I needn’t add that I’m against capital punishment):

From Malcolm: Cats vs. d*gs:

This is adorable: kitten gets swatted for misbehaving and then carried back home:

From the Auschwitz Memorial; a 12-year-old girl gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, still in Paris. First, technology advances:

This is a real duck, a male Northern Shoveler (Spatula clypeata):

Sexual dimorphism in dinosaurs! The hindlimb variation falls into two groups.

A Dumbo octopus

June 17, 2023 • 2:19 pm

There are 17 species in the genus Grimpoteuthis, or “Dumbo octopus”, and you can see where the name comes from in the short video below. It was just posted a few days ago (this species is in the deep ocean), and here are the YouTube notes:

Our Corps of Exploration spotted this absolutely adorable pale orange dumbo octopus surrounded by marine snow around 1,400 meters deep while diving on the summit of “Guyot 10” in the waters of the Pacific Remote Islands. Don’t let its Disney-like appearance fool you; these octopuses (Grimpoteuthis spp) are actually predators! They propel themselves through the water using those famous ear-shaped fins to find food, then gobble their prey up whole, feasting on a plethora of deep sea critters such as copepods, isopods, bristle worms, and amphipods. Learn more about this expedition funded by NOAA Ocean Exploration via the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute: https://nautiluslive.org/cruise/na149

And from Wikipedia:

The name “dumbo” originates from their resemblance to the title character of Disney‘s 1941 film Dumbo, having a prominent ear-like fin which extends from the mantle above each eye. There are 17 species recognized in the genus. Prey include crustaceans, bivalves, worms and copepods. The average life span of various Grimpoteuthis species is 3 to 5 years.

Here’s a shot of Dumbo (who could fly with his ears) from the original movie, and I’ve put the trailer below it”

From IMDb

Remember this?

 

Texas and Arkansas deep-six DEI offices in colleges and universities

June 17, 2023 • 11:20 am

The pushback to affirmative action is already beginning, even before the Supreme Court has handed down its decision—probably one that will end race-based school admissions. Two states, Texas and Arkansas, are already dismantling their DEI programs, the former by law and the second by “choice.”

The article below, from the Dallas News, notes the passage of a bill in Texas (promoted by Republicans and fought tooth and nail by Democrats) that will get rid of all DEI offices and programs in higher education. It’s been signed into law by Republican governor Greg Abbott.

Click to read

The Texas bill does more than just close DEI offices; it also eliminates any DEI training (usually conducted by those offices) and the use of mandatory DEI statements in hiring.   The newspaper doesn’t quote anybody favoring the bill, but does quote two opponents of the bill:

This is a sad occasion for all students at Texas’ public universities,” Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said in a statement. “By dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and offices at these institutions, Texas lawmakers have chosen to prioritize a political agenda instead of the success of these students.”

Academic quality is enhanced and not diminished by DEI programs, she said. ”Even if diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and offices are dismantled, our nation is diverse and diversifying, and diversity on Texas campuses will not disappear,” she said.

”The passage of [this bill] sends a strong message to current and prospective faculty and students that Texas does not welcome a strong, diverse, empowered higher education community,” Pat Heintzelman, president of the Texas Faculty Association, said in a statement. “We are already losing good people as a result of this legislation for no good reason. Texas is now less competitive in higher education than it was just months ago.”

And they quote the President of UT Austin, who isn’t explicit about the bill but clearly was against it given his statements favoring diversity initiatives:

UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell is one of the few college leaders to make a public statement about the bill prior to the governor signing it in early June.

He asked for the community’s patience while his team works to understand “the contours of the new legal framework and how the UT System will implement its oversight under the new legislation.”

“What will not change is our University leadership’s commitment to attracting, supporting and retaining exceptionally talented staff, faculty and students with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and fostering and celebrating diversity across our community,” Hartzell wrote.

The Texas legislature also tried to pass a law completely eliminating tenure (a way to get rid of professors who don’t say the right things, teach the right things, or behave the right way), but that one failed. They did, however, make explicit the criteria under which professors could be dismissed:

Currently, tenure policies indicate professors can only be terminated for a justifiable cause or under extreme circumstances, such as program discontinuation or severe financial restraints.

Under the new law, universities will now be able to dismiss professors for exhibiting “professional incompetence” or “moral turpitude;” neglecting duties or professional responsibilities; failing to complete post-tenure reviews; violating laws or policies of a university or institution; being convicted of a crime; or engaging in unprofessional conduct.

In most places I know of, you can already be dismissed as a tenured professor if you’re guilty of many of these things, but “engaging in unprofessional conduct” is slippery and subjective.

The Arkansas Advocate reports a similar decision by the state’s flagship campus in Fayetteville. Click to read:

This initiative, which will close down the DEI offices and relocate the employees, wasn’t in response to a state law but was apparently the initiative of the University itself, probably anticipating the Supreme Court decision. Further, the University was already under criticism by Republican state officials, including Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Sanders has already issued an executive order banning “indoctrination” of secondary-school students with views like Critical Race Theory.  The legislature, though, had previously failed to “end state-sponsored affirmative action programs.’

There are two ironic things about Arkansas’s decision. The first is that it was announced by Charles Robinson, the first black Chancellor at the University of Arkansas. The second is that Robinson (unless he really approves of the ban) is trying to make the best of it by pretending, along with the school’s director of media relations, that it’s was done simply to improve the University. It may well do that, but it’s probably not the reason they’re taking this pre-emptive action. They want a system in place that can do an end-run around the Supreme Court decision without violating the law. Look at this gobbledygook:

UA Director of Media Relations John Thomas said in an email to the Arkansas Advocate that all DEI office employees will have the opportunity to be reassigned to a new position in a different unit focused on student or employee recruitment and success.

The goal of this restructure is to further the university’s mission, Thomas said.

“Aligning resources directly to the ‘front lines’ of our support for student success and employee recruitment and development will provide direct access, achieve measurable results and help us better fulfill our land-grant mission for which we are accountable to the people of Arkansas,” he said.

In Wednesday’s email, Robinson said he wanted to share a progress report on the university’s strategic planning process, which he said “has affirmed that supporting equal opportunity, access and belonging are critical to our land-grant mission and university values.”

“It is my belief based on my experience as having served as Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Provost — and now as Chancellor — that we can accomplish better outcomes by reallocating resources into these essential areas,” he said. “We must strengthen our ability to achieve measurable results that enhance opportunity for all Arkansans.”

In general, I’m not in favor of big DEI offices or programs in universities, as they’re usually intrusive, helping the university skirt the Bakke that forbade quotas (look at what Harvard did!), fostering and sometimes requiring patronizing diversity and equity training, promoting the quashing of free speech (as recently happened at Stanford), and sucking up an enormous amount of resources with very little to show for it. UC Berkeley, for example, pays 400 people: 150 employees and 250 students, to maintain DEI programs, all requiring $25 million a year. To me that is a program far too bloated, and using up tons of money that could support teaching and learning.

DEI programs also participate, in some places, in promoting requirements or requests for “diversity statements” of job applicants, something I see as illegal: compelled speech that violates the First Amendment. They are self-perpetuating, with a palpable interest in maintaining DEI programs, and the jobs of those involved by constantly supporting a narrative that involves racism and racial divisiveness.

Their overall effect seems to me negative, and in net inimical to free speech and academic freedom. At Harvard, the DEI mentality clearly was involved in discriminating against Asian students, using the ruse that they had lower “personality scores”, which I find ludicrous and unconvincing. And that is one of the two cases the Supreme Court is taking up.

Still, I think there’s room for a few diversity experts in universities—just not whole offices and huge university-wide initiatives. Genuine experts in discrimination can protect entire groups of students from discrimination: not just blacks and Hispanics, but first-generation students as well as religious groups like Muslims and Jews who argue that they often face discrimination. Somebody with expertise has to adjudicate these cases.  And perhaps a few DEI people can help construct ways to widen the net for attractomg students without lowering admissions standards, making sure that all prospective students are reached so they can have equal opportunity for admission.

Arkansas is shifting its DEI resources into other channels, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing:

Beginning in the fall, existing resources and personnel currently assigned to the DEI Division will be incorporated in Student Success, Student Affairs, Human Resources, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Compliance and University Advancement “so that these areas can expand programs around access, opportunity and developing a culture of belonging for all students and employees,” Robinson wrote.

Additionally, the Office of Equal Opportunity & Compliance will be “formally aligned” with Human Resources while also maintaining a direct reporting line to the chancellor’s office.

The decision to reallocate the DEI Division’s resources comes at a time when initiatives addressing topics like diversity and race are facing pushback nationwide.

UA Director of Media Relations John Thomas said in an email to the Arkansas Advocate that all DEI office employees will have the opportunity to be reassigned to a new position in a different unit focused on student or employee recruitment and success.

Now this may be a distinction without a difference, but surely all schools are going to have to make big changes when the Supreme Court rules out race-based admissions.  Many schools, of course, have declared diversity to be a top priority, almost coequal with education, and it will be interesting to see how they deal with the overthrow of the 1978 Bakke decision, which will come any day now.

h/t: Mark

Caturday felids trifecta: Famous cats; how to make your cat love you; NYRB reviews several cat books

June 17, 2023 • 9:45 am

I am running low on cat-related items for future Caturday felids. If you come across an interesting cat-related piece, please send it my way.

Did you know that Wikipedia has a list of famous and notable cats? Yes it does, with lots of them! Click below to go down the rabbit hole, for many of the cats have their own entries.

Here’s just an excerpt (click on links to see cats). Oscar the hospice cat is the one that freaks me out the most.  He would lie down beside terminally ill patients right before they were out to die. In fact, as the article says,

Joan Teno, a physician at Steere House, clarified that “it’s not that the cat is consistently there first. But the cat always does manage to make an appearance, and it always seems to be in the last two hours.”[9]

After Oscar accurately predicted 25 deaths, staff started calling family members of residents as soon as they discovered him sleeping next to a patient in order to notify them and give them an opportunity to say goodbye before the impending death.  

He accurately predicted 100 out of 100 deaths, and nobody knows how he did it!  (Some say it was confirmation bias, but read this article in the New England Journal of Medicine. If you can’t get it, ask me.) This is one case in which I’ll suspend skepticism. Here’s Oscar, the Cat of Death.

  • Beerbohm, a cat that resided at the Gielgud Theatre in London.
  • Blackie the Talking Cat, a “talking” cat who was exhibited (for donations) by an unemployed couple on the streets of Augusta, Georgia. Blackie became the subject of a court case, Miles v. City Council of Augusta.
  • Blue, a Siamese cat taken “hostage” in Gresham, Oregon in a grocery store in the United States in 1994.
  • Browser, a Texas library cat.
  • CC (Copy Cat, or Carbon Cat), the first cloned cat.
  • Chase No Face, a cat who lost her face in an accident, was a therapy cat for people with disfigurements.[55]
  • Crimean Tom, a cat that helped British Army troops find food after the Siege of Sevastopol
  • Dusty the Klepto Kitty (US), notorious for being an expert night cat burglar.[56]
  • Emily, an American cat who, after being lost, was found to have gone to France.[57]
  • Faith, a London cat that took up residence in St Faith & St Augustine’s church (by St Paul’s Cathedral) in wartime, and received a PDSA Silver Medal for her bravery in caring for her kitten when the church was bombed.[58]
  • Fred the Undercover Kitty, a cat famous for assisting the NYPD and Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office in 2006.
  • Jack, a cat who was lost by American Airlines baggage handlers at John F Kennedy airport before Hurricane Irene.[59] He was found later but was severely dehydrated and malnourished after his 61-day ordeal[60] and was euthanized.[61]
  • Lewis, a cat who became infamous after being placed under house arrest.
  • Little Nicky, the first animal cloned for commercial reasons.
  • Marzipan (c.1992–2013), a calico cat who lived in the lobby of Astor Theatre in Melbourne, Australia. She was the theatre’s unofficial mascot and was often seen sitting on the couches, waiting for the patrons to pat her as they left the cinema. She was also known to stroll in the cinema and watch the movies, or simply wander down the aisle and sit on patrons’ laps.[62] She had her own Facebook fan page.[63]
  • Mike (1908 – January 1929), a cat who guarded the entrance to the British Museum.
  • Mittens (~2009–present), a ginger Turkish Angora who wanders Wellington, New Zealand, and has a Facebook-based fanbase who regularly posts photos of him climbing into rental cars, entering businesses, and napping in unusual places.
  • Nora, a gray tabby cat who plays the piano alongside her owner.
  • Oscar, a cat fitted with bionic hind legs following an accident in 2009.
  • Oscar the hospice cat, written up in the New England Journal of Medicine for his uncanny ability to predict which patients will die by curling up to sleep with them hours before their death. To date he has been right 100+ times.[64][65]

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You probably already know what you’re supposed to do to communicate with your cat. Guess first!

From ScienceAlert; click on screenshot:

An excerpt:

Never fear – research from 2020 has shown that it’s not so difficult. You just need to smile at them more. Not the human way, by baring your teeth, but the cat way, by narrowing your eyes and blinking slowly.

By observing cat-human interactions, scientists confirmed that this expression makes cats – both familiar and strange – approach and be more receptive to humans.

“As someone who has both studied animal behavior and is a cat owner, it’s great to be able to show that cats and humans can communicate in this way,” Karen McComb, a University of Sussex psychologist, said in a 2020 statement.

“It’s something that many cat owners had already suspected, so it’s exciting to have found evidence for it.”

Here’s a demonstration:

The SCIENCE:

Anecdotal evidence from cat owners has hinted that humans can copy this expression to communicate to cats that we are friendly and open to interaction. So, a team of psychologists designed two experiments to determine whether cats behaved differently towards slow–blinking humans.

In the first experiment, owners slow-blinked at 21 cats from 14 different households. Once the cat was settled and comfy in one spot in their home environment, the owners were instructed to sit about 1 meter away and slow-blink when the cat was looking at them. Cameras recorded both the owner’s and the cat’s faces, and the results were compared to how cats blink with no human interaction.

The results showed that cats are more likely to slow-blink at their humans after their humans have slow–blinked at them, compared to the no–interaction condition.

The second experiment included 24 cats from eight different households. This time, it wasn’t the owners doing the blinking but the researchers, who’d had no prior contact with the cat. For a control, the cats were recorded responding to a no–blink condition, in which humans stared at the cats without blinking their eyes.

The researchers performed the same slow–blink process as the first experiment, adding an extended hand toward the cat. And they found that not only were the cats more likely to blink back, but they were also more likely to approach the human’s hand after the human blinked.

“This study is the first to experimentally investigate the role of slow blinking in cat-human communication,” McComb said.

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The New York Review of Books has a cat issue with a review of five books on cats by Gregory Hays, an associate professor of classics at the University of Virginia.  If you click on the second screenshot, you can read his article for free!

I’ve put the five books below with their Amazon links.

John Gray’s book has gotten good reviews in other places, too. Here’s from Hays’s bit about it:

Cats aren’t preoccupied with being good, only with being cats. They are incapable of empathy, altruism, pity, or kindness, and likewise incapable of cruelty or sadism. They are beyond good and evil. Cats don’t know that they will die, though they may sense the approach of death when it comes. They do not search for meaning in their lives.

Cats refute continuously the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, by living it. They are both Stoics and Epicureans: they live in accordance with nature and they seek to maximize pleasure. But they do this without reading treatises or attending lectures. Nor do they share the defensive outlook and rejection of the world common to both schools. That cats have no use for philosophy is an indictment, for Gray, not of cats, but of philosophy: “Posing as a cure, philosophy is a symptom of the disorder it pretends to remedy.”

If cats have the answer—that there is no answer, for there is no question—it follows that the best philosophers will be the most catlike. A cautionary example here is Pascal, who lived an anxious life trying to overcome his dread of death through faith and reason. Not a cat person, Pascal. Gray’s sympathies lie rather with Montaigne and Samuel Johnson, who recognize the futility of human striving and urge us to take life as it comes. Not surprisingly, both were cat owners.

Soden’s book is a fictional biography of Jeoffrey, the cat celebrated by Christopher Smart as his companion in the lunatic asylum. Smart’s poem (a fragment of Jubilate Agno) is my favorite bit of literature about cats, and you can read it here.  All cat lovers need to know this relatively short fragment of poetry that, to me, best sums up how humans see cat-ness.

Hays says this:

Unsurprisingly, the years with Smart are the heart of the book. The asylum period is an imprisonment for Jeoffry too. Used to the sounds and smells of London, he is now confined by a wire-topped wall to Smart’s room and tiny garden. We watch with him as Smart is force-fed his “medicine” and herded out naked into the rain with other patients, in lieu of bathing. Soden movingly imagines Smart’s mental illness as experienced by Jeoffry:

To Jeoffry, the man smelled of fear…. Around Smart stretched something that was not there, but which Jeoffry could see all the same: an absence of light, like a silk blanket that was not black but blank, that was not dark but vacuous, empty of meaning, devoid of sense…. On some days the blanket and its jabs sent Smart mad, and on other days it sent him still, and sometimes Jeoffry could see that it wasn’t there at all. Jeoffry knew it for what it was, but what it was he could not say.

Whether this catches a cat’s experience, who can know? But at least it takes seriously the gulf between cats and ourselves.

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

h/t: cesar

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 17, 2023 • 8:15 am

We have several contributors today, whose notes and IDs are indented. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

First, some photos of owls living in Dobrzyn.  Can you ID them? (To me it looks like a juvenile, and note that it has a mustache.)

This is what Malgorzata says, “Yesterday evening Andrzej posted 3 pictures of an owl which Paulina took. We have 4 owls as lodgers this year, probably parents and two young. We are not sure where their nest is but it is in our garden.” Andrzej’s caption:

Paulina’s late night owl hunting (in Polish: “Nocne polowanie Pauliny na sowy.”)

From Charles Sawicki, in Fargo, North Dakota:

A few years ago I raised native leaf cutting bees (family Megachilidae), that normally live in hollow plant stems, and discovered that their population is severely limited by a lack of nest sites. Identification of the particular species requires examination, under magnification by an expert. [JAC: the bees provision each cell for the larvae with pollen or a mixture of nectar and pollen. You may have these bees in your yard, and can just use straws and a container to rear many of them.]

These bees build little cells blocked at the ends with leaf pieces and bee secretions. Each cell is about 0.6 inches long and contains pollen and an egg that eventually develops into a bee. The straws were held in 4-inch plastic pipes, and held about 12 cells each. In year 1 I had only three full tubes, in year 2, 32 tubes and in year 3 there were 305 filled tubes. As can be seen in the first picture, near the center, the bees sometimes cut out pieces of pink flowers instead of leaves. These photos were taken in year 3. The first photo shows bees in the process of filling straws. The second photo shows filled straws in one pipe.

These bees can also make their pipes by rolling cut-up leaves. Here are some leaf-cutter cells from Bangalore India (photo from Wikipedia):

From Robert Woolley:

My favorite wildlife photo is attached. It’s an Eastern copperhead snake  (Agkistrodon contortrix) on a tree stump in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, in western North Carolina. There’s a sneaky second copperhead visible on the left, which I didn’t even know was there until I got home and looked at the photos.

From James Sutzer:

Here’s a few photos of an Eastern racer (Coluber constrictor)  I found passing through my backyard yesterday. Looks like he needed a drink. Later I watched him climb a tree in my front yard. Haven’t seen him since.

Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 17, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning on cat shabbos: it’s Saturday, June 17, 2023, and a day of cultural appropriation: National Apple Strudel Day. This photo is from a site giving you the top five places in Vienna to eat the pastry. You must have whipped cream and coffee (preferably an Einspänner):

It’s also Dog Dad’s Day (does only one male own a d*g?), Global Garbage Man Day, World Croc Day (the reptile, not the shoe), National Eat Your Vegetables Day, World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, and Icelandic National Day, celebrating the independence of Iceland from Kingdom of Denmark in 1944.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked what became known as the Pentagon papers, has died at 92. He was a hero to my generation:

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the voluminous, top-secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, a disclosure that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on press freedoms and enraged the Nixon administration — serving as the catalyst for a series of White House-directed burglaries and “dirty tricks” that snowballed into the Watergate scandal — died June 16 at his home in Kensington, Calif. He was 92.

The family confirmed his death in a statement. Mr. Ellsberg announced in an email to friends and supporters on March 1 that he had pancreatic cancer and had declined chemotherapy. Whatever time he had left, he said, would be spent giving talks and interviews about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the perils of nuclear war and the importance of First Amendment protections.

. . . He went on to embrace a life of advocacy, which extended from his 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers — a disclosure that led Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, to privately brand him “the most dangerous man in America” — to decades of work advocating for press freedoms and the anti-nuclear movement.

Mr. Ellsberg co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation and championed the work of a new generation of digital leakers and whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. He also continued to release secret government documents, including files about nuclear war that he had copied while working on the military’s “mutually assured destruction” strategy during the Cold War, around the same time he leaked the study that made him perhaps the most famous whistleblower in American history.

“When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969,” he wrote in the email announcing his cancer diagnosis, “I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, is a brave man. Ceiling Cat made the wrong choice, letting Kissinger live while killing Ellsberg at the young age of 92.

*The Justice Department has issued a damning report on the Minneapolis Police Department, accusing it of systemic biases that culminated in the highly publicized murder of George Floyd.

The Minneapolis Police Department engaged in the systemic use of excessive force and discriminated against racial minorities in the years leading up to the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in 2020, federal authorities said Friday.

In a scathing 89-page report released after a more than two-year federal civil rights investigation, the Justice Department excoriated the Minneapolis police force as an agency that put officers and local residents at unnecessary risk and failed to act upon repeated warnings about biased behavior.

Specifically, the report criticizes the Minneapolis police for: using “dangerous tactics and weapons” — including neck restraints and Tasers — against people for petty offense or no crimes; punishing residents who criticized the police; patrolling neighborhoods differently based on their racial makeup; and discriminating against those with behavioral health disabilities.

The report called the department’s accountability structures “fundamentally flawed,” with internal misconduct investigations getting lost in an “opaque maze” as senior managers dismissed legitimate complaints without investigation. At times, investigators also routinely mischaracterize the allegations, the report said.

Here we have a barrel at least half full of rotten apples, and it’s good Garland undertook this investigation. Although Floyd’s friends and relatives were distraught, I hope it’s consolation that he spawned a huge movement to promote civil rights (and reform police). Also, it will help people start to trust the local cops.

*Nellie Bowles is back with her engaging weekly news summary at The Free Press. This week’s is called “TGIF: Fortune does not favor the brave,” and I’ll steal the usual three items:

→ Student loan payments to resume: The years-long pause on paying back student loans is lifting, sending the White House into spasms. You see: Biden staffers’ favorite constituency is educated cultural elites with student loans. Which is why this line in the Politico story stood out to me: “White House officials have described the agreement as a relatively narrow one, noting that it ends only the current payment pause. They’ve noted, for example, that it would not prevent the Education Department from pausing payments in response to future national emergencies or if it’s otherwise justified under existing law.” Thank god! I think the climate emergency is calling, and it says it needs debt-free modernist literature PhDs and all mortgages (in Fort Greene, Rockridge, and Silverlake) to be forgiven.

→ “The power, it’s just not comparable”: This week a trans athlete named Austin Killips, who was competing in a women’s cycling match, won by a full five minutes, winning $5,000. In May, Austin won the top prize in another women’s cycling race—taking home $35,000. Austin calls critics “ghouls.” Obviously anyone critical of this is a “bigot.”

I recommend watching the video of the woman, Paige Onweller, who came in second place describing the race right afterward: “Yeah, just kind of couldn’t match Austin. You know, the power, it’s just, not comparable.” As my lesbian tennis leader Martina Navratilova says: “What a joke.

If you’re interested in studying trans participation in women’s sports, get ready to get a big F on your paper, which is what happened to a young woman last week. Her mistake? Using the term biological women in a paper on women’s sports. Last bit on this: public opinion is changing here, per a new Gallup poll out this week.

Here’s victor Austin, and then Paige Onweller, who refers only obliquely to Austin’s “power”:

This is hilarious:

→ Anti-cop ice cream shop sues Seattle for not having enough cops: This week, Molly Moon’s Ice Cream filed a lawsuit against Seattle for allowing antifa to take over a neighborhood and claim it as their own—they called it CHOP—while the city cheered and agreed to give it to them. A lot of shops have sued Seattle for this, but Molly’s Moon is the best one because they were hardcore in favor of CHOP. The new autonomous zone was “beautiful” and “peaceful,” Molly Moon’s Instagram account wrote at the time. And Molly, the shop’s founder, still wants to make it really clear that she loves antifa and hates cops but also antifa made her life hell (city, give Molly money please) and there were no cops when there should have been cops (more money, thank you). From the lawsuit:

*Robert G. Bowers, 50. the man who killed 11 people and wounded 7 in a 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, has been found guilty on 63 counts, and the verdict makes him eligible for the death penalty.

A 12-member jury in federal court in Pittsburgh convicted Robert G. Bowers, 50, of Baldwin, Pa., on all 63 counts, including hate crimes and weapons violations, after two weeks of searing testimony from dozens of prosecution witnesses. Among those who testified were survivors, including police officers, who had been shot during the attack.

Prosecutors also played haunting 911 emergency calls, during which victims could be heard screaming and struggling to breathe before dying amid rapid gunfire from Bowers, who used an AR-15 assault rifle and three handguns.

Five police officers were wounded as they attempted to apprehend Bowers during the attack on Oct. 27, 2018, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, a longtime Jewish enclave. Bowers fatally shot six victims in the head and fired about 100 rounds of ammunition in all, prosecutors said.

“The defendant turned this sacred ground of worship into a hunting ground,” prosecutor Mary Hahn told the jurors in her closing arguments Thursday, according to local news accounts.

The jury deliberated for a total of about five hours over two days before reaching the verdict.

As always, I’m opposed to the death penalty, even in Bowers’s case. Lock him up for life without parole instead (unless for some bizarre reason he can be rehabilitated).

*In his Substack column this week,  “The fault is not in their stars but in themselves“, Andrew Sullivan ponders parallels between the bad behaviors of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

And now we have Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. And the ghost of Bill Bennett seems to have a point, doesn’t he? This past week saw two official reports into the abuse of their respective offices, and their lavish lying about it. The Smith indictment alleges that Trump knew full well that the documents he took from the White House and stored haphazardly at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster were highly classified and not his own. But rather than hand everything back, Trump ignored the best legal advice, lied to his own lawyers, ordered an underling to move boxes to conceal them from the FBI, and threw out his usual barrage of excuses, distractions and falsehoods.

In an eerily similar fashion, the British parliamentary committee set up to investigate whether Boris Johnson lied to the House of Commons about his breaking of social distancing rules during Covid, published its final report this week. It’s as authoritative as the Trump indictment — first-hand witnesses, photos, sworn testimony, due process. And it too focuses on a very basic fact: just as Trump knew he was not authorized to keep top secret documents, so Johnson knew that crowded office-parties were quite clearly banned across the UK. But this awareness of the rules did not stop either man from flagrantly breaking them — and then complaining of a “witch-hunt” when called to account.

. . . And it’s deeply telling that the bulk of the charges against Johnson are about how he responded to the investigation, just as much of Smith’s case rests on what Trump did after he was told there was legal scrutiny of his official records. These two citizens start with a presumption that they are exempt from all rules, and then compound it with perjury and clumsy obstruction because they simply cannot admit guilt. (And neither was framed. A majority of the parliamentary committee were Tories; and the chief accusers of Trump are the national security apparatus and the FBI, which ten minutes ago were regarded as GOP-leaning institutions.)

Overwhelming self-entitlement is just at the core of who Trump and Johnson are. It is their character. . . . .

. . . And as with Trump and his bizarre behavior with “his boxes,” it’s very hard to see some profound, malign motive here in pursuit of something important. It’s just mindless egotism, married with an infinite capacity for deceit.

. . . And there is almost nothing in the narrative of these men’s late careers that isn’t exactly replicated in every previous episode of their lives. A mature democracy will throw up these characters every now and again, and use them. But a healthy one will also test them, and cast them out if they threaten the integrity of the system as a whole. The Brits and Tories have done that, in the end, with Boris — and it speaks well of the remaining integrity of their democracy.

The GOP needs to do the same with Trump. And soon.

Nope; won’t happen. If it does, it will be because Trump is convicted. And I still say that Trump is more horrible than Johnson, even if both were determined by the laws of physics (their environments and their genes) to be horrible.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is actually being HELPFUL!

Hili: There will be plenty of raspberries.
A: You are not eating them.
Hili: But I know that you like them.
In Polish:
Hili: Będzie dużo malin.
Ja: Ty ich nie jesz.
Hili: Ale wiem, że wy je lubicie.

And a photo of Baby Kulka:

 

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A bed I’d like to have from Pet Jokes & Puns:

From the Absurd Sign Project 2.0:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih, the power of religious dogma that is Iranian law:

From Malcolm: a new world record solving a Rubik’s cube. This guy is amazing!

From Pyers, who gives an intro:

There has been a highly entertaining Twitter thread where a game developer for the NYT announced proudly that she had devised a game where words in a 4 x 4 grid have to linked together with some connection. Red herrings are present to confuse etc etc …There is one slight problem.  This game is identical to a round in the fiendishly difficult BBC quiz called “Only Connect”…For info: Victoria Coren Mitchell  (who replies) is the host of the BBC show…

I found this one, a wonderful man rescuing an eagle:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a ten-year-old Jewish girl from Italy gassed upon arrival. Today would have been her 90th birthday. You can see the full photo by clicking the picture.

Tweets from Matthew, the first one shows a release of Scottish wildcats, though I’ve never been completely convinced that the “Scottish wildcat” is a genuinely wild subspecies of Felis silvestris rather than feral tabbies:

Another bird rescue, an emu as far as I can tell. Sound up.

Okay, you can read about the rector here:

More ducks: A new duck cam shows a nesting hen at our Regenstein Library

June 16, 2023 • 1:30 pm

I was informed yesterday, not to my huge delight, that a mallard hen is nesting across the street from my office—on a window ledge at Regenstein Library. This would not normally be a problem, for when her babies hatched and jumped down one floor, we could herd them to BotanyPond (we’ve done it before from this area). The problem, of course, is that there IS no Botany Pond this year, which leaves us with a dilemma. Let nature take its course and let the mother lead the babies to water? But the nearest water is well over a mile and a half away: large ponds and lakes to the east and west, and the family would have to cross big and busy streets.  Most of them would probably not make it.

The other solution is to get the ducklings as they drop, put them in a box, and take them to the rehab people. (This is what I did this morning.) While this assures complete survival of the brood, it requires breaking up the family, as it’s impossible to catch the mother duck and take the whole family to the water.  \

Well, you can see the duck, whom the library folks have named Amy, at this site (be sure to press the “play” triangle), or by clicking on the screenshot below. I’m told the camera and feed will be upgraded soon.

In the meantime, I have about a month to get anxious; she just started incubating, and it’ll be about 28 days to Hatch Time. I had hoped to have a duckling-free season while Botany Pond got renovated, but it doesn’t seem to be working out.

Note to U of C people: this ledge is in an office, so don’t try seeing her from inside the library. And please don’t disturb her from the outside. Thanks!