Caturday felid trifecta: Non-surgical birth control in cats; cocktail named for a Disney cat; AI-enhanced art cats in Vienna; and lagniappe

June 10, 2023 • 9:15 am

Here’s an announcement from Harvard News that has big implications for cats. Click on the screenshot to read:

An excerpt:

For the first time, researchers have isolated a hormone that can prevent cats from getting pregnant.

A single dose of a viral vector containing anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH), a naturally occurring hormone, prevented ovulation and conception in female cats for at least two years, according to researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and their collaborators.

. . . .In 2017, Pépin and his collaborators were the first to publish the contraceptive potential of AMH in rodents.

The team then turned their attention to felines. To raise AMH levels in female domestic cats, the researchers created an adeno-associated viral (AAV) gene therapy vector with a slightly altered version of the feline AMH gene. Human therapies using similar AAV vectors to deliver various therapeutic genes have proven to be safe and effective and have been approved by the FDA.

“A single injection of the gene therapy vector causes the cat’s muscles to produce AMH, which is normally only produced in the ovaries, and raises the overall level of AMH about 100 times higher than normal,” says Pépin.

The researchers treated six female cats with the gene therapy at two different doses, and three cats served as controls. A male cat was brought into the female colony for two four-month-long mating trials. The researchers followed the female cats for more than two years, assessing the effect of the treatment on reproductive hormones, ovarian cycles, and fertility.

All the control cats produced kittens, but none of the cats treated with the gene therapy got pregnant. Suppressing ovarian follicle development and ovulation did not affect important hormones such as estrogen. There were no adverse effects observed in any of the treated female cats, demonstrating that at the doses tested, the gene therapy was safe and well tolerated.

As the article notes, this therapy isn’t yet ready for prime time, but will be useful not only for keeping your own cat kitten-free without surgical intervention, but perhaps also to prevent wild cats from breeding, though every female will have to get a shot every two years. That means they’ll have to keep track of the immunization schedule of wild cats.

I expect that this may be on offer to the public within a few years.

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In May, Nutmeg, one of the beloved feral cats who frequented Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim California, passed away. As the Disneyland website notes:

Nutmeg was one of Disneyland Resort’s feral cats, tasked with keeping the rat population down around the parks and ensuring the only rodents guests see are Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Nutmeg roamed the park quite often, but had an affinity for the Magic Key Terrace lounge at Disney California Adventure.

Nutmeg was so beloved by Imagineers and Disneyland Cast Members like in fact, that they were even integrated into the tiling when Magic Key Terrace was reimagined in 2021. Their frequent perch along the concrete wall is accented with tiling of them, front and center.

A photo of Nutmeg (a good name for a cat) on the wall:

More:

Hardcore Disneyland fans may know that feral cats have become a staple of the resort’s after-hours operations. The cats are reportedly well cared for, with Disney providing stations for feeding, medical care, and neutering services. But this cat in particular was so beloved by Cast Members at Magic Key Terrace that there was a drink named for Nutmeg — made with Myers dark rum, Bailey’s Irish Cream, Frangelico hazelnut liqueur, and apricot liqueur and selling for $16 as a “secret menu” drink.

In 2021, the culinary director of Disney California Adventure, Jeremiah Balogh, explained to the Orange County Register, “We have lots of friends that like to visit us, and some of them are four-legged friends. We have a resident cat that will come and visit guests and Cast Members whenever he or she feels lonely.”

Many of these cats stay hidden throughout the day, although guests occasionally spot them out and about during opening time. It’s the overnight shift when they’re on the prowl, keeping the non-animated mice and rats out of the Disneyland Resort parks.

And here’s an article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the Nutmeg drink (click on the screenshot to read):

An excerpt:

“Everyone who knows the @Disneyland cats is mourning the death of Nutmeg, a true celebrity amongst the beloved feral cats of @Disney,” tweeted cat behaviorist and YouTuber Jackson Galaxy. “We join everyone in mourning Nutmeg’s passing and give many thanks to Disney for elevating and embracing community cats!”

Nutmeg was so beloved by the staff of Magic Key Terrace that it created a cocktail in his (or her?) honor: a $16 concoction on the “secret menu” featuring dark rum, Irish cream, hazelnut liqueur and apricot liqueur. Another version, described by one blogger as “definitely a dessert drink,” is said to include half-and-half, raspberry flavoring and a dusting of cinnamon and nutmeg.

That’s definitely a dessert, not a drink!  More:

Sometimes called “queen of the Disneyland cats,” Nutmeg inspired part of the aesthetic at Magic Key Terrace, according to SFGate reporter Julie Tremaine, who has written about the famed Disney felines several times over the years. A portrait of Nutmeg adorns the wall, and the feline’s face decorates the mosaics.

. . .Disney eventually realized that this arrangement was mutually beneficial: The company could care for the cats and get rodent control in exchange. Staffers began to spay and neuter the felines to keep the population under control, and they established feeding stations throughout the parks, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2010.

Now, as many as 200 cats patrol the area with Disney’s blessing.

“We are not trying to get rid of them,” Gina Mayberry, manager of the ranch where the park’s animals are housed, told the Times. “They keep the rodent population down.”

Among the cats’ fans is actor Ryan Gosling, who was once a Mouseketeer on the Disney Channel’s “The Mickey Mouse Club.” In a 2011 interview with comedian Conan O’Brien, Gosling said lore has it that the felines are “like commando cats” and live in barracks on the outskirts of the park.

Here’s the cocktail, which is a secret menu item (I can’t find the recipe, but that’s just as well. . .):

From reddit, labeled “A glamour shot of Nutmeg from when she popped in to say hello at Magic Key Terrace in February”:

From Cole and Marmalade, Walt admonishing a cat to stay away from Mickey:

“Walt Disney with cat”, Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain

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Vienna is attracting visitors by using AI to dilute its famous artwork, which needs no dilution. Still, they put cats in it. Click below to read:

In an effort to inspire the next generation of travelers to visit Austria’s beguiling cultural capital, the Vienna Tourist Board has launched a cheeky new marketing campaign called UnArtificial Art and is asking viewers to dig a bit deeper and rediscover some of the city’s most iconic masterpieces. Using artificial intelligence (AI), some of the country’s most celebrated pieces of art have been re-created to include the internet’s beloved domestic pet—cats—in an effort to remind viewers to have a little fun, while also taking a moment to see and appreciate the “art behind the art.”

“The campaign aims to show that AI art is only possible because an algorithm references real works made by real humans, and these originals can often only be seen in Vienna,” Norbert Kettner, CEO of the Vienna Tourist Board, told ARTnews.

First a movie, than some augmented art:

In the short film that accompanies the UnArtificial Art campaign, art historian Markus Hübl takes viewers on an existential journey through some of Vienna’s most iconic masterpieces—including Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss and Pieter Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel—all of which have been enhanced using AI technology to encourage viewers to look deeper into the work of some of Austria’s most celebrated painters.

There are three cat-augmented paintings, and they’re good choices.

Here’s one of the paintings, the original created by Egon Schiele, one of my favorite artists, who died at only 28 in the 1918 influenza epidemic.

And, of course, “The Kiss,” by Gustav Klimt, a well known ailurophile.  Klimt died, aged 55, nine months before Schiele, also of the flu. What a loss for art!

It’s unclear how Klimt—who was famously known for surrounding himself with anywhere from eight to ten pet cats at any given time—would feel about the enhancements to one of his most illustrious and frequently reproduced paintings. But the campaign, which encourages travelers to “see the art behind AI art,” will surely open itself up to interpretation by all who bear witness.

Gustav Klimt with a cat in front of his studio in the Josefstädter Straße (Vienna). Photographed by Moriz Nähr around 1910.

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Lagniappe: Linda Calhoun, who recently lost one of her older cats, has topped up her supply with two new kittens. She now has eight, four of them black, but the new ones are orange. Her description:

New arrivals!! They have been here a week.  They will live in the barn with Ebony and Bailey.  Barney died last February, and his remaining sisters are 13 years old, so it was time for some new blood.

Orangina (“Gina”) is on the left, and Orange Crush (“Crush”) on the right.  They are nine weeks old.

h/t: Barry, Winnie, Greg, Ginger K.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 10, 2023 • 8:15 am

Thanks to several readers’ contributions, we’re limping along here and may not run out of photos for a while. One of the contributors is regular Doug Hayes of “The Breakfast Crew” fame, who lives in Richmond, Virginia.  His captions and IDs below are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

The Breakfast Crew is back! The yard is quite busy with all the regulars plus a few newcomers who stay around for a few days, then move on to the park and wooded areas along the James River. We’ve also had quite a bit of rain, but that doesn’t stop the Crew from coming for a free meal!

A male American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis). These birds are found all over the neighborhood, especially in yards where the owners have planted sunflowers. This little guy is a bit soggy from the rain:

This American Robin (Turdus migratorius) is damp but not deterred from visiting the yard:

I think I’ve mentioned that mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) are not the brightest of birds. It looks as if this one didn’t have enough sense to get out of the rain:

This house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) doesn’t mind a bit of rain when there is free food to be had:

Peanut girl, a red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus), does not let a little rain stand in the way of her and her favorite food:

Pretty Girl is the most brilliantly colored female Northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) that visits the yard – although her colors are a bit hard to see when she’s drenched. Her red crest, red wing markings and bright orange beak make her stand out from the other more drab-looking females. She has been around for at least three years:

This Carolina wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus) is one of the regulars. Seeds or suet, this little guy enjoys it all:

We get quite a few Eastern bluebirds (Sialia sialis) throughout the neighborhood as the park service has set up a number of nesting boxes for them in Forest Hill Park:

White-breasted nuthatches (Sitta carolinensis) are frequent visitors to the yard. They’re tricky to photograph as they tend to zip in, grab a seed or peanut and quickly take off to eat in the trees. They never linger like finches or doves:

A male rose-breasted grosbeak (Pheucticus ludovicianus). This is only the second time these birds have visited the yard. They came by for about a week, then left for parts unknown. I never saw the males feed, preferring to chase each other away from the feeders:

A female rose-breasted grosbeak (Pheucticus ludovicianus). This female came by a couple of times a day for a week or so, eating greedily. She may have been getting ready to lay eggs or had babies to feed:

I put out a bowl of peanuts hoping to attract bluejays and woodpeckers, but this house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) decided that she wanted some too!:

A male house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus). Mother Nature loves making male birds flashier than the females!:

A tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor) decides to get in on the peanut feast too:

A quick trip to the Chamberlayne Swamp revealed that the anhingas (Anhinga anhinga) are back. This is the second year for them to nest in the area:

Camera info:  Sony A1 and A7R5 dslr bodies, Sony 200-600 zoom lens + 1.4X teleconverter, photos either hand-held or the camera supported with an iFootage Cobra 2 monopod and Neewer gimbal head. The anhinga photo was shot with the aid of the camera’s Clear View digital zoom for added reach.

Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 10, 2023 • 6:45 am

It’s CaturSaturday, June 10, 2023: Sabbath for all Jewish cats, and National Iced Tea Day. It’s a good drink, but I usually drink it sweetened, especially when eating barbecue, for which it is the perfect drink.  Here I am chowing down on a chicken-fried steak and a quart of sweet tea (best served in big Mason jars) at Hoover’s Cooking in Austin, Texas. Look at the size of that monster!

It’s also National Black Cow Day (a root beer float), World Gin Day, National Herb and Spice Day, National Rosé Day (the wine), and the running of the Belmont Stakes, the last race in the “triple crown” series.

Today’s Google Doodle goes to a YouTube video (click on screenshot) honoring  Willi Ninja, described this way in Wikipedia as. . .

. . . American dancer and choreographer best known for his appearance in the documentary film Paris Is Burning.

Ninja, a gay man known as the godfather of voguing, was a fixture of ball culture at Harlem’s drag balls who took inspiration from sources as far-flung as Fred Astaire and the world of haute couture to develop a unique style of dance and movement. He caught the attention of Paris Is Burning director Jennie Livingston, who featured Ninja prominently in the film. The film, both a critical and box office success, served as a springboard for Ninja. He parlayed his appearance into performances with a number of dance troupes and choreography gigs.

Here’s another short bio with scenes from “Paris is Burning”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*All eyes are on The Donald, the first ex-President to face federal charges. But there’s a bit of a respite for him in that the judge before which he’ll be arraigned is a judge he appointed, and who gave him a couple of breaks in the early stage of the investigation.

Mr. Trump is expected to appear in Federal District Court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon. Judge Aileen M. Cannon is scheduled to preside over that initial hearing, according to people familiar with the matter. It was not clear whether Judge Cannon, who was criticized by a higher court for handing Mr. Trump a series of unusually favorable rulings during the early stages of the investigation, would remain assigned for the entirety of the case.

The indictment, handed up by a grand jury in Miami, is the first time a former president has faced federal charges. It puts the nation in an extraordinary position, given Mr. Trump’s status not only as a onetime commander in chief but also as the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to face President Biden, whose administration will now be seeking to convict his potential rival of multiple felonies.

Mr. Trump continued to rail against the indictment on Friday, calling it the “greatest witch hunt of all time,” in a Truth Social post.

Here’s what else to know:

  • The indictment reaches back to the end of Mr. Trump’s term in January 2021, when the documents — many of which were said to be in the White House residence — were packed in boxes along with clothes, gifts, photographs and other material, and shipped by the General Services Administration to his private club and residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

  • Two lawyers, James Trusty and John Rowley, have left Mr. Trump’s legal team, and will no longer represent him in the documents case. “I will be represented by Todd Blanche, Esq., and a firm to be named later,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.

  • A recording of a meeting involving Mr. Trump in July 2021, six months after leaving the White House, is expected to be a key piece of evidence against him. During that meeting, he described a document in front of him as “classified” and “highly confidential,” according to a person briefed on the matter.

*The Washington Post has a handy summary and explanation of the crimes Trump’s accused of. There are four of them, and 37 charges total (!), but remember that he’s (also) under three other criminal investigations involving, respectively, the falsification of his business records in relation to the Stormy Daniels affair (a state crime in NY), his attempts to overturn the last election (a state crime in Georgia), and a federal investigation of similar attempts as well as trying to raise money from false allegations.

Trump is accused of violating seven federal laws but faces 37 separate charges. That is because each classified document he is accused of holding onto illegally is charged in a separate count, and his alleged efforts to hide classified information from federal investigators is charged in several different ways. His longtime aide Walt Nauta faces six charges, all but five of which are also lodged against Trump.

Espionage Act/unauthorized retention of national defense information: Trump is charged with 31 counts of violating a part of the Espionage Act that bars willful retention of national defense information by someone not authorized to have it. Such information is defined as “any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

Conspiracy to obstruct justice: Trump is charged with one count of conspiring with longtime aide Walt Nauta to hide the classified material from federal investigators, by lying to the FBI about what was found at Mar-a-Lago and moving boxes of documents out of a storage room before agents searched the home.

Tampering with grand jury evidence: Trump and Nauta face two counts of trying to keep evidence out of grand jurors’ hands: one for withholding the classified documents and one for corruptly concealing them.

Concealing evidence in a federal investigation: For the same alleged conduct of hiding the classified information still at Mar-a-Lago, Trump and Nauta separately face one count of concealing evidence with the intent to obstruct an FBI investigation.

False statements: Both Trump and Nauta together face one count of scheming to making false statements for allegedly hiding from the FBI and the grand jury that the former president still had classified documents in his possession. Trump faces a separate count for causing his attorney to falsely claim in June 2022 that all classified documents in his possession had been handed over in response to a subpoena, according to the indictment

That is a LOT of charges! I’m beginning to think that, in conjunction with the other investigations he’s facing, The Donald is going to The Slammer.

*Why should Trump be indicted for keeping classified information when Hillary Clinton got off scot-free for storing classified information on her private devices? That’s a question that James French, and explains clearly, in his new op-ed “Is it right to make Donald Trump answer for the crimes he is accused of.”  French’s answer is a firm “yes.”

As Comey said of Clinton’s storing classified information on a private server, “There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”

But Comey declined to recommend prosecution because he said he couldn’t find evidence that the Justice Department had prosecuted any case under similar facts: “All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct or indications of disloyalty to the United States or efforts to obstruct justice.”

That’s the Comey test: no prosecution absent evidence of one or more of the factors above. I disagreed with the decision at the time and still disagree. I’m a former Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer, an Army lawyer who helped investigate classified information breaches when I served in Iraq, and I feel confident that I would have faced military charges under similar facts.

But once the Comey test was articulated, it should be evenly applied. And thus the critical question for the political legitimacy — and not just legal sufficiency — of the indictment is whether there is evidence of intentionality or obstruction in the Trump case that was absent in Clinton’s. (This is the same question that should be asked of the mishandling of classified documents by Joe Biden and Mike Pence.)

As of Thursday night, we had not yet seen the indictment, so there is a chance my assessment will change. But a review of the publicly available evidence indicates that Trump’s conduct likely does meet the Comey test. There is evidence of intentionality and obstruction.

*The latest edition of Nellie Bowles’s weekly and snarky news summary at the Free Press is called “TGIF: Tangerine squeeze and marmalade skies“, and this week it’s written by Nick Gillespie, editor at large of Reason (Nellie’s on vacation). I attach three items, but nobody’s as good at this as Nellie.

→ Joe Biden’s popularity has fallen, and he can’t get up: In last week’s TGIF, Nellie noted that the octogenarian President Biden took a couple of serious falls in plain view. A very public collapse by Jimmy Carter during a 1979 fun run and George H. W. Bush barfing on the Japanese prime minister in 1992 helped firm up the idea that those guys should be one-termers. Biden’s tumbles and bespoke word salads certainly aren’t helping his approval ratings, which remain stuck in the low 40s. In fact, his approval ratings have been very similar throughout his term to Trump’s, and we know how that worked out for the Liege of Mar-a-Lago. It must be worrying to Biden that his main Democratic challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., seems to be maintaining or even gaining traction while pushing conspiracy theories and a hardcore anti-vaccine line, including the idea that his father was not killed by convicted murderer Sirhan Sirhan. (Read Peter Savodnik’s story about RFK Jr. here.)

→ More signs of the apocalypse, Taylor Swift edition: Hellish fires, check. North Dakota governor appearances, check. Revelations of contact with aliens, check. The return of Tucker, check. Here’s one more possible sign of the End Times: fans of Taylor Swift are reporting amnesia after her concerts, where tickets cost thousands of dollars. “It just feels like I blacked out for a whole day lol and now I’m just living life?? With no memories of the highlight of my year??,” wrote one attendee on Reddit. Our friends at Forward put a biblical spin on forgetting things after such a peak experience: “In the Talmud, rabbis discuss how after Moses’ death, Joshua forgot a large portion of the Jewish laws Moses had explained to him, and the halacha was lost to the Jewish people.”

But that was just Jewish law communicated on Mount Sinai via God. Imagine missing the 10-minute version of “All Too Well.”

This next one really ticks me off. Increasingly, the stuff on the shelves at my local Walgreen’s and CVS are being put behind locked glass, and I have to ask to get shaving cream. OY!

→ Lululemon CEO defends firing workers for challenging thieves: Two employees at a Lululemon store in Peachtree Corners, Georgia, were fired for telling shoplifting thieves not to steal and filming the incident as the bad guys made off with handfuls of athleisure wear. Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald took to CNBC to defend the firing, saying that the company “has a zero-tolerance policy that we train our educators on around engaging during a theft.” (The word educators is Lululemon-speak for “employees.”) The way McDonald explains it, the policy is there to keep workers safe, but something is obviously deeply wrong when “educators” get canned for protesting brazen theft.

*Andrew Sullivan went to see the new movie The Little Mermaid this week, and had a mixed reaction. He liked Halle Bailey as the black mermaid, but then said that much of the movie was “woke stereotypes”. On the upside, read this (and watch the video):

The one saving grace was Halle Bailey’s spectacular performance — and her early show-stopper, “Part of Your World,” brought a classic gay Disney lump to my throat.

Her race? Completely irrelevant to the plot — but, it seems to me, a case study in why minority representation is well worth doing, if done right.

There was no clunky, ideological message attached. And there’s no reason a mermaid has to be “white”. Giving the starring princess role to a non-white actress was a completely cost-free way to give young girls of color a sense they belong in the Disney universe — try to watch this reax without tearing up. The casting also had the advantage of giving us an inter-racial (as well as inter-species!) love story.

And then he dilates on the infusion of wokeness, via minority characters, in movies and plays (the title is “When diversity works on stage and screen“). Much of the time it works, especially when you just forget about the character’s ethnicity, but sometimes it goes too far:

What’s bad, it seems to me, is representation by quota and representation as a form of virtue-signaling. By quota, I mean the hideous bean-counting of special interest groups demanding certain percentages of all casts be black or female or Latino or “LGBTQIA2S+”, regardless of the content. (Take a look, if you must, at GLAAD’s “Studio Responsibility Index.”) I mean casting with an eye to the story rather than “social justice.” Does anyone care that Succession barely had a single minority character? I know it helps in Hollywood if all the white people are evil, but still. Ditto the movie masterpiece, Dunkirk. Or the recent All Quiet On the Western Front.

By virtue-signaling, I mean demanding that straight actors be barred from playing gay roles — looking at you, Tom Hanks — and vice-versa, as if acting doesn’t allow for anyone to play any character, within reason. And I mean crude modern morality tales imposed on stories that cannot bear the weight: an ahistorical “nonbinary” version of Joan of Arc (at London’s Globe theater); a black lesbian version of Richard III (in Central Park right now); or a white female version of Othello (just kidding, we all know that would never happen).

Even in these cases, however, it’s possible to pull it off, and not merely be a political statement but an actual enhancement of the material itself. It’s just that sometimes, the wokeness detracts, rather than adds. In the current Richard III, for example: “Ali Stroker plays Queen Anne in a wheelchair, deaf actress Monique Holt plays the Dutchess [sic] of York and uses sign language, and Greg Mozgala, who plays both Edward IV and Henry VII, has cerebral palsy.” I suppose it’s possible to see through these woke gimmicks to the actual plot and characters (I haven’t seen the production), but I doubt it. The point of virtue-signaling is that the signals are seen and heard — above anything Shakespeare might have wanted to say.

Good point!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is thinking in Cat:

Hili: I’m thinking.
A: I can see it but I don’t know what you are thinking about.
Hili: And I don’t know how to tell you.
In Polish:
Hili: Myślę.
Ja: Widzę, ale nie wiem, o czym myślisz.
Hili: A ja nie umiem ci tego powiedzieć.

And a lovely photo of Szaron:

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From The Cat House on the Kings:

From the B. Kliban Appreciation Society via Stash Krod:

From Divy:

From Masih, a heartwarming tweet from Iran:

From Malcolm, the naked truth:

From Luana; the CIA does a crossword-puzzle AND an acronym version of Pride Month celebration:

I found this one; a great volley ending with a point for Jimmy Connors:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 13-year-old girl gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Professor Cobb.  Wouldn’t you like to be the person in the first one? Sound up!

The dexterity (and cleverness) of a snail:

CRAB FIGHT IN SECOND TWEET! But who won?

Man rescues Indian cobra trapped in a fishing net, gives it a big drink of water

June 9, 2023 • 1:20 pm

The Indian or spectacled cobra (Naja naja) is widespread in South Asia, and is the “classical” cobra that Westerners are familiar with from wildlife shows, movies, Kipling stories, etc. The one shown in this video got itself trapped in a fishing net. Fortunately, a skilled snake handler was around and, after giving the snake a long drink of water, pinned its head and then proceeded to free it from the net, releasing it back where it was found.

My favorite part is where the snake greedily guzzles water from a plastic bottle. It must have been plenty thirsty! As in all Dodo videos, things end well, and so this is your Friday heartwarmer.

The YouTube notes:

This king cobra [see Note by GCM below] was found trapped in a fishing net on New Year’s Day near a rice paddy in East India. When the local villagers found the trapped snake, they called in snake rescuer Mirza Arif. Arif uses scissors to cut the fishing net off, but not before giving the cobra sips of water from a Sprite bottle to quench his thirst. After being freed from the net, the snake was later released near where he was found.

[Note by GCM: Youtube wrongly identifies this as a king cobra  (Ophiophagus hannah), also native to Asia, which is the world’s longest venomous snake, with extremely toxic venom. The key to identifying it correctly are the markings on the neck, which sometimes resemble glasses (hence “spectacled”), and sometimes a monocle; there are various cobras with these marks, some split off as separate species.

The guy in the video, BTW, shows real skill and knowledge in handling the snake. A lot of online videos show people doing stupid and dangerous things with venomous snakes, but this guy is appropriately prudent!]

Conor Friedersdorf questions the usefulness of DEI training

June 9, 2023 • 12:15 pm

Conor Friedersdorf, who writes for The Atlantic—not just a reputable publication but a liberal one—has been getting away with criticizing the DEI industry for some time (check hie earlier articles here, here, and here). Now he has a new piece that you can access by clicking on the screenshot below (it’s free, at least for the time being).   It’s definitely not something that the NY Times or Washington Post would publish, and I’m not sure how he gets away with fundamentally anti-woke articles in The Atlantic, but it’s good that he does.

Here Friedersdorf reiterates his claim that diversity training is largely ineffectual (though it does have a limited place), and that the tons of money spent by businesses and universities to run  DEI bureacracies is better spent helping poor people directly.

He’s also just done two podcasts about this issue, and I put the links below as well.

Click for the Atlantic piece:

It all started, we know, with the murder of George Floyd. In fact, it’s hard to find any “woke” article in a scientific journal these days that doesn’t begin with a ritualistic invocation of George Floyd, often coupled with a mention of Black Lives Matter. And Floyd’s death did galvanize a racial reckoning. What Friedersdorf wonders is whether it’s become the right sort of reckoning:

Floyd’s murder was similarly galvanizing. Arresting, trying, and convicting the police officers involved, and implementing new police training, was the most immediate response. But Floyd’s story suggested some additional possibilities. With several criminal convictions in his past, Floyd tried to turn his life around, preaching nonviolence in a neighborhood plagued by gun crime, serving as a mentor to young people, and trying to stay employed. He also struggled with drug addiction, layoffs due to circumstances beyond his control, and money problems that presumably played a role in the counterfeit bill he was trying to pass on the day that he was killed. If a callous police officer was the primary cause of his death, secondary causes were as complex and varied as poverty in America.

So how strange––how obscene, in fact––that America’s professional class largely reacted to Floyd’s murder not by lavishing so much of the resources spent in his name on helping poor people, or the formerly (or currently) incarcerated, or people with addictions, or the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, or children of single mothers, or graduates of underfunded high schools, but rather by hiring DEI consultants to gather employees together for trainings.

Although Friedersdorf later re-emphasizes better uses for DEI money, he does note that DEI consultants may have some use given their expertise on hiring, processing trauma, and assessing discrimination. But he still argues, quoting several studies, that the vast majority of studies on the effectiveness of DEI shows it’s a nonstarter. It doesn’t work. (It’s worthwhile, if you don’t know the data, to go through his short summary.)

Why, then, is there so much investment in DEI? You guessed it: it’s an easy way to show a company or university’s virtue, though it may have a benefit in making workers feel more comfortable. At least somebody is doing something:

The DEI spending of 2020 and 2021 was a signal sent from executives to workers that the bosses are good people who value DEI, a signal executives sent because many workers valued it. Put another way, the outlays were symbolic. At best, they symbolized something like “We care and we’re willing to spend money to prove it.” But don’t results matter more than intention?

A more jaded appraisal is that many kinds of DEI spending symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good.

In that telling, the DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits.

But I agree with Friedersdorf that DEI initiatives are largely an exercise in optics. Given that the data show they don’t really reduce bias, what other reason can there be for them? In academia, they’re becoming increasingly intrusive—to the point of seriously eroding the real mission of a university: teaching and producing knowledge. Remember, if DEI initiatives don’t do much, and given how much DEI people get paid, for every DEI worker replaced you could hire a professor, or give grants to several students. And also free up the time we spend taking surveys and reading authoritarian emails to allow us to do our teaching and research.

Friedersdorf is on a roll here; he’s fired up about the issue, and you can see this in his last paragraph. (Again, I don’t know how he gets away with this in The Atlantic):

. . . the reflexive hiring of DEI consultants with dubious expertise and hazy methods is like setting money on fire in a nation where too many people are struggling just to get by. The professional class should feel good about having done something for social justice not after conducting or attending a DEI session, but after giving money to poor people. And to any CEO eager to show social-justice-minded employees that he or she cares, I urge this: Before hiring a DEI consultant, calculate the cost and let workers vote on whether the money should go to the DEI consultant or be given to the poor. Presented with that choice, I bet most workers would make the equitable decision.

I’ve written many times about ineffectual efforts to increase diversity, when the real efforts should go not towards tearing down statues or renaming birds, which has virtually no societal effect, but to creating equal opportunities for the underclass. (That is not, by the way, best achieved by “giving money to poor people”, which is a form of reparations. It take a fundamental restructuring of American politics and social priorities.) And if there is to be a vote about hiring a DEI consultant, let that vote be anonymous, for too many people will vote for DEI if they know that others will admire them for doing so.

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There are two new interviews with Friedersdorf out on the web. It’s Friday, and I haven’t yet listened to either, but I will.

One is From Tara Henley’s Substack site Lean Out, and is 27 minutes long. Click to access it, and subscribe to her site if you read it often. (h/t:Ginger K.)

 

The second podcast is 40 minutes long, is at Quillette, and has Friedersdorf interviewed by Jonathan Kay. Click below to access it; I’m not sure if it’s free for all.

New director of academic freedom for England’s office for students commits a bit of plagiarism

June 9, 2023 • 10:15 am

UPDATE:  Dr. Ahmed was appalled to realize that he’d unconsciously used the words of the Kalven Report, and tried to get the Times to note that in its printed piece. But the Times says it usually doesn’t add stuff like that, so Ahmed has asked me to add the following note to this site; I’m glad to comply.

******

Prof. Coyne is quite right that the first two sentences of this article include words used in the Kalven Report of the University of Chicago. This was completely unconscious on my part but I am happy to acknowledge it. I’d like to thank him very much for pointing this out.

I also wish to take this opportunity to mention that the third sentence, ‘It is not a seminary’, of course expresses a common idea that many others have expressed in these or similar terms, notably John Henry Newman.

*****

 

Reader Jez sent me some news from England, which seems pretty good, but I found a bug in the ointment. First, Jez’s news, highlighted in a piece he wrote for The Times of London (first link):

Just in case you’re interested, Arif Ahmed was recently appointed the director for freedom of speech and academic freedom for the Office for Students in England. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge and seems to be a good choice.

Indeed, Ahmed is not only an MBE, but, more important, is described this way in Wikipedia:

At Cambridge he has been an advocate for tolerance of diverse political views, in reaction to the university administration’s cancellation of an invitation to the politically conservative academic Jordan Peterson.

But reading the archived Times article in the first link, something struck me as sounding familiar. Ahmed’s piece starts this way:

A university is not a club. It is not a political lobby. It is not a seminary. It is not a “brand”. It exists to seek and speak truth, whatever it costs and whoever it upsets. Therefore, without freedom to explore controversial or “offensive” ideas, a university is nothing.

Well, that made me go back to the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report of 1967—the University’s declaration that it will officially adhere to political, moral, and ideological neutrality save in circumstances directly affecting the University’s real mission: to disseminate and produce knowledge.

And in that Kalven report you’ll find these stirring words:

A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

Now these words aren’t identical to Ahmed’s, but I find it hard to believe that he didn’t lift the phrases “it is not a club” and “it is not a lobby”—succinct and eloquent phrases—from our Kalven report. And if that’s the case, then he should have given credit to Kalven and his colleagues.

Lifting phrases like this, which to me is plagiarism, is not a good way to begin one’s tenure as a director of freedom of speech and academic freedom. For what you are not free to do is pass off other people’s prose as yours.

Granted, these are small phrases, and the copying may have been unconscious, but had I written this, I would have referenced the quote or used my own words.

Otherwise, it’s a very good editorial, and a good harbinger of more free speech and academic freedom in British universities.

A religion-addled reader writes in denigrating atheists

June 9, 2023 • 9:15 am

Yes, I get these emails quite frequently, but this one was so full of repressed anger that I had to post it. This morning’s emailer was one “Ian Coombe”, and though you can find that name all over the Internet as an author and “decision-making strategist,” I’m not sure this is that guy.  But I do think it’s his real name because his gmail address (not given) includes it. (While I don’t reveal real names of commenters here without permission, I don’t adhere to that for personal emails, especially if they’re aggressive and nasty.)

At any rate, Mr. Coombe’s email was headed “Lennox bashing,” which I suppose refers to my quarrels with John Lennox, including a post about his pathetic attempts to reconcile science with his Christianity. At the previous link I reproduced Lennox’s bona fides from Wikipedia.

John Lennox is a Northern Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian apologist. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and faith (like his books, Has Science Buried God and Can Science Explain Everything), and has had public debates with atheists including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

I presume the peevish Mr. Coombe had read the post I mentioned (there are others, too), and was out to set me straight about my misguided criticism of religion and accommodationism.

I submit his email for your approval (or, more likely, disapproval):

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There are many people in this world who derive strength from their religious faith especially today with so much suffering and lack of civility. We have lost our compass.
Perhaps your band of shallow atheist followers could develop a little empathy and or compassion for those who are not as sure of themselves and are content to grasp beliefs that work for them.

I always found the arrogance of Hitchins and others of his ilk astounding.

Perhaps the ‘evolution’ of quantum physics, quantum eraser and the fascination of quantum entanglement will reduce your followers smug out dated convictions and suggest new possibilities that would take them out of their sad black hole. It’s all plain sailing for them until personal tragedy strikes and then they search for a parachute, imaginary or otherwise, that doesn’t exist for them.

At the moment our world needs help from a source other than our own over blown egos and you’re not helping.

*********

This is the old “you have to respect/embrace religion because it makes people feel good”, coupled with the old saw that “atheists turn to God in rough times.”  The first was handily refuted by George Bernard Shaw, who said this:

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”

Or, as Richard Dawkins said in his interview that I discussed yesterday, “I think that truth actually is a genuine value. I believe that a true scientific outlook on the world would actually be best for the flourishing of humankind.”  Religion is, to anybody with two neurons to rub together, a belief system lacking evidence, or, as Dawkins called it, a “delusion.”

Sadly, Mr Coombe conceives of atheism as a “conviction”, but it’s really not—except for diehard atheists who declar “I know that there’s no god.” If atheism is a claim, it’s simply a claim about evidence: “I don’t think there’s a god because I see no evidence for one.”

As for all of us atheists clinging to a “parachute” in times of personal tragedy—a parachute “imaginary or otherwise”—that’s a red herring.  Yes, we all seek consolation in hard or tragic times, but I prefer to look to reality than to fiction. When a friend or relative dies, I am not consoled by thinking, “Well, he/she is with god, and I’ll meet them again someday.”  That’s not only a false consolation, but one I find impossible to believe given my nature. Rather, we can be consoled by truths: that we had some good years with the person, that the person will persist in our memory, that the world may have been a better place because of that person, and so on.

But I digress. If you have a response to the email above, I’ll send it to Mr. Coombes tomorrow. Simply put it in the comments below (especially if you’re an atheist), and I’ll send him the link to this whole post tomorrow.