Readers’ wildlife photos

June 2, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today we have the second batch of photos taken by ecologist Susan Harrison on a recent trip to Finland (part 1 of her trip is here). Her IDs and narratives are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Finnish Forest Fauna

While visiting the University of Oulu in May 2023, after enjoying the common migratory birds flooding into the city’s parks, I took two guided day tours to see elusive forest-dwellers such as owls and grouse.  On these trips I met British “twitchers” and German “Vogelbeobachters” who’d come to Finland just for this purpose, since it’s one of the best places in Europe to see forest wildlife.

Large old trees with nest cavities are scarce, so nesting boxes are frequently set out by bird-lovers.  The nature tour company in Oulu takes it a step further: they put up owl boxes, and take customers to view the inhabitants, but you must sign an agreement not to record the location.  I guess on balance this is a good arrangement for the owls and us.

Female Ural Owls (Strix uralensis) sometimes maim people who approach their nests, so we were cautious:

Her three owlets seen from a respectful distance:

Female Great Gray Owl (Strix nebulosa) tending her owlet in the former nest of a Northern Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis):

My grouse-oriented tour took place around Kuusamo, a small resort town on the Russian border. Finnish bird tours begin at 3 am, so please forgive some grainy photos taken in dim light.

Male Willow Grouse or Ptarmigan (Lagopus muta):

Male Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), the size of a turkey, strutting and fanning his tail:

Female Capercaillie stuffing her gizzard with roadside gravel:

Male Black Grouse (Tetrao tetrix) running, leaping and tail-fanning in front of females:

Eurasian Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) stalking the forest:

Domestic Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) wandering around in radio collars:

On both trips we also saw many interesting songbirds and water birds; here are some of the latter.

Arctic Loon (Gavia arctica), a.k.a. Black-Throated Loon or Diver:

Slavonian Grebe (Podiceps auritus), known as Horned Grebe in North America, and also picturesquely called Devil-Diver, Hell-Diver, Pink-eyed Diver, and Water Witch:

Male Ruff (Calidris pugnax). This shorebird has three types of males, determined by a chromosomal inversion. The common type (85-90%) is colorful and puts on aggressive group displays. A second type is paler and less aggressive, and a third type mimics females and sneaks copulations.  The genetics and evolution of this complex mating system are just beginning to be understood.  This male is of the common type:

JAC: I’ve added a figure from a paper in BMC Genomic Data showing the various types of males. “L. L. F.” is Lindsay L. Farrell, and “S. B. M.” is Susan B. MacRae; click to read the caption.

 

We watched their displays at a distance:

Friday: Hili dialogue

June 2, 2023 • 6:45 am

It’s Friday, June 2, 2023, and National Rocky Road Day. If you’re not an American, that’s usually a genre of chocolate ice cream that contains nuts, chocolate chips, and marshmallows, and it can be good:

 

It’s also It’s also American Indian Citizenship Day, Hug an Atheist Day, I Love My Dentist Day, National Doughnut Day, National Gun Violence Awareness Day, National Rotisserie Chicken Day, and International Sex Workers Day. Here’s a statue to sex workers in Amsterdam:

(from Wikipedia) Bronze statue Belle in front of the Oude Kerk in the De Wallen red-light district in Amsterdam. It was unveiled in March 2007 with the inscription “Respect sex workers all over the world.”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 2 Wikipedia page.

Wine of the Day: Are you in the mood for a white Burgundy that doesn’t break the bank. This is your baby: a recent (2021) vintage of Mâcon-Villages from the southern region of Burgundy, well priced at $17.00. Although it lacks the “dung” aroma of great Burgundy (“great Burgundy smells of shit,” one critic said), it’s redolent of pears, apples, and orange blossoms. The color is pale straw, and it’s ready to drink.

I had it with Indian sag paneer (spinach and cheese) and rice, a somewhat spicy dish that was a good complement to this wine.  This is a good all-purpose white, relatively cheap for what is, in effect, a Pouilly-Fuissé, grown right next door to that region but cheaper without the name.

Da Nooz:

*Halleluljah! Yesterday the bipartisan bill dealing with the debt limit passed to the Senate. It was late last night, and they had to stave off a number of amendments that would have delayed the bill by forcing it back to the House.

The approval by the Senate on a 63-to-36 vote brought to a close a political showdown that began brewing as soon as Republicans narrowly won the House in November, promising to use their new majority and the threat of a default to try to extract spending and policy concessions from Mr. Biden.

. . . .On Thursday night, Mr. Biden cheered its passage, promising to sign it as soon as possible and address the nation from the Oval Office on Friday evening.

“Tonight, senators from both parties voted to protect the hard-earned economic progress we have made and prevent a first-ever default by the United States,” he said. “No one gets everything they want in a negotiation, but make no mistake: This bipartisan agreement is a big win for our economy and the American people.”

The agreement suspends the $31.4 trillion debt limit until January 2025, allowing the government to borrow unlimited sums to pay its debts and ensuring that another fight will not occur before the next presidential election. It sets new spending levels that will be tested as Congress begins to write its annual spending bills. Other policy changes on energy project permitting and work requirements on social benefits were also included.

“We saved the country from the scourge of default,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, exulted after the bill cleared Congress.The Senate vote came after an afternoon of closed-door talks to resolve a last-minute flare-up over Pentagon funding, ignited by Republicans who said the debt-limit package severely underfunded the military. Senate leaders resolved the dispute with a formal statement that the debt-limit deal “does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities.”

The vote was 63-36, and you can see how the Senators voted at this site.

*Foreign ministers of NATO countries are meeting in Norway this week to decide whether Ukraine should join. The thing is, NATO unwisely promised a while back that Ukraine would eventually be in the club, and that was premature.

A day earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to add weight to calls for Ukraine’s membership, telling a conference in Slovakia that Kyiv deserved “something concrete” in terms of a path forward.

“Our focus today was how can we bring Ukraine closer to NATO, where it belongs,” said Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg after foreign ministers from the alliance’s 31 members and applicant Sweden concluded.

NATO must “have in place frameworks to provide guarantees for Ukrainian security after the end of the war,” Stoltenberg said before opening the meeting, which was arranged as an opportunity to talk more casually than at regularly scheduled ministerial gatherings, and at which no formal decisions will be taken.

The U.S. has until now largely sidestepped discussions of how or when Ukraine might join NATO, instead focusing on Kyiv’s security and military strength. Asked about whether a pathway to NATO would be approved at a coming summit of alliance leaders in Lithuania, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters, “I fully anticipate that will be part of the conversation in Vilnius.”

“Ultimately these are decisions that the leaders have to make and finalize,” Blinken said.

I believe every NATO country has to sign on before an applicant nation can be approved.

The heads of the parliamentary foreign-affairs committees of 19 NATO members released a joint statement on Thursday calling for Ukraine to be given a clear road map to joining at the NATO summit in July. Signatories included the heads of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee and its counterpart committees in the U.K., Germany and France.

Finally, here’s the mistake that NATO made before. Premature guarantees lead to invasions by Russia!

NATO said in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join, but gave no details or timeline. Germany and France led opposition to a concrete path to Ukrainian membership. The 2008 statement has been widely criticized for angering Russia without giving greater security to Ukraine or Georgia. Russia invaded Georgia soon after the summit, and continued to seek political sway in Ukraine.

*The Sensuous Curmudgeon and the National Center for Science Education report on a Texas bill requiring secondary schools that teach evolution present it not as a “fact”, but as a theory with strengths and weaknesses. Well, that bill is an ex-bill; it sings with the choir invisible.   (h/t Steve) From the NCSE:

When the Texas state legislature adjourned sine die on May 29, 2023, a pair of identical bills that would have harmed science education, House Bill 1804 and Senate Bill 2089, died in committee. If enacted, the bills would have amended the state education code to require that instructional material adopted by the state board of education “present a scientific theory in an objective educational manner that: (i) clearly distinguishes the theory from fact; and (ii) includes evidence for both the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of the theory.”

Clause (i) appears to reflect a common misconception about facts and theories. “In scientific terms, ‘theory’ does not mean ‘guess’ or ‘hunch’ as it does in everyday usage,” as the National Academy of Science explained in its publication Science and Creationism, second edition (1999). “Scientific theories are explanations of natural phenomena built up logically from testable observations and hypotheses. Biological evolution is the best scientific explanation we have for the enormous range of observations about the living world. … [S]cientists can also use [“fact”] to mean something that has been tested or observed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing or looking for examples. The occurrence of evolution in this sense is a fact.”

Clause (ii) betrays the intention of the bills. As The New York Times editorialized of the phrase “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” in 2008, “This is code for teaching creationism.” Employed by proponents of “creation science” and “intelligent design” alike, the phrase appears in antievolution laws enacted in Louisiana in 2008 and Tennessee in 2012. In 2017, Texas’s House Bill 1485 would ostensibly have provided Texas science teachers with the academic freedom to teach “the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of scientific theories discussed in the state science standards; after receiving a public hearing, during which a member of the state board of education testified that the bill would allow the teaching of creationism, the bill died in committee, as NCSE previously reported.

Both bills were, of course, sponsored by Republicans.

*Writing on Substack, Clyde Rathbone explains why “Modern intellectuals are writing their best ideas on Substack.” And, by and large, yes, you get better ideas (though not necessarily news) on Substack than on the MSM. One problem is that there are too may people to follow, and of course those subscriptions mount up. But there are two new authors that you might want to follow. One is Jon Haidt:

Much of my work is focused on helping academics establish a sustainable publishing strategy on Substack, and I had suggested Jon might consider using Substack as a platform to explore the themes of his book, inviting criticism that could help him refine his manuscript. I am thrilled to say he found merit in the proposal. On his new Substack’s About page, he explains part of his rationale for launching  on Substack:

“I could make this Substack an adjunct to my writing, where I could share findings, theories, and questions while inviting the kind of criticism that I’d rather get before I submit the manuscripts than after each book is published.”

Through his Substack, Jon is modeling a new and exciting way for academics to communicate directly with readers. He’s creating an avenue for collaborative feedback, akin to crowdsourced peer review but with the added advantage of early engagement. He’s also expanding the audience for his upcoming books and raising significant funds for his nonprofit organizations. Jon is not alone.

. . . and:

This week, Richard Dawkins  is launching on Substack.

An esteemed evolutionary biologist, prolific writer, and passionate advocate for science and reason, Richard has captivated audiences with his thought-provoking ideas and unwavering dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.

One thing that will differ from the Twitter account is that, as far as I know, there are no comments on Twitter, so there won’t be the rancor you often see when Richard speaks his mind. On the other hand, ten to one people will still spew stuff on his Twitter feed. I, for one, am looking forward to see what he says.

*In Connecticut, a bear with a sweet tooth gorged itself on 60 cupcakes when nobody was looking. From the AP:

A hungry black bear barged into the garage of a Connecticut bakery, scared several employees and helped itself to 60 cupcakes before ambling away.

Workers at Taste by Spellbound in the town of Avon were loading cakes into a van for delivery on Wednesday when the bear showed up. There are between 1,000 and 1,200 black bears living in Connecticut, the state environmental agency says, with sightings last year in 158 of the state’s 169 towns and cities.

Bakery owner Miriam Stephens wrote in an Instagram post that she heard employee Maureen Williams “screaming bloody murder” and yelling that there was a bear in the garage.

Williams told TV station WTNH that she shouted to scare the bear off but it retreated and came back three times.

Williams said the bear charged at her so she backed out of the garage and ran.

Surveillance video obtained by WTNH shows bakery workers walking around the side of the business to try to scare the bear, but then running away after it scares them.

And here’s that video, which I found on YouTube. The bear has a whole bloody BOX OF CUPCAKES! Let him eat in peace—this bear will never have it so good again!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, a carnivore, bemoans carnivory:

Hili: We had a guest.
A: Who?
Hili: A caterpillar, but a starling ate it.
In Polish:
Hili: Mieliśmy gościa.
Ja: Kogo?
Hili: Gąsienicę, ale szpak ją zjadł.

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

From Merilee:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih: On trial for reporting in Iran; you can read about them here and here.

A Twitter conversation found by Barry:

I found this one, with a cockatoo hitting the jackpot:

From Malcom, a Bruce Lee cat!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, “she did not survive”:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. First, a snake on a plane!

This guy just added a bunch of cats to his collection:

A Woodstock romance:

 

The legality of diversity statements

June 1, 2023 • 12:00 pm

This piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses an issue we’ve taken up here before: is it legal to require applicants for university jobs to submit DEI statements? The piece gives both sides of the argument, although I’ve long thought that such statements should be always be illegal on two grounds: they are irrelevant for nearly all academic jobs, and they violate the First Amendment because they’re a form of compelled speech.

When I first wrote about this, I thought that someone with standing should bring a lawsuit against a public university (such schools must adhere to the First Amendment), as diversity statements are a form of compelled speech as well as viewpoint discrimination, forcing applicants to voice certain approved political beliefs.

Now that lawsuit has been brought. As the article notes:

John D. Haltigan, the plaintiff, is being represented pro bono by the nonprofit Pacific Legal Foundation. He is arguing that the University of California system’s use of diversity statements in hiring violates the First Amendment and represents unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Haltigan wants to apply for a tenure-track position in the psychology department at the University of California at Santa Cruz and is asking the court, among other things, for an injunction that would allow him to apply without submitting a diversity statement. The university system has required diversity statements in applications for tenure-track positions and promotions since 2018.

As I wrote in a previous post, Haltigan didn’t actually apply for the job, because he realized that his own statement would never pass muster with the faculty. But he did write and publish the statement that he would have used had he applied. It wouldn’t have passed muster, though, because it included stuff like this:

I believe that the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements in evaluating candidates for positions in higher education and academia are anathema to the ideals and principles of rigorous scholarship, and the sound practice of science and teaching.

Haltigan’s own “colorblind” statement would of course have led to his being rejected for the UCSC job, but he published it on a blog, and it was on those grounds that the Pacific Legal Foundation is representing him in a lawsuit.  Whether this gives him “standing” is not clear, but what is clear is that it will be hard to find somebody who can convince a court that they didn’t get a job because their diversity statement didn’t pass muster. That is what’s required to win such a suit.

Click to read: it’s free:

The Chronicle is fair in giving the pros and cons of requiring diversity statements.  First-Amendment arguments can be used for jobs in government, which include academic jobs in public universities, but it’s not clear whether private universities can require DEI statements if they still take federal funds. And even if they can require those statements, in my view they shouldn’t, for every college, public or private, should have policies that adhere to the First Amendment.

Three professors make the argument that diversity statements aren’t legal; one (Leiter) is my colleague at the U of C law school:

Public universities have a First Amendment right to have their own values and mission statements, said Zach Greenberg, a senior program officer with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has warned that diversity statements could be used as political litmus tests. But colleges may not force students or faculty members to adhere to values and mission statements, Greenberg said, “if they’re in political terms.”

“So, a university may say that we are antiracist, we believe in DEI, but we also welcome those with opposing views,” Greenberg said. A university can even encourage faculty to share those views, as long as it doesn’t cross the line into compelling them, he said.

While private employers are generally allowed to practice viewpoint discrimination, public universities, like other public employers, typically cannot discriminate based on political beliefs. “A public university can’t require its faculty to have certain beliefs,” said Brian Leiter, a professor of jurisprudence and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago, who has been a vocal critic of diversity statements. “No matter how laudable one thinks the beliefs are, it’s not allowed. And that’s just true of any public employer. There are very narrow exceptions.” Courts have ruled that government can base hiring decisions on political viewpoints only in very limited cases, such as political appointments, Leiter added.

But do diversity statements require a particular political viewpoint? Keith E. Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University, said that diversity statements, as they are commonly used in academe, “definitely run afoul of these kinds of viewpoint discrimination concerns.” For example, Whittington pointed to evaluation rubrics from the University of California system that downgrade applicants who say they treat every student equally. The rubric used by the University of California at Santa Cruz, for example, gives applicants less credit if they describe “only activities that are already the expectation of our faculty such as mentoring, treating all students the same regardless of background, etc.”

But giving less credit to “color blind” applicants violates the First Amendment by privileging political statements that promise a form of affirmative action in academia. While schools can have policies for mentoring ill-prepared applicants, they cannot refuse to give jobs to professors who simply promise to afford everyone equal opportunities to learn.

There’s really only one one viewpoint given that touts the legality of diversity statements, and I don’t find this very convincing:

Brian Soucek, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis, has argued that diversity statements can be constitutional, if used correctly. He previously served as chair of a systemwide committee on academic freedom for the University of California that provided input for the university system’s latest recommendations on the use of DEI statements.

Soucek recommends that in order to avoid infringing on academic freedom, faculty members, rather than administrators, should determine how to judge applicants. In order to avoid comparisons to loyalty oaths, he recommends that colleges ask what applicants “have done or plan to do, not what they believe, when it comes to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in their field.”

And regarding viewpoint discrimination, Soucek argues that the central question is not whether applicants are being judged on their viewpoints, but whether those perspectives are relevant to the position in question. An immigration-asylum clinic, for example, could legitimately ask about an applicant’s views on immigration, Soucek said, but it would appear to be constitutionally problematic if a law school asked an applicant for a bankruptcy professor position about immigration.

In Haltigan’s case, Soucek said, the University of California at Santa Cruz is hiring for an assistant professor of developmental psychology to enhance the program’s “long-established strengths in studying the lived experiences of children and youth from diverse backgrounds.” According to the job posting, the department seeks candidates whose research explores areas such as “cultural assets that promote healthy development in the contexts of inequities related to gender, ethnicity/race, social class, and/or sexuality” and “conditions and practices that leverage the psychological strengths of children from historically underserved backgrounds in the U.S. or other countries.”

For that particular position, Soucek said, “it would seem especially strange for somebody to come in and say, ‘I believe in colorblindness and refuse to see people’s race or ethnicity.’”

But I think Souchek is stretching it, for he’s giving an example that has been confected so that only those with a politically correct view of DEI could even apply for the job.  The immigration-asylum clinic isn’t as relevant simply because if the hired person does the job expected, there is no reason to deny him the job because he privately holds the “wrong” views about immigration.  There are plenty of people who can keep their political views out of their jobs.  The one requirement that holds for all job is simply is that people should be treated equally and fairly regardless of immutable characteristics like race, gender, disability status, and so on.   That’s simple adherence to civil rights law.  And even in the case of the “developmental psychology” job, what they should be looking for is people who can best deal with a variety of children. Do they really need to quiz applicants about their private views on race, gender, and sexuality?

But the worst part of this “pro-statement” argument is this. If people adopted Soucek’s rationale, it would result in job descriptions being tailored to those people holding the “proper” DEI views, or, indeed, views on any political or ideological issue that the school likes. I can imagine even biology jobs being tailored this way. But that would tilt all of academia towards the currently dominant ideology—exactly what we don’t want to do in a university, where free and open discussion is the order of the day.

Pamela Paul on the lack of humor of the woke

June 1, 2023 • 9:45 am

I’m wondering how long Pamela Paul will last as a NYT op-ed columnist if she keeps producing columns like this. (She used to be the Sunday Book Review editor.) The point of the column, a bit thin for her, is a good one: the woke (she calls them “politically correct”, and perhaps we should re-adopt that term) have no sense of humor about themselves. Is she right, given that there are indeed quite a few places where you can find humorous mockery of wokeness, e.g., The Babbling Beaver or The Babbling Bear. But yes, it’s not as easy to come across that humor as it used to be. As Paul says in her column:

A world without making fun is a world with a lot less fun in it. It also misses out on the relief humor provides. The whole point of comedy is to poke us where it’s most uncomfortable, to get us to laugh at our foibles and excesses, and the self-seriousness alone of contemporary political correctness practically begs for satire. Today we seem to mistake humorlessness for seriousness.

Read by clicking on the screenshot, and I found the column archived here.

The first thing to ask is whether Paul’s claim is correct: do the woke refrain from engaging in self-mockery and comedy? And the answer is “well, but not entirely”. The truly militant woke, like Ibram Kendi, aren’t expected to mock themselves, as they are deeply engaged in trying to reform society according to their program, but there are several sites, as I noted, that , but sites that mock wokeness.  And I’ve found that those sites don’t usually come from the Right (the Right lacks a sense of humor, though The Babylon Bee, said to be a conservative Christian Site, is an exception), but from the Center Left. Who’s the most famous person to satirize wokeness? Bill Maher, and he’s on the Center Left.  Paul even mentions him below. No, he’s not on ABC any more, but he’s as popular as ever.

But Paul’s correct in saying that things have changed. Mockery may be sparser, but what has really changed is that you are now automatically demonized as the enemy (i.e. someone on the Right) for mocking “politicial correctness”:

Yet there was a time, says Paul, when it was done, and taken in a good spirit. She recalls the 1992 book The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook (still available), which was a bestseller to everyone. Even I had a copy, for “political correctness” was neither as pervasive nor as serious as wokeness is now.  (“Political correctness”, unless “wokeness”, started out as a pejorative word, while “wokeness” has morphed into one, perhaps because its exponents are so dead serious. Paul notes the different atmosphere thirty years ago:

In 1992, two Harvard Lampoon alums, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, published “The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook,” which mixed together actual terms of P.C. orthodoxy with fictional ones in a way that left you unsure which was which. Real or fake: assimilationism, carbocentricism, chemically inconvenienced, heterosexually celibate, humyn, chair?

Thirty years later, on Amazon, a customer gave the book a worried one-star review, noting, “You’ll get in more trouble using this book than you were before.” These sensitivities are no longer a laughing matter. They are the stuff of moralizing retribution.

But back in benighted 1993, the year I graduated from college, we couldn’t fathom such censoriousness. That was the year Comedy Central introduced the political talk show “Politically Incorrect,” hosted by Bill Maher. Four years later, the show crossed over to network television — network television! — where ABC aired it until advertisers balked over comments Maher made about Sept. 11. The concern? Insufficient patriotism.

Expressing the opposite sentiment today — when merely referring to yourself as “American” is enough to be deemed “imperialist” — is what might get you in trouble.

People have clearly lost their sense of humor.

I think she’s right here, for if you mock extreme forms of wokeness, such as the opposition to “Kimono Wednesdays” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—a palpably ridiculous attempt to quash “cultural appropriation” (itself something ripe for mockery)—your are immediately placed in the opposition.

It’s an interesting question, and one Paul needs to ponder, why those on the Left used to mock political correctness so easily and get away with it, but can no longer do so with wokeness, even though the latter is just an updated version of the former.

Here’s my own twofold explanation, which is mine:

1.)  Wokeness is more intimately connected with race and gender than was “political correctness”, and these issues are touchy and often taken dead seriously. If you mock them, you become the enemy, as happened to Dave Chapelle when he dealt with transsexuality in one of his Neflix comedy shows. Things have become so bad that comedians like Jerry Seinfeld will no longer perform on college campuses, as all that brings is heartache. This, of course, creates self-censorship if you want to make fun of wokeness. For nobody on the Left ever wants to be called a racist or a sexist.

But that brings up the question of WHY, even if you’re a liberal or Leftist,  do you suffer more now than you used to? The answer, I think, may involve this:

2.) The extreme Left is more extreme than it used to be, and that’s led to more emotional fragility. Its members thus tend to strike out at those who oppose them, demonizing them even though they’re on the same half of the political spectrum. (It may not be irrelevant that surveys show that mental illness is more pervasive on the extreme Left than on the extreme Right). Emotional fragility leads to extreme behavior—remember how Nicholas Christakis was attacked by unhinged Yale students simply because his wife sent an email to the students in their “house” saying that adults could choose their own Halloween costumes? This is emotional fragility in action (on the part of some students, not Christakis):

I’m not the first to make the point: it is in fact a major aspect of Haidt and Lukianoff’s book The Coddling of the American Mind. And regardless of whether emotional fragility is a cause or a consequence of being on the extreme left, it has produced a polarization and animus that didn’t used to exist.

Let it not be said, though, that Paul lets the Right off the hook. Here’s what she says about them:

What weak laughter is left? Nowadays, critics of P.C.’s pedantic excesses can be even more strident than its advocates. Making fun of political correctness (efforts not to offend) is one thing; telling outright offensive jokes (efforts intended to offend) is quite another. On right-wing outlets like Fox News and The Daily Caller, the tone is more rage and sneer than ridicule and smirk — they’re attacking the enemy rather than recognizing their own foolishness.

Yes, but the tone of all opponents of wokeness is at anger or criticism, and not often mockery. The Right sees themselves in a battle, and, while Rightists themselves seem to lack sense of humor, the Left, which in general does have more humor, has been cowed by the extreme wing from mocking its own excesses. But I’m not sure what Paul’s last sentence above means, especially the word “foolishness.”  All I can say is that the Right doesn’t go after the extreme right with nearly the vitriol that the Left goes after the extreme Left.  This may be connected with the reduced emotional fragility of the extreme right—if what the surveys show is correct.

So Paul is correct that it’s not as easy to satirize political correctness as it used to be, but incorrect in implying that there is hardly any mockery of wokeness from the Left. And I think she missed a valuable chance to analyze why this change in attitudes has occurred in the last few decades.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 1, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today’s photos are from Howard Feldman of Houston. His captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

All these photos were taken with my old Iphone5 in our community garden near downtown Houston, TX, over about 1 year.

European honeybee, Apis mellifera, on an arugula flower (Erica vesicaria):

Davis’s Cuckoo Sweat Bee, Sphecodes davisii. Sphecodes bees are kleptoparasitic on other bees, stealing their food:

Bumblebee, Bombus sp.:

Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa sp.  There are approximately 500 species of carpenter bees, and several visit our garden:

Monarch Butterfly, Danaus plexippus:

Gulf Fritillary Butterfly, Agraulis vanilla.  This butterfly loves parks and urban gardens:

Black-Bordered Lemon Moth, Marimatha nigrofimbria.  Houston is at the far southwestern edge of its range:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 1, 2023 • 6:45 am

June is here! Yes, it’s Thursday, June 1, 2023, and although Summer doesn’t officially start for three weeks, June really IS summer. It’s National Hazelnut Cake Day, which nobody has ever eaten, as well as these food-month designations for June:

National Candy Month
National Dairy Month
National Fresh Fruit and Vegetables Month
National Iced Tea Month
National Papaya Month

It’s also Dinosaur Day, Heimlich Maneuver Day (note that there are now two ways to do this: abdominal thrusts and back blows, and you should alternate between them), International Children’s Day, National Go Barefoot Day, National Nail Polish Day, National Olive Day, Say Something Nice Day (how about “you look maah-velous!”?), Wear a Dress Day, World Milk Day, and Global Day of Parents.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Yesterday the House passed a bill affirming the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling, so the U.S. won’t go into default (the Senate is almost certain to pass it, too).  The support was bipartisan, but so was the opposition:

The bill would defer the federal debt limit for two years — allowing the government to borrow unlimited sums as necessary to pay its obligations — while imposing two years of spending caps and a string of policy changes that Republicans demanded in exchange for allowing the country to avoid a disastrous default. The 314-to-117 vote came days before the nation was set to exhaust its borrowing limit, and days after a marathon set of talks between White House negotiators and top House Republicans yielded a breakthrough agreement.

With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks. On the final vote, 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats backed the measure, while 71 Republicans and 46 Democrats opposed it.

That was a blow to the Republican speaker, whose hard-fought victory on the measure was dampened by the fact that more Democrats ultimately voted for the bill than members of his own party.

The measure nearly collapsed on its way to the House floor, when hard-right Republicans sought to block its consideration, and in a suspenseful scene, Democrats waited several minutes before swooping in to supply their votes for a procedural measure that allowed the plan to move ahead.

The “progressive” Democrats, including Jayapal and Ocasio-Cortez, voted against the bill because it didn’t give them what they wanted (same reason the Republicans voted against the bill), but do these people want to throw the country into a crisis? AOC:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said she, too, would vote against the bill, in part because of changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

“Republicans need to own this vote,” she said. “This was their deal, this was their negotiations. They’re the ones trying to come in and cut SNAP, cut environmental protections, trying to ram through an oil pipeline through a community that does not want it.”

Sorry, but both Dems and Republicans own this vote, and it was negotiations and a deal from both parties. And a good thing, too.

*As reported in Forbes Magazine, a nationwide telephone poll of 1,680 adults conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago assayed Americans on a number of issues, the one reported in this piece being how much weight should be given to race in college admissions. According to Americans, “some, but not much.” We should find out shortly if the Supreme Court will allow any consideration of race in admissions, and it doesn’t look likely.

A new poll conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that 63% of adults believe that the Supreme Court should not prohibit colleges from considering race or ethnicity as one factor in their admission decisions, but most also believe it should not be treated as a major factor.

. . . Support for the limited use of race as an admission factor was surprisingly consistent across political and racial lines. A majority of both Democrats (65%) and Republicans (60%) favored allowing applicants’ race to be considered. Likewise, there was no significant difference based on race or ethnicity. Sixty-two percent of white adults, along with 62% of Black adults and 65% of Hispanic adults said consideration of race and ethnicity should be permitted by colleges.

. . . There were, however, differences in how much consideration people thought race/ethnicity should be given in college admissions with Blacks, Hispanics and Democrats more likely to say they should be important.

When asked about the importance of several other admission factors, respondents assigned relatively low priority to race/ethnicity (only 13% said it should be extremely or very important), donations to the school (10% said the same), athletic ability (9%), gender (9%), and legacy status (9%). Overall, 68% of adults said race and ethnicity should not be a significant factor.

And although the Supreme Court will be the ultimate arbiter of this issue, Americans have lost confidence in the Court in a large measure: only 12% of those polled expressing great confidence in it—down more than 50% from 2020.

*Yesterday North Korea just tried to launch its first spy satellite, but it failed miserably, with the rocket falling into the sea.

North Korea’s attempt to put its first spy satellite into space failed Wednesday in a setback to leader Kim Jong Un’s push to boost his military capabilities as tensions with the United States and South Korea rise.

After an unusually quick admission of failure, North Korea vowed to conduct a second launch after it learns what went wrong. It suggests Kim remains determined to expand his weapons arsenal and apply more pressure on Washington and Seoul while diplomacy is stalled.

South Korea and Japan briefly urged residents in some areas to take shelter after the launch.

The South Korean military said it was salvaging an object presumed to be part of the crashed North Korean rocket in waters 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of the southwestern island of Eocheongdo. Later, the Defense Ministry released photos of a white, metal cylinder it described as a suspected rocket part.

A satellite launch by North Korea is a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban the country from conducting any launch based on ballistic technology. Observers say North Korea’s previous satellite launches helped improve its long-range missile technology. North Korean long-range missile tests in recent years demonstrated a potential to reach all of the continental U.S., but outside experts say the North still has some work to do to develop functioning nuclear missiles.

They’ll eventually succeed, even as they’ll eventually succeed in producing workable ICBMs with nuclear warheads. This is one of the most difficult diplomatic problems to solve—if it even needs solving. Negotiating, of course, won’t work, and, the country not being suicidal, it’s not going to launch nukes without provocation. But all the money for this war material is coming out of the mouths of North Koreans, who are starving en masse. And there’s no hope of a regime change.

*The NYT has discovered that the James Beard Foundation, which gives prestigious award to various chefs, has gone full Pecksniff and is now grilling candidate chefs about their sociopolitical backgrounds and scrutinizing their past social media accounts. After all, our chefs must be politically correct!

[Chef Sam] Fore is a finalist in the James Beard awards, which for nearly three decades have been considered the most prestigious culinary honors in the United States, the so-called “Oscars of the food world.” As the #MeToo movement led to high-profile revelations of misbehavior and workplace abuse in the restaurant world in recent years, the Beard foundation overhauled its processes to make the awards more equitable and diverse, and to ensure that chefs with troubling histories are not honored.

Ms. Fore is among the first subjects of an investigatory process created in 2021 as part of that overhaul. But in many ways she is the kind of chef the retooled awards are meant to recognize more fully. Early indications suggest that the new process is vulnerable to failure in several ways.

While the awards have historically honored mostly white chefs serving European-derived food in expensive urban restaurants — in fact, the other four finalists in the Best Chef: Southeast category with Ms. Fore are white men — her business, Tuk Tuk, is a pop-up that serves cuisine inspired by what she grew up eating in Lexington, Ky., as the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants.

In what she called “an interrogation,” the investigators asked her about social media posts she had made on both private and public accounts. Someone had sent them to the foundation through an anonymous tip line on its website. The men told Ms. Fore that the posts potentially violated the organization’s code of ethics — specifically that they amounted to “targeted harassment” and “bullying.”

They included an Instagram post, she said, that was part of a domestic-violence awareness campaign, and others related to her advocacy for victims of sexual violence, including “vague tweets” about people the posts did not name.

Here’s the “problematic” post, which isn’t problematic at all:

The Foundation even has an anonymous “tip line”, where you can report a chef or restaurant for not practicing Social Justice correctly.  It’s a good thing that there is no Big Brother to record people’s words, for then all of us would have been guilty of at least one such offense in our lives.

*Talk about May-December romances, India Today reports that actor Al Pacino, who’s now 83, is expecting a baby with his 29-year-old wife Noor Alfallah. I found one photo of them on her Instagram page (below), but he’s not named (the guy on the right is artist James Bennett).

Veteran American actor and filmmaker Alfredo James “Al” Pacino is set to become a dad for the fourth time. He is 82 years old! As per TMZ, the actor’s 29-year-old girlfriend, Noor Alfallah is eight-months pregnant. Pacino’s representative also confirmed the news to PEOPLE

Al Pacino and Noor Alfallah have been linked since April 2022 when they were spotted grabbing dinner together. According to Page Six sources, it was revealed that the couple had actually been quietly dating since the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Pacino and Noor started seeing each other during the pandemic. She mostly dates very rich older men. She has been with Al for some time and they get on very well. The age gap doesn’t seem to be a problem, even though he is older than her father. She moves with the wealthy jet-set crowd, and she comes from a family with money,” the source revealed.

Meanwhile, Al Pacino already shares daughter Julie Marie, 33, with his ex-girlfriend, Jan Tarrant. She is an acting coach. He also has 22-year-old twins Anton and Olivia with ex-partner Beverly D’Angelo. The duo dated from 1997 to 2003. Meanwhile, this appears to be Alfallah’s first child.

Previously, Alfallah was linked to Mick Jagger, who was 74 at the time, and she was just 22. She was also linked to billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, 60.

I’ve heard people criticize Pacino for this, presumably on the grounds that his child won’t have a father for very long, but this seems to be the business of Pacino and Alfallah alone. But as long as we’re gossiping, Robert DeNiro just had his seventh kid at 79.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili still despises molehills, but Andrzej likes them:

Hili: A tragedy.
A: How so?
Hili: Six molehills in my field of vision.
A: But I like moles and their molehills very much.
In Polish:
Hili: Rozpacz.
Ja: Z czym?
Hili: Sześć kretowisk w polu widzenia.
Ja: A ja bardzo lubię krety i ich kretowiska.

. . . and a photo of baby Kulka:

. . . and a photo of Baby Kulka:

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

From Nicole:

From Facebook:

This guy won the Grand Prize in the claw machine! (Click on screenshot to see the short video.)

 

From Masih. I never fail to be impressed by the bravery of Iranian women. She could certainly be imprisoned for going unveiled in public:

Here are a few “life tips” from “Strong Minded”, who self-identifies as “Investor, Learner, Out Of The Rat Race. Sharing Wealth, Wisdom, And Motivational Tips To Help You Perform At Your Highest Level.” They actually seem to make a lot of sense, so I’ll post them here (click on each tweet to see all the “wisdom”).

Of course nobody could adhere to all of these all of the time—if you did you’d be like Jesus was supposed to be, but much of this advice is good. And #20, the last tip, is the best.

From Barry: spa day for human and kitty!

From Malcolm, the beginning of a cat brawl:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a mother and child gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. First, a Dali Hamster:

Ah, those crafty Norwegians. What a way to change!

The headline is a bit confusing (it’s about Matthew’s book), but it sure impressed his daughter:

Book recommendation: “G-Man”

May 31, 2023 • 12:45 pm

Assuming you’re not put off by long books (this one has about 750 pages of text) and that you a well-written biography of a fascinating American character, I can highly recommend G-Man, which won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. It also nabbed a bunch of other awards, including the 2023 Bancroft Prize, the 2023 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History, the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, and the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.  I found out about the book via a recommendation fr0m my editor at Viking Penguin, the terrific Wendy Wolf, who happened to be the editor of this book—her second editing job to win a Pulitzer for nonfiction.

I presume that you know a little about J. Edgar Hoover: how he was FBI director from 1935-1972—from the days of John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd right up through the Watergate burglary.  He refused to step down (and so died in office), served under eight Presidents, and grew the Bureau from a small investigative office into the behemoth institution it is today.

You’ve probably also heard that he illegally bugged Martin Luther King (among many other people), catching the Reverend in acts of infidelity and sending the tapes to Coretta King. After that, he had an anonymous note sent to King urging him to “do the right thing”, i.e.,  kill himself. (Hoover, an arch-conservative, disliked the civil rights movement, all Communists, and, at the end of his life, the left-wing antiwar movement.) You may have also heard that he was gay and dressed in women’s clothes. The latter isn’t true, while the former probably is, though Gage was unable to produce convincing proof that Hoover, who never married, had a homosexual relationship with his deputy Clyde Tolson.  They were surely partners of some sort, and nearly all of Hoover’s money (and the flag on his coffin) went to Tolson after his death. Hoover also bugged John and Bobby Kennedy, catching them in multiple infidelities, though he didn’t use that information against them.

Beverly Gage spent 16 years writing this book, and it shows: it’s loaded with facts that only a dogged researcher could pry out of archives, and yet the prose is superb. This is a long book that’s also a page-turner.

I don’t think that anyone who reads this book and has a moral neuron could think anything other than that Hoover was an odious human being, even though he ran the Bureau efficiently (although autocratically). He regularly violated the law by wiretapping, intimidating people, and engaging in quasi-legal manipulations to get his way, and I could find no sense of humor in the man, or, indeed, anything to like. Acts of empathy on his part were almost nonexistent. People befriended him simply because he was powerful.  But that’s what makes the story fascinating: how he cowed seven Presidents, including several who couldn’t stand him, into getting his way. (He got along best with Nixon and Johnson).

Gage sums up his life in a couple of pages at the end, and, like me, sees him as a pretty awful human being, but one who had the facility to wield power to his own advantage. He played a huge role in American history, though not always a good one, and if you’re a history buff or simply like biographies, this is one to read.  It’s a good book to take on a long trip, but too heavy to schlep to the beach!

I give it two hearty thumbs up.

Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon page:

Click below to see a 16-minute NPR interview of Beverly Gage by Michel Martin: