Readers’ wildlife photos

May 26, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today’s photos come from Larry Powell of Calgary; his captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are some photos of amphibian and reptile species that are found in Alberta. Most of our species are widely distributed through western North America, and reach their northern (or eastern) range limits here. We don’t have a very diverse herpetofauna, and the species we do have must deal with long cold winters.

Some of these (Prairie Rattlesnake, Greater Short-horned Lizard, Long-toed Salamander) are species that I’ve conducted ecological research on in Alberta, and the others are individuals that I’ve come across during various field projects.

Tiger Salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum) – A large and amiable salamander found over much of Alberta’s prairies, but seldom seen, as it spends most of its time underground. This one was found right at the western margin of its Alberta distribution, at the eastern edge of the Front Range:

Long-toed Salamander (Ambystoma macrodactylum) – This is our other salamander species, found in the mountains. It’s much smaller than the Tiger Salamander, but also spends most of its time underground:

Three Long-toed Salamanders from the same population in the Front Range, showing the great variability in dorsal colouration and pattern. This species exudes a toxic secretion from glands in the skin, and from a ridge of glandular tissue down the dorsal side of the tail, that is both sticky and irritating, so the bright yellow blotching is presumably warning colouration:

Wood Frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) – This is a cold-adapted species found in the boreal forest across Canada. It overwinters by allowing its extracellular fluids to freeze, and limits damage to cellular structures through cryoprotectants. This individual was found in the Front Range:

Leopard Frog (Lithobates pipiens) – This species was formerly widespread and abundant in the Alberta Prairies, but almost disappeared in the late 1970s. There doesn’t seem to be any satisfactory explanation for this. They are still locally common in spots, however – this individual was found in a dugout in the deep southeast of the province, in relatively undisturbed short-grass prairie:

Great Plains Toad (Anaxyrus cognatus) – A handsome and charming toad that reaches its northern limits in southeastern Alberta, where it occurs in great numbers in spots (mainly the sandy areas around the South Saskatchewan River). The breeding call sounds like a miniature jackhammer, and breeding congregations are audible for a long distance:

A Great Plains Toad in the hand:

Bullsnake (Pituophis catenifer sayi) – Bullsnakes are found over the short-grass prairie region of southeastern Alberta, mainly near rivers. They are unusual in being oviparous – most Alberta reptiles are viviparous. This specimen was encountered by the South Saskatchewan River, north of Medicine Hat. Bullsnakes spend a lot of time underground, hunting rodents in their burrows – note the large rostral scale, thought to be used in burrowing:

Prairie Rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis) – Another species of the short-grass prairie in the southeast of the province. Like Bullsnakes, their distribution is associated with drainage channels – they hibernate communally in the bedrock exposed in these situations, and travel considerable distances during the warmer months to and from their dens. This individual is a subadult, encountered on a road at the edge of the Cypress Hills:

Greater Short-horned Lizard (Phrynosoma hernandesi brevirostris) – This is our only lizard, found in scattered locations across the southeast corner of the province. They are remarkably cold-hardy. This is a large adult female I’m holding – males are quite a bit smaller. The species’ viviparity is probably part of the reason for this sexual size dimorphism:

Another Greater Short-horned Lizard – this individual is a member of the northernmost population of this species in the world, located about 30 km north of Medicine Hat. It’s a subadult female:

Friday: Hili dialogue

May 26, 2023 • 6:45 am

Greetings at the end of the “work” week: it’s May 26, 2023, and National Blueberry Cheesecake Day, something that would make a fine breakfast, no?

It’s also Ascension (again?), National Cherry Dessert Day, Red Nose Day, Sally Ride Day (she was born on this day in 1951), World Redhead Day, National Sorry Day in Australia, and National Paper Airplane Day./

Here’s the record flight for a paper plane, one made by Boeing engineers that traveled 290 feet:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The skinny on the debt-ceiling talks goes back and forth from “stalled” to “deadlocked” to “some progress”. The WSJ now says that we’re in the third area, printing an article called “House Republicans see progress in debt-ceiling talks.”

House Republican negotiators indicated they were closing in on a deal with the White House to raise the debt ceiling, with both sides wrangling over coming years’ government spending levels as talks continued Thursday.

Leaders are hoping to pass the deal through both the Republican House and Democratic Senate ahead of a deadline next week, when the government could run short of funds to pay all of its bills on time.

The discussions were taking place as House lawmakers took the final votes of the week and were set to leave for a Memorial Day recess. GOP leadership told members that they would have 72 hours to review any legislation and 24 hours’ notice to return to Washington if there was a deal struck. The Senate is on break now and is scheduled to return next week.

“We know where our differences lie. We worked well past midnight last night. We’re back at it today trying to get to the conclusion,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) told reporters. “Nothing is agreed to overall, but we know exactly where we need to be to solve this problem,” he said.

In remarks from the White House, President Biden said he and McCarthy have had several productive conversations and their staffs continue to meet. “They’re making progress,” he said. “I’ve made it clear time and again, defaulting on our national debt is not an option.”

This is more optimistic than the sides have been in a while, so here’s my prediction: the Democrats will agree to freeze spending for two years and offer to make only trivial cuts in the budget, not serious ones but enough to say that they’ve compromised with the GOP. But they’d better work fast, as the default begins in six days.

*In Pamala Paul’s NYT column this week, she rereads and admires the prescience (in light of the end of affirmative action) of Stephen L. Carter’s 1991 book, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. It’s a good column though it’s sure to stick in the craw of NYT editors.

The end of affirmative action, in Carter’s view, was both necessary and inevitable. “We must reject the common claim that an end to preferences ‘would be a disastrous situation, amounting to a virtual nullification of the 1954 desegregation ruling,’” he wrote, quoting the activist and academic Robert Allen. “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and a chance.”

For Carter, affirmative action was a necessary stopgap measure to remedy historical discrimination. Like many people today — both proponents and opponents of affirmative action — he expressed reservations about relying on diversity as the constitutional basis for racial preferences.

The diversity argument holds that people of different races benefit from one another’s presence, which sounds desirable on its face. But the implication of recruiting for diversity, Carter explained, had less to do with admitting Black students to redress past discrimination and more to do with supporting and reinforcing essentialist notions about Black people.

An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”

In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.” This belies the reality that Black people, he said, “fairly sparkle with diversity of outlook.”

. . .This strikes me as the greatest difference between reading the book today and reading it as an undergrad at a liberal Ivy League college: the attitude toward debating controversial views. “Reflections” offers a vigorous and unflinching examination of ideas, something academia, media and the arts still prized back in 1991. Carter’s arguments were considered worthy of discussion, however misguided his critics took them to be. And Carter was prepared and willing to defend them.

Today, a kind of magical thinking has seized ideologues on both the left and the right, who seem to believe that stifling debate on difficult questions will make them go away. But if affirmative action itself goes away, America — which Carter deemed “a society that prefers its racial justice cheap” — will no longer be able to avoid grappling with the real and persistent inequalities that necessitated it in the first place.

This column could easily have come from the McWhorter playbook, and so the NYT has two left-center columnists with heterodox ideas on race. This is all to the good, because, just like Carter’s book did to Paul, her own (and McWhorter’s) columns inspire discussion and make us think.

*AT The Free Press, James Fishback discusses how high school debates have drastically changed in the last decade—and it’s not for the better.  Ideology has infected them, too, but not in the way you’d expect:

In the past few years, however, judges with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology are becoming common. Debate judge Shubham Gupta’s paradigm reads, “If you are discussing immigrants in a round and describe the person as ‘illegal,’ I will immediately stop the round, give you the loss with low speaks”—low speaker points—“give you a stern lecture, and then talk to your coach. . . . I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.”

Debate Judge Kriti Sharma concurs: under her list of “Things That Will Cause You To Automatically Lose,” number three is “Referring to immigrants as ‘illegal.’ ”

. . . let’s say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”

. . . Should a high school student automatically lose and be publicly humiliated for using a term that’s not only ubiquitous in media and politics, but accurate?

. . . Unfortunately for students and their parents, there are countless judges at tournaments across the country whose biased paradigms disqualify them from being impartial adjudicators of debate. From “I will drop America First framing in a heartbeat,” to “I will listen to conservative-leaning arguments, but be careful,” judges are making it clear they are not only tilting the debate in a left-wing direction, they will also penalize students who don’t adhere to their ideology.

Of course this doesn’t surprise you, does it?  But it’s a debate, Jake; judges should strive to weigh the merits of arguments, not whether they conform to the judge’s personal beliefs.

*Well, the Texas legislature may have tabled a bill requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in each classroom, but they more than made up for it yesterday by passing a bill that allows schools to hire chaplains as well as counselors. Guess which end of the political spectrum is supporting this?

The Texas legislature has passed a bill that would allow schools to employ chaplains in addition to school counselors, with Republicans overriding objections by Democrats to send the legislation to the governor’s desk.

The bill would permit school districts to hire chaplains who, unlike school counselors, are not required to be certified by the State Board for Educator Certification. A version of the bill already sailed through the state Senate last month, and the Texas House passed an amended version Tuesday evening in a vote that appeared to fall largely along party lines, with 89 voting in favor and 58 opposed.

Conservative groups such as Texas Values Action have voiced support for the bill, and the National School Chaplain Association, an arm of the Christian group Mission Generation, testified in support during committee meetings last month.

. . .But Malloy’s organization has suggested otherwise in the past, and critics of the bill argue that it could lead to proselytization and erode the separation of church and state.

“I worry that this bill will lead to Christian nationalists infiltrating our public schools and indoctrinating our students,” Democratic Rep. James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, told Religion News Service in a phone interview from the state House floor Tuesday.

But here’s one saving grace: they won’t hire chaplains who were sex offenders! What an enlightened decision!

All of those efforts failed, although lawmakers did amend the bill to prohibit registered sex offenders from serving as chaplains, to institute background checks, and to require those serving in the role to be endorsed by an organization recognized by the U.S. Defense Department, the Federal Bureau of Prisons or the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The bill will be challenged by some parent with standing, and eventually it will work its way up to the Supreme Court, which no longer seems to recognize the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It won’t be long till preachers will be able to present a daily prayer to the whole school.

*Kudos to Panama, which has just given legal rights to sea turtles!

The students [checking leatherback turtle nests] worked under the guidance of Callie Veelenturf, who founded a group that works to protect leatherback turtles and pushed for a new law in Panama that guarantees sea turtles the legal right to live and have free passage in a healthy environment.

The new law “will allow any Panamanian citizen to be the voice of sea turtles and defend them legally,” Veelenturf said in a text message as she boarded a plane to Panama City after her group’s work near Armila. “We will be able to hold governments, corporations, and public citizens legally accountable for violations of the rights of sea turtles.”

When Panama’s president signed the law in March, it was a victory for people who have long argued that wild animals should have so-called rights of nature that recognize their legal right to exist and to flourish, and allow for lawsuits if those rights are violated. Experts hope it’s part of an evolution that will see other countries take similar steps to protect species under threat.

“Business as usual laws aren’t doing enough to protect against the extinction crisis and climate change,” said Erica Lyman, a clinical law professor and director of the Global Law Alliance for Animals and the Environment at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. “This is an attempt at a new kind of framing that offers hope.”

. . .Wildlife protection laws typically are passed because of some perceived benefit to humans, Lyman said. Panama’s law instead considers what sea turtles need and the fact that humans should curb their behavior to meet those needs, she said.

The law gives sea turtles the right to an environment free of pollution and other human impacts that cause physical or health damage, like climate change, incidental capture, coastal development and unregulated tourism.

What makes the law remarkable is that it explicitly says sea turtles, as living creatures, have rights, and with enough specificity that those rights can be enforced, added Nicholas Fromherz, an adjunct law professor and director of the alliance’s Latin American Program.

Now if Panama will only enforce the protection. It’s easier to pass laws than to punish those who flout them, and injuring endangered species isn’t always that high on the priority list. Good luck, turtles!

 Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is chilling:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m listening to the grass growing.

In Polish:

Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Słucham jak trawa rośnie.

. . . and a photo by Paulina of baby Kulka:

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

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

Here’s the relevant verse (King James translation): 28 Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord.

A Gary Larson Far Side cartoon sent in by Chrisopher. Get it?

A puritanical cat from Pet Jokes and Puns:

An extra from Pet Jokes & Puns:

From Masih, two protestors, each with an eye shot out. The Iranian police do this deliberately, often using birdshot. As the BBC reports:

The New York Times has established that 500 people with similar injuries sought treatment at three hospitals in Tehran between September and November last year.

Lauren Boebert testifying, sent by reader Ken, who adds, “A 36-year-old pistol-packin’ grandma’s guide to birth control.  Boebert’s third son, Kayden, was born in 2009. The average cost for raising a child born in that year to age 18 is $369,000. So those must’ve been some damned expensive birth control pills.

PS – Boebert has voted against the right to contraception unregulated by the government. She also supports defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides low- or no-cost birth control pills to women without health insurance.”

From Barry, a Craigslist kitten. “Kevin just took over.”

From Malcom, a very bad cat:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 15-year-old girl who perished in the camp:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. First, the Big Claw:

A defaced sign (“Sacred Heart”), but from Wikipedia:

A strange animal highlighted on The Daily Parasite:

Mathematicians warn of ideology polluting their discipline

May 25, 2023 • 11:30 am

It looks as if today will be about ideology infecting science—in this case, mathematics. One would think that math would be relatively impervious to the ideological tides inundating other sciences, but one would be wrong. This article from the Torygraph (click on screenshot, or on the archived version here), discusses nonbinding but injurious ideological guidelines given to college teachers of math in the UK. These guidelines have nothing to do with improving math education, of course, but everything to do with propagandizing students with certain approved political views.

Excerpts are indented:

More than 50 of Britain’s leading mathematicians have accused standards bosses of politicising the curriculum with new diversity guidance.

Academics at top UK universities have signed an open letter criticising guidance on academic standards that states that values of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) “should permeate the curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience”.

The guidance was published in March by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), an independent body that receives membership fees from more than 300 UK higher education providers and distributes advice on courses.

In an open letter, the mathematicians write: “We reject the QAA’s insistence on politicising the mathematical curriculum.

“We believe the only thing that should permeate the mathematics curriculum is mathematics. Academics should teach from a perspective informed by their academic experience, not from a political perspective determined by the QAA.

“Students should be able to study mathematics without also being required to pay for their own political indoctrination.”

I believe the letter of protest to the QAA guidelines is here, though it may be an earlier version. The link to the guidelines themselves (given in the letter) seems to be gone, but the letter’s signers paraphrase some guidelines:

A particular concern is that the new edition states: “the curriculum should present a multicultural and decolonised view of MSOR, informed by the student voice.”

We abhor racism, but one can abhor racism without subscribing to the theory of decoloniality.

The theory of decoloniality is a postmodernist critique of the “European paradigm of rational knowledge”. We believe that history suggests that mathematics is not a particularly European paradigm. On the contrary there are many examples where the same mathematical ideas have been developed independently across cultures. As just one example, the Japanese mathematician Seki and the Swiss mathematician Bernoulli both studied what are now called Bernoulli numbers. We agree that where practical the mathematical community should use terminology that gives nonWestern mathematicians proper credit, but this is not the meaning of decoloniality.

The QAA suggests promoting a decolonialist perspective as follows:

Students should be made aware of problematic issues in the development of the MSOR content they are being taught, for example some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, or some mathematicians had connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism.

The mathematicians are correct; math curricula should be about math alone.  But what is the QAA recommending? This is hard to believe, but seems to be true:

The QAA guidance suggests that professors should note that “some early ideas in statistics were motivated by their proposers’ support for eugenics, some astronomical data were collected on plantations by enslaved people, and, historically, some mathematicians have recorded racist or fascist views or connections to groups such as the Nazis”.

Maths professors said that the agency wanted to teach “a skewed view of the history of mathematics”. They noted that the QAA did not recommend teaching “the universality of mathematical truth, the use of statistics to disprove historical racial theories or about the Jewish mathematicians persecuted by Nazis”.

If you take this tactic, then every single academic subject must devote its time to showing how famous achievers in its area were politically impure. If you want to discuss things like how slaves collected astronomical data, do it in a history or sociology of science class.

But the scariest thing in these guidelines—and I can’t verify this because I can’t find the guidelines themselves—is that the QAA did NOT recommend teaching “the universality of mathematical truth, the use of statistics to disprove historical racial theories or about the Jewish mathematicians persecuted by Nazis”.  Is mathematical truth not universal?  Yes, I know that Euclidean geometry differs from non-Euclidian geometry, but that itself is a universal truth. And they recommending teaching how mathematicians promoted slavery, racism, and Nazism, but, curiously, don’t recommend teaching how slaves enriched astronomy or how Jewish mathematicians were persecuted by Nazis? And, as a secular Jew, I want to know why Jewish persecution get a pass here.

In truth, none of this should be in math class, but I find it deeply weird that of all the philosophies held by some mathematicians, including the morality of slavery and of Nazism, they leave out Jews, who of course were the very victims of Nazi persecution, just as slaves were the victims of racism.

But there’s pushback beyond the letter:

Dr John Armstrong, a reader in financial mathematics at King’s College London, and a signatory of the letter, said: “Education for sustainable development may sound like a positive thing, but when you look into what that is, what they are promoting is encouraging all students to become activists on issues of social justice.

“It’s really quite a remarkable thing to change education from goals such as understanding, learning and appreciating art and shift everything towards consideration of social justice.”

It is simply bizarre that we all sit back and accept this explicit injection of ideology into science, a practice that not only takes time away from science (and, in this case, math), but tries to turn young mathematicians into ideologues. Were I a parent, I’d want my children to decide their views themselves, not have propaganda stuffed down their throats by math teachers.  These are bizarre times we live in, but we can’t let those who are most vocal foist their politics onto children who want to learn math or science (or anything else, for that matter).

Oh, and in light of the letter, the QAA has added this:

A spokesman for the QAA said: “Subject benchmark statements are written by groups of academics from the relevant discipline. Institutional autonomy and academic freedom are crucial principles, and therefore the statements do not mandate academics to teach specific content – they are a reflective tool to support course design and are not compulsory. We agree with the letter’s assertion that course content should be taught by academics in line with their own expertise and academic judgment.”

Indeed. Why, then, did they insist on producing a benchmark statement? And, as one of my friends asked, “How did it all go off the rails?”  It’s almost as if we’re being subject to “extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds,” as the famous book was called.  This foisting of ideology on education is our version of Tulip Mania.

The Lancet’s editor jumps the shark, disses global health because of its racist and white supremacist history

May 25, 2023 • 9:30 am

I don’t know much about Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet (one of the world’s top medical journals); but what is clear is that he’s uber-woke. He was, for example, responsible for this controversial cover:

 

 

There have been other political covers, other woke editorials by Horton, and a fair few woke articles that, in saner times, wouldn’t be published in The Lancet. But once someone like Horton is handed his bully pulpit (and is presumably supported by “allies”), he can go hog wild with proselytizing and virtue flaunting. Yes, he may mean well, but his latest op-ed is so over the top, so full of the drive to reform everything in the world, and so unhinged in its tone, that there was a reason I once called The Lancet “the medical Scientific American.”

Here’s my own brief summary of Horton’s op-ed that you can (and should) read by clicking the screenshot below. These are my words:

“Global health” is a manifestation of colonialism and white supremacy, an exclusive and structurally racist club that must be decolonized and dismantled. We shouldn’t waste our time pursuing the traditional version of this practice, which won’t be decolonized until the entire world is fixed: rid of war, racism, unequal wealth, climate skepticism, and all other manifestations of right-wing politics.”

But what is “global health”? Well, I use the Lancet’s own definition:

. . . . we offer the following definition: global health is an area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. Global health emphasises transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions; involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration; and is a synthesis of population-based prevention with individual-level clinical care.

This, then, involves not just improving health of people throughout the world, but achieving “equity in health,” which to me means that everyone gets equal opportunities to access health care. Well, that seems fine: equal opportunity for everyone is what I want. Note, however, that they emphasize “equity in health,” not simple “equity,” which means representation of  all underserved groups of people in professions—presumably healthcare here—in proportion to the groups’ occurrence in the population.  But, as you see below, “equity in health” has been reinterpreted by Horton, half intoxicated with wokeness, into simple equity in everything, which leads him to not only indict “global health” for racism and colonialism, but also to call for sweeping reforms of the entire planet.  Yes, most of these reforms would be nice, but right now there are sick people to cure, and we can’t wait centuries until everyone has more comparable incomes before we start making people well.

Click to read:

 

Seriously, Horton has gone the Scientific American route.  I don’t mind him noting the underlying cause of health disparities, but here he picks up a megaphone, mounts a soapbox, and shouts his own views to the world. I will quote him so that you’ll see that I’m not making this up. I’ve put the more interesting claims in bold:

Global health has become fashionably unfashionable. The case against global health is strong. Global health is the invention of a largely white and wealthy elite residing in high-income, English-language speaking countries. The discipline claims to be concerned about the health of people living in low-income and middle-income settings. But the resources—human, infrastructural, and financial—underpinning global health are mostly concentrated in those countries already replete with power and money. “Helicopter” research is not uncommon. The contribution of scientists and research funders to sustainable advances in health care in the countries of their alleged concern is minimal. More often, the relationship between western medical science and the countries they work in is extractive. Global health institutions are mostly led by western-educated men. Global health agencies are only superficially member-state organisations. In truth, influence lies with those nations providing the greatest resources. Global health has enabled public health schools and university departments to continue to enrich themselves through exorbitant student fees and generous research grants. Global health journals are no better. Most are creatures of western medical publishing houses, even those that proclaim radical open access histories. The unearned privileges of a few suppress the justified demands of the many. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that global health is little more than an exclusive club, disguising its colonial origins and practices in the stirring language of equity and justice.

That’s a big passel of accusations. (He doesn’t note that modern science is also largely the invention of a “white and wealthy elite”.)  First , I take issue with his claim that the desire to give everyone equal access to health care is the product of a “white and wealthy elite”, whose faux concern for sick people throughout the world really masks a desire to enrich themselves and their “colonialist” countries. Could it be that the powerful and rich countries like Britain and the U.S. (once colonialist, but no longer) simply had the resources and the moral wherewithal to do something about global health?

By the way, I happen to know a few people in global health, and I detect no whiff of colonialism about them, but rather a dogged determination to give medical care to people in poor countries. And believe me, they have not gotten rich doing so. Those are, of course, anecdotes, but Horton gives no data at all.

But you can see where he’s going.  He wants global health “decolonized,” which presumably means that the initiatives of rich, white, colonialist countries would give way to those of poorer countries. But right now that’s not possible—at least not without the help and funding from wealtheir nations.  I also note that to do so we must solve “inequities,” and by that he doesn’t mean just healthcare inequities, but even inequities in everything, including journal fees, which have already been tackled.

The view that global health is a colonial project underlies the call for decolonisation. As Franziska Hommes and colleagues wrote in The Lancet Global Health in 2021, the goal of decolonisation must be “to critically reflect on [global health’s] history, identify hierarchies and culturally Eurocentric conceptions, and overcome the global inequities that such structures perpetuate”. The democratic promise of global health to be an inclusive enterprise has been broken. Some critics argue that global health can never solve inequity. Some go further and suggest that global health is structurally racist. It is hard to disagree with these conclusions. Although global health journals might mean well, the operation of waiver policies for article processing charges has created a culture of humiliation for scientists who cannot afford western journal open access fees. Journals have worsened Northern ventriloquism, where scientists from lower-income settings feel forced to adhere to high-income norms and standards to be permitted to publish in their pages. In Global Health in Practice, Olusoji Adeyi offers a compelling analysis of how imperialism and colonialism became the “founding pillars” of global health. And his observation that “The din of protest against colonialism in global health is getting louder and it has merit” should provoke those of us who work in global health to pause. For Adeyi is surely right that “the Global North decides the narrative and assumes the omniscience to tell the Global South what the latter needs, when it can have it, how to do it, and on whose terms it must be done”.

But science journals, as Horton admits, have already waived publication fees for scientists and doctors from poor countries. Yet even in that gesture Horton finds sin, as fee waivers have created a “cultural of humiliation.” Okay, Dr. Horton, what’s the alternative? If there are to be publication fees, should we eliminate the “humiliation” by hitting authors from poor countries with those huge (and, to my mind, exorbitant) charges? Only a Pecksniff would find in an attempt to achieve equity yet another form of inequity!

And what are the “high-income norms and standards” to which those from poorer countries need not adhere for publication? Does he mean that we should give up standards of merit when refereeing papers from that group? Apparently! Let us lower the bar for papers coming from scientists in underserved countries. Perhaps we shouldn’t require them to have control groups, or use statistics instead of “lived experience”?

Well, I might as well cite the the rest of Horton’s short article. At the end the editor seems to lose it, calling for impossible (though desirable) reforms that must replace the effort we put into global health care. What he means is that we must get rid of right-wingers—the true opponents of global health:

When I was a medical student, I remember those attached to various causes arguing with passion among and against ourselves, viewing one part of our group as betraying the real truth that we were seeking to defend. Those on the progressive wing of politics are supremely good at introspective annihilation. And that same process of internal obliteration is now unfolding in global health. While we identify enemies among ourselves, we miss the larger story of just who our opponents really are—those trying to destroy the conditions for achieving the right to health, equity, liberty, and social justice. For the real enemies of the values we stand for do not sit within the ranks of global health. They are to be found in governments that instinctively mistrust—and who wish to undermine and defund—global organisations. They will be found among those who demonise refugees. They are the climate sceptics, anti-vaxxers, and purveyors of scientific misinformation. They are those who attack the redistribution of wealth, those who believe that war brings peace, and those who defend racism under the guise of patriotism. Global health practitioners should certainly engage in robust discussions about the meaning of their discipline. But they should be clear about who our struggle is really against. It is not global health. Instead, we must work harder together to create a new political frontier and forge a new collective against the true enemies of health.

This has very little to do with making people in poor countries better, for it is a political and ideological program to which he’s calling The Lancet’s readers.  (Note the language of war: “enemies”.) High-sounding words indeed, and some of them I agree with (who could help but criticize anti-vaxxers and climate skeptics?). But demonisizing refugees? That is a viable discussion in the U.S. right now, and those who call for limits in immigration can hardly all be tarred with “demonising refugees.” This is hyperbolic, divisive, and inaccurate language. In the end, Horton calls us to follow his own program, for apparently he alone has identified the “true enemies of health.”

Even on her worst days Sci. Am. editor Laura Helmuth has never written stuff like this, even if she believes it. But Horton is turning The Lancet from a medical journal into Mother Jones. I wonder how many doctors adhere to his hyperbole and to his political program. Does he represent the views of British medicine? And what gives the editor of a medical journal the right to spout his personal politics as if it were official doctrine? Yes, if there are root causes of global health inequality that can be pinpointed, he has a right to mention them. But note that he gives no evidence for his claims, and in the end calls for all readers to join him in forming The New Collective.

Curiously, in an earlier editorial opposing Brexit, Horton, citing John Gray, asserts that the idea of progress itself is a “dangerous fallacy”:

Scientists and those educated scientifically are prone to a dangerous fallacy—we believe in progress. The notion that human beings are forever moving forwards towards a better place. It is a noble vision: the accumulation of knowledge, self-correction, the application of science to enhance society’s wellbeing and wealth. The discipline of medical history is almost entirely based on this admiringly Whiggish precept. But it is mistaken, philosophically and historically. John Gray shattered the notion of progress two decades ago in his bitter polemic, Straw Dogs.

No he didn’t. Only a fool could say that progress hasn’t been possible, and medicine is one of the areas where it’s been profound. Since 1900 the average global life expectancy has more than doubled. You’d have to be a fool to say that that is not progress. (I could go on about medical progress, but there’s no point; you all know about it.)

So, in the paragraph above, Horton apparently rejects an overweening characteristic of liberalism and Englightenment values: belief that progress can be made. Yet what is he doing in this entire editorial but laying out a path for progress and “health equity”?  Either he is confused or has rejected what he wrote in 2019.

It is Horton’s dead certainty that he alone is right, combined with the accusations that his opponents are rich white  colonialist supremacists who promote “global health” not to help others, but to enrich themselves—that combination is the sign of wokeness.  He is sure his critics are wrong, and he will brook no discussion.

As usual, I don’t like publicly calling for people’s jobs, for that’s a woke tactic. But I do think that those who publish The Lancet should take a hard look at what Horton is doing to the journal.  “Bodies with vaginas” indeed!

Let me finish by saying that Horton and I probably agree on many political issues. But that doesn’t mean that were I to become editor of a science journal, I would splash my views all over its pages.

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 25, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today we have warbler photos from Paul Edelman at Vanderbilt University. Paul’s narrative is indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

It’s springtime and an old birder’s mind turns to migration.  In particular, warbler migration.  Here are some of the warblers that have come through Nashville, some on their way north and others to settle down and breed.

Two of the many species that are just passing through are the Bay-breasted Warbler (Setophaga castanea) and the Blackpoll Warbler (Setophaga striata).  There was an unusual number of these two species, which is why I was able to get some decent pictures. 

Bay-breasted Warbler:

Blackpoll Warbler:

Of those coming in to breed we had Yellow Warblers (Setophaga petechia), the Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas)  but did not include it in the list of warblers that breed here. Prothonotary Warblers (Protonotaria citrea), Prairie Warblers (Setophaga discolor), Black-throated Green Warblers (Setophaga virens), Kentucky Warblers (Geothlypis formosa) and Worm-eating Warblers (Helmitheros vermivorum).

Yellow Warbler:

Common yellowthroat:

Prothonotary Warbler:

Prairie Warbler:

Black-throated Green Warbler (Setophaga virens):

Kentucky Warbler (Geothlypis formosa):

Worm-eating Warbler (Helmitheros vermivorum):

We also get two birds that are considered warblers for reasons I don’t really understand.  The Ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapilla) looks and behaves a lot more like a thrush than a warbler.  The Yellow-breasted Chat (Icteria virens) looks more like a vireo and sounds more like a mockingbird.  I am sure there is a method behind this madness, but it escapes me.

Ovenbird:

Yellow-breasted chat:

Obviously there are birds other than warblers migrating to and through here.  But that will be a subject for a different post.

Thursday: Hili dialogue

May 25, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, May 25, 2023, a good day because it’s National Wine Day. Drink some today: it’s good for you (assuming that you abide by the Federal Alcoholic Intake Regulations). Perhaps you are lucky enough to have this, which I would kill for ($700/bottle):

It’s also Geek Pride Day, International Plastic Free Day, National Missing Children’s Day, National Tap Dance Day, and, of course, Towel Day in honoring the work of the writer Douglas Adams,.

Here’s a nice tap number with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. The bandleader is Xavier Cugat, and Shorty George was a real person. I particularly like the sequence of steps from 3:37-3:42.

Hayworth was a fantastic dancer, but nobody ever made it look easier than Astaire. He was the greatest.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 25 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries:

  • Tina Turner passed away yesterday at age 83 after a long illness. I was never a big fan, but many readers were, and they’re invited to weigh in below with their remembrances.
  • The NYT finally published an obituary of Robert Zimmer, ex-President of the University of Chicago, who died Tuesday of what the paper says was “glioblastoma multiforme, a virulent form of brain cancer.” (I wrote about him yesterday, emphasizing his concern with the Botany Pond mallards.) It’s a decent but not outstanding obituary, but does end with this:

According to Mr. Stephens, Mr. Zimmer balked at the notion that unfettered free speech would jeopardize the cause of inclusion because it might upset, among others, some of the people who were seeking to be included.

“Inclusion into what?” Mr. Zimmer had wondered in a speech that year. “An inferior and less challenging education? One that fails to prepare students for the challenge of different ideas and the evaluation of their own assumptions? A world in which their feelings take precedence over other matters that need to be confronted?”

For Mr. Zimmer, the mathematician, that kind of education wouldn’t count.

*The endless, tiring discussions between Biden and the Republicans over the debt ceiling continues; it now appears to have come down to two strategies: the Democrats’ “freeze” or the Republicans’ “cut”:

Reining in government spending has become the central focus of negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) under pressure from conservatives to secure deep cuts, while the White House has offered a spending freeze.

GOP negotiators have said that any deal with Democrats must result in lower discretionary spending next year than this year, calling it a critical step in starting to address the country’s growing debt, which now stands at $31.4 trillion.

“You have to spend less than you spent last year. That’s not that difficult to do,” McCarthy told reporters Wednesday, while adding that he is hoping to make progress in talks. A top negotiator, Rep. Garret Graves (R., La.), said the administration “thinks they can continue in the future on the same [spending] trajectory. And we’ve made it clear that that’s a nonstarter.”

Democrats say the GOP demand to cut spending is unreasonable, particularly after the White House has signaled it could agree to freeze discretionary spending next year and increase spending by 1% in fiscal year 2025.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) noted a freeze on spending was a position many in his party “might even be uncomfortable with.” But he said House Republicans rejected that “because they want to impose draconian cuts.”

Well, we have a week left.  The problem is that I don’t know what would happen if they eliminated the debt ceiling completely, something Biden has pondered. From what little I know, the debt ceiling has been raised before without catastrophic circumstances. The catastrophes are supposed to occur only when the ceiling is hit and the government is forced to default.

*From reader Ken:

Did you see the piece in WaPo about school book bannings? The paper reviewed over a thousand book banning requests in 153 school districts across 37 states and found that 60% of the book banning requests had come from just 11 people.

Here’s what the article says:

The Post requested copies of all book challenges filed in the 2021-2022 school year with the 153 school districts that Tasslyn Magnusson, a researcher employed by free expression advocacy group PEN America, tracked as receiving formal requests to remove books last school year. In total, officials in more than 100 of those school systems, which are spread across 37 states, provided 1,065 complaints totaling 2,506 pages.

The Post analyzed the complaints to determine who was challenging the books, what kinds of books drew objections and why. Nearly half of filings — 43 percent — targeted titles with LGBTQ characters or themes, while 36 percent targeted titles featuring characters of color or dealing with issues of race and racism. The top reason people challenged books was “sexual” content; 61 percent of challenges referenced this concern.

And the perps:

The majority of the 1,000-plus book challenges analyzed by The Post were filed by just 11 people.

Each of these people brought 10 or more challenges against books in their school district; one man filed 92 challenges. Together, these serial filers constituted 6 percent of all book challengers — but were responsible for 60 percent of all filings.

LOCK ‘EM UP!

Here are the top reasons books were pulled in 2021-2022 (LGBTQ books seem to be the main target):

*In his op-ed “The DeSantis delusion,” NYT writer Frank Bruni argues that while DeSantis is marketing himself as an alternative to Trump, Republican voters don’t want that. (But maybe centrists leaning right do!):

But do Republican voters want an alternative to Trump at all? The polls don’t say so. According to the current Real Clear Politics average of such surveys, Trump’s support is above 55 percent — which puts him more than 35 percentage points ahead of DeSantis. Mike Pence, in third place, is roughly another 15 percentage points behind DeSantis.

There’s an argument that Trump’s legal troubles will at some point catch up to him. Please. He’s already been indicted in one case and been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in another, and his supporters know full well about his exposure in Georgia and elsewhere. The genius of his shameless shtick — that the system is rigged, that everyone who targets him is an unscrupulous political hack and that he’s a martyr, his torture a symbol of the contempt to which his supporters are also subjected — lies in its boundless application and timeless utility. It has worked for him to this point. Why would that stop anytime soon?

But if, between now and the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters do somehow develop an appetite for an entree less beefy and hammy than Trump, would DeSantis necessarily be that Filet-O-Fish? The many Republicans joining the hunt for the party’s nomination clearly aren’t convinced. Despite DeSantis’s braggartly talk about being the only credible presidential candidate beyond Biden and Trump, the number of contenders keeps expanding.

The other Republican wannabe candidates face the same situation:

Most of these candidates are in a pickle similar to DeSantis’s. It’s what makes the whole contest so borderline incoherent. Implicitly and explicitly, they’re sending the message that Republicans would be better served by a nominee other than Trump, but they’re saying that to a party so entirely transformed by him and so wholly in thrall to his populist rants, autocratic impulses, rightward lunges and all-purpose rage that they’re loath to establish too much separation from him. They’re trying to beat him without alienating his enormous base of support by beating up on him. The circus of him has them walking tightropes of their own.

So what do Republicans want? Don’t ask me; I’m not a Republican!

*Hallelujah! (If that’s the right word.) The Texas legislature, poised to pass a bill mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in every secondary-school classroom, failed to pass the bill.  But the fight isn’t yet over:

Texas lawmakers had been scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to require that the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom in the state, part of a newly energized national effort to insert religion into public life.

. . . Texas’s biennial legislative session is short, chaotic and packed, anda midnight deadline passed without a vote on the Ten Commandments bill, meaning the measure is dead for the session. But several other measures promoting religion in public spaces still have a shot at passage before the regular legislative session is scheduled to end May 29.

Here’s the arrantly ignorant mindset behind this clearly unconstitutional bills:

“There is absolutely no separation of God and government, and that’s what these bills are about. That has been confused; it’s not real,” said Texas state Sen. Mayes Middleton (R), who co-sponsored or authored three of the religion bills. “When prayer was taken out of schools, things went downhill — discipline, mental health. It’s something I heard a lot on porches when I was campaigning. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time.”

. . . Josh Houston, who has advocatedat the Capitol for progressive and minority religious groups since 2005, said the kinds of bills passing chambers this year would have gone nowhere in the past in Texas. Even though religious expressions in public places in Texas are common, he said, there was an understanding that public employees represent the government and that legally the government shouldn’t impose religion.

But now the theocracy—Christian nationalism—is ascendant, and only Ceiling Cat knows how Texas will violate the Constitution. The scary thing is that if bills like this pass and are challenged, there’s good reason to think that the hyperconservative Supreme Court will uphold them. That’s why they’d best be defeated at the State level, as you can’t challenge a defeated law.

*This has been reported in several places, but here’s the NYT’s report on an amazing advance in medical technology: “A paralyzed man can walk naturally again with brain and spine implants.”

In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers in Switzerland described implants that provided a “digital bridge” between Mr. Oskam’s brain and his spinal cord, bypassing injured sections. The discovery allowed Mr. [Gert-Jan] Oskam, 40, to stand, walk and ascend a steep ramp with only the assistance of a walker. More than a year after the implant was inserted, he has retained these abilities and has actually showed signs of neurological recovery, walking with crutches even when the implant was switched off.

“We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” Grégoire Courtine, a spinal cord specialist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, who helped lead the research, said at the press briefing.

In the new study, the brain-spine interface, as the researchers called it, took advantage of an artificial intelligence thought decoder to read Mr. Oskam’s intentions — detectable as electrical signals in his brain — and match them to muscle movements. The etiology of natural movement, from thought to intention to action, was preserved. The only addition, as Dr. Courtine described it, was the digital bridge spanning the injured parts of the spine.

I don’t quite get that las paragraph about philosophy. It’s straight naturalism: the brain commands for walking are electrical patterns in the neurons, and if these can be decoded and fed to the muscles, then there’s a possibility of walking again. Screw the philosophy: what’s amazing here is that we now have the technology and AI methods to translates the brain patterns into the muscles they normally control

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili still hasn’t completely warmed to Szaron:

Szaron: Is there room for me here?
Hili: We have a big garden, we don’t have to crowd together.

In Polish:
Szaron: Czy jest tu jeszcze miejsce dla mnie?
Hili: Mamy duży ogród, nie musimy się tłoczyć.

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

From The Cat House on the Kings; this is who calls you about your car warranty:

 

From Science Humor:
From Now That’s Wild:

Masih is interviewed on MSNBC about Iran’s increasing number of executions–all protestors against the regime:

From Bob Zimmer’s wife, announcing his death:

A tweet about Bob’s death from Barack Obama (h/t Simon):

From Luana, and yes, this is real (Luana notes, “Prof was fired.  She was adjunct.  There goes the academic freedom to attack people with knives… “). An excerpt:

The manic Manhattan college professor who threatened a Post reporter with a machete has been fired, the school said Tuesday — as it emerged she is suing the NYPD for allegedly abusing her during the 2020 George Floyd protests.

Shellyne Rodriguez was sacked by Hunter College just hours after the adjunct professor was caught on camera holding the blade to the veteran reporter’s neck while threatening to “chop” him up outside her Bronx apartment.

From Barry. I’m not sure this is a woodpecker, but it has found some fine nesting material:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 13-year-old boy, gassed on arrival:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. First, Sir Martin Wagstaffe?

Matthew says, “This is Florida. Among the books is The Encyclopaedia of Mammals.”

A moggy at the bar:

A short Forbes magazine interview with Peter Singer

May 24, 2023 • 1:00 pm

I’m posting this clip for two reasons. First, it’s a Forbes Magazine interview with a philosopher I much admire: Peter Singer. He’s admirable because he deals with philosophy’s original purpose: to figure out how to live a good life; because he deals with tough questions (one of them here: the euthanasia of terminally suffering newborns, which he discusses at 6:45); because, even when attacked he defends his ideas with tenacity; because he walks the walk, giving a lot of his income to others; and because does a lot of charitable work. Despite calls to get him fired because of his views on infant euthanasia, he maintains his equanimity and simply proffers a defense of his stand that I, for one, find convincing. And, of course, he spends a lot of time dealing with animal welfare, which a biologist has to admire (sadly, I’m too hypocritical to give up eating meat, but Singer abjures it).

Second, because he’s one of the founders of The Journal of Controversial Ideas, I was chuffed to hear that he talks about our paper recently published there, “In defense of merit in science” (between 9:30 and 13:00). I’m not sure who the interviewer is, but she seems to push on our merit thesis because in some ways it opposes racial diversity. Singer, in response, seems dubious about the idea of equity trumping merit.

They begin by discussing Singer’s new book (an update, actually): Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed, which came out on Tuesday. I read the original book  (Animal Liberation), which was when he first came to my consciousness. I also admire his book The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress., which suggests how our evolved ethical system has been extended to all humanity.

p.s. Singer has compiled a list of charities where, he thinks, you can get the most relief of suffering for your dollar. I’ve used that list, which you can find here, to decide who will get my money when I die.