Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
It’s Sunday: a day for themed photos of birds by John Avise. John’s IDs and notes are indented, and you can click on his photos to enlarge them.
Owls
Many people nearly apotheosize a particular animal group, be it cats, ducks, wolves, elephants, eagles, or pandas. Another revered category of charismatic megafauna involves the mostly nocturnal denizens that are the subject of this week’s post. All of these owl species can be found in North America, especially if you’re very lucky or willing to search for the birds after dark. The state where I took each photograph is shown in parentheses. The Snowy Owl was an amazing vagrant that created great excitement when it showed up in Southern California in December of 2022.
Welcome to Sunday, February 12, 2023, and National Biscotti Day—but, more important, Darwin Day: the great man was born on this day in 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropsure, England. Have some biscotti and celebrate Darwin’s contributions to biology today! Below we have a special illustration for the day by Mario Zara, who notes:
I have no wildlife photos to send you, but I like to draw and paint, so I’ve made an illustration to celebrate the next Darwin Day. It’s inspired by a famous Darwin quotation. The style resembles perhaps more a medieval bestiary (or gothic “drolerie”) than a scientific illustration. Despite that, you may recognize a (kind of) feline:
You’ll find the quote in the picture. Can you spot the cat?
Here’s Darwin in 1854, five years before he published On the Origin of Species. (Can you give the full name of the book? See here.) He was 45 when the photo was taken, five years away from publishing The Big Book. Later today I’ll post about a new site that has every known photo of the man.
“I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” Mr. Trudeau said in a statement he posted on Twitter. He said an American F-22 with the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is operated jointly by the United States and Canada, “shot down the object over the Yukon.”
As with the object that President Biden ordered shot down on Friday, officials said they have yet to determine just what was shot down over the Yukon Territory.
Mr. Trudeau said he had spoken with Mr. Biden Saturday afternoon. “Canadian Forces will now recover and analyze the wreckage of the object,” he said in his Twitter post, adding, “Thank you to NORAD for keeping the watch over North America.”
In a statement, NORAD said that it had “positively identified a high-altitude airborne object over Northern Canada” and declined to discuss specifics.
The U.S. is still looking for the one shot down over Alaskan sea ice two days ago, but the search has been slowed by darkness and freezing temperatures.
*Legal news from reader Ken: it’s about a lawsuit in Texas alleging that the FDA’s approval of an abortion-inducing drug was unlawful and therefore the drug should be banned—not just in Texas, where abortion has become almost entirely banned since Roe v Wade was overturned and abortion left to the states—but everywhere in America. This is one of the most widely-used medications to induce abortion, and medication is used in over 50% of all abortions. If the FDA approval is deemed illegal, the pill thus would hamper abortion everywhere, including in states that have few restrictions on it.
From Ken:
A federal lawsuit has been filed in the Northern District of Texas seeking to ban the use of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication-induced abortions. The case has been assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a Trump appointee who obtained his undergraduate degree at Abilene Christian University, formerly served as deputy general counsel for the First Liberty Institute, and is a member of the Federalist Society (the legal group that, during the Trump years, was essentially given the authority to grant the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to federal judicial nominees).
I’m hard-pressed to see how there is a federal cause of action here — which is to say, one grounded in the US constitution or federal law. Any appeal from a ruling by Judge Kacsmaryk in this case will go to the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (which, as you may recall from a discussion of this case, recently upheld the Second Amendment rights of wife-beaters).
And from the Texas Tribune (link above):
Inside the Justice Department, a reproductive rights task force established in July by Attorney General Merrick Garland has been searching for legal avenues to protect access to abortion pills.
The department issued a legal opinion in January saying that the U.S. Postal Service may deliver abortion pills to people in states that have sharply restricted the procedure, arguing that federal law allows the mailing of the pills because the sender cannot know for sure whether the recipient would use them illegally.
Now, officials say, the task force has its eyes on the case in Texas.
“We are vigorously defending the FDA in unprecedented litigation that is seeking to withdraw mifepristone from the marketplace — an action that would work severe harm to all who rely on the medication,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who chairs the reproductive task force, said at a public event in January.
The Justice Department has conceded in its legal arguments that the Supreme Court’s opinion striking down Roe stands as the reigning federal law. The crux of the department’s opposition in the Texas case is that Congress empowered the FDA to approve the use of new drugs — not states. Allowing abortion pill opponents to undercut the FDA’s judgment with “cursory and baseless allegations of harm” could spark challenges to other approved drugs and fuel public distrust of the process, Justice Department lawyers argued in a filing in the case.
* Over at the Compact site, read about “A black professor trapped in anti-racist hell“. It’s about the Telluride Association’s summer programs for students about to enter their last year in high school. The program gives you six weeks of rigorous educational seminars on specific topics, held at either Cornell University, the University of Michigan, or the University of Maryland. It’s very prestigious and very selective: I was rejected when I applied from my Virginia high school, and I was the class valedictorian. Now, apparently, the summer programs have become completely devoted to antiracist indoctrination of the Kendi-an stripe. (h/t several readers)
In the wake of the George Floyd protests, a group of black Telluride alumni pressured the association to examine the racism that, they claimed, was baked into the organizational culture. “We have all experienced anti-blackness within the association and through its programs,” their open letter said. The result was a redesign of the summer seminars: Telluride would now offer only “Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies” seminars. The former would “seek to focus more specifically on the needs and interests of black students.” The seminar I taught—“Race and the Limits of Law”—would be classed with the latter.
At the Cornell location, students live in the same house while participating in two different seminars. In 2014, participants in the two seminar groups lived their lives together seamlessly outside of the seminar, exploring Ithaca and the Cornell campus, eating and laughing together, and setting up a system to govern their community together. In 2022, however, I was told that the “Critical Black Studies” students would live and learn separately, creating a fully “black space.” My “Anti-Oppressive Studies” students were separated from them. Instead of participating in a summer community of 32 high-school students, my group was to be a community of 12 (that would dwindle to nine by the time of the mutiny).
Furthermore, in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.” Students described the workshops as emotionally draining, forcing the high schoolers to confront tough issues and to be challenged in ways they had never been challenged before.
What happened to professor Vincent Lloyd, who appealed for support to the Telluride Association, which didn’t want to interfere, is beyond belief. Read the story if you have time.
*The NYT shows and describes what it considers the 25 most important tweets (“world changers, they say”) in the history of Twitter. Look at them all: I’ll show a few and the backstory that the paper gives. It’s a fascinating selection:
The idea of #MeToo, first raised by the activist Tarana Burke, had been around for more than a decade before October 2017. But Alyssa Milano’s tweet, combined with the force of new reporting on Harvey Weinstein, suddenly gave it a broad audience — and #MeToo stories were everywhere. Did they achieve meaningful change, though? We’re still debating that.
Remember this one?
A random P.R. executive tweeted a joke about race, AIDS and Africa before getting on a plane in 2013; the public waited with giddy anticipation for what would befall her once she landed. (She was eventually fired.) Perhaps the definitive Twitter pile-on and cancellation, serving as both preview and cautionary tale.
Janis Krums’s understated 2009 tweet, accompanied by an on-the-scene photo of a sinking US Airways jet, still seems unbelievable. It’s significant not just because it captured a dramatic moment firsthand but also because it was a preview of the ways Twitter would be used for citizen journalism — i.e., real people sharing information, often unverified, about news events — in the years to come.
Well before he was a candidate, Donald Trump harnessed the power of Twitter to direct the conversation and propagate his talking points. One of his go-to subjects — birtherism — contained many of the ingredients (conspiracy theory, dog whistle) that would help propel him to the presidency.
In January 2019 an anonymous Twitter account tweeted a short video that appeared to show white high school students in MAGA gear taunting and mocking a Native American elder. Outrage ensued, and multiple news outlets scrambled to catch up. Then more footage of the encounter emerged that complicated the social media narrative, and conservative media (plus Donald Trump) cried foul. But wait — why was this national news, anyway? Because a video went viral.
As I recall, the kid pictured sued several MSM organizations for defamation and won, as he wasn’t harassing anyone and the students were being harassed by the Black Hebrew Israelites.
From Divy Bill Maher on the spy balloon and, mostly, on the SOTU Address. I didn’t know James Carville got in trouble for calling the shouters like Marjorie Taylor Greene “white trash.” (Another good segment on the “tragedy of the commons” in environmental pollution is here, and another funny one on Matt Damon’s encounters with the Woke Police here.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is messing with Hili about Adam Smith:
Hili: Does the invisible hand use sign language?
A: Ask it.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy niewidzialna ręka posługuje się językiem migowym?
From Barry. I couldn’t find the ichthyosaur tweet on @JBradley119 account, although the man does appear to be a conservative and hundreds of his tweets seem to have been eliminated.
I was today years old when a creationist patiently explained to me that the story of Noah’s Ark is real because there’s no other reason why an Ichthyosaur, which he thinks is a land-dwelling dinosaur, might be found underwater. pic.twitter.com/vvUEOeSv5B
Tweets from the striking Professor Cobb. First, another esoteric but fascinating fact about biology. Chitons are marine molluscs, and the “teeth” are on its radula.
Matthew thought that ducks were herbivores until he saw this tweet, but I informed him that they love earthworms and often try to eat small fish in Botany Pond. Note how fast this call duck eats!
This is both a speculative theory and a speculative explanation, but it came to me when I was preparing today’s “Caturday felid” post. Whenever I see a photo of an artist with a pet, it’s almost always a cat (very often a Siamese cat as well). In contrast, whenever I see an actor with a pet, it’s very likely to be a d*g. I can think of tons of artists (I mean those who paint, photograph, or draw) who had cats, artists like Klimt, Matisse, Warhol, Picasso, O’Keeffe, Warhol, and so on.
And my feeling is that actors have dogs more often than do artists. I can’t name many, but here are a few. I don’t think this is due to confirmation bias. Cat photos do tend to stick in my mind, but it’s irrelevant whether the cat is with an actor or artist.
Yes, there are artists who had dog and actors who have cats, but I’m making a statistical argument here. You could do a 2 X 2 table with the cells labeled “cats” and “dogs” at the top and “artists” and “actors” on the side. To do this right, you’d have to get several people to make a big list of actors and artists, not knowing about their pets, and then look up whether they had cats, dogs, or both. My guess is that artists would be significantly more cat-heavy than are actors, and you could test this association with a Fisher’s Exact test. (I suppose some people have both, so you’d have to add another cell and do a 2 X 3 chi-squared test.)
I have predicted this in the absence of known data, but here is my theory for such an association if it exists.
Here it comes: I am about to expound my theory.
My theory, which is mine, is that artists have cats because they admire their grace and beauty, which art is largely about. Cats are, in a way, living sculptures.
Actors, on the other hand, live for approbation and immediate and constant love. You can get that kind of affection from dogs, but not from cats, who are more aloof. If you want someone to tell you how great you are all the time, you’ll want a dog. If you want to simply admire the beautify of an animal, then a cat is where you should go.
This immediately suggests that politicians, who want obsequious followers, would in general have dogs more often than cats. I don’t know if Trump has a pet, but if he does, you know it would be a dog. Wikipedia’s list of “Presidential Pets”, which you should look at, suggests that, in general, I am correct. (Some presidents had pretty weird pets that were neither cats nor dogs.)
And that is my theory, which is mine. You may attack it if you will, and you’re welcome to do so in the comments. But you can’t refute it merely with anecdotes: by citing actors whom you know have cats and artists who have dogs. We are looking for a large-scale statistical association to test my theory, which happens to be mine.
I have no theory about musicians, except that I know Taylor Swift has several cats—the only thing I like about her. Oh, and Freddy Mercury had cats, too. If musicians tended to have cats more than dogs, though, that would refute the psychological underpinnings of my theory, for musicians, even more than actors, need immediate love. Actors often do their work onscreen where the love comes later, at the box office, but performing artists crave immediate gratification in the form of cheers and applause.
I was brought up imbued with science, so I’ll be glad to be tested, and will freely admit it if the data show I’m wrong.
Below you can (and should) see John McWhorter‘s 20-minute keynote talk in a January panel called “Towards the Common Good: Rethinking Race in the 21st Century” hosted by The Equiano Project at Emmanuel College and King’s College, Cambridge. The panel included Kenan Malik, columnist for The Observer, Munira Mirza, political advisor and Chief Executive of Civic Future, Dr Alka Seghal Cuthbertand (chair) and Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, University of Oxford.
I couldn’t find a video of the entire panel, but there’s another 75-minute discussion, featuring McWhorter, Sir Trevor Phillips, Alka Seghal, and Samir Shah, that you can watch here.
Here’s the theme of the discussion from which the video below was taken:
Despite the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s in transforming the lives of black people, race politics in the US at the start of this century seems more polarised than ever. Racial inequality persists but there are fierce debates over the causes and solutions. Rather than seeking to realise the liberal ideal of a ‘colour-blind’ society, a new anti-racism politics wants to raise consciousness about race and the ‘problem’ of whiteness. Is this leading to more equality and progress or not? How should liberals approach this question? Crucially, how is the US experience influencing what happens in the UK and what can we learn from it?
McWhorter’s keynote deals with a topic he discusses often: the takeover of public discourse by a Social Justice crowd who flaunt their vindictive, authoritarian, and quasi-religious brand of antiracism, whose object is often to destroy the careers and credibility of their opponents. The talk is largely a precis of McWhorter’s book on Woke Antiracism, but has new stuff in it, too.
McWhorter exemplifies the Zeitgeist by describing several incidents. One is the suspension of USC business communication professor Greg Patton for using the Chinese filler pharse “negah. . negah. . negah” (equivalent to “that. . .that. . . that”) to show how people in different cultures use verbal marks of hesitation. But the fact that this Chinese word sounds like the American “n-word” slur was enough to offend students and then get Patton suspended and removed from the course. Intent, in this case, was irrelevant, for “offended” feelings, regardless of a speaker’s intent, are often sufficient to hurt someone’s career or get them fired. The idea that “intent doesn’t matter” was also what got NYT reporter Donald McNeil Jr. fired for using the n-word in a didactic discussion with a student. As Reason reported:
“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn said in a memo to staffers.
But the newspaper backed off on that (too late for McNeil!) when letting McWhorter himself spell the n-word out in full in his own column. Clearly didactic intent did matter, so long as it was the intent of a black man.
The other issue is a course in the history of Western classical music (including two weeks on jazz) that McWhorter taught for several years at Columbia. The last time, however, there was a new “antiracist” syllabus that omitted Brahms, Chopin, Wagner and replaced them with singer Nina Simone, who, McWhorter says, was a great artist but wasn’t involved in Western classical music. The reason for the change, says McWhorter, was because “two and a half people said so and everybody else was afraid of them.”
Here are two excerpts from his talk that I’ve transcribed that give you the tenor his feelings. But do listen to the whole thing; it’s eloquent and pretty short. Most of us will agree with McWhorter, but we can all use a dose of support from time to time.
He first describes the efforts of woke antiracists as:
. . . a reign of terror enforced by a small number of earnest but misguided people, and the reason that they get their way is because of how much progress we’ve made. Specifically, we in America are a society where the enlightened view is that to be a racist is almost equivalent to being a pedophile—it’s the worst thing you can be called that you’re actually likely to be. That is an accomplishment: that wasn’t true in 1960; that wasn’t really true even in 1980. That is a mark of advance in a society that, frankly, most human societies have not made. If people are a little oversensitive about it, that’s human nature. The fact is something great has happened. But the negative byproduct is that if someone says we have to have Nina Simone instead of Brahms, Chopin, or Wagner, then although almost nobody in the room agrees , they will do it because they know that if that person doesn’t get their way, they’re going to call the Music Department at Columbia “racist” on Twitter where the whole world could see it. . .
I find it ironic that the very success of the civil rights movement is instantiated in the pervasive fear of Americans of being called “racist”. As McWhorter shows, that is a sign of success, and it’s good. His beef is with the fact that that movement has morphed into an authoritarian “reign of terror.” So what can we do? As he argues in his book, just say “no” to these people.
. . . We can’t hope to change this by talking to people like that and saying, “Open up to new ideas.” They won’t. And that may sound cynical, but I’m basing it partly on my having experienced these people as an academic for the past 25 years, and especially over the past three. They’re impregnable; they’re thoroughly unreasonable. The issue is getting to most of us—all of the rest of us who are having our lives destroyed or affected negatively, or watching people having their lives destroyed or interfered with because of the actions of a vocal and frightening minority of people who themselves can’t be changed. There’s a bravery that’s necessary at this point. The only way we can keep society from being turned upside down by this religion. . . . we have to have the bravery to tell people like this “no” and to endure that there’s a certain kind of noice they’re going to make. But if we don’t have that bravery, if we don’t realize that being called a “racist” in the public square might not always destroy a life—sometimes, and in many cases, people are just scared— really, if we don’t do it, we’re going to lose what we have thought of as an enlightened society because of certain contingent things that happened during a pandemic and a particularly grisly murder of an innocent man. Just because of chance; just because of Zoom, Slack, boredom, habit, and fear. That is not the way that a mature society should operate.
The ending is quite eloquent, with McWhorter calling us to be “mensches” and stand up to the “misguided and recreational self-focused kind of manipulation” that goes under the name of “antiracism as social justice.” (I think the word “recreational” is quite appropriate.)
If you click below, you’ll go to a Guardian article about female artists who painted or photographed their own beloved moggies, or about females depicted with cats:
A couple of examples:
When Tracey Emin’s cat Docket went missing in 2002, the “Lost Cat” posters she pasted around her east London neighbourhood were pilfered and valued at £500. Her gallery, White Cube, argued that they didn’t count as works, though some art historians said otherwise. Whomever you believe, they still occasionally turn up on eBay.
It is Emin’s self-portrait with Docket that I love the most, however. (That and her handmade cat photo book, Because I Love Him, a dream art purchase should I ever make it rich.) In the photograph, Docket faces the camera with that deadpan, slightly morose expression that is particular to cats, his impressive whiskers shooting out beyond the artist’s fingers, which frame his face as she nuzzles him from above. It’s a strikingly maternal image, and indeed Emin has in the past referred to the cat, who has sadly now left this earthly plane, as her “baby”. It comes in a long line of artistic depictions of women or girls with cats.
It’s no surprise that cats appear so frequently in paintings: artists tend to love them, maybe because they are so defiant and independent. Plus, it is easier to paint while caring for a cat than a dog: they do not require walking, though they can still get in the way, as a gorgeous photograph of the painter Lois Mailou Jones standing at an easel with a kitten on her shoulder shows. Leonor Fini, meanwhile, kept two dozen cats, so it’s no surprise that their fur sometimes ended up melded with the paint on her canvases.
Here’s that picture of Jones with her kitten in a tweet:
There are some fabulous photographs of Leonor Fini with her pets. In a 1961 portrait by Martine Franck, her wild dark hair is an eccentric counterpoint to the white cat’s refined appearance, while in another image she is shown wearing an evening gown as she kneels to feed six cats in her kitchen. Dora Maar’s image is perhaps the most deliberately erotic. Fini wears a sort of low-cut corset, and a long-haired black cat is held between her open legs in a visual pun that is not lost on the viewer.
That male artists should use cats as a means of eroticising the objectified female nude will come as a surprise to no one. In Félix Vallotton’s La Paresse, a naked woman is sprawled on a bed, her hand extended to stroke the cat. In a Masaya Nakamura photograph, we see only the curve of her backside and her pointed feet as a black cat gazes in the direction of her genitals. I’d far rather Pierre Bonnard’s more humane depiction of an irritated-looking woman, sitting fully dressed at the table with a plate of food while the “demanding cat” of its title harasses her. Or even better, Lotte Laserstein’s 1928 Self-Portrait with a Cat, wherein her head-on gaze appears to challenge the viewer as the disgruntled-looking animal she holds in her lap seems ready to pounce if necessary. It’s as though they are both daring you to say something: call Laserstein a crazy cat lady at your peril.
Centuries after the witch-hunts, the love that women – particularly childless women – have for cats is mocked and stigmatised to this day. That is why I take such delight in the photographs of Brooke Hummer, who asked various cat women to pose in the style of historical paintings, their styles ranging from 19th-century colonial to surrealist. These funny, celebratory images subvert the shaming stereotype of the cat lady. My favourite is a pastiche of a medieval painting of the Madonna and child, but instead of a baby, the Virgin Mary holds a tabby cat. Laugh if you like, she appears to be saying, but cat love is real love.
Here is that painting, I think, taken from Hummer’s website (she’s a Chicago native):
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From PetHelpful we have a lovely story of a stray cat who, during a cold winter, was invited inside and never left. Click to read:
Excerpts:
When kindhearted @lindaeckel opened her doors to a stray cat who was living near her home during freezing temperatures, she didn’t expect to have a new furever friend. Still, that’s exactly what happened! The beautiful long-haired tabby cat made herself right at home with Linda and her pets, and the result is just precious.
The first video featuring the ex-stray went viral on TikTok for adorably obvious reasons, and we think you’ll love it, too. Miss Kitty and her new friends are inseparable!
“That cat made biscuits for your dog. That is a contract,” wrote commenter @marcescence. Exactly! We’d like to think that was the moment the cat knew she’d found her forever home–but her new mama still made it official recently.
“Thank you all,” Linda said. “Bella has a new home. Merry Christmas all!” Now that is the perfect holiday gift for everyone. The kitty gets a new home, and the family gets someone new to love–especially this adoring Golden Retriever!
Here’s the Golden Retriever, Major, with Bella. See more cats and d*gs on Linda Eckel’s TikTok page:
Lizzy (stage name: OwlKitty) is a 5 year-old floof living in Portland, Oregon. She stars in all your favorite movies and tv shows and gets lots of treats and cuddles in return. Offscreen, Lizzy loves her laser pointer, her adoptive mother (a 12 year-old tabby) and the taste of cream cheese. She’s never caught a bird.
So far, OwlKitty has made appearances in such classics as Star Wars, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, How to Train your Dragon, The Shining, Titanic, 50 Shades of Gray and Risky Business. You can also find her in Game of Thrones, Ariana Grande’s music video and Red Dead Redemption 2.
There are lots of good videos on the OwlKitty YouTube site, all done with clever technology and tedious work. Here’s the famous OwlKitty “Titanic” trailer:
. . . and how it was made. The work is amazingly thorough:
Owlkitty in Jurassic Park (with tuna!):
There are many more movies, so knock yourself out!
We’re running low again, folks, so send in any good wildlife/travel/people photos you have. Remember, good ones! Thanks. Oh, and I want to thank all the readers who keep the photo tank full. All of us who appreciate these photos should give a hand to the contributors that keep this feature going nearly every day of the year—and that’s a lot of photo!
Today we have the first photos of a two-part series by Aussie reader Rodney Graetz. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Close to Home, part 1
Here are six photos of the wildlife that inhabit my suburban back yard, in Canberra, Australia. Canberra is nationally known as the ‘Bush Capital’ because it remains in touch with the natural world
A Crested Pigeon (Ocyphaps lophotes), aka ‘Topknot’, probably female. With copper-coloured chest feathers, dark banding, iridescent wing patches and pink feet make these bird attractive to see and observe. Originally a bird of the plains, it has now widely and permanently moved into urban gardens, including ours.
A juvenile Crested Pigeon resting but alert threatened by my presence (about 5 metres away). Crested Pigeons rarely have more than two offspring.
A very common backyard visitor is the Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen), a mid-sized black and white bird found almost everywhere across the continent. The patterning of the plumage varies between ‘black-backed’ and ‘white-backed’ races. This bird has mixed patterning, but the white back of neck indicates a male.
Being ground feeders and mostly insectivorous, they are well established in urban areas that provide trees for nesting and lawns for foraging, as this bird is doing. They habituate slowly to the presence of people, or quickly and permanently, if fed. Fiercely territorial, they will contest the ownership of your backyard against any intruders with noisy ground and aerial battles.
There is a temporary downside to magpies. For a period of about five days, between completing the nest building and the female beginning to lay eggs, the male bird becomes extremely protective by attacking any territory intruders, including dogs, pedestrians, and particularly cyclists.
These attacks, known as ‘swooping’, involve the male bird coming in silently from behind, then noisily attacking the head, especially ear lobes. Swooping is tolerated and managed by displaying temporary warning signs. The birds appear to have a particular dislike of gaudily dressed cyclists sporting equally gaudy and menacingly shaped helmets. Come the swooping season, October-November, cyclists protect themselves by decorating their helmets with cable ties, which have limited effectiveness, as shown here (photo extracted from a newspaper article). When the swooping season ends, peaceful coexistence holds until next breeding season.
This long-tailed parrot species is a regular visitor throughout the year. With the obvious name of Crimson Rosella (Platycercus elegans), it can always find fruits, as in this photo, or seeds, both provided by popular garden plants. Both sexes are similar in size and plumage, but in the breeding season, September-December, the plumage colours intensify, especially the cobalt blue cheek patches. As tree hollow nesters, they rarely can find suitable trees in the suburbs, so they temporarily depart to the woodlands of the neighbouring Nature Reserve, returning two months later with 2-4 mottled green and red offspring.
This bird with dead rat is a (Laughing) Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae),the largest bird in the Kingfisher family. It is leaning backwards because out of shot on the right-hand side were three different birds (Currawongs) harassing the Kookaburra to make it drop the rat and flee. They failed, and the Kookaburra, plus rat, flew away to the nearby woodland reserve where it would have repeatedly beaten the rat against a tree branch until the body was pulp, but intact, to be swallowed whole, headfirst.
The Kookaburra is an Australian iconic bird, widely known for its bizarre call – loud maniacal laughter – hence the original name of Laughing Jackass. It is also admired as a pugnacious bird. Weighing around just 350 grams (about 0.8 pounds), it will unhesitatingly attack, kill, and eat one-metre-long venomous snakes.
YouTube holds many videos of Kookaburra calls, and activities, such as befriending people with balconies and a supply of red meat, plus the legendary snake catching.
JAC: Here’s a video of snake-catching. The video maker, “Oztralien”, gives these notes:
I didn’t realise this kookaburra was eyeing off a snake as I was filming it. The kookaburra suddenly darts out of a tree, catches the snake, beats it to death and eats it whole. There are a few videos on YouTube of kookaburras killing and eating snakes but I haven’t seen one to date of a kookaburra actually making the catch. I guess I got lucky 🙂
But this one (and yes, it’s called “Peppermint Pattie,” lacking the “y”. According to Wikipedia, York Peppermint Patties used to be made in Reading, Pennsylvania but are now made in Mexico.
*For crying out loud, the military shot down an unidentified object over Alaska just yesterday, less than a week after The Chinese Balloon bit the dust. This time we don’t know what the thing is, but if it was shot down it’s likely to have looked nefarious. We have no idea yet where it came from or what it was.
The Pentagon shot down an unidentified object over frozen waters around Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden, according to U.S. officials, less than a week after a U.S. fighter jet brought down a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic.
John Kirby, a White House spokesman, confirmed the incident at a news conference on Friday.
U.S. officials said they could not immediately confirm whether the object was a balloon, but it was traveling at an altitude that made it a potential threat to civilian aircraft.
Republicans had called the Biden administration weak for not shooting down the Chinese spy balloon as it hovered over Montana last week, a step that Pentagon generals had advised against for fear that debris could hurt people on the ground.
On Friday, Mr. Kirby said that Mr. Biden ordered the unidentified object near Alaska downed “out of an abundance of caution.”
Also, out of fear that he’d be criticized by members of both parties for being too timorous! At any rate, it was traveling at 40,000 feet and was umanned (or “unpersonned”?).
A U.S. official said there were “no affirmative indications of military threat” to people on the ground from the object. Officials said they could not confirm whether there was any surveillance equipment on the object that was shot down.
A recovery effort on the debris will be made, Mr. Kirby said. He said the object was “roughly the size of a small car” — much smaller than the spy balloon that had a payload the size of multiple buses
Multiple buses? I hadn’t heard that! The Wall Street Journal adds that the object landed on the ice in Alaska, which should make recovery a piece of cake. In fact, I bet they already have it. Stay tuned.
*I can’t be arsed to read and distill the real Nooz this evening (I write most of the Hili posts the evening before they go up), so here’s some light news that should cheer you up. The World’s Oldest Living Mouse has just been certified:
A tiny California mouse now has a big title after winning a Guinness World record for longevity.
A Pacific pocket mouse named Pat — after “Star Trek” actor Patrick Stewart — received the Guinness approval Wednesday as the oldest living mouse in human care at the ripe age of 9 years and 209 days, the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance announced after a certification ceremony.
Pat was born at the at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park on July 14, 2013, under a conservation breeding program, the alliance said.
The Pacific pocket mouse, which weighs as much as three pennies, is the smallest mouse species in North America and gets its name from cheek pouches the animals use to carry food and nesting materials, the wildlife alliance said.
The mouse once had a range stretching from Los Angeles south to the Tijuana River Valley but the population plunged after 1932 because of human encroachment and habitat destruction, the alliance said.
The mouse was thought to be extinct for 20 years until tiny, isolated populations were rediscovered in 1994 in Dana Point in Orange County but the species remains endangered, the alliance said.
And the mouse is still alive!
Only about 150 of these endangered creatures (Perognathus longimembris pacificus, a California endemic subspecies) are left in the wild, and here’s how big they are (from Wikipedia). It’s amazing that such a tiny rodent can live nine years—but that’s in captivity, of course. And note that the Latin trinomial indicates that this is a subspecies of the Little Pocket Mouse, P. longimembris, which is more widely distributed in the American Southwest and Mexico
Photograph of adult Pacific pocket mouse (perognathus longimembris pacificus) taken in 1996 in the Oscar One Training Area on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California.
And here’s the Methuselah of Mice, named Sir Patrick Stewart (an odd name given that the mouse is fully furred). Caption from the AP:
This Jan. 10, 2023, photo provided by the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance shows a Pacific pocket mouse named Sir Patrick Stewart. (Ken Bohn/San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance via AP)
*More and more bad stuff keeps coming out about George Santos, but I haven’t seen anything to top this Washington Post headline (click to read the story). How could you NOT read it?
It was after dark when George A. Santos approached the farmer in Pennsylvania’s Amish country looking to buy at least eight puppies.
He promised a wire transfer of more than $5,000 but it never appeared, the farmer said in an interview. He said Santos ended up writing a smaller check — and driving off with four golden retrievers.
“Something inside me said I just cannot trust him,” the farmer told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy.
The check bounced.
The farmer, who has not previously spoken to the media, said he called police following the encounter in 2017. It took nearly two years for the authorities to locate Santos back home in New York, but he was eventually charged with theft by deception, according to a brief mention in The Star, a local newspaper in York County. In May 2021, the paper reported, the case was dismissed under a provision of Pennsylvania law that allows misdemeanor charges to be dropped when a prosecutor consents and “satisfaction has been made to the aggrieved person.”
Indeed, the farmer said he was finally paid for his four dogs. In his handwritten bank ledger, he wrote: “George Santos reimburse bad ck.”
A man who stole puppies is still sitting in Congress! What is this country coming to? Here’s the Washington Post’s copy of the bounced puppy check, clearly saying “puppies.”
Lock him up!
*Don’t forget to have a look at Nellie Bowles’s patented and snarky take on the news on Bari Weiss’s substack; this week’s is called “TGIF: Real Housewives of the SOTU.” Here are three of her reports:
→ Don’t shoot the spy balloon, it’s my friend: The culture war came for the spy balloon. And for some godforsaken reason, the American Left decided they are pro-spy balloon, or at least spy balloon-agnostic. Here’s MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: “Digging real real deep to try to get myself to care about the Chinese spy balloon and coming up empty.”
The strangest take came from Bill Kristol, who has become truly Twitter-brained: “If the balloon had anti-black history messages stenciled on it, or if it were dropping anti-trans pamphlets down to earth, or if it were broadcasting denunciations of wokeness non-stop, MAGA would be pro-balloon. They’d be welcoming the balloon. They’d be worshiping the balloon.”
Listen, Chris, Bill, my buddies, I know you’re angry that we all saw the spy balloon and thought, “Let’s get rid of that spy balloon.” But I promise you: The Chinese Communist Party has other ways to spy on us (TikTok, for example). At least try to pretend in public that you’re not rooting for the CCP!
→ Any news about the Jews? Surely people are talking about a different minority this week—maybe Gypsies, maybe the Kurds? Nope, still Jews. Joe Rogan’s podcast blasts through our home (the baby can fall asleep only to the sounds of a bro, very close to a microphone, explaining crypto). Well, this week Rogan started talking about Ilhan Omar, the progressive congresswoman from Minnesota, and how she doesn’t need to apologize for her past antisemitic comments at all. He said this: “The idea that Jews are not into money is ridiculous. That’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza.” His interlocutor Krystal Ball didn’t call him out, but she did segue seamlessly from Jews loving money right into Israeli politics.
→ Kamala puff piece gone horribly wrong: Kamala Harris, America’s absent stepmom, the border czar who didn’t really feel like doing border stuff, can’t catch a break. When The New York Times went to profile her, the Kamala team gave them a list of friends to call.It didn’t go well, or as the reporters wrote: “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”
I love an eccentric San Franciscan with wacky politics and wacky shoes, and I think Kamala should come home. As someone who couldn’t cut it on the East Coast, I want to tell you that it’s okay, Madame Vice President. I also don’t want to march along the border! I’m writing this in my pajamas. Come back west and we can go on a hike and have an afternoon at the med spa. This is what we’re meant for.
Perhaps most important was Biden’s decorum and cheerfulness — in contrast to the GOP’s aggressive surliness. He was the smiling cat to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s version of a scowling Real Housewife. He was playful. He toyed with the Republican rabble like a restaurant reviewer toying with his food. And here’s something that is perhaps the perfectly not-Trump passage:
Some Republicans — some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s a majority — other Republicans say — I’m not saying it’s a majority of you. I don’t even think it’s a significant — but it’s being proposed by individuals. I’m not — politely not naming them, but it’s being proposed by some of you.
Why is this not-Trump? It’s sophisticated and irrefutable, as opposed to crude and wrong. He is both bashing the GOP over the head with a big club, and showing he’s being fair, by acknowledging it isn’t all of them. As they heckled and booed, he merrily bantered. The faux-politeness was very old-school and reassuring that normalcy was returning. This was a reboot of the Clinton-Gingrich dynamic. Which was primarily good for Clinton.
He’s always faulted Biden for being too woke (and I have to say that Uncle Joe has turned out woker than I expected), but adds that Biden hid that stuff in his address as part of a re-election strategy:
And by highlighting the hideous police murder of Tyre Nichols, Biden was also able to call for reform without any white-black connotations. Defund the police? “White supremacy”? Not a word. Fast-tracking children with gender dysphoria into medicalization? Crickets. Just this: “Let’s also pass the bipartisan Equality Act to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity.” Pretty much interest-group boilerplate.
The strategy is obvious: don’t mention the woke shit. Even though it’s at full tilt in his administration’s policies to socially re-engineer America, better not to engage at all. Just keep the focus on the economy, on America First populist themes, and on a return to normalcy, i.e. all the popular Trump stuff and none of the cray-cray. And when the GOP talks about nothing other than wokeness, because they remain an incoherent mess on policy as a whole, it makes them seem a bit nutty and lacking in perspective. When Sarah Huckabee Sanders is your opponent, it’s an easy Biden win. When he’s talking jobs and she’s talking CRT, he’s gonna win.
Sullivan then judges Biden against what may be his opponent in next year’s campaign: Ron DeSantis:
Up against DeSantis? Not so sure. DeSantis can talk policy and wokeness, has a record of governing decisiveness, and makes Biden look very old. And this is where Biden is eschewing the Clinton model. Bill knew that he needed to inoculate himself firmly against the left to regain the center — and so ramped up immigration control, passed a tough crime bill, and came out swinging against marriage equality. But Biden’s party is far further left than Clinton’s, and although Biden’s talk has changed quite a lot, he has yet to do anything that would provide a clear clash with the far left. Maybe he fears he would break his party. Maybe he just doesn’t want to go there. Or maybe that too is shifting. . .
Sullivan’s judgment in the end:
But this week was Biden at his best. He reassured reluctant supporters like yours truly. The whole event felt familiar, his good cheer infectious, and his emphases smart. Whether he can keep this up, and adjust his policies toward the center more, we’ll just have to see.
Against Trump, he’s a decent bet. Against DeSantis, it’s iffier. Against mortality, it’s just a question of when.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili makes a witticism:
Hili: All options are on the table.
A: You are on the table.
Hili: Together with all my options
In Polish:
Hili: Wszystkie opcje są na stole.
Ja: Ty jesteś na stole.
Hili: Razem z moimi opcjami.
And there is a picture of Kulka with the caption: “The last photo from this series taken by Paulina.” (“Ostatnie z tej serii zdjęć zrobionych przez Paulinę”.)
A Chicago squirrel hit the jackpot, nabbing a whole bagel! Now if it was a truly Jewish squirrel, it would also have a schmear. Photo by Jean Greenberg:
From Masih, with the Farsi translation below:
This is the picture of the dance and passion of life of one of the martyrs of the Iranian revolution: #یلدا_آقافضلی . (her name, I presume, which I translated as Yalda Aghafazli A young protester girl who died suspiciously immediately after being released from prison. He [she?] happily said to his [her?] friend: “It was written on the file that the accused did not express remorse and I was like, ‘Yes, exactly.'”
این تصویر رقص و شور زندگی یکی از جانباختگان انقلاب ایران است: #یلدا_آقافضلی. دختر جوان معترضی که بلافاصله پس از آزادی از زندان به طرز مشکوکی درگذشت.
او با خوشحالی به دوستش گفته بود: «روی پرونده نوشته بود متهم اظهار پشیمونی نکرد و من اینطوری بودم که یااااه دقيقا».#مهسا_امینیpic.twitter.com/6TF3Q7z0MX
Reader Amy sent several tweets about Jerry the Cat, who apparently is staff at the de Havilland Aircraft Museum in London Colney, Hertfordshire, England. I have four tweets and will feature one per day. Isn’t Jerry a lovely cat? “Recons” below should be “reckons”.
From Ruth, who says, “I found these pictures of a cat and a dog comforting each other after escaping from the rubble of a house destroyed in the earthquake in Turkey/Syria (picture supposedly from Syria) very moving. The Twitter account is of a small leftist newspaper, of which there are a lot in Turkey. Can’t vouch for the correctness of the picture desciption.
From the Auschwitz Museum: a teacher and mentor of children, who died after 6 months in Auschwitz
Read about Fredy Hirsch.
💬@ankahajkova: "He was young, charismatic, good looking & gay. Born in 1916 in Aachen, Germany, Hirsch emigrated to Czechoslovakia at age 19. A sportsman, he became a much-loved Zionist youth leader in the Theresienstadt ghetto."https://t.co/8e12hoOSt7
Tweets from Matthew, amazing camouflage, with a spider looking like a piece of wood. (Translation: “It looks like a piece of wood, but it’s a camouflaged spider! A harmless ‘Epicadus stelloides’, from the crab spider family (Thomisidae). You need to be very attentive not to go unnoticed by such a beautiful and camouflaged animal!”
Parece um pedaço de madeira, mas é uma aranha camuflada! Uma inofensiva 'Epicadus stelloides' , da família das aranhas-caranguejo (Thomisidae). Precisa estar muito atento pra não passar despercebido por um bicho lindo e camuflado desses! pic.twitter.com/bD3vXvOVnS
