Tuesday: Hili dialogue:

March 29, 2022 • 5:30 am

Where we are now: The ship’s real-time map shows that since we left Puerto Natales at noon yesterday (and once again traversed the White Narrows), we’ve been wending our way north through inland passages.

Today we’re scheduled to pass by the remote town of Puerto Eden, (pop. 176),  but do to covid and the law there’s no stopping in these small hamlets. I was here in 2019 and we did walk around, but the town is so small that we overwhelmed the inhabitants, and it seemed that many of them hid in their houses. I felt like a gawker.

Villa Puerto Edén is a Chilean hamlet and minor port located in Wellington Island, in Natales commune, Última Esperanza Province, Magallanes Region. It is considered one of Chile’s most isolated inhabited places together with Easter Island and Villa Las Estrellas. The village is known for being the home of the last Kawéshkar people. Owing to the large tidewater glaciers caused by the region’s super-high precipitation, it is only accessible by sea, on the Navimag ferry from Puerto Montt in the north, or Puerto Natales in the south. There is also a monthly boat from Caleta Tortel.

I had photos at the time, but hadn’t learn to downsize them for posting. It’s just as well.

We’re also scheduled to see Brüggen Glacier, noted in our itinerary as “the largest glacier in South America”, which, according to Wikipedia, seems to be true:

[The glacier] is the largest western outflow from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. Now about 66 km (41 mi) in length, it is the longest glacier in the southern hemisphere outside Antarctica.

And indeed, after breakfast I saw a huge glacier from my balcony (it was still pretty dark at 8 a.m.):

We may take Zodiacs to see it up close; stay tuned.

Greetings on the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, March 29, 2022; I’ll be home in a week. It’s National Chiffon Cake Day. But pie is better than cake (especially for breakfast), and almost any decent cake is better than a chiffon cake, which is basically air, eggs, sugar, and flour. One exception: sponge cake, but only when served with fruit (strawberries are best) and whipped cream. Here’s a fancy example, though more strawberries are needed:

If you want to help out with “this day in history”, go to the Wikipedia page for March 29 and give us your favorite notable events, births, and deaths.

Here’s today’s headline from the NYT; click to read.

The news summary:

Diplomats from Ukraine and Russia are meeting in Turkey on Tuesday for their first face-to-face talks in more than two weeks, an effort that comes as a Ukrainian counteroffensive pushed back Russian forces in a hard-fought area near Kyiv, the capital.

The talks are being held at a critical moment, with Ukrainian and Western intelligence officials cautioning that despite Ukrainian success in driving Russian troops from the Kyiv suburb of Irpin, Moscow’s forces continue to try to cut off eastern Ukraine and are exacerbating a humanitarian disaster with attacks against critical infrastructure across the country.

Diplomats from Ukraine and Russia are meeting in Turkey on Tuesday for their first face-to-face talks in more than two weeks, an effort that comes as a Ukrainian counteroffensive pushed back Russian forces in a hard-fought area near Kyiv, the capital.

The talks are being held at a critical moment, with Ukrainian and Western intelligence officials cautioning that despite Ukrainian success in driving Russian troops from the Kyiv suburb of Irpin, Moscow’s forces continue to try to cut off eastern Ukraine and are exacerbating a humanitarian disaster with attacks against critical infrastructure across the country.

It seems to me inevitable that Kyiv will be entered and largely destroyed, though Ukrainian stealth and guerrilla attacks could continue for months or years. Zelinsky has offered Russia a few crumbs, but one of them implies that Ukraine would not join NATO.  According to Ukraine’s finance minister, the war so far has cost that country $565 billion.

*The tweet below threw me off, because I thought it meant that the Russians had attacked Ukraine was attacked with chemical weapons and the peace negotiators were accidental victims. Actually, as the relevant Wall Street Journal story reports, it’s possible that the Russians government itself poisoned some of their negotiators. Read below the tweet:

From the WSJ:

Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning after a meeting in Kyiv earlier this month, people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Abramovich, Ukrainian lawmaker Rustem Umerov and another negotiator developed symptoms following the March 3 meeting in Kyiv that included red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands, the people said. Mr. Abramovich has shuttled between Moscow, Belarus and other negotiating venues since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Mr. Abramovich was blinded for a few hours and later had trouble eating, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Some of the people familiar with the matter blamed the suspected attack on hard-liners in Moscow who they said wanted to sabotage talks to end the war. A person close to Mr. Abramovich said it wasn’t clear who had targeted the group.

However, the NYT says the evidence for deliberate poisoning is almost nil:

But another U.S. official, briefed on intelligence reports, said the incident appeared to be environmental, something like run-of-the mill food poisoning, rather than some kind of chemical agent.

Yet this morning the WSJ is still floating the possibility of poisoning.

This seems more plausible and I don’t see a good reason why Putin would countenance the poisoning of his own negotiators.

*The Washington Post and other venues report that, according to a federal judge. Trump may have committed crimes connected with the January 6 insurrection:

A federal judge said Monday that then-President Donald Trump “more likely than not” committed federal crimes in trying to obstruct the congressional count of electoral college votes on Jan. 6, 2021 — an assertion that is likely to increase public pressure on the Justice Department to investigate the former commander in chief.

The determination from U.S. District Judge David O. Carter came in a ruling addressing scores of sensitive emails that Trump ally and conservative lawyer John Eastman had resisted turning over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot and related efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.

. . . “Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021,” wrote Carter, who is based in California and has jurisdiction because that is where Eastman filed the case.

*Glory be! MIT has announced that it has reinstated required standardized tests (the ACT and SAT) for admission. (h/t cesar) Stu Scmill, MIT’s Dean of Admissions, says this:

After careful consideration, we have decided to reinstate our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT. We believe a requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy. In the post below —  and in a separate conversation with MIT News today —  I explain more⁠01about how we think this decision helps us advance our mission.

This is what the UC Berkeley study concluded as well, but its decision to retain the tests was overturned and they have been eliminated in the UC system.

We all know why the tests were eliminated—the pandemic temporary suspension was largely a ruse—and I thought that eliminating tests would become permanent. I still think it will be for most schools, as it’s an effective way to increase diversity without explicitly saying so (the euphemism is “holistic admissions”), but MIT adds this:

To briefly summarize a great deal of careful research:

  • our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT⁠02 Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing. Of course, we can never be fully certain how any given applicant will do: we’re predicting the development of people, not the movement of planets, and people always surprise you. However, our research does help us establish bands of confidence that hold true in the aggregate, while allowing us, as admissions officers, to exercise individual contextual discretion in each case. The word ‘significantly’ in this bullet point is accurate both statistically and idiomatically.is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics — alongside other factors
  • some standardized exams besides the SAT/ACT can help us evaluate readiness, but access to these other exams is generally more socioeconomically restricted⁠03 relative to the SAT/ACT
  • as a result, not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education,⁠04 relative to having them, given these other inequalities

*Here’s a screenshot of a letter to the New Zealand magazine The Listener by Bryan Boyd, a member of the Royal Society of New Zealand who hasn’t yet resigned, but might. I wrote about the slimy omission of the sentence to which Boyd refers here:

*The  kind of renaming described below getting so common that it no longer deserves a post of its own—except this one was prompted by the Right.  Reader Tom sent me a link from the Orlando Weekly about a new renaming, this one prompted by right-wing students:

The University of Florida has renamed a study room honoring economist and philosopher Karl Marx following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The room in UF’s Library West was named for the Prussian historian as part of a wider initiative to celebrate influential thinkers. A plaque outside the room has explained the impact of the “revolutionary critic” since 2014. The move to remove it comes after pearl-clutching, conservative college outlet Campus Reform reported on the plaque earlier this month.

This is clearly yet another knee-jerk reaction for several reasons, including the fact that Marx was German, died well before the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union came into existence, and, according to the paper, didn’t have anything to do with that Revolution. Well, that’s not completely true, as Marx had a substantial influence on Lenin and other Russian and Chinese communists.  But, as the paper says, this is a merely a reflexive response to deep-six anything considered “Russian”. Still, I’m surprised that the University of Florida had a “Marx reading room” in the first place!!

*Finally, the formerly reasonable CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan, who was let go over errors in reporting, joined the Fox News Network and has since gone bonkers—even more so than other Fox correspondents. Recently she criticized evolutionary biology in a bizarre rant:

LARA LOGAN: What is the only thing on Earth that is actually renewable? It’s life. And they can, you know, go back to the big-bang theory and Darwin. I mean, when I found out, does anyone know when, who employed Darwin? Where Darwinism comes from? Well, I mean, you know, look it up, the Rothschilds. It goes right back to 10 Downing Street and the same people who employed Darwin and that’s when Darwin, you know, wrote his theory of evolution and so on and so on. And I’m not saying that none of that is true. I’m just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with the theory. Right? Based on evidence. OK, fine.

MediaMatters says this lunacy was emitted on a QAnon show!

If you think I’m making this up, there’s a video of this rant, and the accuser is indeed Logan. This isn’t the only conspiracy theory she’s floated, but it’s the only one I know of claiming that Darwin was in the pay of Jews and Brits, and that he was hired to confect a theory of evolution. That’s not even wrong.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is excited as there’s a sign of Spring (she doesn’t catch or eat moles):

Hili: The moles have woken up.
A: LIke every year.

In Polish:
Hili: Krety się obudziły.
Ja: Jak co roku.

And here’s a picture of little Kulka licking Szaron. They are fast friends, and always have been. Hili is okay with Szaron but still wary of Kulka.

From Divy, though the results of this exercise are temporary:

A Venn Diagram from Anna:

From Lorenzo the Cat:

And a painting I like from a young Ukrainian artist, which I saw posted by Barbara on the FB page “Animals in Art Through History“. The details:

Maria Chepeleva b.1985. Ukraine.
“Her First Snow” n.d. Oil on canvas.

God gives the requested sign:

From Simon: a comment from Titania after the Oscars kerfuffle between Will Smith and Chris Rock. (Smith finally apologized for slapping Rock on camera.)

How Ricky Gervais would introduce the Oscars (sound up):

Reader Simon says that “For some reason, this paper is all over my Twitter feed.” And no surprise, either: look at the subject and click on the picture to go to the highlights, which I’ve also put below:

No surprise here! But they should have tried the Beatles (or the Carpenters):

 

From reader Ken, with an introduction:

For its combination of stupidity and bigotry, it’s hard to beat the comment below by Marjorie Taylor Greene, made at Donald Trump’s hate rally this past weekend in Georgia. She seems to be suggesting that electric cars and bicycles are gay and that married gay men are secretly pedophiles who prey upon little girls in women’s restrooms.

How did that women get elected? See CNN’s deconstruction of this rant here.

Tweets from Matthew. All I can say in response to this first one is, “Indeed!”

Yes, it’s Cat Crazy Hour!

Antarctica: Days 26-27

March 28, 2022 • 2:11 pm

I’ll write this quickly as I just lectured and want to post this before it’s too late in the day.  This may be the last batch of photos I send from my trip. It’s sad, but I got to where I wanted to go!

Don’t forget to enlarge the photos by clicking on them once or twice with a pause

Two days ago, leaving the end of the Beagle channel and heading north, there was a mountain with a long tongue of glacier:

And then we traversed the “White Narrows“, a famous approach to the city of Puerto Natales where a large ship can barely squeeze between the islands. The width is said to be 260 feet  (80 meters) au minimum, and the squeezing through must be done at the narrow window of “slack water”: the period befween the tide’s coming in and going out. I just learned why this is, but we’ve just come through the other way, so I’ll explain it in my next post.

We had to send out a Zodiac ahead of the ship while someone in the Narrows measured the current. Just at the time of slackwater, a signal was sent to the ship and we quickly steamed through.

Here’s the passage; it’s actually between the mainland and the island you can see to the center left. I’ve put an arrow in the second picture to show you where the ship must go through. It’s a formidable feat of navigation.

There’s a narrow passage round the island where the arrow is. That’s the White Narrows.

Here’s the current-measuring Zodiac returning to our ship.

Approaching the Narrows. Everyone was on the top deck for the transit. Look at that squeeze!

This is how close we got to the mainland during the transit:

. . . and how close to the island on the starboard side:

We made it! You can see the boat’s wake curving around from the left as the Zodiac returns to the ship.

A rainbow appeared when we were through as if to smile on our success.

About two hours later we docked at the large-ish town of Puerto Natales. It’s the center of tourism for much of Patagonia, especially those who want to hike or visit the fantastic Torres del Paine National Park. Because of the pandemic and fall-off of tourism, this town suffered economically during the last two years, and many stores are closed.

Docking here was complicated. Because there’s no wharf long enough to tether the ship, there are mini-wharves made of cement (three are shown) to which the Amundsen was tethered as well. There were also two behind the boat

A panorama of the city and its dock, taken while docking. Do enlarge this photo; I quite like it!

Birds in the harbor! These are black-necked swans (Cygnus melancoryphus), the largest waterfowl in South America, weighing in at a hefty 3.5-6.7 kg, or 7.7-14.8 pounds.

Here’s the swan’s range:

And some beautiful Patagonian crested ducks(Lophonetta specularioides specularioides); many were tooling around in the harbor. They have beautiful red eyes with black pupils. It’s found only in southern South America, where it prefers quiet waters: bays, wetlands, and coastal areas:

It eats aquatic invertebrates, crustaceans, molluscs, and algae, and appears to dabble for them the way our mallards do.

A shiny black beak sets off the devilish-red eyes:

I couldn’t see the crests very easily, but here’s one with a bit of the crests showing. I’m not sure whether they can erect them.

We had a three-hour free bus tour of Puerto Natales and its environs in lieu of the expensive Torres del Paine excusion, which costs 300 Euros. (I did that two years ago; see my report here.) The big sight of the day was the Milodon cave, a cave where many fossils have been found, including that of Mylodon darwinii, a giant ground sloth that gives the cave its name. And the sloth’s name comes from Darwin himself, who discovered the type specimen on the pampas (only one species of Milodon is recognized.

These were some of the largest land mammals who ever lived; some of their relatives, in the genus Megatherium, were the size of small elephants.  Wikipedia notes what’s below, and mark that they mention the cave (my emphasis):

Mylodon is a genus of extinct ground sloth belonging to the family Mylodontidae, known from the region of Patagonia in Chile and Argentina in southern South America. With a total length of 3 to 4 m, it is one of the best-known and largest representatives of the group. The oldest finds probably date to the Lower Pleistocene. Most of the fossil remains, however, date from the Upper Pleistocene period. One of the most important sites of this phase is the Cueva del Milodón in southern Chile. Shortly after, about 10,200 BP,[1] Mylodon became extinct. At this point in time, it coexisted with the first human colonists in America. However, there is little evidence that it was hunted by humans.

In the cave they found samples of the dung, skin, and toenails, which I’ve put below from the Wikipedia article. The freshness of the skin led some to believe that Mylosona were still around 200 years ago, but the samples are dated to 10,000 years ago; they were preserved in the cave because it was dry and protected.

Richard Owen recognized the lower jaw found by Darwin as that of a sloth, and the geographic affinity of modern sloths, all of which are Central or South American, with the giant sloths, all from South America, led Darwin in part to his theory of evolution.

Here’s the entrance to the cave, which is large and high, but not that deep. Two people on the right show the scale:

We were told that they’re still excavating for fossils here, but we didn’t see any activity.

Looking back to the entrance from within the cave.

Some fellow passengers for scale. We were told that there were no plants inside until the pandemic drove tourists away, and the dripping water inside the cave lured in animals, whose dung helped plants grow.

I couldn’t resist getting my photo taken near a life-sized Mylodon statue.  It’s amazing that these animals lived only 10,000 years ago, and coexisted with humans.

Time for food. I’m eating very little breakfast and no lunch, so I get hungry at dinner and often eat a lot. That’s probably counterproductive, but what the hell. Here’s the local Patagonian barley wine.

A small steak, veggies, and fries.

Steamed dumplings with chicken:

I drank all the barley wine, so they gave me an IPA yesterday. It was okay, but readers here know that I’m not a big IPA fan because the flavor is too dominated by hops.

Quesadillas, which are quite good (these are shots from different meals, by the way.) You can have them with either chicken, pork, or couscous filling (the latter is just weird), and they have melted cheese and avocado as well.

What they call “sticks”, which are kebabs; you can get them with chicken or pork and a variety of sauces. These are lamb kebabs with chili sauce and satay sauce:

And my dessert last night: Norwegian pancakes (svellen) with homemade blueberry compote and meringue.

Scientific American: What we can learn about abortion from quantum mechanics

March 28, 2022 • 9:45 am

Scientific American continues to publish dreck, and I’m not sure why anybody who’s enthusiastic about science would want to continue subscribing.

This latest op-ed, to which I shouldn’t devote any attention (but the laws of physics dictate otherwise) is a prime example of the naturalistic fallacy. By looking at quantum mechanics, says author Cara Heuser, we can realize that one can hold two seemingly opposite views in one’s head at the same time. To wit: light can sometimes act as a particle, and sometimes as a wave, depending on the nature of the observation. Similarly, one can care for and about children and yet still be pro-choice.  The author, in fact, holds both views of medical care, and simultaneously saves children’s lives and provides abortion care. As the author’s bio notes:

Cara C. Heuser is a maternal-fetal medicine physician. She provides full-spectrum reproductive care, including prenatal care for high-risk pregnancies and abortion care, in Salt Lake City.

It’s not that I object to Heuser’s views, for I agree with her completely. But I do object to extrapolating from quantum physics to one’s views on abortion. This is the naturalistic fallacy, and a fallacy that could be applied (or rather, misapplied) to other real or apparent instances of cognitive dissonance. (That terms is usually reserved for a conflict of views that causes mental distress, but here I’ll just refer to having two seemingly or actually opposite views). There’s simply no lesson to be learned by extrapolating from how particles behave to how humans behave—or should behave.

Click on the screenshot to read.

My own views on abortion pretty much jibe with Roe v. Wade, but go even further. For example, I think that perhaps the threshold of abortion legality should be the onset of sentience—the ability to actually feel suffering—rather than viability. (One should also realize that if viability outside the womb is the criterion for prohibitng abortion, then this criterion will eventually be pushed back all the way to conception, as eventually we’ll have the ability to rear humans from fertilization to time of normal birth—all in vitro. The onset of sentience, on the other hand, does not change with technological innovation.) But I haven’t settled on my “threshhold” yet, though I still believe with Peter Singer that if a child is born with a defect or disease that will kill them very soon, is incurable, and causes suffering, it should be legal to euthanize them with the agreement of doctors and the parents).

I also bridle when people try to shut down the abortion debate by asserting a simple “right” to abortion. Where does this “right” come from? Granted, there is a Constitutional right to privacy, but instead of seeing abortion as some kind of inherent “right”, or as “moral on the face of it”,  I think abortions should be legal on grounds of pragmatism: society is better off allowing them rather than prohibiting them. (In matters of ethics, I tend to be a consequentialist.)

Indeed, the author, while several times asserting the “right” to an abortion, also argues for the procedure largely on practical grounds:

Perhaps we even have a moral compass that pushes us to provide this care. Perhaps we also value life. Many rights proponents argue that we must speak up because we value life: thousands of women have died from unsafe abortions before they were legal; multiple studies demonstrate that restrictions result in significant harm and confirm that abortion is safe; the oft-cited concern that having an abortion is detrimental to mental health has been demonstrated as false and, in fact, the opposite is true—denial of abortion care has resulted in extreme trauma to families and individuals.’

Here Heuser is arguing for “choice”, not from some abstract “right” or “morality”, but from its practical benefits. And I largely agree with that view. Unfortunately, courts would rather judge abortion from the Constitution, which says nothing relevant—and yet will probably repeal Roe v. Wade on Constitutional grounds—than from what is best for society. Courts are not ethical pragmatists.

But I digress. The author seems to think that for many, being in favor of abortion conflicts with being an ethical person. She realized this when she donated part of her liver to save the life of a sick child, and one of her colleagues was surprised, since this donation showed she cared for the life of children, while at the same time she was providing abortion care.

I don’t see this altruistic act as a fundamental conflict between ethics and a pro-choice view. In fact, I see no hypocrisy in caring for children and favoring abortion at the same time. In deed, in many cases, the best thing for a fetus that’s unwanted may be to abort it. But of course religionists do see a conflict, since they regard a fetus as the equivalent of a sentient human being.

So far so good. But then the author extrapolates the wave/particle duality of quantum mechanics to the issue of abortion. Just like that, she says, so one can be a moral person who cares for children and yet someone who can countenance abortion as well. She is, she says, one of these. Of course she is, and only a Pecksniff would call her out for hypocrisy. Yet one did:

In August of 2020, I had major surgery to donate a part of my liver to a child unrelated to me and whom I had never met. (Did you know you can do that? Find a center and/or register to be a deceased donor at www.unos.org). One month later, I petitioned our state medical society to oppose abortion restrictions, describing the harm these laws pose to patients under my care. I had no reason to think that my liver donation and my opposition to abortion restrictions were related until a colleague expressed his astonishment that I was “so pro-abortion but also donated an organ to a kid.”

Learning that I had undertaken an act that many people view as altruistic (a description that causes me discomfort, but I will at least allow it demonstrates a respect for life) presented a direct challenge to his view of abortion providers as morally bereft. My colleague found these two empirical truths difficult to reconcile. In his mind, one cannot be both an abortion provider and an ethical and thoughtful human. Pick one, says this belief system, team particle or team wave.

This is not a good example of hypocrisy; one can, on grounds of societal good as a whole both allow reproductive choice and allow (and applaud) someone who donates part of an organ to save a life. Her colleague is simply muddled.

This apparent conflict still bothers Heuser, however, but she should simply forget about that colleague. And she needn’t try to satisfy “pro-life” religionists, who will never be convinced that abortion can be the right thing to do.

But, apparently, she turns to quantum mechanics—the wave/particle duality—as a way to find solace—or to convince doubters:

Instead of either/or, imagine both/and. We recognize the value placed on a desired and loved pregnancy by families and understand that ending a pregnancy is the right decision for some people some of the time. Individuals may have ethical objections to abortion and recognize that anti-choice laws can harm people. We can value human life and recognize the complexities of reproductive decision making. Attending thousands of births has been a great joy in my career and has cemented my belief that forcing a person to give birth against their will is a fundamental violation of their human rights.

Given that one quarter of women in the U.S. have an abortion, many Americans have benefitted directly or indirectly from abortion care. I implore readers to emulate previous generations of scientists who changed our understanding of the universe by their willingness to consider seemingly opposite empirical truths:

Particle and wave, abortion providers and ethical physicians, pro-life and pro-choice.

Nope, that last sentence is meaningless with those first three words.

You can see the problem here. Any kind of hypocrisy or doublethink or conflicting tendencies can be rationalized via this fallacy, and not all those tendencies are pretty. Think of a celibate priest who is also a pedophile, someone who crusades against alcoholism while drinking on the sly, a diehard atheist who thinks religion is good for others (the “little people” argument) or even, to evoke Godwin’s Law, of Hitler who was a Christian and loved his dogs.

But there’s not even any hypocrisy in Heuser’s view—at least none that I can see. Ergo she doesn’t need to grope for explanations beyond consequentialist ethnics. By trying to do so, she gives people a rationale for all sorts of bad arguments about reconciling opposite or apparently opposite views.

I admire Dr. Heuser, but Scientific American really should not have published her specious analogy.

Monday: Hili dialogue

March 28, 2022 • 6:30 am

Where we are now: The ship’s real-time map shows that, as expected, we’re still moored at the dock in Puerto Natales. We had to stay here overnight because the people on the trip to Torres del Paine weren’t scheduled to return till after 10 pm, and we may have to pass through the White Narrows again, but only during “slack tide”. (See post from later today.) We’re scheduled to depart, still wending our way towards Valparaiso, around noon:

There are no photo of the area this morning because I’m keeping my curtains closed, on the ship’s advice, to fend off bird strikes. But here’s where we are anyway in a photo from yesterday:  the dock at Puerto Natales, taken as we were slowly approaching it. It’s one of the few panoramas I’ve taken that I actually like (do click to enlarge):

There will be a travel post later today; I’m lecturing at 1 p.m.

Welcome to Monday, March 28, 2022: National Black Forest Cake Day. which is best if one uses sour (pie) cherries rather than maraschino cherries. It’s bascially a chocolate cake with cherries and cherry liqueur; the latter (“Kirschwasser”) gives the cake its name since the liqueur is typical of the Black Forest region. You can find a good recipe here, and this is a photo:

If you want to help out with “this day in history”, go to the Wikipedia page for March 28 and give us your favorite notable events, births, and deaths.

Here’s the headlinea from today’s New York Times; click on the screenshota to read. The first was 45 minutes ago, before I went to breakfast; the second must have been put up during that time. For each I’ve given the NYt’s summary

And the NYT’s summary:

Russia appears to be shifting its focus to securing control of eastern Ukraine after efforts to take the capital, Kyiv, and other major cities stalled in the face of stiff resistance.

Ukrainian officials said that they are worried that Russia may try to split the country between regions it controls and those it does not, a division that recalled the fate of Germany and Korea after World War II.

Two notable events. First, the Russian shelling around the nuclear facility at Chernobyl has caused concern among Europeans, who fear that an accident could unleash radioactive material across a wide region. The deputy prime minister of Ukraine has “called on the U.N. to establish a mission to take immediate measures to demilitarize the exclusion zone around the plant.” Of course that would, like “closing the skies,” put the West in military conflict with Russia, and seems a non-starter. Further, Ukrainian President Zelensky gave a 90-minute Zoom video interview to Russian journalists. Did they air it in Russia? Not a chance!:

Hours later, the Kremlin responded. A government statement notified the Russian news media “of the necessity to refrain from publishing this interview.”

. . .After they finished the interview, the journalists posted about it on social media, promising that they would soon publish it. Several hours after that, the Russian telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, released a statement directing Russian news outlets not to publish the interview, and warning that an inquiry had been launched against the reporters involved to “determine their responsibility.”

Even by the standards of contemporary Russia’s arbitrary law enforcement, the statement was remarkable, offering no legal pretext to justify the order not to publish the interview. But in the wake of the law signed by Mr. Putin early this month — potentially punishing news reporting on the Ukraine invasion that deviates from the Kremlin narrative with as much as 15 years in prison — the government directive had an impact.

None of the Russian interviewers, of course, published anything about the exchange with Zelensky, though several media companies based outside Russia put the interview on YouTube.

It is not in Russia’s interest to have Zelensky describe the carnage that Russians are inflicting on his country.  One could not have expected Putin to allow this interview to be aired.

As Russian attacks continued across Ukraine, diplomats from the two nations were scheduled to arrive in Turkey on Monday for talks, with President Volodymyr Zelensky saying his country was “ready” to discuss adopting neutral status, while the Kremlin offered little hope for an agreement that would end five weeks of fighting.

In an interview on Sunday with Russian journalists, Mr. Zelensky said that Ukraine was willing to discuss lifting restrictions on the Russian language and adopting a neutral geopolitical status. But he insisted that any deal would need to be validated by a referendum to be held after Russian troops withdraw, and that other countries would need to provide his nation with security guarantees.

The “neutral geopolitical status” would mean that Ukraine would promise not to join NATO, and perhaps not the EU. But a referendum wouldn’t win, and the insistence that Ukraine retain its sovereignty is a non-starter for Putin. It’s no wonder that a spokesman for the Kremlin said that diplomatic efforts so far had made “no significant progress.” My guess is that Putin won’t accept what Zelensky is offering.

*The death toll of Ukrainian civilians given by the UN is 1,119, including 99 children. The wounded number 1,790, among them 126 children.

*The Essay That Didn’t Need To Be Written Department: The winner for the week is by writer Rod Buntzen, who gets the raspberries for trying to draw conclusions we already know from his own personal experience. It’s from his NYT essay, “This is what it’s like to witness a nuclear explosion.” Buntzen watched a test detonation of an H-bomb in 1958, and describes it graphically. But we already know about this, and the lesson that Buntzen draws after a long account of the damage from that bomb is this:

If nuclear weapons are used in Ukraine, the biggest worry is that the conflict could spin quickly out of control. In a strategic war with Russia, hundreds of detonations like the one I witnessed could blanket our countries.

Having witnessed one thermonuclear explosion, I hope that no humans ever have to witness another.

Does anybody?  And this was a full-fledged H-bomb. Should Putin go that route instead of using tactical nuclear weapons, he’s guaranteeing the destruction of his country. The whole editorial is an exercise in showing off and virtue flaunting.

*Here are the winners of last night’s Big Six Oscars (Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal‘s movie critic, published his predictions yesterday about who should win in the major categories and who will win.

Best Picture: CODA
Best Director: Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”)
Best Actress: Jessica Chastain (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”)
Best Actor: Will Smith (“King Richard”)
Best Supporting Actress: Ariana DeBose (“West Side Story”)
Best Supporting Actor: Trey Cotsa (“CODA”)

It looks as if my movie-loving nephew Steven guessed all of these all on the money, so he wins the book. He even bested Joe Morgenstern.

Gossip from the Oscars: The Guardian reports this:

So just a refresh for those coming in late or early wherever you are. The night’s biggest moment came from best actor winner Will Smith, who went viral after he appeared to slap Chris Rock for making an ill-advised joke about his wife Jada Pinkett’s alopecia. Rock joked that she was set to make GI Jane 2 next, which led Smith to rush up on stage and try to hit Rock. Smith then told him to get his wife’s name out of his mouth.

Here’s the actual video. Smith was rightly angered, but he shouldn’t have hit Chris Rock, especially on live television. They could have settled it in the alley afterwards:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is talking about “hell on Earth”. When I asked whether the cat was referring to Ukraine, Malgorzata replied, “It’s more general. There is not a day without hell present in many places on Earth. Some people live far away and they have a ‘normal’ life.”

Hili: What is normality?
A: Awareness that today hell is far away from us.
In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest normalność?
Ja: Świadomość, że dziś piekło jest daleko od nas.

And here’s a picture of Karolina, the girl from Kyiv, showing her love of Hili:

A groaner from Barry:

From reader David (it’s not his cartoon, so I’ll point out that the word “only” is misplaced):

. . and from reader Pliny the in Between’ssite The Far Corner Cafe (click to enlarge):

God screwed up, as he does so often. Well, he allowed Hawkins to screw up, preliminary toxicology reports indicate at least ten drugs found in his body.

Two tweets from Simon. Yes, the famous “ploughman’s lunch” in Britain is now harmful and offensive, and has received a new name. And the second tweet makes you guess (not hard!). (“Quorn” is a meat substitute mad from fungus.)

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Here’s how Trump would be handling the Ukraine/Russia conflict:

Tweets from Matthew: Ceiling Cat bless the Ukrainians: they don’t even forget the marsupials!

I’ve read a lot about Darwin, but this fact is new to me.  It appears to be his son William Erasmus Darwin (1839-1914).

I may have posted this before. If so, here it is again:

This is funny, and it is true that the bill has an axolotl on it! Click on the picture to see the adorable salamander.

Lawrence Krauss: Stop indicting science for systemic bigotry

March 27, 2022 • 10:15 am

I didn’t realize the Lawrence Krauss had a Substack site, but all the cool kids seem to be getting one, along with the dosh that comes with it. Krauss’s site, named “Critical Mass,” is new, but already has interviews with notable people he knows, including Steve Pinker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Richard Dawkins, Roger Penrose, and Stephen Wolfram.

This is all well and good, though I shy away from podcasts of any stripe, but there’s one article that should be read by all the Pecksniffs and Virtue Flaunters who are, in my view, dragging down modern science by turning its purpose from the investigation of nature towards a form of social engineering.

Krauss’s piece doesn’t say much that hasn’t been said before, but he’s a good writer and doesn’t pull any punches.  I wish that every scientist—and that includes my Chicago colleagues who indict evolutionary biology for current bigotry—would read the piece below (click on the screenshot):

Krauss’s words are indented; mine are flush left.

Earlier this month Science magazine, whose editor since 2019 has promoted the notion that science is systemically racist and sexist, ran four hit pieces on physics in a single issue. It was claimed that physics is racist and exclusionary, run by a “white priesthood,” and based on “white privilege.”

The articles themselves were inconsistent at best. They promoted a specific viewpoint and sometimes made claims that were manifestly contradicted by their own examples. I don’t want to spend a lot of time here critiquing the specifics, or the magazine in general, because I don’t think either are worth it. But it is worth summarizing some of the misconceptions they promote. If one hears the same things over and over again, even if they are not true, it is easy to begin to believe them. So, it is important every now and then, to step back and question the assumptions on which they are based.

(a)  If the representation of various groups in scientific disciplines does not match the demographics of the society at large, the cause must be racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination.

This comes straight from the Kendi-an playbook: one of the major theses of How to be an Antiracist is that “inequity” in organizations—ethnic or gender composition differing from that of society as a whole—is an unquestionable sign of bigotry currently acting against members of those groups less represented in government, companies, science, and so on.

This accusation is just wrong, and wrong for several reasons. First of all, “inequities” may be the sequelae of past bigotry, and not the sign of present racism or misogyny in organizations like universities. While both alternatives indict bigotry, the way to fix the problem, given that “equity” is one’s goal, are very different.. Most people, including me, think that fixing such problems for good requires fundamental structural change. John McWhorter, for example, suggests that fixing the root cause of inequity can be largely with just three changes: teaching kids to read via phonic, ending the war on drugs, and discarding the idea that everyone must go to college.

But if inequities reflect differences in preference and not just racism, then they don’t necessarily need to be rectified to equal the existing proportions of groups in society.

So we have three hypotheses for inequities—present-day bigotry, reflections of past bigotry with minimal present bigotry, and differential preference. Asserting that only #1 is true, as Kendi does (and many scientists and science journals), is not only unjustified, but goes against some evidence, particularly regarding inequity of the sexes.

None of this is to deny that bigotry still exists and still holds people back. Of course it does. The question is whether the bigotry is structural—still built into the system—and what proportion of the variance in representation is due to bigotry past, bigotry present, or difference in preference. Here we have no evidence, but anecdotes and a lot of assertions involving “lived experience.” Data contravening the bigotry narrative—including the negative correlation between measures of gender equality and the proportion of women in STEM careers, so that more egalitarian societies have a lower proportion of women in STEM—is ignored.

The glomming on to favored hypotheses without strong evidence as well as the rejection of counterevidence are both unscientific.  It’s odd that scientists themselves are so ready to behave unscientifically when it comes to this issue. But a lot of it is understandable as a way of signaling one’s virtue.

As Krauss says,

Without some control over confounding factors or some other clear empirical data validating a theoretical model, it is impossible to isolate the cause of this effect. Most areas of human activity are self-selecting. To argue that people don’t become scientists because they are excluded by the scientific community is an extraordinary claim. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is not to claim that racism or sexism do not exist in society at any level. Nor that examining such demographics might not be useful. But to lay this demographic on the doorstep of science without further justification is inappropriate. Moreover, there is a lot of empirical data that shows quite the opposite

That data includes not only the negative correlation mentioned above ,but studies showing that there is no evidence for racial discrimination in evaluating NIH grants. You rarely hear about data like these because they don’t support the preferred narrative. Krauss continues:

(b) When interviewed, white male scientists cannot provide examples of racism or sexism in their disciplines

In the Science articles, this was taken, as it often is, as manifest evidence of white privilege. One is reminded of one of the ancient ways of determining if someone was a witch. If they claimed not to be, that was good evidence that they might be. Alternatively, it could be because most faculty at universities are acutely concerned about possible discrimination on the basis of race and gender and would root out efforts to discriminate on the basis of either. In these articles, and in most other claims about systemic racism in science, empirical examples of such systematic racism are generally absent. Instead vague anecdotal claims are made.

This is dead common. Articles indicting modern evolutionary biology for racism, for instance, invariably lack either supporting data or even examples.

c)  Anecdotal claims of slights based on ability, or of working in an atmosphere that seemed neither friendly nor inclusive are not in themselves evidence of anything except an atmosphere that seems neither friendly nor inclusive.

. . . Science is an intensely competitive field, and, as I will argue below, it probably should be. It is tempting, to view such a situation as a reflection of discrimination, and to feel victimized on the basis of your race, gender, religion, or other personal identity characteristics. Especially if you are constantly told in training sessions that this must be the reason for any hardships.

It’s considered impolite to claim that some people blame their failures on the bigotry on others, but that’s sometimes the case. This is one reason why “hate crime” hoaxes are common on college campuses, with members of minorities fabricating racist or sexist graffiti—something that always raises a huge ruckus. When those crimes are found to be fabricated as a way to exaggerate the extent of bigotry, they are quietly forgotten. (Jussie Smollett is an exception, because he was caught in the act and the evidence against him too damning.) Indeed, sometimes the narrative is reversed, with the fabricated hate crimes actually serving to underscore the continuing presence of bigotry. 

(d) It is claimed that too few programs exist to recruit and retain women and minorities.

As Krauss says, “this is manifestly wrong.” Anyone in science knows that universities are falling all over each other to recruit minority professors and graduate students.

Another critique that is raised is that minority scientists pay a price because excessive demands are placed on them to assist in diversity recruiting and retention efforts. Yet a number of the individuals interviewed for the Science articles, who complained about this, are the very individuals who have lobbied hard for such programs to be expanded. If they were not included, I suspect that omission would be criticized even more. Universities have worked for over 40 years to increase diversity, through affirmative action programs at all levels, and other programming. In 1960, women in science may not have been taken seriously, but that was 62 years ago.

Finally,

(e)  It is claimed that standard merit-based evaluations must be relaxed to increase diversity in science, and that this will strengthen the field.

This is a form of affirmative action in which the bar for hiring or admission to graduate school—indeed, even for evaluating performance—is lowered as a way to increase diversity, almost always ethnic diversity.  And this is one area in which people dissimulate like crazy when explaining the changes. It is rarely admitted, for example, that ditching standardized tests like SATs or GREs is done explicitly because if test scores are used to evaluate people, many minorities will score lower, creating inequities. And above all, people can’t bring themselves to admit that there is a negative correlation between the height of the bar and the degree of diversity. (If there wasn’t, there would be no reason to get rid of standardized test.)

The question that Krauss raises in his title bears directly on this: when thinking about the future of science when hiring or taking on students, do we go for maximum quality or maximum diversity? You can’t have both—at least now—though people pretend otherwise. Krauss goes for quality:

. . . there is little or no objective evidence that talented students or researchers who have a genuine interest in science are excluded on the basis of these measures. It is true that social inequities, financial at least as much as racial, mean that some individuals who, had they access to proper educational resources early on, end up not following a career track in science. But the solution to this is not diluting requirements for researchers at an advanced level.

Krauss’s most telling argument is that the very reason science is supported by the taxpayer is the reason that quality of work, past record of achievement, and future promise to produce good science must be prized above al else:

Similarly, while enjoying science is everyone’s right—I have spent a large part of my career trying to spread that joy as widely as I can—being paid to do science is a privilege, not a right. It is largely solipsistic and self-indulgent. What right have we to be supported by the public to simply explore questions that interest us? Science is supported by the public because of the public good it does. That good is not met by employing a rigidly diverse workforce. It is met by producing the best science money can buy. We should reserve that privilege to carry out this public good to those who can best exploit it. No system of culling is perfect, but not all students should succeed, nor should all researchers.

Finally, while admitting that bigotry, especially against women, is a major barrier in non-Western countries, Krauss argues, and I agree, that the supposed “colonial” nature of modern science—the claim that it’s structurally racist or misogynist—is not the cause of inequities.

And that is the key point. There may be economic and racial barriers that currently restrict equal opportunity in society. But science itself is not the cause of any induced lack of diversity, nor can it be the solution. To address deeper issues of racism, or sexism, requires addressing societal problems at a much deeper level, and confusing the end result with the root causes is folly.

Krauss then asks the Question that is Most Taboo:

Put another way, as harsh as it may sound, we need to ask a question that is currently impossible to ask in polite company, or even impolite company: Why is it so necessary for more women, minorities, and transgender individuals, and fewer white males, to become scientists? Surely the science doesn’t care about melanin or gonads or sexual preferences or identities.

Here I differ from him—not wholly, but a bit.  Insofar as minorities aren’t represented in science, that points to a societal problem that must be addressed, and if inequities reflect bigotry in the past, as they must surely do to some degree, that must also be fixed. But the fix is not to indict science itself as a bigoted enterprise, nor lower the bar to a level that won’t support limbo.

And, as I’ve said before—and here I differ from many of my colleagues—I think that some degree of affirmative action is still needed in science and in schools in general,  As I’ve said, the “optics” themselves point out a problem, but also, as a matter of reparations, one should at the very least give some preferences to underrepresented people if they show promise to do good future science. It’s not a matter of admitting the unqualified, but of putting ethnicity in the balance among qualified people.

Yes, the real solution to inequities, if they be caused by bigotry, lies in creating equal opportunities beginning at birth, but that won’t happen for decades.  And given society’s unwillingness to make these fundamental changes right now, we must do something. And we can do something without severely affecting the quality of science. To me that means more outreach combined with a bit of affirmative action.

Sunday: Hili dialogue

March 27, 2022 • 6:30 am

Where we are now: The ship’s real-time map shows that last night we headed north, threading ourselves through the confusing farrago of fjords, inlets and channels, to approach Puerto Natales, where we’ll have a three-hour land excursion today, stay moored tonight awaiting those guests coming back from Torres del Paine National Park, and then head further north tomorrow.

The Chilean fjords await, though I don’t know how much we’ll get to see of them.

I have no photos from early this morning as we’ve been told we’re in an area of bird strikes, and have been asked to keep our curtains drawn and the lights lower when it’s dark. It started out a gloomy day, and by 7:45 there was enough light to take pictures. Patagonia!

I lecture at 8:30 this morning (what an ungodly time to roust passengers out of bed on a lazy day!), and, given the tour later today, posting will be light. But that’s okay: reading seems to be light, too, and I fear once again this site is circling the drain.

Welcome to Sunday, March 27, 2022: Whisky Day (without an “e”). Give me an aged Springbank any day: my favorite whisky-ish tipple. Here’s an expensive bottle:

If you want to help out with “this day in history”, go to the Wikipedia page for March 27 and give us your favorite notable events, births, and deaths.

Here’s today’s headline in the New York Times (click on screenshot to read):

And the paper’s news summary:

President Biden ended three days of diplomacy in Europe on Saturday that brought him within miles of the war in Ukraine, using a speech in Poland to rally American allies for what he said would be a long fight and escalating his personal denunciation of Vladimir V. Putin, saying the Russian leader “cannot remain in power.”

Mr. Biden described the war in sweeping terms, as “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” He portrayed it as part of a long struggle against authoritarianism, linking it to past uprisings against Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.

I listened to Biden’s speech, and it was okay but not of Churchillian proportions. But his statement about Putin, which I think was made off the cuff, has excited a lot of speculation. Did Biden mean that there should be regime change in Russia? I can’t see any other interpretation, but the administration walked back that construal later:

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Mr. Biden said Saturday, his cadence slowing for emphasis.

On its face, he appeared to be calling for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to be ousted for his brutal invasion of Ukraine. But Mr. Biden’s aides quickly insisted that the remark — delivered in front of a castle that served for centuries as a home for Polish monarchs — was not intended as an appeal for regime change.

*If it wasn’t, what was that remark supposed to mean? It’s either a call for his removal or his death, and either way it’s regime change. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken issued a masterpiece of Secretarysplaining:

“We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia – or anywhere else, for that matter,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday from Jerusalem, stressing that Biden’s point was that the Russian president “cannot be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else.”

If that’s what Biden meant, why didn’t he say it. And why is this so important? Is it because Putin might regard the “regime change” interpretation as some sort of declaration of war?

In the meantime, Mariupol seems to be on its last legs, and the NYT reports that people are trying to effect “daring escapes”, since the beleaguered city is surrounded by Russians.  Now the Russians have begun extensive shelling of Lviv in western Ukraine, once a haven for those fleeing the Russians. In the face of all this, Zelensky has asked NATO for more planes and tanks, though I haven’t heard him call lately to “close the skies,” which wouldn’t solve Ukraine’s problems but would create bigger ones for Europe.

*The new toll of dead Russian generals is seven in five weeks of combat.

“It is highly unusual,” said a senior Western official, briefing reporters on the topic, who confirmed the names, ranks and “killed in action” status of the seven.

In all, at least 15 senior Russian commanders have been killed in the field, said Markiyan Lubkivsky, a spokesperson for the Ukraine Ministry of Defense.

NATO officials estimated earlier this week that as many as 15,000 Russian troops have been killed in four weeks of war, a very high number. Russia has offered a far lower figure, reporting Friday that only 1,351 of its fighters had died.

The Russian government has not confirmed the deaths of its generals.

*The Washington Post has a convenient illustrated guide to the weapons being used in the Ukraine/Russia war, ranging from cluster munitions to hypersonic missiles. Here are two particularly nasty ways of killing people that have probably been used by the Russian Army in Ukraine.

From WaPo text: Cluster munitions are rockets, bombs or other projectiles that scatter small bomblets. Because they end up indiscriminately hitting a wide area, they can pose a large risk to civilian populations, even if they are not specifically targeted.

Here’s a nasty group: the thermobaric weapons:

(From NYT text): Thermobaric weapons are designed to cause intense heat and pressure. Typically launched from tanks, the missiles explode in two stages, first distributing an aerosol before a second charge ignites the cloud. The ensuing explosion produces an extreme blast and burns up oxygen in the area.

*The Oscar awards, which are losing t.v. viewers faster than the Miss America contest did, are tonight. For what it’s worth, here are the predictions of the Associated Press:

Netflix’s “The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s gothic western, comes in with a leading 12 nominations and a good chance of snagging the top award. But all the momentum is with Sian Heder’s deaf family drama “CODA,” which, despite boasting just three nods, is considered the favorite. A win would be a triumph for Apple TV+, which acquired the movie out of the Sundance Film Festival last year and has spent big promoting it to academy members.

But expect the most awards on the night to go to “Dune,” Denis Villeneuve’s sweeping science fiction epic. It’s the odds-on-favorite to clean up in the technical categories.

But in an op-ed in the NYT, Ross Douthat says it’s not just the televised award show that’s on the way out, but the movies themselves. In his column “We aren’t just watching the decline of the Oscars. We’re watching the end of the movies“, Douthat doesn’t claim that movies themselves are getting worse, though he does suggest that, but rather that movies as a genre are disappearing:

No, what looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.

This end has been a long time coming — foreshadowed in the spread of television, the invention of the VCR, the rise of cable TV and Hollywood’s constant “It’s the pictures that got small” mythologization of its own disappearing past.

. . . this combination of forces pushed Hollywood in two directions. On the one hand, toward a reliance on superhero movies and other “presold” properties, largely pitched to teenage tastes and sensibilities, to sustain the theatrical side of the business. (The landscape of the past year, in which the new “Spider-Man” and “Batman” movies between them have made over a billion dollars domestically while Oscar hopefuls have made a pittance, is just an exaggerated version of the pre-Covid dominance of effects-driven sequels and reboots over original storytelling.) On the other hand, toward a churn of content generation to feed home entertainment and streaming platforms, in which there’s little to distinguish the typical movie — in terms of casting, direction or promotion — from the TV serials with which it competes for space across a range of personal devices.

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There’s no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences.

It’s a rather confusing piece, and sometimes contradicts itself (the movies are getting worse; no, the movies are as good as ever), but I agree with Douthat on one thing: watching the movies in a proper theater (and by that I don’t mean the Crackerjack boxes that pass for “theaters” in multiplexes) is an experience completely different from watching one on a television set or—Ceiling Cat forbid—on a phone. The whole way of making movies is affected by how they’re seen; there’s no substitute for the giant screen that immerses you in the story.

An offer: if you manage to guess the Big Six—awards for best picture, best director, best actor best actress, and best supporting actor and supporting actress, I’ll send an autographed book (of mine) of your choice (except Speciation), to either your or a recipient of your choice, autographed and with your choice of messages and a special cat drawn in by me. Or just put your guesses down below for fun. Here’s a list of all the nominees. Sadly I haven’t seen a single one of the nominated films.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is stymied, but reassured by Andrzej.

Hili: We do not know the future.
A: It may be better that way.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie znamy przyszłości.
Ja: Może to lepiej.

BFFs Szaron and Kulka on the outside windowsill:

From Barry, who swears that the book on the left is real:

From Divy, who does have a favorite spatula. But that’s the only criteria in this list that I don’t fulfill:

From Merilee: Cat as bagpipe. Sound up!

From Titania. Remember, this is defended by the America Cheetah Liberties Union:

From reader Barry. This guy seems insidious, but remember, he’s just doing what Allah tells him, and he gives you two good options.

After Life benches, like the one Ricky Gervais sat on with his grieving friend who helped him to live, are springing up everywhere in the UK. Again: watch all three seasons!

Tweets from Matthew. First, an Honorary Cat®:

A puggle gets released (one of my bucket-list items is seeing one of these in the wild):

Live and learn, biology department:

Note the special bristles around the nightjar’s gaping mouth, which may help guide prey into the mouth when it’s hunting. Those things need to be groomed!

“You can’t go home again”—genetics version:

The cloned cat looks pretty much like its predecessor, but the staff reports that their personalities are completely different. The “scientific” explanation makes some sense, but a substantial amount of variation in behavior, at least in people, is due to differences in genes. (p.s. You can adopt a lot of cats for $25,000.)

ViaGen told The Sun that it guarantees that they’ll look identical but the animals will develop their own personality because that’s based on external factors.

Those factors include how many animals are in the house, what the animal is being fed, how the cat is raised, among dozens of other nature-versus-nurture impacts.

Anderson said Belle’s personality “is completely different” from Chai.

“They have some baseline personalities that are a little similar. Like they’re very bold, sassy, cats, but that could be the breed. But Belle is a totally new cat.”

Washington Post runs rare column that praises atheism

March 26, 2022 • 1:00 pm

With things going to hell in Eastern Europe and the U.S. sliding into wokeness, perhaps there’s one area where we can expect good news: religion seems to be inexorably disappearing ain the U.S., Canada, and most of Europe. “None-ness” is just a step from godlessness.

In fact, this is the first time since 2019 that the Post has published a pro-atheism editorial by a regularly contributing columnist (that was Max Boot calling for an atheist President of the U.S.), and the first time since 2011 that outside contributors were allowed to publish an atheist piece (“Why do Americans still dislike atheists?” by Greg Paul and Phil Zuckerman). Today’s contributing columnist is Brian Broome, who writes about “politics, culture and the African American perspective.” Atheism is hardly an African-American perspective, making this both both more unusual and more laudatory.

Click on the screenshot to read:

What turned Broome into a godless person is that Achilles Heel of theism: the presence of physical evil, like childhood cancers. No rational theologian can explain the conundrum that drove Broome over the line: innocent children suffering. If you’re going to be parsimonious about this, the most likely explanation, given the absence of evidence for God when there should be such evidence, is that there simply is no God. Alternatively, there could be a malicious or indifferent God, but that’s not how most Christians, Muslims, and Jews like their deities.

Broome spells it out plainly:

I was raised in a Christian household, and my family is still religious. But, at a certain point in my childhood, the whole thing stopped making sense to me. I couldn’t work out why a loving God would let so many children suffer. The idea of eternal life seemed to be a way for people to skirt their fear of death or assuage the pain of grief. I noticed that the things people told me God wanted were, more often than not, things that they wanted as well.

I didn’t give it up all at once. Like many people, I went on a spiritual quest. But, like some of those, I quit the hunt after a while.

I stopped looking for the meaning of life and instead decided to just live it.

Living life is of course finding its meaning, for as a determinist, I’m convinced that the “meaning of life” is simply our following our evolved program to do whatever gives us satisfaction.(Much of that involves family–reproduction–and garnering the approbation of others.)

Not only is Broome an atheist, but he also espouses some antitheism, even rarer in the “MSM”:

 I often think that faith in God can be just as self-serving as staring at yourself in a mirror. The way a religion is practiced too commonly reflects the person who is practicing it.

If you want to be rich, you can find a religion that tells you that’s what God wants you to be. If you’re a misogynist, you find a church that will reaffirm your misogyny. If you don’t like our politics, or some of our political leaders, there’s a pew with your name on it somewhere, maybe closer than you think. If you are a hateful person, there are preachers for that, too. I watch people cherry-pick their religious texts to find what they want and ignore the rest. It was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who said that the most segregated hour in Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.

We are not the only country where things work this way. For those who think it is a good idea to invade other countries, the battle cry will always be that God is on your side. Wars and atrocities have been committed in the name of religion throughout history. People fight over who’s doing religion right and who’s doing it wrong — or who are not doing it at all. Some religious leaders make no distinction between their role and that of their nation’s political ambitions.

Broome explains below why he think religion will inevitably vanish. (Like many, I don’t think it will ever disappear completely, but I’m confident even the U.S. will become as areligious as Scandinavia in the next hundred years):

Church attendance and membership have long been on the decline in America. My guess is that because many folks realize that fear is at the root of so much religious conviction, the proposition has become untenable. Those fears have led too many people of faith to police the way that others choose to live their lives.

Well, I don’t agree 100% with that. If divisiveness and policing caused movements to decline, wokeness would be on the wane. More important, though, I think there are better reasons. Mixed in with the avoidance of fear and divisiveness is the well-known negative correlation between how well people are doing in their lives and their religiosity. As people get better off, and have better access to food, shelter, medical care, and other amenities that bring security, their need to rely on an unhearing god wanes. And of course as science dispels mysteries once seen as evidence for god, that takes its toll, on faith as well. .

Whatever the causes, and despite the lies of those who tell us we NEED religion as a form of social glue (the “little people argument”), we can do just fine without faith. Just ask the Danes and Swedes.

h/t: Greg Paul for the link to this and the earlier columns.