Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 25, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to  Thursday, April 25, 2024, and it’s National Zucchini Bread Day (It’s really more of a cake). I refuse to show a picture of this odious confection. It’s made because when you grow its equally odious precursor vegetable, you get a lot more than you can use. Given that it’s not very good, people wind up foisting it on others.

When I lived in Davis, CA, where zucchini grows like weeds, I was always having the Green Devil pressed upon me, and at all affairs there was zucchini bread.  Yes, I know that readers will say, “I like it,” but they have palates of asbestos. The ONLY vegetable that should be made into a cake is the carrot, and there  should be lots of cardomom, raisins, and, of course, a cream cheese frosting. Fie on zucchinis and fie on the bread.

If you Google “zucchini bread is bad,” you get this (their bolding):

Why is zucchini bread a thing?

Zucchini is abundant in the summer months, and it’s fun to incorporate this vegetable when baking, too. Zucchini adds flavorless moisture. We’re talking pure moisture with zero savory vegetable flavor. I don’t think I would bake a cake with a green vegetable if I could taste it.

That pretty much says it all! For concurring opinions, see here. “Flavorless moisture” and “I wouldn’t make a cake with a vegetable if I could taste it.”  Isn’t there a better way to add moisture?

Okay, if you must see one, here it is; I’m showing you this just so you can avoid anything that resembles it.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Zucchini_Cake_%284804574268%29.jpg

It’s also ANZAC Day, honoring the Kiwis and Aussies that have died in wars, National Telephone Day, National Plumber’s Day (which plumber?), National Steak Day (in the UK), National DNA Day, celebrating the “completion” of the Human Genome Project in 2003, World Malaria Day, and World Penguin Day

Here’s a picture of  some pengies I took in 2022:

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

Da Nooz:

*Lots of news that you probably know: Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan got multibillion-dollar aid from the U.S. yesterday (with some of the Israel aid going to Palestine), and as of October, airlines won’t be able to rip you off as much. But I’ll highlight a lesser-known event: one that involved Russia being the sole member of the U.N.’s Security Council to veto what seems like a sensible resolution:

Russia on Wednesday vetoed a U.N. resolution sponsored by the United States and Japan calling on all nations to prevent a dangerous nuclear arms race in outer space, calling it “a dirty spectacle” that cherry picks weapons of mass destruction from all other weapons that should also be banned.

The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 13 in favor, Russia opposed and China abstaining.

The resolution would have called on all countries not to develop or deploy nuclear arms or other weapons of mass destruction in space, as banned under a 1967 international treaty that included the U.S. and Russia, and to agree to the need to verify compliance.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said after the vote that Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow has no intention of deploying nuclear weapons in space.

“Today’s veto begs the question: Why? Why, if you are following the rules, would you not support a resolution that reaffirms them? What could you possibly be hiding,” she asked. “It’s baffling. And it’s a shame.”

It’s not baffling: Russia (and probably China) aim to produce space-launched nuclear weapons. What I want to know is why, if there’s already an international treaty, signed by Russia, banning the deployment of nuclear weapons in space, they voted on it again, and why Russia vetoed it?

*A WSJ article on Columbia University shows that President “Minouche” Shafik is in trouble. (I predict she’ll resign or be fired. The protestors have returned to Columbia, the tents are back up, along with the drums and chants, all classes have gone hybrid for the rest of the semester, and Shafik is NEGOTIATING with the miscreants. Some want her gone because she’s coddling the protestors, while others want her gone because she called the cops and had them arrested and many suspended.  Regardless, she is now waffling:

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik is facing mounting discontent as the school grapples with intense protests over the Israel-Hamas war, with the latest round prompting administrators to switch to hybrid classes for the remainder of the semester.

Late Monday, the university said students could choose to attend classes in person or online for the final weeks of the term, a sign that leaders don’t expect an immediate end to the tension on campus.

Criticism of Shafik has taken a variety of forms in recent days.

Some faculty and student groups have called on her to step down, citing her statements to a congressional committee last week that seemed to set limits on what is acceptable for professors to say in academic settings. Others say she trampled on students’ free-speech rights by calling in police last week to shut down a demonstration. Still others say they are disappointed by how little Shafik has done to quash protests. Meanwhile, other professors and alumni say changing leadership now would throw the campus into further chaos.

Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, testified before a congressional committee last week. PHOTO: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/ZUMA PRESS

The Columbia and Barnard College chapter of the American Association of University Professors has drafted a resolution censuring Shafik, and is seeking to get it before the University Senate for a discussion later this week.

. . .Columbia officials met with representatives for student protesters until 2 a.m. Tuesday, and that work continues in good faith, said Chang. “We have our demands and they have theirs,” he said Tuesday afternoon.

He said the protest “is in violation of university rules, full stop,” and the school is concerned as the encampment continues to grow and people who aren’t affiliated with Columbia remain present. “We are acting on concerns we are hearing from our Jewish students, and we are providing additional support and resources to ensure that our community remains safe,” he said.

Among the protestor’s demands are that Columbia divest from investments in Israel and that none of the protestors be disciplined. (The latter means that they don’t really want to engage in civil disobedience, which means you accept the legal consequences of your actions in an attempt to move people morally.) But since when do students get to dictate University policy to administrators. Daniel Diermeier at Vanderbilt had the right idea: don’t negotiate, just arrest and expel when demonstrations are illegal.

Here’s the Speaker of the House, Republican Mike Johnson, speechifying at Columbia yesterday.  Make of it what you will (he went to talk to the school’s Jewish students), but I certainly don”t approve of those protestors who keep trying to shout him down. At least he sees what “free speech” constitutes at Columbia. (See the WaPo’s article, archived, about how Johnson escalated the tension” at the school.”

*The NYT is finally pushing back against the execrable music of Taylor Swift, which of course is wildly popular among young women but, to my ears at least, mediocre. They’ve now published two articles about how her latest pretentiously-titled double album (“The Tortured Poets Depatment, with 31 songs)  may be too much, and “On ‘The ‘Tortured Poets Department’, Taylor Swift could use an editor,” and “Taylor Swift has given fans a lot. Is it finally too much?”

From the first piece:

For all its sprawl, though, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s production. (Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a more muted and organic sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the first album, and the majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have been working together since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has become her most consistent collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to much of “The Tortured Poets Department,” however — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato — that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.

As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer,” one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is one hell of a drug.” If you say so!

. . .Swift has been promoting this poetry-themed album with hand-typed lyrics, sponsored library installations and even an epilogue written in verse. A palpable love of language and a fascination with the ways words lock together in rhyme certainly courses through Swift’s writing. But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities. It is also an art form in which, quite often and counter to the governing principle of Swift’s current empire, less is more.

Sylvia Plath once called poetry “a tyrannical discipline,” because the poet must “go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of “The Tortured Poets Department” would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.

And the second:

On a new podcast episode, which was released over the weekend, Hubbard and his co-host, Nora Princiotti, were among those who pointed out that while the album may be imperfect, Swift simply may have needed to purge herself of the songs on “Poets” to process a turbulent time in her life.

Princiotti said she enjoyed much of the album and was careful to stipulate that “Poets” did contain several “special songs.”

But she also allowed for some “tough love.”

“Musically, I do not really hear anything new,” she said, adding that Swift “could have done a little bit more self editing.”

“I don’t think the fact that this is a double-album that is more than two hours in length serves what’s good about it,” Princiotti said. “And I think that for the second album in a row, I’m still sort of left going, ‘OK, where do we go from here?’”

Princiotti ultimately graded “Poets” a “B.” And in the world of her podcast and universe of Taylor Swift, Princiotti acknowledged — that might have been an all-time low.

Here’s the unmemorable title song, in which Swift sounds like a bargain-basement Joni Mitchell. The words are tortured and the tune is unmemorable. Songs like this won’t be played on Oldies Stations of the Future:

 

*The CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, has defended herself against charges, leveled by now ex editor Uri Berliner in a Free Press piece, that the station’s pervasive wokeness was creating a huge bias (and costing the organization money, trust, and listeners.

Maher said NPR should be open to criticism, but defended the news organization against the charges Berliner laid out.

. . . “We have robust conversations across the organization, including in response to the article,” she said. “Clear and well-reasoned pieces” from reviewers, like a write-up from NPR’s public editor and Poynter executive Kelly McBride that examined coverage of Israel and Gaza, have “found that our journalism is really solid,” Maher said.

. . .What is needed is a more comprehensive business strategy, she said. “How do we actually go out and grow audiences, how do we use data in order to inform our decisions, how do we understand what’s working?” she said.

Part of it will be changing the tone of its broadcasts. Research shows people see the network, which includes over 240 member organizations, as “accurate and intellectual,” she said. “We want to be able to speak to folks as though they were our neighbors and speak to folks as though they were our friends.”

. . .Maher became part of the story when critics including writer Christopher Rufo—of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank—resurfaced her past posts on X that indicate liberal leanings and progressive views. In 2018, she called former President Donald Trump a racist in a post that has since been deleted, and a couple of years later she shared a photo of herself in a “President Biden” campaign hat.

“There are many professions in which you set aside your own personal perspectives in order to lead in public service, and that is exactly how I have always led organizations and will continue to lead NPR,” she said.

Rufo and others also circulated a video clip from a 2021 interview in which Maher describes the First Amendment as the top challenge in the fight against disinformation. Maher was referring to the difficulties of regulating social-media platforms. She said it was important for tech companies to have free-speech rights, but “it also means it’s a little bit of a tricky road to be able to really address some of the real challenges of where does bad information come from.”

Well, I suppose listeners should give her a chance, but her boilerplate prose doesn’t heart4en me. “A more comprehensive business strategy?”  How to grow the audience is to have VIEWPOINT diversity to both challenge the audience and provide something for every thinking person, not all of whom are woke.  She doesn’t point out any problems, but actually praises the organization’s accuracy and intelligence. So what needs changing? Berliner had an idea, but Maher doesn’t seem to agree.

*A migrating male mallard has been clocked as flying at nearly 100 mph, much faster than I imagined. (h/t Charles). It’s as fast as a MLB pitcher’s fastball, and twice as fast as a cheetah!

Spring waterfowl migrations are in full swing as millions of ducks, geese, and other species depart the southern U.S. and Central America and head toward Canada to live out the warm months. One drake mallard fitted with a GPS tracker from the Cohen Wildlife Ecology Lab at Tennessee Tech broke a lab record on April 6 by reaching a top speed of 99.3 miles per hour somewhere between southern Minnesota and the Canadian border.

For context, that means the duck was flying as fast as Hall-of-Famer Aroldis Chapman’s fastball and twice as fast as the world’s fastest land mammal, the cheetah, can run. The Cohen Wildlife Lab posted the feat to its various social media accounts Tuesday, along with a map of the greenhead’s northwesterly route.

Here’s the route it took from western Tennessee to its present location in Saskatchewan:

Spring waterfowl migrations are in full swing as millions of ducks, geese, and other species depart the southern U.S. and Central America and head toward Canada to live out the warm months. One drake mallard fitted with a GPS tracker from the Cohen Wildlife Ecology Lab at Tennessee Tech broke a lab record on April 6 by reaching a top speed of 99.3 miles per hour somewhere between southern Minnesota and the Canadian border.

For context, that means the duck was flying as fast as Hall-of-Famer Aroldis Chapman’s fastball and twice as fast as the world’s fastest land mammal, the cheetah, can run. The Cohen Wildlife Lab posted the feat to its various social media accounts Tuesday, along with a map of the greenhead’s northwesterly route.

Covering 600 miles in 8 hours means the duck maintained an average speed of 75 mph during that time. The lab’s principal investigator and assistant professor of wildlife ecology and management Bradley Cohen pointed out in a reply to a commenter that mallards usually migrate at an altitude of 4,000 to 5,000 feet at night. (The lab did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)

While this particular drake broke the lab’s record, it’s not unheard of for ducks to travel at these breakneck speeds when they get good wind at their backs. One pintail hen flew from eastern Russia to California — some 2,000 miles — in 25 hours, maintaining an average speed of 80 mph as it traversed the width of the Bering Sea. The next day, it crossed three flyways and landed in Louisiana.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili pulls a long cat face, probably in an attempt to get fed.

A: You have sad eyes.
Hili: I’m doing my best.
In Polish:
Ja: Masz smutne oczy.
Hili: Staram się.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Not Another Science Cat Page:

From Masih: a singer of protest songs in Iran gets sentenced to death:

I put this here because people don’t seem to realize that peaceful demonstrations (i.e., without violence) can also create a climate of hatred on campus as well as preventing people from doing what they’re supposed to do in college: learning and promulgating knowledge. It’s a stupid mistake to equate all peaceful demonstrations with ones that don’t need to be dismantled.  Columbia University is an example of a “nonviolent” demonstration where the cops needed to be called in. Now they’re back, and real academic life at Columbia has stopped for the semester.

From the Babbling Beaver, a site that mocks MIT:

From Barry, a baby armadillo:

From Jez, who says, “So much for ‘Never again!'”:

From Malcolm: two woodcock crossing the road (he adds, “annoying music”).  Nobody knows why they walk this way:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I tweeted:

Two tweets from Matthew. His first comment is correct: “BIG!”:

This one just gets a “!”:

Blatant discrimination in Canadian ads for academic jobs

April 24, 2024 • 1:15 pm

An anonymous author (presumably Canadian) has written this piece for Times Higher Education, and it’s clear why he or she doesn’t want their name given. If that was publicized, the person would never be able to get any academic job in Canada.  Below are the two job ads from the University of Waterloo to which the anonymous author objects (click to find them). Note that there are two positions in computer science, but both reserved for those who self-identify as “minoritized” people, including Two-spirit people. What are those? The U.S. Indian Health Service defines them this way:

Traditionally, Native American two-spirit people were male, female, and sometimes intersexed individuals who combined activities of both men and women with traits unique to their status as two-spirit people. In most tribes, they were considered neither men nor women; they occupied a distinct, alternative gender status.

I had thought these were simply indigenous people, but they seem to be non-binary indigenous people. So the first position is for people whose sexual identity doesn’t conform to their natal sex (I assumed that “identify as women” meant transwomen, but since “trangender” follows that, it could mean natal females as well. And the other job is for a minority, but a “racialized” minority, which means “not women”and nobody white”. I’m not sure whether Asians count as “members of a racialized minority.”  They are in a minority, and they are thought of as a race, so perhaps they would be. Canadians can weigh in here.

Regardless of how you interpret the requirements, it’s clear that these ads are targeted only for “minoritized” individuals. (Women in computer science stubbornly remain a minority, perhaps not because of structural sexism).

 

And here’s the anonymous article (click to read):

The author wants to apply for these jobs but since he or she (I’m guessing it’s a “he” since women could apply for the first job) simply isn’t qualified.  Excerpts:

The intention behind these postings is not malicious; rather, it aims to correct historical injustices. The attempted correction, however, only adds to the injustice of discrimination.

Why is academia so equivocal about making a universal condemnation of discrimination?

The author gives three reasons. First, the ad implicitly aims to correct bias, but underrepresentation of groups in a field, as you should know well know by now, need not automatically imply systemic bias. As the author says, it could reflect “differences in sex or culture” that “influence interests, behaviours or priorities.” I am pretty sure this plays a role in the underrepresentaiton of women in computer science.

Second, such ads, by assuming that the oppression reflects a hierarchy of bigotry, “perpetuates the false and dangerous idea that scars are passed down through generations, as if modern-day French children should cultivate hatred towards Germans because of the world wars.” He/she believes that the ads perpetrate a view of society as an eternal power struggle à la postmodernism. Well, that may be partly correct if underrepresentation reflects lower qualifications based on historical discrimination, but one can still wonder whether that should be rectified by ads like these, which list identity as the first criterion for application (presumably merit will be considered later).

Third, the author claims that “debate is stifled.”  I’m not sure what that means, but presumably the mere appearance of these ads justifies discriminatory hiring. As the author notes,

While intellectual and cultural diversity enriches humanity, equality in dignity unites us in a spirit of fraternity. Discrimination violates this moral equality, fosters resentment, undermines social cohesion, instrumentalises individuals and conveys the fatalistic and wrong idea that one’s path is determined by one’s ethnicity or gender. These severe consequences are wishfully thought to be dodged when discrimination is given a different name. But they are not.

Finally, the author tacks on another problem: those who are hired may be under the self-stigma of realizing that they got their job because of racial or sexual identity, not because of merit. This fact is of course the case for many minority hires, but I’m not sure if those hires are constantly tormented with this kind of self-doubt, though I know from testimony that some are. The author favors a “colorblind” approach to hiring, i.e., prize merit over identity.

I agree that the ads are objectionable, and they’d be illegal in the United States. Still, I favor a form of affirmative action, which is gradually taking shape as a belief that when candidates are pretty equally qualified, you can hire (or admit) the minority candidate more than half the time.  But even that is now illegal in the U.S., though of course schools will practice it anyway by getting around the “tick a box” prohibition. But no, there should not be jobs completely reserved for people who have a certain race of gender identity

McWhorter et al.: some new articles on Columbia University and similar college protests

April 24, 2024 • 10:00 am

I’ve collected several articles on the troubles at Columbia and other American campuses; two of these I found in Tom Gross’s newsletter. If you click on the headlines, you can access them all for free, as I’ve used archived links. I also give a brief excerpt from each article below the headline.

In my view, this is a far more troublesome time for colleges than the period of civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war protests of 1968 and after, for the protestors are not only bigoted and calling for the extermination of Israel, but seem opposed to all Western values—almost as if they would be delighted to live under Hamas. They’re certainly extolling Hama and Iran, both purveyors of terrorism.

And, if I don’t miss my guess, this trouble will spread off campus, for campus is where what is ideologically “cool” begins. (As Andrew Sullivan said, “We’re all on campus now.”)  Arresting or expelling the protestors won’t solve the problem, for arrested protestors are energized protestors.

The solution? I don’t know, but I put the blame on universities themselves, which, by buying into and selling DEI to campuses throughout America, have promoted the divisive idea that Jews are settler-colonialists who don’t deserve a state.

I’m not afraid that concentration camps will come to America, but these protests have exposed not only the ugly underbelly of anti-Semitism among many Americans, but also the hatred of Western values of young people, probably instilled in them by colleges themselves or adopted as the au courant ideology. As you’ll see in the second article, the protests are of course applauded by foreign terrorists and extremists Muslims, for the college students camped out across America are playing precisely by the Islamist rulebook.

The points that in common among these articles are that the student protests of today are not similar to the civil-rights and antiwar protests of the Sixties, as the ones going on now are pervaded by bigotry, hatred, and a wish to destroy a people. Further, several articles argue that preventing the disruption of society and academia in this way, or refusing to even call out the hatred, will ultimately redound to a weakening of American—and therefore Enlightenment—values. This is not going to end soon.

First, in the NYT, John McWhorter is appalled by the demonstrations, but lays them at the door not of antisemitism but of DEI:

Excerpts:

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere, and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

. . .On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

This Wall Street Journal column is important, for it’s by Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization that translates articles, speeches, and sermons from Arabic into Hebrew, English, and other languages. MEMRI thus has its finger on the pulse of Middle Eastern Muslim society. Stalinsky notes that those who promote terror in the Middle East are also promoting these college protests (I suggest that they’re funding them, too), and certainly approve of them, for the protests will move worldwide Islamism forward. Globalize the intifada!

Excerpts:

What is most discouraging is the lack of attention to what the protesters are demanding, which goes far beyond a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.

Take the March 28 re-election fundraiser for President Biden in New York featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, which was disrupted by shouting in the auditorium. That made headlines, yet the protesters’ chants, including “Down with the USA” and the “Al-Qassam are on their way,” a reference to Hamas’s miliary wing, received no coverage. Neither did their physical threats to attendees outside, a common tactic. Also ignored are the flags and posters of designated terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—displayed at protests in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Major terror organizations have expressed support for these protests and disruptive actions, which have long been a key part of Hamas’s plan to win hearts and minds in the West. As early as a decade ago, during the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza war, Hamas’s Interior Ministry issued guidelines to social-media activists on framing events for a Western audience.

. . . Every senior Hamas leader has also acknowledged the importance of the protests and said that influencing U.S. and Western policy is part of the organization’s strategy for destroying Israel. Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader abroad, on Oct. 10 urged supporters to protest “in cities everywhere.” On Oct. 31, he said that the organization’s friends “on the global left” were responding to its appeal. On March 27, he called for millions to take to the streets in protest, saying there had been an unprecedented shift in global public opinion.

. . . Six months after the attack on Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others aren’t merely cheering those protesting in the streets. They are working with and grooming activists in the U.S. and the West, through meetings, online interviews and podcasts.

. . . On March 25, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student group hosted an event called “Resistance 101” on campus. It featured leaders of the PFLP-affiliated Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and other extremist organizations. At the event, former PFLP official Khaled Barakat referred to his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] the PFLP in Gaza,” saying that particularly after Oct. 7, “when they see students organizing outside Palestine, they really feel that they are being backed as a resistance and they’re being supported.” On March 30 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Mr. Barakat said “the vast majority” of young Americans and Canadians now “support armed resistance” because of “the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula.”

. . . The collaboration between senior terrorists and their growing list of friends in the U.S. and the West has real-world consequences. These groups are designated terrorist for a reason. They don’t plan marches and rallies—they carry out terrorist attacks. And when the U.S. and Western activists, including college students, see that their marches and protests aren’t achieving their goals, they may consider their next steps—which will be influenced by the company they have been keeping.

From Bret Stephens in the NYT, who begins his story with the visit of two Jewish Yale undergraduates, one visibly Hasidic, to the center of campus protests, where they were “yelled at, harassed, and pushed”.  Like McWhorter and others. Stephens notes that Jews are treated much worse in these demonstrations than other minorities would be, for DEI considers Jews as “white adjacent”.  Stephens not only sees administrators’ lack of action as a form of “bigotry,” but also argues that history will show the demonstrators ineffectual and wrong. And donors will speak with their wallets:

Excerpts:

Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.

But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.

At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”

. . .The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

From the Harvard Crimson, published at a university where protests are muted, but a student organization was expelled for illegal demonstrations:

An excerpt from the above:

The Crimson reported on Monday that the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee was suspended for “violating student organization rules”— but that doesn’t mean that student organizing efforts will suddenly cease. It’s likely that, like on campuses across the country, the opposite will occur.

While inflated accusations of antisemitism on college campuses may undermine the ability to call it out where it actually exists in the pro-Palestine movement, the antisemitic scenes unfolding at Columbia University — and now other campuses, too — are as blatant as ever.

The ongoing demonstrations are led by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (whose post-Oct. 7 statement makes the PSC’s words seem benign) and conducted in partnership with an organization called Within Our Lifetime and a few other campus groups.

WOL’s demonstrations at Columbia this weekend were advertised as “Flood Columbia For Gaza,” seemingly referencing Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

. . .Pro-Palestine groups must acknowledge that proud extremist antisemites are joining campus protests at universities much like ours, and confront the fact that their hateful and violent theories of change are seeping into on-campus advocacy.

These extremists do not care about promoting peaceful coexistence and ending the onslaught on innocent civilians in Gaza. They are there because these protest spaces have opened a conduit that is permissive of violent extremism and overt eliminationist antisemitism. It seems student organizations have allowed it, or at the very least, turned a blind eye in the name of coalition-building.

That said, the students who were arrested for their specific encampment protest within Columbia’s gates — while their words and choices may be objectionable to some — were largely non-violent. Even the police said so.

But non-violent is not the same as non-hateful, and a peaceful act does not negate overt antisemitism and intimidation of students on Columbia’s campus.

. . .The chaos at Columbia — which blurred the lines between student and non-student protestors and unleashed a whirlwind of antisemitism reminiscent in tone to the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, V.A. — is a prime example.

If they are dedicated to peacebuilding, pro-Palestinian campus organizations — as they determine the goals of their movements, how to frame their rhetoric, and with whom to build coalitions — must reckon with an irrefutable fact: Over seven million Jews live between the river and the sea, too, and they sure as hell aren’t going “back to Poland,” where over 85 percent of the Jewish population was murdered in death camps.

Simplify their existence to settler-colonialism all you want, and the fact still stands.

A lasting ceasefire, Palestinian liberation, and any positive future in the region will not come from demonizing and attacking Jews and Israelis. It will not happen through eliminationist slogans and events where “Zionists are not welcome.” Boycotting Starbucks probably won’t do it either.

Until that reality is fully recognized in the ethos of pro-Palestine student organizations, their voices and demands will fall on deaf ears. They will be co-opted by violent and hateful extremists, making administrators all the more emboldened to repress their non-violent demonstrations.

Author Nekritz says that pro-Palestinian demonstrators will attain their goals only when they “treat other people with respect, afford our opponents dignity, and foster conversations across deep disagreement.” Good luck with that!

Below: Brendan O’Neill at Spiked is not known for gentle persuasion, and his anger is on view in this article. He sees the Columbia protests, as do others here (as well as I) as a harbinger of the dismantling of Enlightenment values after the entitled, propagandized, and antisemitic college students of our era grow up. (Note: that is of course not all college students, or even a majority, but does include the most vociferous and activist ones.)

Excerpts:

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.

. . .We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.

More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.

How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.

From the Wall Street Journal, where author Jason Riley is an opinion columnist. And as he’s African-American, he adds a civil-rights perspective to his piece, and calls for authority to curb illegal demonstrations:

Excerpts:

In 1957, white mobs in Little Rock, Ark., in defiance of the Brown ruling, were preventing black students from safely attending school. President Dwight Eisenhower decided to do something about it. In a prime-time television address, the president explained that “demagogic extremists” and “disorderly mobs” were thwarting the law and that he had an “inescapable” responsibility to respond if Arkansas officials refused to protect black students. “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts,” he said. Then Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division.

The particulars then and now may differ, but the same principle is at stake. The federal government was obligated to come to the aid of an ethnic minority group being threatened by mob violence. Jews in 2024 deserve no less protection than blacks in 1957. And if university officials can’t handle the situation, or won’t let police deal properly with the unrest, Mr. Biden needs to step up.

. . .Mr. Biden’s response to antisemitism is also tempered by political expediency. The young people acting out on campuses are a crucial voting bloc that Democrats worry about losing to independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” the president said on Monday, before quickly adding: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” That sounds like someone who knows how badly he needs Michigan, a state with a large Arab-American population that has soured on him for supporting Israel.

Contrary to what Mr. Biden suggested, the outrage over what is happening to Jews isn’t the result of ignorance or a misunderstanding. Rather, it stems from yet another viewing of a movie Jews have seen too many times. It’s the one where those in a position to do something choose to do nothing.

Biden’s statement was craven: an attempt to placate everyone. The man is incapable of condemning attacks on one side without offering a bouquet to the other.  He’s certainly desperate to get as many votes as possible, but I’m tired of his waffling.  The fact is that the demonstrators at Columbia are worthy of condemnation for their act alone. It’s as if he said, “I condemn the attack of ships in the Red Sea, but I also condemn those who don’t have empathy for the Houthis.”

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 24, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today’s photos are black-and-whites sent in by Jim Blilie. His notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Another set here of black and white images.  Some are scans of color images, and are noted.  I am continuing to enjoy reimagining some of my color images in black and white.

First, a shot of Summit Lake in Jasper National Park, Canada, September 1981.  A figure in a landscape.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a December 1988 shot of skiing in the Cascade Range (back when my knees would do that).  These places are all now grown over with trees and no longer really skiable.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a shot taken in Lincoln Park in Seattle in March 1990 after a rare sea-level snow fall.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a shot of the Mount Saint Helens crater, 10 years after the eruption, in March 1990.  Taken the old-fashioned way, from a Cessna 172 that a friend was piloting.  Scanned Kodachrome 64:

Next is a shot of Nilgiri North in Nepal, taken in the summer of 1991.  Taken with my old Tokina ATX 80-200mm f/2.8 lens at 200mm, f/5.6 and 1/500s (I remember the entire sequence of choices leading up to this photo as ai watched the clouds drift into place).  Scanned Kodachrome 64:

Next is a shot from along the Seine in Paris in May 1992.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is another shot from May 1992 in France:  Sully sur-Loire chateau.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Another shot from France; but much more recent:  Paris in 2010.  I call this, “Before the Rush”.  Waiters relaxing before the dinner opening.  (Pentax K-5 and a telephoto lens, not sure which one.)

Figures under Double Arch in Arches National Park, Utah, June 2013.  (Pentax K-5 and almost certainly the same telephoto lens as the above photo):

Next is a shot from Badlands National Park in South Dakota from July 2013:

Finally, an image of a sunflower from Shawano County, Wisconsin, August 2023.  (Olympus m4/3 camera):

Some of these photos were taken during my bicycle tour around the world in 1990-92.

Equipment:

Pentax K-1000, ME Super, and LX cameras
Various Pentax M series and A series lenses
Pentax K-5 digital camera and various Pentax D lenses
Olympus OM-D E-M5 mirrorless M4/3 camera and various Olympus and Lumix lenses
Epson V500 Perfection scanner and its software
Lightroom 5 photo software

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

April 24, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Giorno della gobba ” in Italian): Wednesday, April 24, 2024, and National Pigs-in-a-Blanket Day, celebrating that beloved party food of the Fifties. Easy to make (and I liked them):

“pigs in a blanket” by plasticrevolver is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit here

It’s also International Noise Awareness Day, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (yes, Cenk, it happened), Denim Day, International Guide Dog Day, Fashion Revolution Day, and World Day for Laboratory Animals.

Speaking of that, here’s a statue near the biology building at the University of St. Petersburg, Russia, dedicated to all the cats used in lab experiments (photo from 2011). I should not be smiling.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 24 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Will Donald Trump go to jail if he’s convicted in his NYC trial for financial shenanigans? The NYT doesn’t think so.

But protecting a former president in prison? The prospect is unprecedented. That would be the challenge if Donald J. Trump — whom the agency is required by law to protect around the clock — is convicted at his criminal trial in Manhattan and sentenced to serve time.

Even before the trial’s opening statements, the Secret Service was in some measure planning for the extraordinary possibility of a former president behind bars. Prosecutors had asked the judge in the case to remind Mr. Trump that attacks on witnesses and jurors could land him in jail even before a verdict is rendered.

(The judge, who held a hearing Tuesday morning to determine whether Mr. Trump should be held in contempt for violating a gag order, is far more likely to issue a warning or impose a fine before taking the extreme step of jailing the 77-year-old former president. It was not immediately clear when he would issue his ruling.)

Last week, as a result of the prosecution’s request, officials with federal, state and city agencies had an impromptu meeting about how to handle the situation, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

That behind-the-scenes conversation — involving officials from the Secret Service and other relevant law enforcement agencies — focused only on how to move and protect Mr. Trump if the judge were to order him briefly jailed for contempt in a courthouse holding cell, the people said.

. . .The far more substantial challenge — how to safely incarcerate a former president if the jury convicts him and the judge sentences him to prison rather than home confinement or probation — has yet to be addressed directly, according to some of a dozen current and former city, state and federal officials interviewed for this article.

That’s at least in part because if Mr. Trump is ultimately convicted, a drawn-out and hard-fought series of appeals, possibly all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, is almost a certainty. That would most likely delay any sentence for months if not longer, said several of the people, who noted that a prison sentence was unlikely.

Things haven’t gone well for Trump, and they could even throw him in the pokey for contempt of court—for violating a judge’s gag order that he not intimidate witnesses. “Gag order” and “Trump” don’t belong in the same sentence:

Mr. Pecker’s testimony came after a bruising hearing for Mr. Trump and his legal team, as prosecutors argued that Mr. Trump’s attacks on witnesses and jurors pose a “threat” to the trial. They urged the judge to hold him in contempt of court over what they said were 11 violations of a gag order that bars the former president from attacking witnesses, prosecutors, jurors and court staff, as well as their relatives.

The man needs to learn to shut up, but I don’t think that’s in his DNA. Stay tuned.

*The Times of Israel has a long summary of the unrest that has spread across American campuses as pro-Palestinian students demand divestment. (See also this article in the NYT.) Now NYU is in turmoil:

Clashes broke out between NYPD officers and demonstrators at New York University after police moved in to clear out an anti-Israel “liberated zone” set up by pro-Palestinian protesters late Monday amid reports of antisemitic incidents, the latest violence as unrest over the Israel-Hamas war spreads to campuses across the US.

Officers in riot gear scuffled with demonstrators, after the police began getting rid of equipment and arresting protesters for violating an order to disperse. Some of the protesters appeared to act violently toward officers, with a masked man draped in a keffiyeh throwing a chair toward them.

One hundred and thirty-three protesters — including students and faculty — were arrested, police said on Tuesday, and all of them were released overnight.

. . .Students across the country said the Columbia arrests only further emboldened them to call for their universities to divest from Israel. Buoyed by the growing number of demonstrations, the national umbrella of Students for Justice in Palestine announced the launch of a cross-campus initiative called “Popular University for Gaza.”

“Over the last 72 hours, SJP chapters across the country have erupted in a fierce display of power targeted at their universities for their endless complicity and profiteering off the genocide in Gaza and colonization of Palestine,” the group posted on X, on Sunday afternoon.

The post was headlined, “CAMPUSES IN REVOLT FOR GAZA AND DIVEST.”

. . .Similar protests are springing up at a range of other schools. One student activist collective at the University of Michigan, the TAHRIR Coalition, said Monday that it, too, had set up an encampment on the Diag, the center of campus. One banner at the encampment reads, “Long Live the Intifada.”

. . . In addition to Michigan, pro-Palestinian protesters at several other schools have set up new encampments in solidarity with Columbia students, including at New York University and the New School in New York; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University and Emerson College in the Boston area. At some schools, including UNC, those encampments have already been dismantled after administrators intervened.

Harvard Yard is closed for the week to prevent demonstrations and encampments, and Columbia has been forced to offer “hybrid” classes (both live and virtual) until the end of the year. Further, graduation is coming, and that will be a great time to disrupt everything (USC has canceled all its graduation speakers, including  those receiving honorary degrees). From the NYT”:

At Columbia University, where the arrests of more than 100 protesters unleashed a flurry of national protests, students will have the option to attend their last week of classes remotely for safety reasons. Several schools across the Northeast closed parts of their campuses to the public, in an effort to conclude the year quietly.

The latest news from that beleaguered New York City school is that another deadline for arrest has passed without the appearance of cops, and the students, who have removed some tents, are IN TALKS with the Columbia administration. Seriously? Is the school going to accede to some of the thugs’ demands?  If so, then they should boot out President Shafik pronto.  She is not exercising any leadership.

*Israel’s attack on Rafah, supposedly the finishing blow in the war, appears imminent, at least to the WSJ:

As tensions with Iran ease, Israel’s military is gearing up to complete what it says is unfinished business: Uprooting Hamas from its last stronghold in the Gazan city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians are taking shelter.

Israeli leaders say they intend to go ahead despite vocal opposition from the country’s most important ally, the U.S., which has warned that a full-scale move on the enclave could cause widespread civilian casualties and disrupt humanitarian-aid efforts aimed at preventing famine.

“In the coming days, we will increase the military and diplomatic pressure on Hamas because it’s the only way to release our hostages and achieve our victory,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday in a message to mark Judaism’s Passover holiday, which begins Monday evening.

Israel’s air force has been hitting targets in Rafah in recent days. Strikes on Sunday killed at least 16 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, according to Wafa, the official news and information agency of the Palestinian Authority. Israel’s military said in mid-April that it had called up two reserve brigades “for operational activities on the Gazan front.”

. . .Netanyahu has said that Israel plans to evacuate civilians ahead of operations. The military has said it plans to move Gazans to humanitarian enclaves to be constructed within the Gaza Strip, which would include food, water, shelter and medical services.

“One, it’s going to happen. Two, we’re going to have a very tight operational plan because it’s very complex there. Three, there’s a humanitarian response that’s happening at the same time,” said an Israeli security official.

Israel is preparing to move civilians from Rafah to nearby Khan Younis and other areas, where it plans to set up shelters with tents, food-distribution centers and medical facilities such as field hospitals, according to Egyptian officials briefed on the Israeli plans.

That evacuation operation would last two to three weeks and be done in coordination with the U.S., Egypt and other Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates, the Egyptian officials said. They said Israel plans to move troops into Rafah gradually, targeting areas where Israel believes Hamas leaders and fighters are hiding. The fighting is expected to last at least six weeks, they said.

Well, I predicted that the civilians would be moved to Khan Younis, but this was based on rumors. It now appears to be true, so there is a place for Gazans to go. Whether the attack on Rafah will be the death blow to Hamas is not clear to me, for Israel has resumed fighting Hamas in northern Gaza, where it was supposed to have cleared out terrorists. (I suspect that some of their persistence is due to Hamas taking a lot of food and fuel from the large amount of “humanitarian aid” sent to Gaza.) And Hamas is still firing rockets at Israel from northern Gaza.  This war is going to take a long time, and who knows what will happen afterwards (one inevitable result is that Netanyahu will be ditched).

*Well, The College Fix, a right-wing group that monitors activities of colleges and universities, got hold of my post on this site about the light punishments (or no punishments) of the Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago, and wrote a piece on it. While I don’t like being in bed with a bunch of hyper-conservatives, there’s no chance that any other group would glom on to criticisms like mine,

The University of Chicago should punish Students for Justice in Palestine for disrupting campus events and effectively shutting down free speech, according to a longtime professor.

Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus of ecology and evolution, said he believes his school has betrayed its well-known commitment to free speech principles over the past six months by letting pro-Palestinian activists disrupt campus life and the rights of others.

In a recent phone interview with The College Fix, Coyne said the university is afraid of bad press if it punishes protesters who break rules.

That commitment is a key aspect of the school’s public identity, so it’s important. Furthermore, Coyne said “there is a climate of antisemitism building on campus, and the administration is not eager to stop it.” (The ADL gave UChicago an F for antisemitism in its report cards last week.)

Coyne, who writes the widely read blog “Why Evolution is True,” recently penned an essay headlined “J’Accuse!” arguing the school is now allowing the suppression of speech.

He wrote the school is “either not punishing those who engage in suppression or giving them ridiculously light punishments. The result is that there is no palpable deterrent to students who want to silence others or violate University policy by disrupting activities.”

“Because there are no serious sanctions for disrupting speech or academic activities, one organization has sworn to continue its illegal actions,” he wrote.

It goes on, but my website post has more information (the Fix is somewhat inaccurate). Well, at least they can’t fire me.

*Larry Nassar was the U.S. women’s gymnastics team’s official doctor but for years he sexually abused the young gymnasts, even after it was called to the FBI’s attention. That lack of care, combined with the abuse that many of the girls suffered, has led to the Justice Department settling with the victims for a large sum of money. As for Nassar, who’s 60, he will be in prison for the rest of his life.

The Justice Department announced Tuesday it has agreed to pay nearly $139 million to victims of former Team USA gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, settling legal claims brought over the department’s failure to investigate allegations that could have brought the convicted child molester to justice sooner and prevented dozens of assaults.

The settlement brings to a close the last major legal case over Nassar’s prolific abuses, which occurred over a span of more than a decade at international sporting events including the Olympics, as well as at Michigan State University, where Nassar worked, and at local gymnastics centers in Michigan and around the country.

Nassar, 60, is serving an effective life sentence for federal convictions relating to possession of child pornography, as well as state convictions for sexual assaults of patients under his care.

A 2021 Justice Department inspector general’s report found that FBI agents in both the Indianapolis and Los Angeles field offices failed to adequately respond to allegations against Nassar raised in 2015 and 2016. More than 70 girls and women later alleged in court filings that Nassar assaulted them between 2015 and when he was arrested in November 2016.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray publicly apologized to Nassar’s victims, and the bureau fired an agent in the Indianapolis office involved with the Nassar case.

In a news release Tuesday, the department said it had agreed to pay $138.7 million to resolve 139 legal claims over its handling of the Nassar case.

. . . . Tuesday’s announcement brings the total sum paid out by institutions to Nassar’s victims over his abuses to nearly $1 billion. In 2018, Michigan State agreed to pay $500 million to more than 330 victims. And in 2021, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee agreed to pay $380 million to hundreds of Nassar’s victims.

I’m not sure how many victims were involved in this restitution scheme, but they include Simone Biles and McKayla Maroney. Nasser has been assaulted twice in prison (that’s what happens to pedophiles), with one assault involving him being stabbed ten times.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is angling for her favorite drink:

Hili: Are you making coffee with milk or with cream?
A: With cream.
Hili: Leave some for me.
In Polish:
Hili: Kawę robisz sobie z mlekiem, czy ze śmietanką?
Ja: Ze śmietanką.
Hili: To zostaw trochę dla mnie.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Jesus of the Day. Look at those blow-dried cows!

From Not Another Science Cat Page:

From Masih: This brave Iranian woman, whose sister was killed for burning her hijab, was also imprisoned for hijablessness. And right outside the prison she becomes a criminal again.

I swear to Ceiling Cat, Weinstein is either off the rails or in it for the clicks. I know a bit about speciation and I have no idea what he means. He’s also spouting that neo-Darwinism is “badly broken” too, something I criticized back in 2019.

From Luana. Students are goofing off too much these days. Only one-eighth of each day is spent on academic pursuits?

From Simon, who says “no comment needed”:

From Barry (second tweet). This is why males nearly always die younger than females:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 9-year-old German boy was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz:

And two tweets from Matthew, who, as a space-o-phile, is delighted that the spacecraft Voyager 1, which kept going long after it was expected to die. In November it stopped sending data, but they fixed it with a patch!

The US space agency says its Voyager-1 probe is once again sending usable information back to Earth after months of spouting gibberish. 

The 46-year-old Nasa spacecraft is humanity’s most distant object.

A computer fault stopped it returning readable data in November but engineers have now fixed this.

For the moment, Voyager is sending back only health data about its onboard systems, but further work should get the scientific instruments back online.

Voyager-1 is more than 24 billion km (15 billion miles) away, so distant, its radio messages take fully 22.5 hours to reach us.

“Voyager-1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” Nasa said in a statement.

“The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.”

Voyager-1 was launched from Earth in 1977 on a tour of the outer planets, but then just kept going.

https://twitter.com/gralefrit/status/1782675348573831387

And the celebration at NASA:

Scientists call for reexamination of animal consciousness

April 23, 2024 • 11:00 am

The Oxford English Dictionary, my go-to source for definitions, has this one for “consciousness”:

But there are other definitions, including sensing “qualia” (subjective conscious experience like pleasure or pain), or “having an inner life” involving self-awareness.  But it’s hard to determine under any of these definitions whether an individual of another species—indeed, even an individual of our own species—is conscious.  We think that other humans are conscious because we’re all built the same way, and we’re pretty sure that other mammals are conscious because they appear to feel pain or pleasure, and are built in a mammalian ground plan. But when an earthworm reacts when you poke it, is it feeling pain and having a subjective experience, or is that an automatic, built-in response to being poked that is adaptive but isn’t mediated through conscious experience?

I’m not going to get into the thorny topic of consciousness here, but I do feel that the more an animal is conscious (whatever that means), the more we should take care of it and avoid hurting it. (This of course is a subjective decision on my part.) It’s probably okay to swat mosquitoes, but not to kill a lizard, a duck, or a cat. (I tend to err on the “assume consciousness” side, and am loath to even swat mosquitoes.)

Researchers themselves have arrived at similar conclusions, for there are increasingly stringent regulations for taking care of lab animals. If you work on primates or rats, you have to ensure your university or granting agency that your research subjects will be properly treated, but those regulations don’t apply to fruit flies. But whether members of another species are conscious in the way that we are (well, the way I am, as I can’t be sure about you!), is something very hard to determine. The “mirror test“, in which you put a mark on an animal’s forehead, put it in front of a mirror and see if it touches its own forehead, is another test used to determine self awareness. The article below describes several other ways scientists have approached the question.

At any rate, according to Nature, a group of scientists have signed short joint declaration (second link below) saying that we need more research on consciousness and that the phenomenon may be present “in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).”  They add that knowing whether an animal is conscious should affect how we consider its welfare, which seems correct. The letter (or petition) doesn’t really define “consciousness”, but the Nature blurb about it does. Click the link below to read that blurb:

An excerpt:

Crows, chimps and elephants: these and many other birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they might be conscious. And the list does not end with vertebrates. Researchers are expanding their investigations of consciousness to a wider range of animals, including octopuses and even bees and flies.

Armed with such research, a coalition of scientists is calling for a rethink in the animal–human relationship. If there’s “a realistic possibility” of “conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal”, the researchers write in a document they call The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. Issued today during a meeting in New York City, the declaration also says that there is a “realistic possibility of conscious experience” in reptiles, fish, insects and other animals that have not always been considered to have inner lives, and “strong scientific support” for aspects of consciousness in birds and mammals.

As the evidence has accumulated, scientists are “taking the topic seriously, not dismissing it out of hand as a crazy idea in the way they might have in the past,” says Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and Political Science and one of the authors of the declaration.

The document, which had around 40 signatories early today, doesn’t state that there are definitive answers about which species are conscious. “What it says is there is sufficient evidence out there such that there’s a realistic possibility of some kinds of conscious experiences in species even quite distinct from humans,” says Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, and one of the signatories. The authors hope that others will sign the declaration and that it will stimulate both more research into animal consciousness and more funding for the field.

And Nature says that the group has a definition of consciousness, though I can’t find it in the short declaration:

The definition of consciousness is complex, but the group focuses on an aspect of consciousness called sentience, often defined as the capacity to have subjective experiences, says Birch. For an animal, such experiences would include smelling, tasting, hearing or touching the world around itself, as well as feeling fear, pleasure or pain — in essence, what it is like to be that animal. But subjective experience does not require the capacity to think about one’s experiences.

This is as good a definition as any, I think, but determining whether another animal is even sentient is nearly impossible; all we can do is look for signs of sentience, like a dog howling if you kick it.  But if a protozoan heads for a source of food, is it having a subjective experience of “here’s food”?  Unlikely; protozoans don’t have brains and this is probably an inbuilt adaptive reflex. But there are tons of species intermediate in potential sentience between protozoans and mammals, and how do we decide whether, say, a fish is sentient? (I’ll tell you that scientists have ways of approaching this, but no time to go into it now. But the article has some interesting descriptions of these tests.) And of course most people think that octopuses are sentient.  Some even think that fruit flies are sentient!:

Investigations of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) show that they engage in both deep sleep and ‘active sleep’, in which their brain activity is the same as when they’re awake. “This is perhaps similar to what we call rapid eye movement sleep in humans, which is when we have our most vivid dreams, which we interpret as conscious experiences,” says Bruno van Swinderen, a biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who studies fruit flies’ behaviour and who also signed the declaration.

Some suggest that dreams are key components of being conscious, he notes. If flies and other invertebrates have active sleep, “then maybe this is as good a clue as any that they are perhaps conscious”.

Well that’s stretching it a bit, but who knows? And some people weigh in with the caveat I mentioned above: acting as if you’re conscious may not mean that you’re conscious, for consciousness produces adaptive behavior, but so does natural selection, which has the ability produce adaptive reflexes not mediated by consciousness but look like consciousness.

We have a hard problem, then, and that’s reflected in the declaration itself, which is below. You can see the whole thing as well as its signers by clicking on the screenshot:

And the text of the document:

Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.

I don’t recognize many of the signers, and I’m surprised that Peter Singer, who surely agrees with the declaration, didn’t sign it. But I think more signers are being added.

At any rate, I can’t disagree with what the document says, but the interesting problems are both philosophical (on the ethical side) and scientific: what do we mean by consciousness, and, once that’s agreed on, how do we determine if a member of another species is conscious? Or, upon rethinking what I just wrote, perhaps we don’t need a definition of consciousness, but simply a set of empirical observations that we think are signs that animals are suffering. But that itself involves some philosophical input. It’s all a mess, but one thing is for sure, we should avoid causing unneeded suffering to animals, and we shouldn’t kill them just because we don’t like them. Even a lowly ant has evolved to preserve its own existence, and to what extent can our selfish desires override that consideration?

As the classic ending of many scientific papers goes, “More work needs to be done.”

h/t: Phil

PEN America cancels awards ceremony because some members insist that the organization denounce Israeli genocide

April 23, 2024 • 9:30 am

Well, you can write off yet another organization dedicated to promoting free expression. First the ACLU went down the tubes, followed by the SPLC, and now PEN America, a group of American writers dedicated to promoting free expression, has canceled a ceremony because the writers want PEN to take a stand on an ideological issue: Israel, say many of its members, is committing genocide, and they are demanding that PEN America take that position. And PEN America crumpled, canceling an upcoming event.

No matter that the issue is debatable, and no matter that the real committers of genocide, those absolutely dedicated to destroying a people, are Hamas, which has sworn to kill all Jews and eliminate Israel. Now that is genocide. But PEN members don’t care what Hamas is doing.  The claim of Israeli genocide is not a “truth”, and many of us (including me) disagree, as do many PEN members. But a vocal group of these “free expression” writers insist that their organization call for a cease fire and accuse Israel of genocide.  Doesn’t that count as something that chills free expression, and associates an organization for such expression with a specific ideology?

You may recall that a similar dubious position was taken by some PEN members in 2015, when six members refused to attend a banquet—and 145 writers signed a protest letter—all because PEN America was going to give a “freedom of expression award” to Charlie Hebdo after many of the magazine’s writers and artists were killed.  That’s even more of a no-brainer, because, yes, Charlie Hebdo, in the face of threats, continued to mock everything, including all religions. But it was their liberal satire of Islam that did them in, with 12 Charlie Hebdo employees shot by Muslim terrorists. Protesting a “courage” award for Charlie Hebdo is ridiculous.  But such is PEN  America.

Here’s the group’s mission as stated on their “about us” page:

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.

Are they protecting free expression by canceling a ceremony because of a misguided assertion about Israel? And what they say is laughable (read below):

Click the headline to read, or find it archived here:

A few excerpts:

The free expression group PEN America has canceled its 2024 literary awards ceremony following months of escalating protests over the organization’s response to the war in Gaza, which has been criticized as overly sympathetic to Israel and led nearly half of the prize nominees to withdraw.

The event was set to take place on April 29 at Town Hall in Manhattan. But in a news release on Monday, the group announced that although the prizes would still be conferred, the ceremony would not take place.

“We greatly respect that writers have followed their consciences, whether they chose to remain as nominees in their respective categories or not,” the group’s chief officer for literary programming, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, said in the release.

“We regret that this unprecedented situation has taken away the spotlight from the extraordinary work selected by esteemed, insightful and hard-working judges across all categories. As an organization dedicated to freedom of expression and writers, our commitment to recognizing and honoring outstanding authors and the literary community is steadfast.”

In recent months, PEN America has faced intensifying public criticism of its response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and Israel’s military response in Gaza, which has left about 34,000 people dead, according to health officials there.

In a series of open letters, writers have demanded that PEN America support an immediate cease-fire, as its global parent organization, PEN International, and other national chapters have done.

In other words, the writers have demanded (using Hamas statistics, of course) that PEN America take a political position. They are demanding that a group dedicated to free expression take an “official” position that would tend to chill expression and associate PEN with an ideological stand.  And if PEN doesn’t, then the writers are going to take their ball and go home.  They are demanding, in other words, that the group broach any kind of institutional neutrality that it may have—and it should have some since it’s dedicated to free expression.

More:

In March, a group of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Michelle Alexander and Hisham Matar, announced that they were pulling out of next month’s World Voices Festival, one of PEN America’s signature events. And over the past several weeks, growing numbers of nominees for the literary awards, including Camonghne Felix, Christina Sharpe and Esther Allen, announced that they were withdrawing their books from consideration.

In a letter that PEN America leadership received last week, 30 of the 87 nominated writers and translators (including nine of the 10 nominees for one prize) criticized the group’s “disgraceful inaction” on the situation in Gaza, accusing it of “clinging to a disingenuous facade of neutrality while parroting” what the letter characterized as Israeli government propaganda. The letter also called for the resignation of the group’s longtime chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, and its president, the novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan, along with that of the group’s executive committee.

And here’s the dumbest statement of all:

“PEN America states that ‘the core’ of its mission is to ‘support the right to disagree,’” the nominees stated. “But among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Well that’s just wrong. I bet I could find many “writers of conscience” who do disagree on the “fact” that “Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people”.  If Israel was, all Gazans would have been dead for a long time, but the population of Gaza has grown like gangbusters. And we know that Israel doesn’t just go into Gaza for no reason and kill civilians. It responds only when it’s attacked, and tries to limit damage to Hamas terrorists or their military assets.  It’s clear that the IDF wants to eliminate not Palestinians, but members of Hamas. Has any other country sent truckloads of humanitarian assistance, like food and medicine, to an enemy state? Or warned people where and when it was going to attack? Those are real “facts”! But they don’t matter, for these PEN morons claim that they already know the truth.

The reader who sent me this article added the following:

I chortled to myself. It would be funny that fiction writers so self-confidently assert a fiction to be a “fact” if it wasn’t sad that they’re likely driven by anti-Israel animus to do so. Anyway, while PEN tried to push back in its own statement upholding free expression, their awards ceremony has now been derailed by self-righteous nominees who want free expression shut down in service of propagating grotesque lies.

And yes, PEN America did push back, but it still truckled to the ideologues. From the NYT:

That letter [from the 30 nominees] drew a brief but forceful response last week in which the organization described the war in Gaza as “horrific” but challenged what it said was the letter’s “alarming language and characterizations.”

“The perspective that ‘there is no disagreement’ and that there are among us final arbiters of ‘fact and fiction’ reads to us as a demand to foreclose dialogue in the name of intellectual conformity, and one at odds with the PEN Charter and what we stand for as an organization,” the organization said in a statement.

The second paragraph is spot on, and admirable. So why did PEN cancel the ceremony? Maybe some of the nominees won’t show up, but either they can get their award in absentia or they can be dropped because they don’t favor free expression.  I really don’t care. What I do care about is that yet another one of America’s bastions of free expression has turned cowardly, violating its own charter in the face of loud and misguided ideological demands from writers.

If the PEN Charter really does stand for institutional neutrality, then the organization should conform to it. Writers are of course welcome to express their own views, but the organization itself should not be the arbiter or promoter of those views.