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Yes, there are Goddesses in the Bible,
This is the 4th in a series of blog posts about finding goddesses in the bible who had been hidden away through translation or denigration or other means. In my last blog post I discussed Lilith as a Great Goddess symbolized by both tree and bird. You can see it here. https://feminismandreligion.com/2020/09/11/yes-there-are-goddesses-in-the-bible-part-3/
Today I continue with the topic of trees along with an examination of reversals and how many of beautiful, female pagan symbols were changed or removed from the texts. Perhaps the most obvious and pernicious has been that Eve “caused the fall” of humankind through a sinful act. Thus, the logic goes, it was Her action that has created the “grand curse” that we have labored under ever since. As I wrote in my last blog post, Lilith is another example, being portrayed as a demon in order to denigrate her Great Goddess roots. Lilith originally embodied both bird and tree energies. In my last blog post I showed one image of the Goddess in the tree which was a common theme in ancient Levantine cultures. The image today shows the goddess breast in the tree, which is identified as Isis suckling the future pharaoh Tutmose III. These images show the “Goddess in the Tree” as freely bestowing Her gifts and nurturing (not cursing) humankind.
There is another goddess in the bible with connections to the sacred tree – Asherah. The name of Asherah is often translated into English as a pole or tree and it shows up in the bible in the negative or as a taboo.
The following biblical verse has two examples of reversal. Asa, a descendant of King David, had recently become king of Judah.
*Asa did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, as his father David had done.*
*He expelled the* ***male shrine prostitutes*** *from the land and got rid of all the idols his ancestors had made.*
*He even deposed his grandmother Maakah from her position as queen mother, because she had made a repulsive image for the worship of* ***Asherah****. Asa cut it down and burned it in the Kidron Valley.*
*1Kings 15:11-13 (New International Version – NIV)*
There are two words in particular in this passage that are worth a closer look. The first is the one translated as “male shrine prostitutes” which is the Hebrew word *qadesh.* Other translations use sodomites, perverted persons, whoremongers, and some translations include females among the shrine prostitutes. By design, these translations were all created to sound seedy and sinful.
If the word *qadesh* sounds familiar to those of you who know Hebrew, it should be as it is used over 100 times in the bible in its etymological twin form, *qadosh* which means “holy.” Remember that Hebrew words were originally written without vowels so the vowels put into the words were later additions and may not have reflected original meanings. Here is one example of how *qadosh* is commonly used:
*And one cried unto another, and said,* ***Holy, holy, holy****, is the LORD of hosts:*
*the whole earth is full of his glory.*
*Isaiah 6:3*
In fact, *“qadosh, qadosh, qadosh”* is used as a beautiful chant. *Qadesh* (Strong’s #6945) and *qadosh* (Strong’s # 6918, Strong’s notes that the two words come from the same root – *godesh*) differ only by a vowel. Again, vowels that were added later. In pre-biblical times, those who worked in the temple were clearly thought of differently than in Asa’s time. They were sacred, likely the priests and priestesses of previous cultures.
The same process of reversal occurred with Asherah. She is only referenced in the bible when Her groves are being cut down.
*Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles.*
*Exodus 34:13 (NIV)*
*Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places.*
*Deuteronomy 12:3 (NIV)*
But who was Ashera and why does She figure so negatively in the bible? The obvious answer is that She was very powerful indeed and needed to be taken down in order to make room for a new order of deity.
As if to prove the point, there is some beautiful pre-biblical poetry honoring Her. The following Ugaritic verse is quoted by religious historian Mark Smith.[i] Ugarit is a pre-Hebraic language found on tablets in what is present day Syria. https://feminismandreligion.com/2020/09/17/yes-there-are-goddesses-in-the-bible-part-4-by-janet-maikai-rudolph/#_edn1
*I would invoke the beautiful gods,*
*[voracious ones of the sea, sons of] the sea,*
*who suck from the teat of the breast*
*of Asherah [and Rahmay].*
Below is another Ugarit verse quoted by another religious historian, John Day.[ii] Athirat is an alternative spelling/translation of Ashera. Notice who the god is who cries out to Her. https://feminismandreligion.com/2020/09/17/yes-there-are-goddesses-in-the-bible-part-4-by-janet-maikai-rudolph/#_edn2
*El cried out to Lady Athirat of the sea: ‘Hear O Lady Athir[at] of the sea:*
*give one of your sons that I may make him king.’*
*And Lady Athirat of the sea answered:*
*‘Indeed. Let us make king one who knows and has understanding’*
Ashera has two more connections that are important in understanding Her. Asherot or Asherim, the two plural forms of Ashera refer to Goddess Groves. Notice how She was worshipped, honored and connected with trees just as Lilith, Eve, and Isis.
I can’t help but to think about these foundational stories of our world and how they have become so ingrained in our thinking. Their influence is so pervasive that it is unconscious. How would our lives be different if the stories weren’t so focused on denigrating the feminine by the cutting down trees and groves? If both trees and women were honored and respected from the start, how different would our ecological situation be today?
Next blog post: More on Ashera and Her relationship to Israel.
[i] Mark Smith, *The Early History of God*, William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002; 51
[ii] John Day, *Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan*, Continuumbooks, 2002; 172 https://feminismandreligion.com/2020/09/17/yes-there-are-goddesses-in-the-bible-part-4-by-janet-maikai-rudolph/#_ednref1 https://feminismandreligion.com/2020/09/17/yes-there-are-goddesses-in-the-bible-part-4-by-janet-maikai-rudolph/#_ednref2
***Janet Maika’i Rudolph****. “IT’S ALL ABOUT THE QUEST.” I have walked the spirit path for over 25 years traveling to sacred sites around the world including Israel to do an Ulpan (Hebrew language studies while working on a Kibbutz), Eleusis and Delphi in Greece, Avebury and Glastonbury in England, Brodgar in Scotland, Machu Picchu in Peru, Teotihuacan in Mexico, and Giza in Egypt. Within these travels, I have participated in numerous shamanic rites and rituals, attended a mystery school based on the ancient Greek model, and studied with shamans around the world. I am twice initiated. The first as a shaman practitioner of a pathway known as* *Divine Humanity**. The second ordination in 2016 was as an Alaka’i (a Hawaiian spiritual guide with Aloha International). I have written three books:* When Moses Was a Shaman*,* When Eve Was a Goddess*, and* One Gods*. In Ardor and Adventure, Janet.* https://sites.google.com/site/divinehumanityreligion/ https://www.amazon.com/When-Moses-Shaman-Janet-Rudolph/dp/098627951X https://www.amazon.com/When-Eve-was-Goddess-Shamanic/dp/1547152028 https://www.amazon.com/One-Gods-Mystic-Pagans-Guide/dp/1621376435
Good Morning
And another morning light breaks on a little village somewhere in Switzerland with as many cows as people, although I have not seen a cow yet. I think they do the night shift on the meadows. There are some birds chirping but they also remain unseen. When the food gets scarce they will be hopping around to see what there is to have.
I had an early start this morning, not very early, but 20 minutes earlier. It is fresh linen day on the beds. I have already put new covers on my duvet and head cushion and removed the fitted sheets. Now there is a pause whilst I have my breakfast and talk to my computer.
I went to bed with a the new update on my iPhone. This time the iPads and iPhones are really going to town with their improvements, although I am not so sure they are improvements. I started the updates just before I went to bed and found that the cyber powers can look after the rest whilst I am sleeping. At some time in the night I was awake and had a look to see how it was progressing. I was greeted in 20 different languages with hello and invited to go through the procedure of getting to know my new adaptations. Of course they have some new developments, but I do not need them. I was quite satisfied how things were. Why do we have to have these new updates which are really of no use to me. A golden oldie does not try to compete with Bill Gates, I just like to be left alone.
Having completed the attack of the iPeople I fired up my Apple computer this morning as it is my preferred computer for saying Good Morning. What did I see? Yes the computer also has a new update of course, to follow the others. I got the choice of doing it now, in an hour or this evening. I chose in an hour, although that it not certain. I can see that the day has a complicated beginning. The computer powers told me I must attach my computer to power to make the update. This day does not have such a good beginning.
Yesterday my air fryer arrived. Actually I was not really expecting it until October and so I should be happy that it has arrived, although I am not so happy. It means devoting time to find out how it works. Yesterday I spent more time unpacking it and disposing of unwanted cardboard boxes. Today is the paper and cardboard collection in our village and I was more occupied in getting that organised. Thanks to No. 1 son for his help. He had bundled the unwanted newspapers together and put everything outside ready to be picked up. I heard the lorry this morning already at 7.30 collecting everything.
I kept the original box for the air friar as advised, now I just have to learn how it works. Naturally, as usual, the instructions are in three languages, but not in english, so I will have to plough through the German version.
I did manage to get into town yesterday for my Wednesday shopping. It looks very idyllic from the camera view of our main street the the cathedral at the end. It was not so idyllic at the entrance to the supermarket.
As I already mentioned the building is again being renovated. It used to be a hotel and now being converted to appartments. The scaffolding in the photo was quite harmless, but it has now been moved to the entrance of the supermarket and above and what used to be hotel rooms are also being converted. It would not bother me so much if they did not park their various trucks occupying half of the pavement. I cannot get through on my scooter. The workman said I could park where I was, but I was stuck and could not reverse. I told hime to forget it and I would have to wait until he was finished, Eventually workman No. 2 arrived and hitched his vehicle onto the the offending transport and pulled it away. I eventually managed to park my scooter and enter the supermarket. This seems to now be the shape of things to come.
eventually completed my shopping and scootered on my way home through town, seeing these strange figures on my way. They were part of a music group, as there was a guitar in its case on the ground. I did not stay to see what they were performing, their dress was enough for me.
Eventually I was on the home stretch towards my village and was glad to get home after losing so much time with workmen and their problems.
Due to all this confusion I realised that I have nothing to eat this evening, so I will be off again to the store this afternoon, but only the one along the road which is nearer. I just have to get a few items to ensure we survive until tomorrow and do not suffer from hunger pains.
And now I will leave you, I have a bed to assemble. My your day be a good and above all calm with no excitement as mine was yesterday.
Another criterion for judging whether to “cancel” someone
Although I don't spend a lot of time calling for people to be unpersoned, canceled, or have their statues toppled or namesakes changed, I do try to discern whether "cancellation" calls are justified or unwarranted. Clearly there's no good criteria that will work all the time, so it usually comes down to a judgment call. In general, I tend to side with those who want history left as it is, but sometimes qualified, as with statues of Confederates famous for defending the South. (I favor "counterstatues" or explanatory plaque.) But in many cases, such as the Teddy Roosevelt statue at the American Museum of Natural History, I see no need for revision (see Greg's post on that **here**). https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/29/teddy-roosevelt-and-the-american-museum-of-natural-history/
My criteria so far have been twofold. First, is the statue celebrating something good a person did rather than something bad? So, for example, Hitler statues fail this test, though I hear that some Nazi statues are simply left to molder and degenerate rather than having been pulled down. Second, were the person's contributions on balance good or bad? So, though Gandhi was a bit of a racist towards blacks as a barrister in South Africa, the net amount of good he did in bringing India into existence through nonviolent protest seems to me to heavily outweigh his earlier missteps. Gandhi statues should stay.
What if someone was bad on balance but did a good thing—should that person be celebrated? That would be a judgment call.
In general, I err on the side of preserving history, for statues and buildings are a mark of history—of times when our morality was different from what it is today. And it's useful to be reminded of that rather than simply having our past, especially the bad bits, erased. History, after all, isn't all beer and skittles. We don't want a lot of Winston Smiths operating in our culture.
Now, in an article in *Quillette*, Steven Hales, described as "Professor and Chair of Philosophy of Bloomsberg University of Pennsylvania", and author of ***The Myth of Luck: Philosophy, Fate, and Fortune***, has added another criterion, one that seems sensible to me. Well, it's not really a criterion for determining who should be cancelled, but a way to look at the supposed missteps of figures from the past. I have tweaked it to make it a criterion. https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/the-myth-of-luck-9781350149281/
Click on the screenshot to read:
Hales analyzes morality as analogous to science. Science has improved over time in helping us understanding nature, but we don't denigrate scientists who made honest errors in the past. (Miscreant scientists, like Lysenko, are a different case.) Similarly, morality improves over time. (I don't think there's an objective morality, but surely the way we run society has allowed flourishing of more people over the past few centuries.) To Hales, it makes as little sense to denigrate those who went along with the morality of their time as to denigrate those scientists who accepted the "received wisdom" of their time. As he says:
All of which to say, there is a vital difference between being wrong and being blameworthy. Einstein struggled to admit the fact of quantum entanglement, but that does not entail his blameworthiness as a scientist. In one clear sense, he was on the “wrong side” of quantum history, but that doesn’t necessarily merit demotion from the pantheon. Scientific praiseworthiness or blameworthiness is determined not by the standards of our times, but of theirs. While you can hardly blame Darwin for not knowing the unit of natural selection, you would certainly blame a modern biology undergraduate if she did not know about DNA. Nonetheless, it is Darwin who deserves our admiration and praise, even if today’s undergrad knows more than he did.
And so we should judge people by the "average" moral standard of the time, which I interpret as meaning that if someone wasn't considered immoral in their own society, but had values and beliefs that were fairly standard, then we can't fault them too much today, for people are products of their genes and environments.
Hales:
Anyone who thinks that right moral thinking is obvious, and is incredulous at the horrible beliefs of the past, is the unwitting heir to a philosophical fortune hard-earned by their forebears. The arc of the universe may bend towards justice, but it is a long arc. As with scientists, moral actors of the past also fall into the great, the average, and the bad. Our judgment of them shouldn’t be by the standards of our own times, but the standards of theirs. By the moral understanding of his day, Vlad the Impaler was still a monster. But should we say the same of St. Paul, who in his *Letter to Philemon*, returns Onesimus, a runaway slave, to his owner instead of providing the slave with safe harbor? While Paul’s letter includes a request for Christian mercy, he omits condemnation for the horror of slavery. Paul was no slave trader, but the moral views displayed here were typical for his time.
By these lights, Hume, who gave approbation to a slaveholder, wasn't the monster he seems to be today, as acceptance of slavery wasn't seen as immoral back then as it is now. Morality has evolved for the better. I think it's misguided, then, to "cancel" Hume, as they're trying at Edinburgh with a building name, because of one "misstep" in a life that was otherwise very useful and salubrious.
Now of course this criterion has its own problems, the most obvious being "what was the 'received' moral wisdom of the time?" For example, Darwin was not in the majority of Brits of his time in being an abolitionist. Should we expect people of Darwin's era, then, to adhere to the "best" morality, or simply to an "average" morality—one that wouldn't get its adherent labeled as immoral in his society? Since there are always *some* angels in society, however rare, I'd go with the latter criterion.
This doesn't solve all the issues, for of course the Nazis adhered to the average anti-Semitic morality of their times, and we don't want people to put up statues to Nazis or label buildings "Goebbels Hall." How do we judge an "average" morality? Morality among all humans on the planet in a time when people can read, learn and think, or the morality obtaining in one's immediate surroundings? I have no answer.
Nor do I know how to combine Hales's criterion with the ones I've held previously. All I know is that I have a mental algorithm about who should be canceled, and few people fall on the "yes" side, mainly those with no redeeming lives, acts, or thoughts. Nor should we *laud* people today for things that were once considered okay, but now are seen as bad. Hume deserves to stay because he was not only a great man and a great philosopher, but also because he wasn't the equivalent of a Nazi. Finally, I don't have problems getting rid of art that shows things that really *are* considered universally offensive: like a mural showing a lynching in the South. Clearly, we will never get everyone to agree on these issues.
But as for Darwin, Gandhi, Jefferson, George Washingon and yes, with qualification, Robert E. Lee—let them stay. As they say, those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it.
Hili dialogue
Top of the morning and middle of the week to you: it's Wednesday, September 16, 2020, and **Peach Pie Day**. You'll be lucky if you get some this week! It's also **National Guacamole Day**, **National Cinnamon Raisin Bread Day**, **World Play-Doh Day**, **National Collect Rocks Day**, and Mexican Independence Day ("**Cry of Dolores**"; see below). https://foodimentary.com/2015/09/16/september-16-national-peach-pie-day/ https://www.checkiday.com/27c8b8565c027563d28d3a41d4ff32bc/national-guacamole-day https://www.checkiday.com/b77ab305dfe30e599cdfe3f4f9a9398f/national-cinnamon-raisin-bread-day https://www.checkiday.com/6e03eb904b55343de227ee9bea82dae9/world-play-doh-day https://www.checkiday.com/fc6038ff76a0b870e3ce7aead6d03c52/national-collect-rocks-day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_of_Dolores
Don't forget to **vote for Clarence the Cat**; you can vote once daily through Facebook. If Clarence wins, his vet bills will be paid off with the $5000 prize. There is a day and two-thirds left to bring this moggy over the top. https://americasfavpet.com/2020/clarence-4?fbclid=IwAR2x1tk01_Ds74oieu4nD9CkAOTKyICjddh7rzlsT7WB0E5zQMB-zXl7ZE8
**News of the day**: For the first time in its 175-year history, ***Scientific American*** **has endorsed a Presidential candidate**. And you can bet it isn't Trump. From the editorial (h/t Barry): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden/
The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which **cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives** by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment. These and other proposals he has put forth can set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html
Here's a misguided op-ed in the *Washington Post* by Danielle Pletka, senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute: "**I never considered voting for Trump in 2016. I may be forced to vote for him this year**." Forced? WHY? Her response: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-cant-stand-trump-but-democrats-may-force-me-to-vote-for-him/2020/09/14/1cf10518-f6c4-11ea-a275-1a2c2d36e1f1_story.html
I fear Trump’s erratic, personality-driven decision-making. His contempt for **NATO** is alarming, as is his delusion that he can manage **rogue leaders**. I don’t doubt that his eagerness to withdraw U.S. troops from their stability missions in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq will encourage conflict and terrorism. And I fret that his bizarrely isolationist attitude toward international trade will hurt the U.S. economy and splinter the global trading juggernaut that over the past half-century has brought the world amazing prosperity, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-told-in-brussels-that-west-should-focus-on-values-not-only-interests/2017/05/25/7aa1865c-40cd-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/09/trumps-seat-of-his-pants-style-and-lack-of-message-control-loom-over-meeting-with-kim-jong-un/?itid=lk_inline_manual_7
But I fear the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party even more.
. . . With Donald Trump, I know what I am getting. He wears his sins on the outside. For good and ill, he runs his administration. I worry more about his incompetence and vacillation than I do about any dictatorial tendencies. On the other side, however, I am increasingly persuaded that what I see in Joe Biden — whom I first met in 1992, and whom I believe to be a decent person — would merely be the facade for an administration, fully backed by both houses of Congress, with an agenda that would seriously damage the nation.
And so it goes. But the Washington Post satirized that op-ed with another by Alexandra Petri, "**I can't believe you're forcing me to vote for Trump, which I definitely didn't already want to do.**" What a burn! And some people thought this piece was serious. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/15/i-cant-believe-youre-forcing-me-vote-trump-which-i-definitely-didnt-already-want-do/?hpid=hp_save-opinions-float-right-4-0_opinion-card-c-right%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans#comments-wrapper
Good news from reader Tom (click on screenshot to read more):
Below: a sad story about how a man intensely devoted to protecting Brazil's reclusive indigenous tribes was mistakenly killed by a tribesman with a bamboo arrow:
Finally, **today's reported Covid-19 death toll** in the U.S. is 195,683, an increase of about 1300 deaths over yesterday's report. The **world death toll** now stands at 934,444, an increase of about 6,500 deaths from yesterday. And we're approaching a million deaths worldwide. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html
Stuff that happened on September 16 includes:
1620 – Pilgrims set sail from England on the *Mayflower*.
1810 – With the ***Grito de Dolores****,* Father **Miguel Hidalgo** begins **Mexico's fight for independence from Spain**. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grito_de_Dolores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Hidalgo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_War_of_Independence
The "cry" is the ringing of the same bell sounded in Dolores, but now in Mexico city, and run by Mexico's president.
**1**880 – *The Cornell Daily Sun* prints its first issue in Ithaca, New York. The *Sun* is the United States' oldest, continuously-independent college daily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1880
1959 – The first successful photocopier, the **Xerox 914**, is introduced in a demonstration on live television from New York City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_914
I still remember the days before Xeroxing caught on, when we had to use mimeograph machines with their purple gel. Here's the Xerox 914:
1961 – Typhoon Nancy, with possibly the strongest winds ever measured in a tropical cyclone, makes landfall in Osaka, Japan, killing 173 people.
1966 – The Metropolitan Opera House opens at Lincoln Center in New York City with the world premiere of Samuel Barber's opera *Antony and Cleopatra*.
**1976** – Armenian champion swimmer **Shavarsh Karapetyan** saves 20 people from a trolleybus that had fallen into a **Yerevan** reservoir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavarsh_Karapetyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerevan
Here's a 7-minute video of Karapetyan's heroic effort, and he is a hero by any definition. Injuries sustained in the multiple rescue ended his swimming career:
**1**992 – The trial of the deposed Panamanian dictator **Manuel Noriega** ends in the United States with a 40-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Noriega
Noriega died in 2017 under house arrest, after he'd been released from prison.
Notables born on this day include:
1858 – Bonar Law, Canadian-Scottish banker and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1923)
1925 – B.B. King, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 2015)
1950 – Henry Louis Gates Jr., American historian, scholar, and journalist
1952 – Mickey Rourke, American boxer and actor
1971 – Amy Poehler, American actress, comedian, and producer
1992 – Nick Jonas, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
Those who perished from this Earth on September 16 include:
**1**672 – Anne Bradstreet, English poet (b. 1612) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1672
1911 – **Edward Whymper**, English-French mountaineer, explorer, and author (b. 1840) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Whymper
Whymper and his party were the first to ascend the Matterhorn (1865), but four of the party of seven died on the descent when the rope broke. Here's the famous painting of that incident by Gustav Doré:
1932 – Ronald Ross, Indian-English physician and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1857)
1980 – Jean Piaget, Swiss psychologist and philosopher (b. 1896)
2009 – Mary Travers, American singer-songwriter (b. 1936)
2013 – Patsy Swayze, American dancer and choreographer (b. 1927)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili repudiates kitten Kulka:
Hili: I hope she will not come closer to me.
A: Why do you think she won't?
Hili: I hissed at her tellingly.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam nadzieję, że ona do mnie nie podejdzie.
Ja: Dalczego tak sądzisz?
Hili: Syczałam na nią wymownie.
Word has it that Hili rubbed up affectionately against Szaron yesterday—a real first. Apparently both Hili's staff and Szaron were astonished, with Szaron standing in place for a long time afterwards. But today's dialogue shows that Hili still doesn't like kitten Kulka.
But Kulka and Szaron are still inseparable friend
From Stash Krod:
From Facebook:
From Pyers, referring to the UK's new social-gathering restrictions:
Stay
Peck me, hug me
comb my feathers with your beak
I am not going anywhere
Will stay on my perch
Your cooing is making me so weak
Incessant
Always hanging around
Nothing else to do
Of course if a fly flies past
I will take a view
Weave him in my threads
and keep him for dinner
If you are a spider
You are always the winner
Life can be monotonous
But I don't want to rant
As long as food has wings
I don't care if it's incessant
After the Hard Part – #1LinerWeds
I love her tail.
I’ll start with some good news. The exterior work on our shed is finished. I still have to hang the lightening detector (part of our weather station) and find a place to mount a small floodlight to shine on the entrance door, but the siding, roof and soffit work is done. If you’ve been following this project and want to skip the recap, drop down to paragraph four.
For such a small building, this project presented numerous challenges. The first phase required jacking the shed up and applying a waterproof membrane to the lower edge of the walls. The shed is in a tight corner, so I worked on two walls with less than 2' (61cm) between the wall and the fence. The doors had to be removed, built out ¾” and rehung. One doorway had to be raised so I can get my snowblower in and out easier, and the window had to be replaced. All of those things were upgrading what was already there. The final wall brought new work.
We wanted some protection for the entry door, specifically the barn door track. The original plan was to extent the roofline out about four feet, but shortages of pressure-treated lumber scaled that back to an 18” overhang. That left me with two tasks that I find annoying. Annoying task one – installing siding in the little triangle above that overhang. Annoying task two – installing soffit on the underside of that overhang. Task one required cutting siding on a long low angle. Task two required fitting J-Channel (the stuff that holds the soffit) in the space between the door track and the roof structure.
I finished siding the little triangle above the roof around noon. The Editor asked if I was going to stop for the day or keep going. My answer included an expression my boss from 30 years ago used to use. I told her that I was going to try to install the J-Channel.
***“Once I get the channel installed, the soffit will go one-two-six.”***
The expression held. The J-Channel, once installed, makes a track on both sides of the overhang ceiling. The soffit sheets are cut into panels and snap in the track. Once the J-Channel was installed, the soffit was up in less than half an hour. This post is part of Linda G. Hill’s fun weekly series One-Liner Wednesday. If you have a one-liner, If you would like to join in on the fun, you can follow this link to participate and to see the one-liners from the other participants.
Capping the ridge and covering the ridge vent membrane. It will take 29 of those shingles to get to the other edge,
And the ridge is finished.
In addition to cutting long low angles, working off the staging and over the roof was awkward.
OK, not quite finished, Those exposed nails will need a dab of roof cement.
The – Last – Piece – of – Siding!
This is why I wanted to do both jobs the same day. They both required some staging to work from.
I love her tail
Jinx, coming on for a landing.
Jinx has found his perch.
Bunny – I hope Rivergirl can see this.
Smokey running along one of the neighborhood fences
Every now and then (I’m sure there’s a schedule) the flags are lowered in CT for the virus victims.
Maddie’s park from Mitzi’s park. Mitzi was our first Irish Setter. She preferred the Family Park across from Veterans Park.
Believe it or not, there’s an airplane in the puddle at about 4-o’clock
After the rain, we walk.
I like the the guy riding the mower fits the curve of the sprinkler.
Done!
his might be the last of the double rose of sharon blossoms this year.
Bill Maher, Malcolm Nance, and Andrew Sullivan
Speaking of tearing down statues, here are two people, foreign policy analyst and **Malcolm Nance** and Andrew Sullivan, having a brief discussion about which statues should be removed today's political climate. Nance doesn't strictly adhere to Maher's time limits, and digresses quite a bit, but I generally agree with both guests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Nance
Mobbed again
Today's guest picture comes from my Lancastrian correspondent Paul's visit to the Lake District. It shows a well positioned seat placed in memory of Hugh Walpole. It is looking out over Derwent Water.
We had another warm and dry day here, though the sun only made occasional appearances. Indeed it even tried to rain as I cycled round the shop after breakfast. However, it got ashamed of itself and soon stopped.
Mrs Tootlepedal drove off to the council dump at Annan to get rid of as much stuff as we could cram into the rather small boot of the Zoe, while I went off to the health centre to get a routine vitamin injection. We both got back in time to have coffee with Margaret on the lawn in one of the sunny spells.
As we sipped and chatted, once again the garden was full of butterflies with the red buddleia being the most popular port of call for them
At times, almost every flower seemed to have at least one butterfly on it.
Just beside the bench where I sit at coffee time, the verbascum is having a second burst of flowers.
While we talked, a scruffy blackbird perched on the handle of a fork that Mrs Tootlepedal was using to prepare the ground for planting the hydrangea that we have been given
After coffee, Mrs Tootlepedal got back to gardening and I wandered around, offering a helping hand when needed, and taking pictures when not.
A lone white rose has come out to join the Crown Princess.
Small tortoiseshell and red admiral butterflies visited a number of different flowers, dahlia, cosmos, potentilla and rose.
I was a bit tired after yesterday's pedal so I went inside for a sit down and some bird watching. The siskins were as lively as ever....
but I did manage to find a moment in the bottom left picture in the panel when they weren't fighting.
A greenfinch posed for me.
They are very superior birds and I liked the way that this one rose above the rough behaviour that was going on beneath it.
I got a strong red Bulgarian Carrot chilli pepper out of the greenhouse and made some lentil soup with added heat. While it was cooking, I visited the garden again. The dead heading is really working well on the little red poppies. There were five out yesterday and more than double that today. When I looked closely, a lot of them had visitors and the computer showed me that they were tiny hoverflies.
After lunch, I did the crossword and had another look at the birds. A pigeon had something to say...
.but a blue tit was keeping its own counsel.
I was gradually wasting a fine and warm afternoon when I pulled myself together, got my cycling gear on and got ready to go for a pedal.
I wasted another few minutes before leaving by wondering how tall the sunflowers are going to get eventually (we will be able to look them in the eye from an upstairs window if they go on like this.)...
and counting all the butterflies and bees that I could see on one area of the sedum.
The clouds had thickened up a lot by the time that I got going, but it was pleasantly warm and the wind was light so I was happy enough, especially as my legs were quite co-operative after a hesitant start.
The fifth turbine at the new windfarm has now got its blades on and can been seen from the Wauchope road, and there seemed to be a new tower in view as I cycled over Callister..
..but when I looked again from the Solwaybank road, I could see the fifth turbine but not the new tower. The crane was attached to another small section of tower. I can't quite work out what I was seeing and will have to visit again soon to try to get it all sorted out. There are ten more turbines to go up so I will have plenty of excuses to go and check on progress.
On my way round to the back road, I stopped to admire a patch of autumn colour and noticed rose hips and snowberries in the hedge behind me.
While I was going along the Solwaybank road, I passed the wild orpines and checked to see if they were attracting butterflies. They weren't but they did have a pair of large bumble bees on site.
And I was very happy to see a horse proving the truth of an old saying.
Further along the road, I passed one of the few hawthorn trees which has actually got a good crop of haws this year....
.and as I came past the Bloch farm, I saw a selection of birds on the overhead wires looking very like the tablature for a three string guitar.
A close look showed that they were starlings.
The gentle wind blew me home and I got back in time to help Mrs Tootlepedal put the hydrangea into position in a flowerbed next to the middle lawn. As this involved a good deal of heaving and lifting, it is just as well that there were two of us on the job.
Tomorrow we will put the irises that were moved to make way for the hydrangea into a gap left by the removal of the hedging plants that Mrs Tootlepedal had taken to the dump in the morning. It is all go in the garden at the moment.
The flying bird of the day is a chaffinch.
Who Are You to Tell Me I’m Not Really a Catholic?
Many opinions are flying around during this election cycle about what makes a Catholic a Catholic. Yes, Joe Biden is a practicing Catholic, only the third Catholic candidate to ever run on a major party nomination in the United States (the first being President Kennedy, the second John Kerry). Yet for conservative Catholics who support President Trump, declarations abound that Joe Biden isn’t *really* a Catholic, especially due to his support of a woman’s right to choose and full civil rights for LGBTQ+ individuals. In the eyes of such commentators, including many priests, people like me are no better— Feminist Catholics who openly support a Democratic candidate. If you’re reading this piece, maybe you are a confused Catholic who is feeling bullied by your own priest or other American Catholic thought leaders right now. Rest assured, not all Catholics are the same, and how you identify in your faith is truly between you and the God of your understanding. Be cautious of anyone who is promoting a theology of exclusion, making you feel *less than* for practicing your faith authentically and in a way that lines up with all of your values and points of identity.
On August 15, the Catholic priest and “pro-life” crusader Fr. Frank Pavone Tweeted that he is prepared to hear the confessions of any Catholic who votes Democrat, yet if we are unrepentant, then absolution will be withheld. For Pavone and many like him, when challenged on any other issues surrounding the dignity of human life, (e.g., how we as Americans treat immigrants or address other human rights violations) nothing matters if we allow for the deaths of innocent fetuses. This is the classic, “At least we don’t condone the murder of babies” defense whenever challenged with issues of real moral complexity that confront the intricacies of human experience. Especially when women and marginalized folks are involved. In the dynamics of spiritual and narcissistic abuse, this ideological argument is a deflection technique that also contains qualities of gaslighting (making *you* believe like you are the crazy or immoral one for even daring to challenge them). https://twitter.com/frfrankpavone/status/1294624486013247488
I know the arguments because I was once schooled in all of them. In my experience growing up with one Evangelical parent and later working for a more conservative expression of the Catholic church, I was taught to believe that to really be a Christian or even a Catholic, I *had* to be pro-life. I *had* to renounce the evils of the homosexual and transgender “lifestyles,” even though I knew from the age of 11 that I experienced attraction to both boys and girls. Incidentally enough, around that same age I was dealing with the Evangelicals telling me that Catholics weren’t really Christians because they believed in man-made law and not the sole authority of scripture. Even at that age, this exclusionary rhetoric from Evangelicals about Catholics upset me. Yet whenever issues of culture wars emerge, I hear Catholics essentially telling other Catholics the same thing—you don’t belong if you don’t believe exactly like us. Yet the irony is that people like Fr. Frank Pavone and similar priests who condemn American Democrats can be cited for ignoring other church teachings around social justice.
I am not a theologian and proclaim no competency in delivering philosophical or theological arguments. I am, however, a clinical counselor specializing in the treatment of trauma, with a specialty in spiritual abuse, and what I can share in this public forum is my lived experience as a woman, a professional, and an open-hearted Catholic. For the record, I do not glorify abortion as I am often accused and do not believe it should be entered into lightly. Yet as someone whose professional work and personal healing has woken me up to what it means to be pro-woman, I must stand for reproductive justice and personal autonomy. Women deserve to be on an equal playing field with men, and believing anything else earlier in my faith formation was simply evidence of me trying to fit in, play the good girl, and do the right thing in the eyes of my respective faith communities. I used to believe that if I didn’t comply, God wouldn’t bless me and I would be kicked off the island of God’s grace and access to the Catholic rituals I love so much. Receiving a great deal of healing ministry through a more liberal, Feminist lens within Catholicism and other spiritual paths, in addition to other trauma therapy, liberated me from this spirituality of perfection indicative of contexts that do not fully honor women. As a result, I discovered a new freedom in that place where Divinity meets humanity, right in my own heart.
My frustration is even greater during this election cycle when I see Catholics declare their support for Donald J. Trump. Defending White Supremacists, turning a blind eye to racial injustice, glorifying gun culture, mocking the disabled, authorizing the detention of children in cages, and bullying those who accuse you of sexual assaults with misogynist attacks that shame the victim in no way feels like Christ to me. I believe that Christ loves, honors, and values women, and anyone who degrades women like this President has throughout his years in public life is perpetuating serious trauma, individually and collectively. One of the first lessons I truly retained in Catholic school is that the commandment “Thou shall not kill” applies to more than just taking physical life. I’ve spent my career ministering to people (especially women) with broken spirits, killed by the kind of behavior and rhetoric that Donald Trump so freely promotes.
Joe Biden is not perfect, not by a long shot, and I do not write this piece specifically to defend or to endorse him. I will say that his basic humanitarian actions and obvious love for his family inspire the love of Christ in me and restore my faith in the potential that we have to be good to each other in this life. His ability to admit when he is wrong, especially on how he treated Dr. Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas conference hearings, offers cause for hope. Having lost too many members of my extended LGBT+ family of choice to suicide and overdose, conditions of shame largely fueled by how rejecting family members and church leaders treated them, basic goodness towards human beings is a value I hold in high regard. If you are a Catholic or see yourself as a defender of traditional faith or family values and you are *not* willing to have this conversation, I see your moral compass as being incompletely formed.
I’ve been repulsed to hear that conservative Catholics or other “traditional family values” Christians say that a child is better off in an abusive home composed of a mother and father than in a loving, nurturing home raised by a gay couple. I’ve witnessed the same people who picket abortion clinics turn their noses up at single mothers, blended family dynamics, or people on government assistance—people desperately in need of such help to keep the babies they’ve had alive. I weep for all of this hatred, and I believe that Jesus does too. I’ve even wondered and have likely posted memes questioning if people like you are really Christians (or Catholics), or soldiers for the American Republican version of Christianity? Yet those are just my opinions—I have no authority whatsoever, nor does any other human being—to exclude you from Christ’s table. My Catholicism and my identity as a member of the larger universal family who understands that fear can drive a great deal of irrational responses does not allow me to drive you away.
I still identify as a Catholic because I love the Catholic Mass, our rituals, and the rich identity of Catholic meaning *universal*. The holy presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary and female saints and mystics in our history such as St. Hildegard of Bingen, guides me every day. Being Catholic was the first placed I learned how to connect with the Divine Feminine! When I go to Mass and read the teachings of Catholic saints I still feel nourished, even though women have largely been marginalized within the church’s mainstream. Even though there is a long and tainted history of childhood sex abuse by priests being covered up by officials in the hierarchy that needs to be fully addressed more than it has, I still believe there is something good within the church. My mental health recovery has taught me to live an authentic life if I want to stay safe, sane, and healthy, and this means that neither my beliefs nor my behavior are fully compliant with what the church teaches or how the church behaves.
Yet my journey has also shown me that there are wide variety of Catholic scholars, writers, and yes, even priests, who challenge the status quo and have a strong commitment to being pro-woman in all of its manifestations. By reading and studying with them, I know that I still belong. If anything, I belong even more because I still choose to hang around a church system that can neglect people like me, a queer survivor of abuse. My healing journey has lead me to explore and draw from other spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism and the path of *sanatan dharma* (the general name of the spirituality of India that gave birth to yoga), Judaism, Islam, and Indigenous spirituality. Through this study I’ve learned that we all have so much more in common than we may realize, and here we are, even as fellow Christians and fellow Catholics, tearing each other to shreds over teaching that can be interpreted in so many different ways.
Even with my Ecumenical world view, there is one reason that I have not abandoned Christianity altogether, especially Catholicism—the Incarnation. *And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us*. I am overcome with chills every time I think of a God who is so powerful, dimensional, and loving would choose to take on a human container and dwell amongst humanity. This gift was made possible by the embodied willingness of a very holy woman. This act shows a love for humanity and the human, embodied experience that I have been unable to fully embrace in my other practices. My love of humanity is what I most love about being a Catholic-Christian. Being a human teaches me that moral decision are intricate and complex, and that radical empathy is required to truly be Christ for each other.
Those are my Catholic values, and no one can tell me otherwise
Tuesday: Hili dialogue
Tis the cruelest day of the week: Tuesday, and September 15, 2020. It's **National Linguine Day:** make mine with clams and lots of garlic, olive oil, and parsley. It's also **National Cheese Toast Day**, **National Double Cheeseburger Day**, **National Crème de Menthe Day**, **Butterscotch Cinnamon Pie Day** (WTF?), **Greenpeace Day** (see below), **Google.com Day**, and **International Day of Democracy.** It's also the beginning of both **German American Heritage Month** and **National Hispanic Heritage Month**. https://foodimentary.com/2015/09/15/september-15-national-linguine-day/ https://www.checkiday.com/71d95cbd78beb89b51a1def746e92f6d/national-cheese-toast-day https://www.checkiday.com/abc40d5ba5f81966ed0460ccb8031cb5/national-double-cheeseburger-day https://www.checkiday.com/1f19656fa41a28fc2f30af6f84c1c07d/national-creme-de-menthe-day https://www.checkiday.com/6b68552ee4f809fad3a57f1bce080ff2/butterscotch-cinnamon-pie-day https://www.checkiday.com/d9fb236070eba0a7450cb025e7613328/greenpeace-day https://www.checkiday.com/94c0e09276284ba3ac7840540e52b75f/google-com-day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_of_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Heritage_Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Hispanic_Heritage_Month
Today's Google Doodle (click on screenshot) honors **Felicitas Mendez**, who, along with her husband, brought an end to the legal segregation of whites and Hispanics in California schools. The case was ***Mendez v. Westminster,*** decided in 1947, and made California the first state America to end school segregation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicitas_Mendez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendez_v._Westminster
Don't forget to **vote for Clarence the Cat at this link**; you can vote once daily through Facebook. If Clarence wins, his vet bills will be paid off with the $5000 prize. There are about 2.5 days left, and you can vote once every 24 hours. Clarence is still in first place! https://americasfavpet.com/2020/clarence-4?fbclid=IwAR2x1tk01_Ds74oieu4nD9CkAOTKyICjddh7rzlsT7WB0E5zQMB-zXl7ZE8
Clarence!!
**News of the Day**: High school parties in the northeast US are **delaying the start of school in some areas**, as students crowd together closely without masks. I saw this yesterday at a fraternity at my school, with a bunch of guys playing beer pong on the front porch, croweded together and without masks (and using the same pong ball). (A "defund the police" sign hung on the outside wall above the pong table.) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/world/covid-19-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage#link-20ebba7e
Two Los Angeles deputies who were ambushed and critically injured inside their patrol car will now be okay, it's said, but the really disgusting part is **the crowd that gathered outside the hospital**, allegedly crying, "We hope they die". More from ABC: https://abc13.com/los-angeles-deputies-ambushed-compton-la-shot-protests/6422147/
Video from outside St. Francis Medical Center shows authorities trying to clear the area. At one point, a few people were seen blocking the emergency exit and entrance to the hospital.
One witness said some of the demonstrators even tried to get inside the building.
"They were saying, 'Death to the police.' 'Kill the police.' And they were using all types of curse words and derogatory terms about the police, just provoking our police officers," said Bishop Juan Carlos Mendez with Churches in Action. "(It's) unacceptable behavior because the hospital should be a sanctuary. We should leave hospitals alone."
Courtesy of reader Ken, we have the article below. Ken adds, "This may be the most unhinged thing I've heard yet. And it comes from the Trump administration's assistant secretary of public affairs of (and official spokesman for) the Department of Health and Human Services (even though he, Michael Caputo, has zero experience in either public health or medicine)." Article is below; an excerpt:
The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the **coronavirus** made outlandish and false claims on Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/world/covid-19-coronavirus.html
Michael Caputo, 58, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump.
Finally, **today's reported Covid-19 death toll** in the U.S. is 194,317, an increase of about 400 deaths over yesterday's report. The **world death toll** now stands at 927,905, an increase of about 4,500 deaths from yesterday. And we're fast approaching a million deaths worldwide. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html
Stuff that happened on September 15 include:
1440 – **Gilles de Rais**, one of the earliest known serial killers, is taken into custody upon an accusation brought against him by **Jean de Malestroit**, **Bishop of Nantes**. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_de_Rais https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_de_Malestroit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Diocese_of_Nantes
This is a sordid tale; read it at the link if you wish. de Rais was eventually caught and hanged.
1530 – Appearance of the miraculous portrait of ***Saint Dominic in Soriano*** in **Soriano Calabro**, **Calabria**, Italy; commemorated as a feast day by the **Roman Catholic Church** 1644–1912. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Dominic_in_Soriano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soriano_Calabro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church
As *Wikipedia* says dryly, "The painting may no longer exist." Here's a painting by **Francisco de Zurbarán (**1626) that supposedly shows the miraculous artwork: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Zurbar%C3%A1n
1812 – The Grande Armée under Napoleon reaches the Kremlin in Moscow.
1835 – **HMS** ***Beagle***, with **Charles Darwin** aboard, reaches the **Galápagos Islands**. The ship lands at Chatham or **San Cristobal**, the easternmost of the archipelago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Beagle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_Islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Crist%C3%B3bal_Island
**1**916 – World War I: Tanks are used for the first time in battle, at the Battle of the Somme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916
1935 – The Nuremberg Laws deprive German Jews of citizenship.
1935 – Nazi Germany adopts a new national flag bearing the swastika.
1959 – Nikita Khrushchev becomes the first Soviet leader to visit the United States.
**1963** – **Baptist Church bombing**: Four children killed in the bombing of an **African-American church** in **Birmingham, Alabama**, United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Street_Baptist_Church_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham,_Alabama
No perps were tried and convicted until 1977, and then another two in 2001. Here are the four girls killed, with the caption below:
(from Wikipedia) The four girls killed in the bombing (clockwise from top left): Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.
1971 – The first Greenpeace ship departs from Vancouver to protest against the upcoming Cannikin nuclear weapon test in Alaska.
1978 – Muhammad Ali outpointed Leon Spinks in a rematch to become the first boxer to win the world heavyweight title three times at the Superdome in New Orleans.
1981 – The **John Bull** becomes the oldest operable **steam locomotive** in the world when the **Smithsonian Institution** operates it under its own power outside Washington, D.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bull_(locomotive) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian_Institution
Here's a video of the John Bull on its 1981 trip:
2008 – Lehman Brothers files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.
Notables born on this day include:
1789 – James Fenimore Cooper, American novelist, short story writer, and historian (d. 1851)[7]
1857 – William Howard Taft, American lawyer, jurist, and politician, 27th President of the United States (d. 1930)
1876 – Bruno Walter, German-American pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1962)
1894 – Jean Renoir, French actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1979)
1907 – **Fay Wray**, Canadian-American actress (d. 2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Wray
1929 – Murray Gell-Mann, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2019)
1945 – **Jessye Norman**, American soprano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessye_Norman
Here's my favorite song by Jessye Norman, "Beim Schlafengehen" by Strauss. I want this playing as I slip away from life, and I want to go out during the big crescendo.
1946 – Oliver Stone, American director, screenwriter, and producer
Those who went West on September 15 include:
1938 – **Thomas Wolfe**, American novelist (b. 1900) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wolfe
Wolfe is one of my literary heroes, though he's disdained by most literature critics as guilty of overwriting. Yes, he could turn on the purple ink, but some of his prose was among the best in American literature. On October 1 I'll post my usual section of Wolfe's "Hymn to October." He died of tuberculosis at only 37. Here's the big man:
2003 – Garner Ted Armstrong, American evangelist and author (b. 1930)
2006 – Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist and author (b. 1929)
2017 – Harry Dean Stanton, American actor (b. 1926)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is kvetching:
Hili: It's the same every day.
A: What do you mean?
Hili: One has to decide whether to go here or there.
n Polish:
Hili: Każdego dnia to samo.
Ja: To znaczy?
Hili: Trzeba się zdecydować, czy iść tu, czy tam.
Little Kulka has made it up to the high wicker shelf on the veranda.
Caption: Kulka is conquering more high shelves.
In Polish: Kulka podbija kolejne półki na wysokościach.
And here's Matthew's cat Pepper lolling about in the Indian Summer sun:
From Facebook. Surely you'll guess the quote:
From Bruce. I get at least one of these calls per day (my car is twenty years old and clearly has no warranty, extended or otherwise):
Good Morning
As I entered town yesterday for my shopping I noticed that the main square had been decorated. I do not know what the idea was, but it attracted my attention. There was a board at the side with a list of explanations, but I could not get near enough to see what it said.
I am later this morning as the cleaning lady was here and I decided to tidy up a few things in the kitchen. It was really time that I disposed of a few things that were just gathering dust - and more - and really not needed. Our local store has a special offer on plastic storage boxes for food and I now have all my dry goods sealed nicely, such as rice and biscuits, much more hygenic.
When I entered town yesterday i was pleasantly surprised to see that it was again our monthly market day. It always happens on the second Monday in the month and there are various stalls with interesting selections. There are no groceries, as that happens every Saturday morning where local produce from the farms is sold.
It is the usual bric-a-brac being sold, but something completely different, Here they had some metal bowls in an Asian style, although I am not sure for what they can be used: probably just ornements looking good on a cupboard somewhere in the home.
Thie was quite an interesting stand and I love the way the various teddy bears were all hanging in a row by pegs.
There are always trinklets to be bought, various pieces of jewellery.
There were not so many customers as usual at the market. It seems to be that since Kovid 19 isolation times people are becoming quite scarce, but I could move quite well between the various stands.
And I was not quite sure what this was, but I think they were various places to keep your cat comfortable at home.
As I moved through the market I saw these two dogs.
And now I must get on with cooking for dinner. This afternoon I will probably take a trip down to the river in my wheelchair as it is easier to move along the river bank than the scooter.
Keep safe, have a good day, and see you around later.
Once again, “Black” versus “white”
I doubt that I'll write much more about this issue, and bring it up here because Greg has turned up some curious journalistic information. This all involves newspapers' decisions about whether to capitalize "black" and "white" when they refer to races, or rather, to socially constructed entities formerly known as races. I've discussed the capitalization issue in two earlier posts, prompted by the AP's stylebook that newly mandates capitalization for Black but not for white (see **here** and **here** for my posts). The *New York Times* has adopted this usage, while the *Washington Post*, in contrast, capitalizes both Black and White. I'd like to see their editors fight it out. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/02/black-vs-white-a-typographical-decision/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/22/why-the-associated-press-is-writing-black-and-white/
None of the justifications for the contrasting caps decision seem valid. For instance, some say that Black should be capitalized because the group shares a common fate of oppression (though not everywhere), but of course whites share the common trait of being the oppressor. And so it goes. My own take is that the real reason "Black" is capitalized is as a form of linguistic reparations: to give respect to a people who have been poorly treated. In contrast, "whites" get lowercase as a form of punishment, for being the oppressor. This is clear from **an article in the** ***New York Times*** that says this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/black-african-american-style-debate.html?ref=oembed
For proponents of capitalizing black, there are grammatical reasons — it is a proper noun, referring to a specific group of people with a shared political identity, shaped by colonialism and slavery. But some see it as a moral issue as well.
It confers a sense of power and respect to black people, who have often been relegated to the lowest rungs of society through racist systems, black scholars say.
“Race as a concept is not real in the biological sense, but it’s very real for our own identities,” said Whitney Pirtle, an assistant professor of sociology specializing in critical race theory at the University of California, Merced. “I think that capitalizing B both sort of puts respect to those identities, but also alludes to the humanities.”
Similarly, this recent article in *HuffPost* (below) which pretends to be evenhanded but comes down on the side of disparate capitalization, says this:
Years before the AP decision, **The Diversity Style Guide** ― which is produced by San Francisco State University journalism professor Rachele Kanigel in consultation with some 50 journalists and experts ― recommended capitalizing Black. https://www.diversitystyleguide.com/
“It’s true that Black, unlike African American, Asian American and Italian, is not derived from a proper noun,” she told HuffPost. “But it is an identity and to lowercase it robs Black people of a certain dignity.”
. . .“The widespread move by media organizations, universities and other institutions to capitalize Black restores this dignity to Black Americans, who have had so much taken from them for so many generations,” Kanigel said.
**Alexandria Neason**, a Columbia Journalism Review staff writer, said. . . To capitalize Black, she **explained in a blog post**, is to acknowledge that slavery “deliberately stripped” people forcibly shipped overseas “of all other ethnic/national ties.” https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
In contrast, the argument for lowercase "whites" is largely, according to both the AP Stylebook and the HuffPost article, because if you capitalize the term, you're validating white supremacy (!):
From HuffPo (which at least lays out arguments for capitalizing "White"):
Capitalizing white certainly doesn’t have widespread support, though, in part because white supremacist sites have also been known to capitalize the “w” in white.
“Capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs,” the **AP said of its decision to leave white lowercase**. https://apnews.com/afs:Content:9105661462
From **the AP stylebook**: https://blog.ap.org/announcements/why-we-will-lowercase-white
We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore those problems. But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.
Well, I think that's ludicrous, but to avoid being accused of being a Proud Boy, while at the same time not treating people differently based on their skin color, I'll write "black" and "white" for the time being. "Brown" will also be in lowercase, though there are arguments about that, too.
So that's settled, but of course readers can use whatever forms they want. The addition to the debate this week comes from Greg Mayer, who noticed what I see as unconscionable editing of other people's words to conform to your own ideology. This is being done by the *New York Times*. I'll quote an email from Greg:
I've noticed that the *Times* silently emends quotations from others' printed texts to follow their house style of "Black". I noticed this when reading **a piece about Michael Cohen's book in the** ***Times***, and they quoted Cohen as writing: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/us/politics/cohen-book-trump.html
“Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a shithole,” Mr. Cohen quotes Mr. Trump as saying.
***The Guardian*****, in its review**, quotes the same line: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/06/cohen-book-trump-obama-obsession-you-re-fired-video
“Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a shithole. They are all complete fucking toilets,” Cohen writes, attributing the comments to Trump following the former president’s election in 2008 – mirroring earlier reports he referred to African and Caribbean nations by the same insult.
The *Guardian*'s house style, like the *Times*, is to capitalize "Black" but they, at least in this instance, don't emend someone else's usage.
Here's further confirmation that the *Times* routinely alters the typography of quoted material to fit house style:
Times article with "Black" in quoted material:
**https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/opinion/trump-portland-kenosha.html**
Original sources, quoted in above, using "black"
**https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/BlackMenMakingItInAmerica-Final_062218.pdf**
**https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/03/opinions/good-news-for-black-men-in-america-opinion-wilcox-wang-mincy/index.html**
This is interesting, and seems to me distinctly un-journalistic. I was told, when I learned to write term papers, that when you quote you must quote *exactly.* You don't change other people's words. If you do, like inserting explanatory material, you must be obvious about it and use brackets. I think someone should point out to the *New York Times* that they're subtly altering quotes to conform to their style, which of course conforms to their ideology. However good the ideology, though, changing things without mentioning it is a journalist no-no.
I doubt that I'll write much more about this issue, and bring it up here because Greg has turned up some curious journalistic information. This all involves newspapers' decisions about whether to capitalize "black" and "white" when they refer to races, or rather, to socially constructed entities formerly known as races. I've discussed the capitalization issue in two earlier posts, prompted by the AP's stylebook that newly mandates capitalization for Black but not for white (see **here** and **here** for my posts). The *New York Times* has adopted this usage, while the *Washington Post*, in contrast, capitalizes both Black and White. I'd like to see their editors fight it out. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/02/black-vs-white-a-typographical-decision/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/22/why-the-associated-press-is-writing-black-and-white/
None of the justifications for the contrasting caps decision seem valid. For instance, some say that Black should be capitalized because the group shares a common fate of oppression (though not everywhere), but of course whites share the common trait of being the oppressor. And so it goes. My own take is that the real reason "Black" is capitalized is as a form of linguistic reparations: to give respect to a people who have been poorly treated. In contrast, "whites" get lowercase as a form of punishment, for being the oppressor. This is clear from **an article in the** ***New York Times*** that says this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/black-african-american-style-debate.html?ref=oembed
For proponents of capitalizing black, there are grammatical reasons — it is a proper noun, referring to a specific group of people with a shared political identity, shaped by colonialism and slavery. But some see it as a moral issue as well.
It confers a sense of power and respect to black people, who have often been relegated to the lowest rungs of society through racist systems, black scholars say.
“Race as a concept is not real in the biological sense, but it’s very real for our own identities,” said Whitney Pirtle, an assistant professor of sociology specializing in critical race theory at the University of California, Merced. “I think that capitalizing B both sort of puts respect to those identities, but also alludes to the humanities.”
Similarly, this recent article in *HuffPost* (below) which pretends to be evenhanded but comes down on the side of disparate capitalization, says this:
Years before the AP decision, **The Diversity Style Guide** ― which is produced by San Francisco State University journalism professor Rachele Kanigel in consultation with some 50 journalists and experts ― recommended capitalizing Black. https://www.diversitystyleguide.com/
“It’s true that Black, unlike African American, Asian American and Italian, is not derived from a proper noun,” she told HuffPost. “But it is an identity and to lowercase it robs Black people of a certain dignity.”
Doth Protest Too Much? Why Corporate and Academic Confessions Increasingly Fall On Deaf Ears
Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the anti-racism demonstrations from the NFL displays to corporate campaigns to academic confessions. What is most striking about these campaigns is how little they are likely to impact opinions on racism. Indeed, the NFL displays were not only booed by fans but denounced by figures like former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as meaningless propaganda. Most people are unwilling to discuss racism honestly. Booing is a form of anonymous speech and many of those individuals would not want to speak publicly about countervailing views of racial justice or the role of the NFL in such causes. Unless we can have that honest (and mutually tolerant) discussion, few minds will be changed in these campaigns. That requires a real interest in discussing different views of racial justice and its underlying issues for social reform, not just repeating affirmations or offering confessions. Otherwise, many are tuning out these demonstrations. There is clearly a view of many that corporations “doth protest too much” and mean too little in terms of real change in attitudes on racism. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/28/networks-hit-coverage-booing-fans-nfl-protests/ https://sports.yahoo.com/kaepernick-takes-aim-nfl-propaganda-232003405.html
Here is the column:
The National Football League tried this week to address cries over racial justice with the demonstration of players, signs proclaiming Black Lives Matter, and the words “end racism” in the end zones. The response was not uniformly positive, including loud disapproval from some fans.
The controversy intensified after announcer Cris Collinsworth praised the demonstration, but went on, “Let us just get that out of the way and call a football game.” Some objected to his transition. Others such as former Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala claimed that announcer Alan Michaels did not declare his own support. “Crickets,” as Begala suggested, was insufficient, leading some to push back on the pressure of forced statements.
The greater concern could be the impact of such corporate displays and whether they constitute real progress toward racial justice or are a tactic that will effectively diminish the issue. The Food and Drug Administration and consumer advocates have studied how the saturation using product warnings has caused consumers to ignore stated risks. It becomes a kind of background noise tuned out by commercials. Racial justice should not fall victim to the same claims. Companies have been fast to create public displays of their “wokeness” in campaigns. But will such messages really resonate with people when they become pervasive and uniform?
Take Lululemon, a $45 billion corporation that is funding the campaign to “unveil historical erasure and resist capitalism.” A global company with a campaign against capitalism brings to mind Vladimir Lenin, who claimed, “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.” Lululemon must hope to sell not just the rope but the attire of the revolution. What better way to redefine society than in a fetching Lululemon “define jacket” that costs more than $100? https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/11/lululemon-athletic-wear-resist-capitalism https://shop.lululemon.com/p/jackets-and-hoodies-jackets/Define-Jacket-Ice-Dye/_/prod10080325?color=46550
Such campaigns have become a kind of certification, where denouncing oneself is the new standard. I have been deluged by relatives and friends blasting out social media confessions of being racists. Several professors have read or signed statements declaring themselves racists.
The acting dean of Northwestern University Law School began a diversity event by declaring, “I am James Speta and I am a racist.” He was followed by Emily Mullin, executive director of major gifts, who said, “I am a racist and a gatekeeper of white supremacy. I will work to be better.” These kind recitations are now expected of anyone claiming to oppose racism. There is a sense for urgency among some faculty not to be the last to condemn themselves. As Begala has shown, “crickets” invite criticism.
I do not doubt the motives of Speta. I assume this was a heartfelt effort to support racial justice. Yet this social catharsis comes across with all such spontaneity of a recitation at a retraining camp. It is difficult to see how it assists the cause of racial justice for everyone to dutifully call themselves racists or tools of white supremacy. But an emerging view is that all white people are racist or at least presumptively racist. Angela Bell, an assistant professor at Lafayette College, said, “If you have to ask if you are a racist, you are, and if you are not asking if you are a racist, you are.”
If everyone is a racist, then this becomes a common rather than a singular distinction. It makes it easy for everyone to declare themselves recovering racists, then tackling real racism becomes more instead of less difficult to address. The protests have educated me with a number of issues. Racism remains our most transcendent and unresolved national matter. However, saying “I am a racist” may be popular now, but it is not true. That does not mean I do not want to address ways that my words may negatively impact other people, or to become better educated about their lives.
The question is whether this movement is being advanced or undermined by these awkward recitations of condemnation or corporate identity. That is why many recoiled when Collinsworth said, “I feel like I have to start off by stating I stand behind these players 100 percent. What they are trying to do is bring positive change for this country that is frankly overdue. Let us just get that out of the way and call a football game.” Most fans believe the National Football League has not actually changed its views. It simply wants to get on with the game, like how Lululemon wants to get back to selling $125 leggings as an anti-capitalist corporation.
It is clear why such campaigns and declarations work for some firms or individuals. Yet they can also give us a false sense of progress. Painting “end racism” in a stadium is gratifying, but it does not move the ball on racism because it is not part of a real discussion on race, and that core conversation happens less in society. Many advocates have pushed for these declarations as evidence that we finally are having a debate over race. However, it is only a recitation instead of a conversation.
What we need is what few are willing to tolerate: a real discussion on race. There are many who believe racism is a scourge but disagree with the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement. Others disagree that police killings of African Americans are under the systemic problem of racism, as opposed to a systemic problem with use of lethal force. When academics have published some studies on such issues, they have been denounced as racists or subjected to firing campaigns. Few minds will be changed in this heated environment, and that is sadly a loss for society.
Public confessions or corporate slogans will not change many minds. We can change minds on both sides by talking about different views of racism with the understanding that reasonable people may disagree over aspects of the problem. For most of us, there may not be different sides but rather different views of the causes and solutions, which is a much more difficult conversation to have than painting a slogan or leading a public confession. Otherwise, from gridirons to colleges to runways, campaigns against racism will simply turn into a cost of doing business.
New duck, who dis?
**UPDATE**: Tara Tanaka has identified these as male wood ducks (I got the species right but not the sex). Tara says this:
How sweet! They’re male woodies – you can tell by the crescent on their faces – the white “comma” behind the eye. I’m guessing they are this year’s, however it’s possible they are adults that are coming out of molt and those are their new feathers. They look really different during molt.
If you want to see how different a male wood duck looks in breeding plumage, go to **this morning's photos by Colin Franks**. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/09/14/readers-wildlife-photos-1100/
After this morning's feeding, three very small ducks flew into Botany Pond and made themselves at home with the mallards, even eating cracked corn on the duck plaza. I suspect these are **wood ducks** (*Aix sponsa*) based on their slight crest and eye markings, and they could be all females or perhaps including males not in breeding color. I'm sure readers can help me out with the IDs. There are also two videos at the end. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Wood_Duck/overview
It was pretty dark, so the shutter speeds were slow, accounting for the non-sharp images.
On the North Duck Island with mallards.
These little ducks are adorable!
The trio swimming together.
U of C English Department now accepting only grad students intending to work in Black studies
**In July I wrote about a statement** that the Department of English put on its webpage—a statement about social justice that, I thought, contravened the **University of Chicago's Kalven Principles** by allowing an official unit of the University to espouse and adhere to ideological principles. (Kalven encourages individual faculty to state their view, but forbids the University, with a few narrow exceptions, from adhering to any political, moral or ideological principles.) Here's the statement, which was not an expression of individual opinion but a statement by the entire faculty of the English department. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/23/the-university-of-chicago-contravenes-its-own-principle-of-political-and-ideological-neutrality/ https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/KalvenRprt_0.pdf
This, I thought, violated the Kalven dictum that the University must take no political positions lest it lead to a chilling of speech and quashing of free discourse—one of the pillars of the University of Chicago. Departmental statements are equivalent to official University statements because departments are not only official units of the university, but are the very places in which saying "wrong" and "offensive" things could penalize your career, your tenure, and your promotions. Individual faculty are, as always, free to express their opinions, even on a department webpage, so long as they're clearly described as the opinions of individuals.
But I digress. Note the following statement in the report above, issued July 20.
**As part of our commitment to funding and fostering scholarship in Black studies, in the coming academic year (2020-2021) we are prioritizing consideration of applicants who work in and with Black studies for admission to our PhD program.**
This has now been changed. First of all, there's **a watered-down version of the above** in the English Department "news" section, while **a stronger statement** has migrated to the main English department page itself. What's interesting about it is that although it also purports to be the "July 2020" statement, there's been one change (click screenshot below to see full statement): https://english.uchicago.edu/news-events/news
This, I thought, violated the Kalven dictum that the University must take no political positions lest it lead to a chilling of speech and quashing of free discourse—one of the pillars of the University of Chicago. Departmental statements are equivalent to official University statements because departments are not only official units of the university, but are the very places in which saying "wrong" and "offensive" things could penalize your career, your tenure, and your promotions. Individual faculty are, as always, free to express their opinions, even on a department webpage, so long as they're clearly described as the opinions of individuals.
But I digress. Note the following statement in the report above, issued July 20.
**As part of our commitment to funding and fostering scholarship in Black studies, in the coming academic year (2020-2021) we are prioritizing consideration of applicants who work in and with Black studies for admission to our PhD program.**
This has now been changed. First of all, there's **a watered-down version of the above** in the English Department "news" section, while **a stronger statement** has migrated to the main English department page itself. What's interesting about it is that although it also purports to be the "July 2020" statement, there's been one change https://english.uchicago.edu/news-events/news
The change, in the second paragraph above, is this statement:
**For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods. For more information on faculty and current graduate students in this area, please visit our** ****Black Studies page******.** https://english.uchicago.edu/black-studies
In other words, the department isn't just *prioritizing* applicants who work on Black studies, but are *requiring* all applicants to work on black studies. If you want to study Milton, Faulkner, Donne, or anybody like that, you're flat out of luck. This is an unconscionable tilting of a department not just toward one area of English, but clearly towards an ideology that infuses black studies: Critical Race Theory. (You can see this by reading the statements above.)
Now the English department has the right to set its own curriculum, for curricular matters don't violate the Kalven report (though the statements above do). If they want graduate students only in black studies, well, that's their right. But it isn't *right*. It's a hamhanded attempt to be anti-racist, but at the expense of the very purpose of the university. What about all those potential applicants who want to study other areas of English, or those many professors in English that don't do black studies? Well, it's too bad for them.
And does anybody really think that Black studies *anywhere* represents an area in which all ideas are entertained and debated freely, and in which there is no received wisdom, and no statement considered off limit because it causes "harm" or "violence"? If you think that, you haven't been following Critical Theory.
This saddens me—not because the English Department is giving more attention to race, but that it's giving *all* its attention to race, at least for the time being. And insofar as Black studies hew to Critical Race Theory, this also represents a chilling of discourse. It's part of the Awokening of the University of Chicago that I feared would come, but is not only here now, but also seems to have its nose in the tent
A useless bit of rubbish passed off as an heirloom
So there you are, watching BBC1 and clutching a Battle of Britain commemorative mug in a living room bedecked with union flags and red white and blue bunting and all ready to break into a rousing chorus of There'll Be Red White and Blue Birds Over the White Cliffs of Dover in order to show everyone how much you despise nationalism. Because as those young pilots fought and died in the skies above the south of England eighty years ago, they were doing it so that in future years a team of estate agents from Leighton Buzzard would be able to buy broken down auld tat in the hope it could be sold for a profit on a telly show. That'll show those vile separatists. That was the scene in Jackie Baillie's house today as she prepared to settle down in front of the BBC and its repeat of Bargain Hunt's Battle of Britain special.
It would also have been the scene in George Foulke's home, but he slept all the way through it. Still, buying a broken clock for a hundred quid and losing seventy on it just shows how we're all Better Together with Labour and the Tories, doesn't it. Isn't it lucky that you're only susceptible to the coronavirus if you live in England and you don't watch Bargain Hunt. George isn't susceptible to any perceptible sense of shame.
But wait. Did you hear that wailing noise? That was Murdo Fraser howling as he penned an angry letter to the Director General of the BBC's Scottish colonial office. Because they showed the First Minister anyway. George Foulkes will do the same once he wakes up, which may be about Thursday. Jackie won't do it, not after she deleted the evidence of her representations to the BBC from her Twitter feed and denied any involvement.
However the fact that the Scottish government briefing was shown on Monday as before isn't because the BBC has changed their minds and bowed to public pressure. The BBC doesn't bow to public pressure. It only bows to pressure from British nationalist politicians who are panicking about how to save their precioussss union. Normal Bargain Hunting service will be resumed as of Tuesday. It's going to save the Union. The red team and the blue team competing with one another to sell broken rubbish that's unfit for purpose to an unsuspecting public for personal profit is as close to a metaphor for the UK as you're likely to get.
The British nationalists are seriously worried. Support for independence has only grown during a pandemic which when it started was confidently predicted to spell the end for any hopes for Scottish independence. There is considerably greater public trust in the Scottish Government than there is in the British Government. Crucially there appears to be greater compliance with lockdown measures in Scotland than in England, and this seems to be because of the clarity of messaging from Nicola Sturgeon during her daily briefings. Labour and the Conservatives are prepared to risk that, to create greater confusion about the public health guidelines, because they are more worried about the political effects than they are about people dying. That is beyond shameless.
What makes it even worse is that a craven BBC has caved in to them. In the process the BBC is showing Scotland that it sees itself as being the voice of the British state in Scotland, and now a public service broadcaster which exists to serve that public which is required to pay a licence fee. No wonder people in Scotland are switching off in their thousands and refusing to pay a licence fee which is spent on the production of British propaganda which is contrary to their own interests.
Over this weekend we've seen yet another opinion poll showing record support for independence. The poll from Survation putting support for independence on 53% is the highest from that company, and is the seventh publicly published poll in a row which puts support for independence in the majority. There are reports of unpublished polls for the British Government which have put support for independence in the mid to high 50s. No wonder they are panicking.
However the British nationalists and their pals in BBC management have decided that the best way to tackle this rise in support for independence is not to get their own act together and improve the messaging of the British government about the epidemic. No, their solution is to create confusion in Scotland too. It's to deprive people in Scotland, especially elderly people who may not be confident about getting their information from the internet, from seeing regular briefings from the Scottish Government which explain clearly and plainly exactly what public health measures are required and what is expected of the public. It's difficult to think of a clearer illustration of how the British state and British nationalism is prepared to damage the health and well being of Scotland in order to protect their supremacy. And these are the people who tell Scotland that we need them in order to be kept safe and secure. It's a cruel and callous lie.
The BBC is once again showing that it is the propaganda arm of the British state. It's an organisation which is institutionally incapable of dealing with a Scotland where a majority of the population support independence. The BBC is an organisation which has defending Britishness written into its very charter. That comes before its duty to act as a public service, because the BBC has defined its public as a British one. We're seeing here yet another example of how the BBC acts in the interests of British nationalism, a nationalism which it is incapable of recognising as a form of nationalism at all. We saw plenty of this sort of thing during the referendum of 2014, and we're going to see a lot more of it to come as public opinion in Scotland slips even further out of the grasp of Westminster.
However this time the BBC has gone too far. It has blatantly prioritised the political concerns of British nationalists over Scottish public health. It is utterly inconceivable that a Scottish public broadcaster in an independent Scotland would have prioritised political representations over what is good for public health. In so doing the biggest health damage that the BBC has created is the damage to what's left of public trust in the state broadcaster. They have only succeeding in alienating a further swathe of Scottish public opinion. The BBC itself has joined that broken clock and that warped wooden shelving unit as yet another piece of useless rubbish on Bargain Hunt that we're being sold as valuable heirlooms.
Stanford Journalism Professor Rejects Objectivity In Journalism
For four years, I have written about the alarming loss of neutrality and objectivity in journalism — a trend that is reflected by many polls showing that the majority of the public no longer trusts the media for fair and honest reporting. While I have regularly criticized President Donald Trump, I have also objected to unrelentingly biased reporting as well as embarrassingly soft coverage of former Vice President Joe Biden. Now, Stanford Communications Professor Emeritus Ted Glasser has publicly called for an end of objectivity in journalism as too constraining for reporters in seeking “social justice.” https://comm.stanford.edu/faculty-glasser/
In an interview with *The Stanford Daily*, Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that the journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.” https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/08/20/should-journalists-rethink-objectivity-stanford-professors-weigh-in/
Dressing up bias as “advocating social justice,” does not remove the taint of yellow journalism. It is the same rationalization for shaping the news to fit your agenda and treating readers as subjects to be educated rather than informed.
While other professors in *The Stanford Daily* disagreed, Wesley Lowery, who has served as a national correspondent for the Washington Post, also rejects objectivity. In a tweet, Lowery declared “American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment…The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.” https://twitter.com/WesleyLowery/status/1268366363359354885?s=20
These are major voices in media. Glasser is a Stanford Department of Communication professor emeritus and served as the director for Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism. He is also the former president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Glasser doubled down in an interview with Campus Reform, stating “My understanding of journalism, like my understanding of history, rests on the premise that there is no finally correct description of anything — only interpretations.” He added that “I’m not a big fan of the term ‘objectivity’ or ‘objective truth’ because it gets us talking about all the wrong things.” https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=15655
That relativistic view, of course, would wipe away any semblance objective reporting. Indeed, he is rejecting the very notion of objectivity or any “correct description of anything.”
It is a liberating notion for writers like Glasser and Lowery. They can assume the mantle of social warriors and join whatever movement they prefer. They can then discard pesky notions of journalism as striving to offer unbiased accounts for the public to reach their own conclusions.
The alarming aspect of these views is that they are prevailing. It is now common to hear academics and reporters reject “both sideism” as a trap and even a form of racism. Even the publishing of opposing views is now considered dangerous as shown by the removal of New York Times editor James Bennet, who resigned in the recent controversy over an editorial by Sen. Tom Cotton. I supported Bennet’s decision to publish that editorial and denounced the cringing apology of the Times after a backlash. Yet, the same journalistic figures at the New York Times who pushed for his removal have continued to espouse unhinged and untrue conspiracy theories in the name of advocacy. https://jonathanturley.org/2020/06/05/mea-culpa-new-york-times-caves-to-protests-and-apologizes-for-posting-conservative-opinion/ https://jonathanturley.org/2020/06/25/new-york-times-reporter-who-denounced-paper-for-cotton-editorial-under-fire-for-advancing-absurd-conspiracy-theory/
With the collapse of objectivity will come the collapse of journalism. While academics revel in their ability to dispense with limitations of neutrality, many of their newspapers and news organizations are declining with the free fall of credibility with the public. As a result, the media has hit a historic low, with less than half of the populace finding it credible. Some polls show that the only group deemed less trustworthy than Trump is the media. The Knight Foundation has found that three-fourths of the public believe the media is too biased; some 54 percent believe reporters regularly misrepresent facts, and 28 percent believe reporters make things up entirely. https://jonathanturley.org/2020/09/07/adrift-over-the-atlantic-how-the-president-and-the-press-destroyed-the-ability-of-the-public-to-judge-scandals/ https://knightfoundation.org/reports/american-views-2020-trust-media-and-democracy/
Notably, as these journalists saw away of the branch upon which they are sitting, the impact may be more than the destruction of the media market. Few people want to fed a diet of what Professor Glasser believes is morally fight as opposed to factually true. The problem is that this view will remove any real distinction between journalism and political science department; between reporters and social warriors. While they will continue to enjoy free speech protections, courts gave become less inclined to support the protections afforded to the free press because there would be no discernible press as opposed to politics or propaganda.
Most importantly, what will be lost is one of the most important protections of liberty found in a free press. It has been the media that has triggered most reforms in our history from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate. Yet, this was only because the public trusted the media because of the very objectivity and neutrality values that Glasser, Lowery, and other now reject.
RDP Monday: Yada Yada Yada
Strange things were happening
In a globi klunky way
Yada Yada Yada
Was the best thing to say
There were smoky chumbles rising
with figures in between
An enchanted blokle grambog
With stangles in a dream
But all was in a toggle wok
No need to despair
The steam was dissolving
Somewhere in the air
A welcome surprise after a pedal
Today's guest picture comes from our neighbour Liz, who is down in the south at the moment. She visited East Carlton Park near Corby and came across this fine specimen. It made me think of Christmas for some reason.
After several windy days, we had a much calmer day here today with the promise of some warm sunshine to come. Under the circumstances this made it seem like a good day to try to cycle 100km. There is no particular merit in cycling 100km except that it is a nice round number and more interesting than aiming for 62.1371 miles which is the equivalent.
It did require me to get up reasonably early and get going not long after breakfast and I managed both these things, though the 'not long' part was a bit elastic. I even managed to have a look round the garden before I left, enjoying the fact that the flowers were standing comparatively still today.
It was cloudy when I left home and there was still enough wind about to make cycling into it a slow business for an old man, but all the same I was in the mood to enjoy a leisurely ride and the touches of autumn colour that I saw on my way to the wind farm to check on progress.
The autumn colour was good...
...but progress on putting the blades on the new tower at the windfarm was non existent so I pedalled on towards Eaglesfield, stopping beside the Kirtle Water...
... for half a banana and a KitKat.
From Eaglesfield, I pedalled up to Ecclefechan just to have the wind behind me for a couple of miles for a break, and then headed to Hoddom Cross, where I stopped at the ruined church.
The contrast between the old burned out church and the still very much in use graveyard is striking.
Juts for the sake of pedalling up a road which I have never used before, I went up past Knockhill, where Mrs Tootlepedal used to help out with the equestrian driving for the disabled, passing this example of the traditional local housing style on my way.
The diversion only added a couple of miles to my trip to Hoddom Bridge which spans the River Annan.
The nearside bank is awash with Himalayan Balsalm.
Having reached the River Annan, I followed its general course down to the town of Annan, but instead of going into the town, I turned right and went along the coast of the Solway as far as Powfoot. I met a more modest bridge there...
Powfoot is on the shore of the Firth but you would hardly have known it today. As always seems to be the case when I visit the seaside, the sea was out, far out, and it was very hazy so that not only could I hardly see the sea, but I could hardly see the scenery either.
I took some pictures as I ate a honey sandwich and the other half of that banana for my lunch.
The I pedalled on through a caravan park and onto the flat lands beside the firth. I was on very narrow roads, but traffic was light so I was able to stop to appreciate these fine cattle.
.before getting to the little village of Ruthwell, famous as the home of the world's **first savings bank.** The building is now a museum. https://www.savingsbanksmuseum.co.uk/
I have often cycled past it without going in, and as the museum is currently closed because of the virus, I did so again today.
I cycled through the village and then turned for home, using the old main road from Dumfries to Annan.
I was on flat roads with the wind behind me, so I made good progress back to Annan and on to Gretna and Longtown. Somewhere along the way, I stopped for another half banana and a bit of another honey sandwich and noticed an umbellifer covered in what I thought were big flies. Putting the picture on the computer when I got home, I found that the 'big flies' were in fact small moths.
I have never seen this before.
When I got to Longtown, I took the opportunity to go into the bike shop and remind them that they had promised some time ago to find me a new pair of pedals for my bike. They promised to check whether they had found me some, and I cycled home through Canonbie without stopping for any more pictures.
At 63.83 miles, the route was slightly over my intended 100km but in every other way, it had been a very satisfactory sightseeing outing. Those interested may click on the map for further details. My nutrition is scientifically calculated and consisted of two bananas, two honey sandwiches, two fingers of KitKat, two fifths of an apple and two dates.
As it turned out, the ride was not the high spot of the day. What made the day exceptional was finding the garden was full of butterflies when I got home. Small tortoiseshells and red admirals were everywhere and there were even occasional peacocks too...
...and if a flower didn't have a butterfly (or two) on it, it had a bee or hoverfly.
The sedum had really come into its own in the warm sunshine. I counted fourteen butterflies on its various flowers as well as many other insects at the same time. I realise that this doesn't quite match the millions of migrating monarch butterflies on the other side of the Atlantic, but it is still a lot for Langholm.
Other flowers were busy too. I don't think I have seen so many small tortoiseshells in the garden before.
Mrs Tootlepedal was out when I got home but she had been busy in the garden while I was away, first having coffee with Margaret and then rooting our more of the box hedge. She has got so much stuff to get rid of that she has booked a slot at the council waste disposal site for tomorrow. (I just mention this to annoy a reader down south who is going to have to wait several weeks to get the first available slot at his dump.)
When she got home, we sat on the bench in the garden enjoying a perfect late summer afternoon as butterflies flitted around us.
I got my macro lens out and had another go at the butterflies and bees.
.and some flowers too.
The day continued with a quick look at the birds...
.and a sibling Zoom meeting where my brother and sisters showed off some of the fine pictures that they have been taking in the good weather down south.
It ended with a meal of spaghetti with meat sauce and a tomato salad.
After our recent spell of indifferent chilly weather, this was a day to relish. Sadly, we are likely to be back to the cooler weather in a day or two, but we certainly enjoyed this late of burst of summer a lot.
After not getting a flying bird of the day yesterday, I got two today. I would normally have been quite pleased with this chaffinch...
...but it has to move aside for a starling, undoubtedly the outstanding candidate for the flying bird of the day today.
tree teachings
I breathe in
the scent of
moist wooded bogs,
crystal lake waters,
baskets of dew
heavy and sweet
soaking heat
through every pore…
note withered leaves
shriveled mosses
and still
the rains do
not come.
The Earth is on Fire.
Stagnant pools
shrunken trunks,
the lack of fruiting bodies
falling leaves
a crisped ground
beneath my feet
remind me
that grief must be
felt with as much
*awareness* as possible
to create the
necessary bridge…
My weeping pine
keeps me mindful –
The Earth is on Fire.
Two thousand year old Redwoods
succumb to flaming
heartwood…
Yet some will live on.
Trees know that
There is nothing they
can do to stop
this holocaust
besides witnessing,
accepting their dying,
leaning into
the Grief of the Earth,
as she yields
to the power of
‘What Is.’
*Working notes: From the personal to the collective*
A few days ago I had to take down a pine tree that I loved. Although I did not do the actual cutting I did make the decision to end the tree’s life, so I am the one responsible. My young friend made the cut, felling the tree in just the right direction; his father who was assisting felt a fierce wind hit his face as the tree slammed into the ground just beside him. Indoors, I shuddered involuntarily even as relief flowed through me like a river. It was over.
This tree cutting was witnessed by “tree people” – three humans who truly love trees. Afterwards, Marcus came to me. “Are you all right?” I choked back an avalanche of tears. Not (at that moment) for the tree, but for me because, like the tree, I too had just been witnessed by this boy’s sensitivity – *For the first time in my 75 years I was not alone with my tree grief*. No other words passed between us but the depth of our feelings united us with each other and that tree. Not a shred of separation. Amazing, and yet so comprehensible.
I felt sorrow over the loss of the tree; but also, strangely, accepting. The next morning I wrote the following:
*Treefall*
*Last night I poured water at the base of the tree as a blessing, gathered herbs to place against her trunk. I lay my hands on rough bark as I spoke … reminiscing about the bear fur I first found scattered around her pine-rooted floor. I told the tree how much I loved the sound of her needles rustling, the intoxicating scent of those that fell to the ground, the “candles” s/he bore in late spring, the masses of pine cones that appeared shortly thereafter. How kindly s/he blocked the heat of the summer sun from the house; how much I loved her. I told her too that I hoped that she would not feel too much pain. I listened then for a response and sensed a stillness; this tree knew what was coming and accepted her dying. There was no answer forthcoming regarding pain… (I called this marked tree a female but all white pines are monoecious meaning that each tree produces male and female cones).*
That was as far as I got.
An email came in from Marcus a few minutes later that addressed my question: did he feel that trees experienced pain?
What follows is his response.
*“In my experience, I have found that trees certainly do feel pain. The difficulty is in understanding it because the pain the trees feel is only knowable at a visceral level in our bodies. The pain in my body is the tree‘s pain. The tough part is that because that pain is in my body, it gets mixed up with my own feelings of loss, which makes it immensely challenging to sort through. However, a few weeks ago when I had to cut down an apple tree that was being destroyed by tent caterpillars the separation of this pain was discernible. Once the tree was gone there was an immense release of pain in my body. But even so I still carried the sadness of the tree’s loss…I spent so much time getting to know that apple tree that I could feel it drowning in its own sap because it could no longer photosynthesize. Yesterday was different. I could feel the tree and the split but couldn’t communicate with it as well…I was so nervous and stuck in my own place (we all were nervous because the tree was 167 feet tall). But what I know for certain is that trees accept death much easier than we do… the dying hurts physically but the trees are never scared of death or regretful at what is being left behind. They are much more in touch with the fluidity of their spirituality and with the cyclic nature of life. They understand that death is not an endpoint… Dead trees that have stumps continue to live as they transfer what I think of as their essence, meaning soul, spirit, consciousness to whatever comes next. It is only when the underground network for transference is ripped away that a tree really dies.”*
I should add that Marcus is a nature mystic, though he doesn’t yet know it. A scholarship to Dartmouth left him feeling as if he didn’t belong and after a year he dropped out. Now he cares for his family’s forest, cuts trees when needed, creates magnificent art from dead trees and trains for the Olympics. He is 21 years old.
It stuns me that someone who is 50 years younger than I am could be such a powerful teacher, friend, and the first person I have ever known that feels the way I do about trees and can communicate these ideas/feelings on such an embodied level. I adore him.
The following day I learned firsthand about the terrible fires that are ravaging Colorado after talking with a woman who cannot even leave her own house (I have deliberately been avoiding the news).
That night I had a catastrophic dream rife with cultural holocaust elements.
When I awakened that morning I was so sluggish I could barely move. I dragged myself outside and stood quietly by the tree soaking in her dying scent. Pinenes. Tears were seeping into the heartwood from the still living cambium. I thought of the billions of burning, slaughtered trees. I felt helpless and quite stupid. Profoundly depressed, *I knew enough to stay with the grief as I moved through the day*; the trees had taught me well. My body felt like lead. I fell asleep in the early afternoon.
The next morning I awakened refreshed; the collective grief had receded because I *felt* it and didn’t try to hurry it or *twist* my experience into some bizarre form blurring its painful edges with new age ‘gratitude,’ for example. I paved my own way to peace and illumination on a personal level by being with others who truly *loved* trees and allowed themselves to feel their grief as I did – with them and also alone.
It also interests me that as a ‘tree woman’ that I was still called to feel catastrophic tree grief on a collective level just after my personal loss. By avoiding the news (because of Trump) I was also lacking in awareness and knowledge. Our Earth *is* on Fire, trees are dying by the billions, and these beings need to be witnessed, especially by those who are capable of standing it (so many are not and I think this is part of the problem). Blind acceptance of the death of billions of trees seems out of place in this context. Resignation is not an endpoint. *The trees will guide me into whatever comes next*. Of this, I am certain.
Mostly indoors
Today's tall and thin guest picture comes from my sister Mary who passed this tall and thin pub a few days ago. My sister Susan had a meal in it last year and wrote about it in her post, which you can find
We have had generally pretty poor weather since the start of August and that pattern was repeated today with the only alteration being that it was slightly worse than usual with a lot of drizzly rain and a strong wind for most of the day.
Under the circumstances, after a quick visit to the shop on my shopping bike in light rain, I was happy to waste a lot of time doing nothing very much indoors.
As always on a wet day though, there are birds to keep me entertained and when I first looked out, I saw a pigeon....
Pigeons are large and stand still, but because of the wind and rain, I had to keep the window shut today and between that and the poor light, getting crisp shots of smaller moving birds was beyond me. Still, there was a lot to watch.
The feeder was mostly quite busy and chaffinches had to wait their turn in the fake tree.
Sometimes they got a rude welcome when they tried to get a perch but this one managed to peck up a seed and make off with it...
Sometimes greenfinches passed serenely by...
At one time, it all got too much to record individually...
...but at other times, it was more peaceful (though the greenfinch still didn't look happy).
Looking at the river when I got to it..
..you would not have believed what a miserable day it had been only a few minutes earlier.
When I got down to the Kilngreen, the ducks certainly thought that this was good weather for ducks...
.but a sinuous bench looked as though the wet weather has been getting to it a bit.
I didn't have a lot of time to spare for my walk so rather than hang about looking for things to look at, I just toddled along enjoying the sunshine....
.noting easily observable signs of the changing season...
.and some of the fine selection of plants growing out of the Scholar's Field wall.
I passed Liz's garden on my way home and was impressed by her Russian vine.
The sun was still out as I went through our gate and the nasturtiums gave me a cheerful welcome home smile.
I had taken a picture of a dahlia as I set out on my walk and I took another one when I got back. It will take quite a bit more fine weather before they begin to dry out.
The flying bird of the day is one of those hopeful chaffinches.
Readers’ wildlife photos
Please send your photos in, as to keep this feature going I need seven contributions per week. We don't want to lose our beastie pics, right?
Today we have diverse photos from reader Dave Campbell, whose notes and IDs I've indented:
Here are some photos to replenish the cache with accompanying text. I tossed in a photo with a connection to Charles Darwin and a gratuitous reference to a fictional rabbit from Brooklyn.
**Eastern Spadefoot Toad** (*Scaphiopus holbrookii*). In June, Tropical Storm Cristobal dumped five to six inches of rain on us and the following night the spadefoot toads came out. They spend most of their lives buried underground waiting for heavy downpours. Immediately following the rain they emerge for a few days and eat and mate and then burrow back underground to wait for the next rain. I live on a high sandridge that is usually pretty dry so the emergence of these amphibians is a major event for us. The adults look like little porcelain frogs with beautiful eyes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphiopus_holbrookii
*Three weeks after the adult was photographed my property was overrun by thousands of spadefoot toadlets, sometimes as many as 20 per square meter. 21 days after the adults emerged the next generation is fully metamorphosed and hunting on dry land. They are tiny, only about three to four millimeters long (those little white things are sand grains). We were still seeing them three week later but the numbers decline rapidly.*
***Vermilion Flycatcher*** *(Pyrocephalus obscurus). The vermilion flycatcher is a western bird but one or two seem to take a wrong turn at Albuquerque every year and wind up in the Florida panhandle. This male showed up at St. Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge southeast of Tallahassee, Florida last November and set up shop at the first roadside pulloff after entering the refuge marshes. The first description of the vermilion flycatcher was made by John Gould based on a specimen collected by Charles Darwin in the Galapagos* https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Vermilion_Flycatcher/id
***Tricolored Heron*** *(Egretta tricolor) Every spring the trees around the boardwalk over the alligator ponds at the Saint Augustine Alligator Farm become a large rookery for hundreds of nesting wading birds. The rookery flourishes because alligators in the ponds below prevent predators like raccoons from reaching the nests. Photographers flock to the boardwalks over the alligator ponds for a chance to capture images of the birds at very close range. The gators get the occasional careless hatchling which bothers some of the tourists but I have never seen anyone jump off the boardwalk to effect a rescue. This bird is reacting to the approach of its mate* https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/tricolored_heron
***Ebony Jewelwing*** *(Calopteryx maculata) Photographed along a stream in the state forest near my home. The metallic exoskeletons have structural colors that change from blue to green to blue as the angle of incidence of light changes. They are common along wooded streams. Damselflies are my favorite insects both because they are beautiful and because they eat mosquitoes.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebony_jewelwing
***Brown Pelican*** *(Pelecanus occidentalis). Immature bird on short final for landing photographed at Bottom Road near St. Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. Notice how individual flight feathers are manipulated to maximize lift in slow flight, not unlike the slats and flaps on airplanes.* https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Brown_Pelican/id
**Ghost Crab** (*Ocypode quadrata*). Photographed at Long Point Park on the Florida Gulf Coast. This young one paused at the entrance to its burrow just long enough for me to record it for posterity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_crab
***Sanderling*** *(Calidris alba). Sanderlings are common, conspicuous, and entertaining shorebirds. They race along the beach, following the edge of advancing and receding waves like little clockwork toys. This bird is in fall plumage, a study in white and gray, and ignored the humans as it ran back and forth.* https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/sanderling
***Paper wasp*** *(Polistes carolina) feeding on a* ***monarch butterfly*** *(Danaus plexippus) larva. Not long ago, another photographer who had submitted images wondered what happened to some of the monarch larva. This is one likely answer. Our first brood last spring had an adult emergence rate in the high ninety percent range. The second brood, mostly offspring of the first one, had a success rate from first instar to adult in single digits. The difference was at least three species of Polistes that found my milkweed patch and chowed down on larvae and two pupae. Last fall I found* ***bald-faced hornets*** *(Dolichovespula maculata) feeding on monarch larvae as well.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polistes_carolina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald-faced_hornet
Spot the wood frog
Something to help pass the time as we continue in this pandemic twilight zone. While walking through a wooded area of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in northern New Jersey this morning, I spotted an adult Wood Frog (*Lithobates* *sylvaticus*) in the leaf litter (it jumped or I never would have noticed it). I only had my iPhone at the time, and took a few photos. Not sure if it’s sharp enough for use, but thought it might make a good “spot the critter” photo. The original file size is a bit more than 6 Mb, which I can send along if you would like - but this attachment is smaller in size (but will not be as sharp if enlarged).
Click to enlarge. This one is rated "quite hard". The reveal will be at 11 a.m. Chicago time. Please don't post the answer in the comments!
Building on Survival Skills
The weather has cooled down quite a bit with this past week’s rains and the arrival of a Canadian cold front. Our three orphaned fawns have enjoyed the respite from the blazing sun and stifling humidity of summer. During those hot days in June and all through August, the fawns took advantage of the cooler temperatures of early morning and late evening for romps and play in the deer pen. Not having had three little deer at one time in the pen other years, it has been interesting to see their personalities and skills develop. Yet as a small herd, they are very much a close-knit group, and do most everything together
https://youtu.be/5LESQ7XWhvI
https://youtu.be/6bC8S1YPceA
https://youtu.be/nhpETCeWo80
Having expanded the deer pen over the years and creating a better habitat for orphaned fawns with good brush and cover plants to mimic a wild scenario, I thought we were well-prepared to take on three little deer. So far, it has been enough space for them, but I wonder about the next four months until their release. Ruthie, the youngest of the trio will be three months old on September 15th. As personalities become more marked and individual physical abilities develop, it will be interesting to see if the pen provides ample space and enough landscape diversity to keep them interested and stimulated in their surroundings. But for now, we can only observe and make adjustments as we move day-by-day through this adventure.
Andrew sullivan
Andrew Sullivan has devoted a lot of the last two editions of *The Weekly Dish* to the genetics of intelligence, perhaps because he's taken a lot of flak for supposedly touting *The Bell Curve* and the genetic underpinnings of IQ. Now I haven't read *The Bell Curve*, nor the many posts Sullivan's devoted to the genetics of intelligence (see the long list **here**), but he's clearly been on the defensive about his record which, as far as I can see, does emphasize the genetic component to intelligence. But there's nothing all that wrong with that: a big genetic component of IQ is something that all geneticists save Very Woke Ones accept. But as I haven't read his posts, I can neither defend nor attack him on his specific conclusions. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/my-record-on-race-and-iq
I can, however, briefly discuss this week's post, which is an explication and defense of a new book by Freddie DeBoer, ***The Cult of Smart***. (Note: I haven't read the book, either, as it's just out.) You can read Sullivan's piece by clicking on the screenshot below (I think it's still free for the time being): https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Smart-Education-Perpetuates-Injustice/dp/1250752043
The Amazon summary of the book pretty much mirrors what Sullivan says about it:
. . . no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In *The Cult of Smart,* educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability.
Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place.
There are several points to "unpack" here, as the PoMos say. Here is what Sullivan takes from the book, and appears to agree with:
1.) Intelligence is largely genetic.
2.) Because of that, intellectual abilities "cannot be dramatically improved".
3.) Because high intelligence is rewarded in American society, people who are smarter are better off, yet they don't *deserve* to be because, after all, they are simply the winners in a random Mendelian lottery of genes fostering high IQ (I will take IQ as the relevant measure of intelligence, which it seems to be for most people, including Sullivan).
4.) The meritocracy is thus unfair, and we need to fix it.
5.) We can do that by adopting a version of communism, whereby those who benefit from the genetic lottery get taxed at a very high rate, redistributing the wealth that accrues to them from their smarts. According to DeBoer via Sullivan,
For DeBoer, that means ending meritocracy — for “what could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?” It means a revolutionary transformation in which there are no social or cultural rewards for higher intelligence, no higher after-tax income for the brainy, and in which education, with looser standards, is provided for everyone on demand — for the sake of nothing but itself. DeBoer believes the smart will do fine under any system, and don’t need to be incentivized — and their disproportionate gains in our increasingly knowledge-based economy can simply be redistributed to everyone else. In fact, the transformation in the economic rewards of intelligence — they keep increasing at an alarming rate as we leave physical labor behind — is not just not a problem, it is, in fact, what will make human happiness finally possible.
If early 20th Century Russia was insufficiently developed for communism, in other words, America today is ideal. . .
Sullivan adds that the moral worth of smart people is no higher than that of people like supermarket cashiers, trash collectors, or nurses. (I agree, but I'm not sure that smart people are really seen as being more *morally* worthy. They are seen as being more deserving of financial rewards.")
6.) Sullivan's says that his own admitted high intelligence hasn't been that good for him, and he doesn't see it as a virtue:
For me, intelligence is a curse as well as a blessing — and it has as much salience to my own sense of moral worth as my blood-type. In many ways, I revere those with less of it, whose different skills — practical, human, imaginative — make the world every day a tangibly better place for others, where mine do not. Being smart **doesn’t make you happy**; it can inhibit your **sociability**; it can cut you off from others; it can generate a lifetime of insecurity; it is correlated with **mood disorders and anxiety**. And yet the system we live in was almost designed for someone like me. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150413-the-downsides-of-being-clever https://www.businessinsider.com/downsides-of-being-smart-2016-7#you-might-not-learn-the-value-of-hard-work-3 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-highly-intelligent/
This smacks a bit of humblebragging, but I'll take it on face value. It's still quite odd, though, to see a centrist like Sullivan, once a conservative, come out in favor of communism and radical redistribution of wealth. So be it. But do his arguments make sense?
Now Sullivan's emphasis on the genetic basis of intelligence is clearly part of his attack on the extreme Left, which dismisses hereditarianism because it's said to imply (falsely) that differences between groups, like blacks and whites, are based on genetic differences. It also implies (falsely) that traits like intellectual achievement cannot be affected by environmental effects or environmental intervention (like learning). Here Andrew is right: Blank-Slateism is the philosophy of the extreme left, and it's misguided in several ways. Read Pinker's book *The Blank Slate* if you want a long and cogent argument about the importance of genetics.
But there are some flaws, or potential flaws, in Sullivan's argument, which I take to be point 1-5 above.
First, intelligence is largely genetic, but not *completely* genetic. There is no way for a given person to determine what proportion of their IQ is attributable to genes and how much to environment or to the interaction between the two: that question doesn't even make sense. But what we can estimate is the proportion of variation of IQ among people in a population that is due to variation in their genes. This figure is known as the *heritability of IQ,* and can be calculated (if you have the right data) for any trait. Heritability ranges from 0 (all variation we see in the trait is environmental, with no component due to genetics) to 1 (or 100%), with all the observed variation in the trait being due to variation in genes. (Eye color is largely at this end of the scale.)
A reasonable value for the heritability of IQ in a white population is around 0.6, so about 60% of the variation we see in that population is due to variation in genes, and the other 40% to different environments experienced by different people as well as to the differential interaction between their genes and their environments. That means, first of all, that an appreciable proportion of variation in intelligence is due to variations in people's environments. And that means that while the IQ of a person doesn't change much over time, if you let people develop in different environments you can change their IQ in different ways—up or down. IQ is not something that is unaffected by the environment.
Related to that is the idea that a person's IQ is not fixed at birth by their genes, but can be changed by rearing them in different environments, so it's not really valid to conclude (at least from the summary above) that "academic potential cannot be dramatically improved". Indeed, Sullivan's summary of DeBoer's thesis is that the difference in IQ between blacks and whites (an average of 15 points, or one standard deviation) *is not due to genes, but to different environments faced by blacks and whites*:
DeBoer doesn’t explain it as a factor of class — he notes the IQ racial gap persists even when removing socio-economic status from the equation. Nor does he ascribe it to differences in family structure — because parenting is not that important. He cites rather exposure to lead, greater disciplinary punishment for black kids, the higher likelihood of being arrested, the stress of living in a crime-dominated environment, the deep and deadening psychological toll of pervasive racism, and so on: “white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it’s irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it in our investigations of the racial achievement gap.”
Every factor cited here is an environmental factor, not a genetic one. And if those factors can add up to lowering your IQ by 15 points, on what basis does DeBoer conclude (with Sullivan, I think), that you cannot improve IQ or academic performance by environmental intervention? Fifteen points is indeed a "dramatic improvement", which according to DeBoer, we'd get by simply letting black kids grow up in the environment of white people. (I note here that I don't know how much, if any, of that 15-point difference reflects genetic versus environmental differences; what I'm doing is simply asserting that even DeBoer notes that you can change IQ a lot by changing environments.)
Further, what you do with your intelligence can be further affected by the environment. If you're lazy, and don't want to apply yourself, a big IQ isn't necessarily going to make you successful in society. So there is room for further improvement of people by proper education and instilling people with motivation. This doesn't mean that IQ isn't important as a correlate of "success" (however it's measured) in American society—just that environmental factors, including education and upbringing, are also quite important.
What about genetic determinism and the meritocracy? It's likely that many other factors that lead to success in the U.S. have a high heritability as well. Musical ability may be one of these, and therefore those who get rich not because they have high IQs, but can make good music that sells, also have an "unfair advantage". What about good looks? Facial characteristic are highly heritable, and insofar as good looks can give you a leg up as a model or an actor, that too is an unfair genetic win. (I think there are data that better-looking people are on average more successful.) In fact, since nobody is "responsible" for either their genes or their environments, as a determinist I think that nobody really "deserves" what they get, since nobody chooses to be successful or a failure. Society simply rewards those people who have certain traits, and punishes those who have other traits. With that I don't have much quarrel, except about the traits that are deemed reward-worthy (viz., the Kardashians).
This means, if you take Sullivan and DeBoer seriously, we must eliminate not just the meritocracy for intelligence, but for *anything*: musical ability, good looks, athletic ability, and so on. In other words, everybody who is successful should be taxed to the extent that, after redistribution, everyone in society gets the same amount of money and the same goods. (It's not clear from Sullivan's piece to what extent things should be equalized, but if you're a determinist and buy his argument, everyone should be on the same level playing field.)
After all, if "the smart don't need to be incentivized", why does anybody? The answer, of course, is that the smart do need to be incentivized, as does everyone else. The failure of purely communist societies to achieve parity with capitalistic ones already shows that. (I'm not pushing here for pure capitalism: I like a capitalistic/socialistic hybrid, as in Scandinavia.) And I wonder how much of Sullivan's $500,000 income he'd be willing to redistribute.
If you think I'm exaggerating Sullivan's approbation of communism, at least in theory, here's how he ends his piece, referring to his uneducated grandmother who cleaned houses for a living.
My big brain, I realized, was as much an impediment to living well as it was an advantage. It was a bane and a blessing. It simply never occurred to me that higher intelligence was in any way connected to moral worth or happiness.
In fact, I saw the opposite. I still do. I don’t believe that a communist revolution will bring forward the day when someone like my grandmother could be valued in society and rewarded as deeply as she should have been. But I believe a moral revolution in this materialist, competitive, emptying rat-race of smarts is long overdue. It could come from the left or the right. Or it could come from a spiritual and religious revival. Either way, Freddie DeBoer and **this little book** are part of the solution to the unfairness and cruelty of it all. If, of course, there is one. https://amzn.to/2Fjh0Qv
Let's forget about the "spiritual and religious revival" (**I wrote about that before**), and realize that what we have here is a call for material equality, even if people aren't morally valued as the same. And why should we empty the rat-race just of smarts? Why not empty it of everything that brings differential rewards, like writing a well-remunerated blog? In the end, Sullivan's dislike of extreme leftism and its blank-slate ideology has, ironically, driven him to propose a society very like communism https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/09/05/my-unpublished-comment-on-the-weekly-dish/
Stunning volcanic eruptions filmed in real time
Here we have some pretty amazing shots of the Ecuadorian volcano **Reventador** erupting between January 5 and 7 of this year, and filmed by **Martin Rietze**. It's quite active, and there are two sites reporting the activity (**here**, and a better one **here**). The curious thing is that, as the second site reports, January 2020 wasn't a particularly active time—even though there were daily explosions! From the second site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reventador https://www.boredpanda.com/volcanic-lightning-martin-rietze/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/reventador/news.html https://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=352010
Volcanism in January 2020 was relatively low compared to the other months of this reporting period. Explosions continued on a nearly daily basis early in the month, ranging from 20 to 51. During 5-7 January incandescent material ejected from the summit vent moved as block avalanches downslope and multiple gas-and-steam and ash plumes were produced (figures 120, 121, and 122). After 9 January the number of explosions decreased to 0-16 per day. Ash plumes rose between 4.6 and 5.8 km altitude, according to the Washington VAAC.
Here's the location:
. . and the YouTube notes, showing it in real time, but during several periods. The noise is amazing, as are the lava flows. At 45 seconds in, you can see the shock wave spreading through the atmosphere before the big blow.
Reventador volcano, Ecuador. Activity documented between 5.-7.Jan.2020. Filming in real time (including nighttime with near full moon). Rare highres material showing vulcanian and strombolian with volcanic lightning and shockwave. Now with real sound! Filmed from observation point in 4,5km distance east of the main summit cone.
If you film it, it's about 11 seconds from the visible explosion to the sound, or a bit less than 4 km of distance, comporting with the description, though the sound probably started before the large eruption
FOWC with Fandango: Replace
This used to be the local railway station in the village. Admittedly it was many years ago, before my time in the village. I can hardly believe that this little house was enough to house the waiting passengers, but things change. The little building is still there, no longer used, just a memory in time. It has often been sprayed and the paint removed again.
Of course the new station is something completely different, but the old one remains. There are some things that are irreplaceable.
Big new British monument to answered prayers
As Britain races towards secularism faster than the U.S., the faithful are making their last stands. One such stand is this Mobius strip of a memorial slated to be started next spring in Coleshill, near Birmingham. As this article in *The Times* explains, it's to be called "The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer", and it's *huge*. (Of course, an Eternal Wall of *Unanswered* Prayer would be much, much larger!)
Here's how big it is:
At 169ft tall, the monument will be just a few inches shorter than Nelson’s Column in London but almost three times the height of the Angel of the North, Anthony Gormley’s 66ft-high steel structure in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.
It's a big 'un! It was envisioned by Richard Gamble, former chaplain of the Leicester City football club, who had a revelation to build it. He began a crowdfunding campaign had an international competition to design it, and then crowdfunded the construction. It'll contain a gazillion answered prayers (actually, about a million).
Each brick in the wall will be associated with a Christian prayer and feature a unique code that can be read with a smartphone app. Visitors can use their phones to learn about the prayers individuals feel were answered, as well as the personal stories behind them. For bricks out of reach, the app can zoom in on a map of the monument.
Gamble, 51, and a team of volunteers have been collecting people’s testimonies online since 2018, noticing a surge in messages during the pandemic.
“Until this year it had been a small trickle,” he said. “But then it started accelerating. During lockdown it went mad.”
They need £9.35 million to finish it off, but, you know, God will provide; all you have to do is pray. So far God has prompted the faithful to **ante up nearly £6 million**. And you can submit answered prayers **here**. https://www.eternalwall.org.uk/ https://www.eternalwall.org.uk/testimony
It's curious that God decided to answer more prayers during the lockdown (were more people were praying?), but the one prayer he didn't answer was "God, please make this pandemic disappear." But of course He works in mysterious ways, and one of those ways is killing off lots of innocent people.
The article gives examples of some of the prayers that will appear on the bricks:
The apparent miracles people have shared range from the dramatic to the mundane.
One person wrote about how their baby daughter had been rushed to hospital with a brain haemorrhage but survived and is now a healthy five-year-old. A doctor told a story about how, after 20 minutes kneeling in prayer, he and his team were sent a delivery of personal protective equipment that had been cancelled. Others also talked about mending difficult relationships and overcoming serious illnesses.
At the other end of the spectrum, one person explained how they had managed to have an “impossible meeting” with a dentist while suffering a swollen gum during lockdown.
“God is sooooooooooo good! He listens to our hearts’ cry,” they wrote.
But God is also sooooooo bad! He's killed a million people in this pandemic, and he could have stopped it. At any rate, there's been some discussion about "inclusivity"—not racial inclusivity but religious inclusivity. Not all religions are Christian, so they'll be an exhibit inside about how adherents to other faiths pray.
I still think the humanists should build an Eternal Wall of Unanswered Prayers nearby, but to make its point it would have to be larger than this one, and that would cost too much.
@craigy
