The Catfish with nine lives

Biologists on a field trip to Suriname discovered to their amazement that the armoured catfish wasn't extinct after all; no, it was alive and well all along, despite mining activity which is usually associated with the mass extinction of species, other than on Navassa Island.

Actually, it seems that driving a species to extinction really is harder than we thought. The armoured catfish turns out to have successfully established itself in creeks throughout the Southern US. Far from hovering on the brink of extinction, it is rapidly increasing its range.

Bad science makes for bad policy.

Modesty and gender

Rob in Kenya writes:
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Where my partner and I were in northern China was VERY cold — we regularly saw our breath inside our apartments from October or so until April. People dressed in layers. What were called “sweater pants” were very common. Our students wore three or four sweaters on top (with a coat over them) and then a pair of knit wool pants (the sweater pants) under their regular pants. Males didn’t wear ties. Most of the Chinese men’s shirts were not designed to be worn with ties — and of course any tie would have been buried under sweaters and a jacket. No girl wore a skirt. She would have been much too cold. A female teacher who wore a skirt would have been looked at as very odd here — and she wouldn’t have appeared terribly “professional” according to our group leaders with pants under a skirt.

But, what was more interesting was that as time passed we eventually learned that for a woman to wear a skirt was considered very daring. It almost made her a “woman of questionable morals”. One female teacher reported that one day, caught up in the desire for spring to come sooner than it was coming, she put on a nice dress to feel better. The reaction she got from her students and fellow teachers was amazing. She was called a “movie star” and basically given multidues of comments about how “dressed up” she was. It was at this point that she started looking around and realizing that women just didn’t wear dresses. Everyone wore the same monotone clothes carefully designed so they would blend into a crowd.

Our group leaders had taught in Beijing where there are numerous foreigners and people are used to seeing them dress in their “foreign” ways so they hadn’t stood out like the teachers did in their “smaller” (if any town can be small in China), more provincial towns. We finally gave up on tryiing to follow their guidelines as we found that to dress “professionally” (according to their standards) was actually separating us from our students — makine them feel we were way above them.

That really drove home to me the fact that it is impossible to make “iron-clad” rules about what is important when it comes to dress. I even heard it said that in China the men wear the skirts (those long robe-like outfits for which I am sure there is a correct name that I don’t know) and the women the pants. That was appropriate clothing in their culture.


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Comments from The White Man:

Dresses, as they are usually worn, aren't necessarily the most modest attire for women. Often associated with "dressing up," they tend to be less modest than what the woman wears around the house, or even to bed. This is not necessary for men; why should it be for women? Try to imagine outfitting your average stage preacher in such a way as to match the modesty level of his wife's stage attire:

1. Take off his socks.
2. Cut his shoes down a ways to show off the bare tops of his feet. Cut around the toes to show them in all their glory.
3. Cut a slit up each leg of his slacks to just above the knee.
4. Put him in sheer not-quite-knee-length boxers that occasionally show through the slits.
5. Take off his tie and put it around his waist, both ends pointing down the middle of his backside.
6. Cut a large V out of the front of his shirt. Remove his undershirt and tie it back around his chest so the top of it shows through the trough of the V.
7. Decorate this exposed area with a string of pearls that ends just out of sight behind the undershirt.
8. Cut a big scoop out of the back of his suit coat and shirt, not quite as far down as the undershirt since this is a stage event and not a formal dinner.
9. Now send him up on the stage and let him preach!

Head Covering and Modesty

Cynthia Gee writes:
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Here in Central PA the Mennonites wear black tights because flesh colored tights or pantyhose look like skin and so are “less modest”. The Amish (there IS a difference) wear flesh-colored tights or pantyhose, because colored stockings are not as “plain” and thus are less modest.

The Mennonites wear flowered dresses because a pattern is thought to distract the eye from the contours of the body and so is more modest than a solid color. The Amish wear solid colored dresses because prints attract attention and thus are less modest than solid colors. (The younger Amish women also wear black bib-aprons that wrap almost all the way around their bodies. Some of them wrap the apron so tightly that they look like they are wearing a spandex dress with contrasting sleeves! 8o )

In the US, some women put their hair up in a bun and cover the bun, because they think that hair is immodest, whereas in Japan, it was once believed that only immodest women showed the ears and the nape of the neck.

And when I was a teenager, women who were on the make and who wanted to attract men would get gussied up in a dress. Pants were considered to be more modest than long skirts, and women who wore skirts when pants would do were show-offs at best, and at worst, they were, well…..

I could go on and on.
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The White Man's comments:

Perhaps a basic black-and white woodland camouflage pattern would work. Oops, no, that would be worldly.

The point is that immodest women can always manage to advertise their wares, no matter what the rules of the culture may be. Certainly the harlots who hung around Jesus were dressed distinctively enough to be readily identified even by those who had never been their customers.

Unfortunately, once rules enter the picture, modesty often goes out the window. No woman really wants to look like a prairie muffin, so the tendency is always to accentuate one's assets in whatever way works. Then other women, who aren't particularly wanting to advertise, fall for peer pressure and wear the same styles just to look nice.

Women in Western (i.e. 'immodest') dress in Saudi Arabia can expect to get their bodies pinched, poked, or groped when they go out in public. We're a bit more refined than that here in the USA, but many women wearing the conservative garb of their order would be shocked to realise the eye candy they are providing some men.

Island of Ignorance

A blog entry of September 27, 2005 reads:

"The Campaign to Defend the Constitution will release a letter on Thursday to all fifty governors signed by Nobel laureates, other leading scientists and scores of clergy, calling on the states to ensure that science classes teach evolution and base curricula on established science, not ideology.

"The Campaign will also release a report highlighting the top ten "Islands of Ignorance" around the country where science education is under attack."

I invite these Leading Scientists to explain to me, if they can, the present proliferation of biodiversity on Navassa Island, located between Haiti and Jamaica. Neglected for centuries after its discovery, Navassa Island was claimed as United States Territory in 1857 by sea captain and phosphate prospector Peter Duncan. For the next forty years, the islands' natural resources were plundered by the Navassa Phosphate Company of Baltimore. Negro miners who were housed, fed, and paid under conditions little better than slavery used pickaxes and dynamite to wrest huge deposits of petrified bird droppings from the island's surface. Then, the mines were abandoned due to the Spanish-American War's disruption of surface traffic. Other than lighthouse keepers and wartime observers, Navassa was to be once again free of resident human contamination.

One hundred years later, an ecological survey of Navassa Island was undertaken under the auspices of the US Department of the Interior, and the scientists on the team found Navassa to be nothing like the ecological wasteland they expected. The island teems with life, from the surrounding reefs to the top of the upper plateau. This expedition

"Yielded the discovery of 250 animal and plants species. They found 15 endemic species, including two lizards. . . previously thought to be extinct. 'We never dreamed that on a single visit the team would so greatly increase our knowledge of the number of species,' said Roger McManus, president of the center. 'Uninhabited islands like Navassa are the very best chance we have to understand and protect the diversity of life in the Caribbean.'"

Now, bearing in mind that this island had been plundered for forty years running, read how the media described it a hundred years after it had been turned back to nature:
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WASHINGTON Aug. 14 (States) -- Attention divers! Are you looking for uncrowded, unspoiled coral reefs with a rainbow of vibrant colors alive with a diversity of plant and animal life?

A team of scientists from the Center for Marine Conservation has found such a place in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, between Haiti and Jamaica.

But there's a catch. The reefs surrounding tiny, uninhabited Navassa Island, two square miles of rocky terrain pockmarked by years of mining operations, are so pristine that U.S. officials are determined to limit public access, lest the destruction of sensitive reefs in other parts of the region and elsewhere be repeated.
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Bear in mind that these "unspoiled coral reefs" are only a few hours by boat from Haiti, and have been continually fished by Haitians throughout the century that Navassa's mines have been abandoned.

Speaking of Haiti, that nation has continued to press its claim to Navassa since 1858, and even incorporates that claim into its 1987 constitution. Navassa is the only piece of disputed territory under the control of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which since taking control in 1996 has declined to issue permits for anyone to visit the island (now a National Wildlife Refuge) for any private purpose whatsoever--despite competing bids from Americans and Hatians to put the phosphate mines back into production.

Protecting a Pristine Paradise? Only a pseudoscientist would say so.

Back to the original question. How is sealing off Navassa Island (less its coral reefs, which continue to be plundered by hungry Haitians) going to protect the endangered species thriving thereon, when 40 years of strip mining did nothing to eliminate them?

Final Resolution of Indiana vs. Grimshaw

As promised, here is the latest, and concluding, chapter in the religious persecution case of Mr. Grimshaw, arrested on a sidewalk outside the Linway Plaza Cinema in Goshen, Indiana for protesting the first showing of "The Da Vinci Code."

At this trial, most of the witnesses were armed with handguns; some of them with electric shock devices. Maybe that wasn't anything particularly unusual, but many other aspects of this trial which was scheduled at the top of the docket for this afternoon at the City Court of Goshen were. In the first place, the defendant refused counsel, preferring to represent himself. The judge admonished him in her opening remarks that he could make objections, but only on the basis of established courtroom decorum, and that as the judge she could not advise him on such; he was on his own. Well, this turned out to be technically, but not actually, the case. He got a little help later on, from an unexpected source.

The first and only objection to be made by parties to the case turned out to be offered by the prosecutor, and it was sustained by the judge. More on that later.

The prosecutor opened the trial by calling as witnesses the police officers who had responded to the call by the manager of Linway Cinema. The first three officers gave stories that pretty well lined up with each other. It was as follows:

The manager of the theater called to report that a group of about seven people, some of them juveniles, led by the defendant were standing on the privately owned sidewalk outside the theater with signs that read "Boycott Blasphemy" and had refused to leave when asked. The police sent an officer, then two more, who finally took the defendant into custody when he refused to leave the private sidewalk that ran along the theater and several other businesses in the plaza, including an Indiana Department of Transportation License Branch office. After being cited and released, he returned alone to the scene of his crime, whereupon he was arrested by the Plaza security guard and taken to the Elkart County Jail for incarceration.

In cross-examination of the first witness, Mr. Grimshaw established that:
-He was not being violent
-He was not obstructing access to the theater
-He was not intimidating any of the customers entering the theater

This was undermined by later testimony of the Cinema owner, who implied that Mr. Grimshaw was a hazard to the safety of the theater. A police detective also testified that she was at the scene, with her squad car, in police uniform (as was her regular practice), but primarily acting in her private capacity as a moonlighting security guard at the theater. She testified that it was she who arrested Mr. Grimshaw the second time and put him in her squad car while awaiting the arrival of more police officers. She stated that Mr. Grimshaw's team was "standing in front of the entry and exit doors," which was further capitalized upon by the prosecutor, who asked the manager if Mr. Grimshaw had asked his permission "to block the doors." The manager also testified that a customer had come into the theater, visibly irate that someone was being allowed to protest the movie on the sidewalk outside. It was at this point that he conferred with the owner and called the police for the first time.

All witnesses emphasized that they had informed Mr. Grimshaw that he was welcome to protest on the public sidewalk on the other side of the Plaza parking lot, but that he had insisted that his business was where the movie was being shown--right in front of the "No Loitering" signs.

In his only effective cross-examination, Mr Grimshaw elicited an admission from the Plaza owner that while protesting along Lincoln Avenue might have provided free publicity, and thus more business for his theater, protesting directly in front of the building interfered with the retail business he was conducting there (it was not brought up in court, but after reading the informative pamphlet that the protest team was distributing (authored by Mr. Grimshaw), one theatergoer decided not to watch the movie and even protested to the management). In response to a question by the prosecution, the manager could not confirm that the theater had suffered any identifiable loss as a result of the protest.

But it was when he attempted to cross-examine the theater manager (son of the Plaza owner) that Mr. Grimshaw ran afoul of the Court Rules. He said something to the effect,
"I appear before a judge today for trespassing. Some day you will appear before the Judge of All the Earth to answer for your trespasses. What will say to Him in your defense when you have to answer for having shown a movie that blasphemes him, just to make money?"

At this point the prosecutor calmly objected that the defendant was speculating about the personal theology of the witness, which had no bearing in the case, and the judge agreed, helpfully explaining to the defendant why this was unacceptable in an American court.

Mr. Grimshaw was then invited to testify in his defense. The essence of his defense was that the prosecutor had done a good job of laying out the facts of the case, and that the police officers had done their job of arresting him very courteously and professionally--a most unusual defense! He went on to state that in fact he offered no defense, but neither would he offer an apology. He further stated his willingness to suffer whatever punishment the judge levied against him.

The prosecutor took advantage of his cross-examination of the defendant to remind the court that Mr. Grimshaw could have carried out his protest in a legal manner, but had chosen not to. Then he began his closing statement.

There was one more objection not very far into it. It all began when the prosecutor began to bring Mr. Grimshaw's motivations into the case, as if they had any bearing on his undisputed guilt. He mentioned Mr. Grimshaw's desire to be "a martyr," thus bringing religious terminology back into a case from which it had already been ejected. But that was not the only ejection to take place in the courtroom this day.

When the prosecutor went so far as to state, "I've seen the Da Vinci Code. I have a copy of it on DVD, and I'm a Christian. . ." one member of the gallery had taken enough. He raised his hand and called out clearly, "OBJECTION! Can you please keep your religion out of this?"

At this unthinkable breach of courtroom decorum, the well-armed bailiff hastened over to the side door and ushered the outspoken observer from the courtroom. He pointed to a chair in the hallway and ordered the observer to sit there, "and if you say another word, you're going to jail. Do you understand?"

The observer must have understood, and furthermore must have preferred to stay out of jail, as he spoke not another word until the court case was concluded.

Meanwhile, back in the courtroom, the prosecutor hastily ended his concluding remarks without any further speculation about theology (his or the defendant's), and the defendant was then allowed to have the last word.

It was brief. Looking right at the prosecutor, he stated,
"You claim to be a Christian. Supposedly, so did Judas Iscariot."
This time there was no objection, and the court ruled the defendant guilty as charged on two counts of criminal trespass.

The prosecutor agreed to immediate sentencing, and at his suggestion a sentence of $50 fine, plus court costs, was handed down, the sentence to be doubled due to the two arrests. It turned out, in total (less suspension), to be only a little more than the "Pre-trial Deferment" agreement that the court had originally offered the defendant nearly a year previous!

One final note here: I call this a Religious Persecution case not because of the legal outcome of the case, but because of the attitude exhibited by all parties to the prosecution: to wit, that blaspheming Christ through a perversion of history and the promotion of a proven hoax is an unassailable form of protected public expression, but objecting to the same in an equally public manner is not only culturally deviant, but punishably criminal. This point was driven home by the prosecutor's pejorative choice of words and the judge's explicit acceptance thereof, with only one lone--and quickly squelched--voice raised in protest of this injustice.

When what used to be considered wrong becomes lawful, sooner or later what used to be considered right becomes unlawful.

It's happening.