Brief but spectacular

More on Judy Heumann's career as a disability rights activist at the BBC.

As a young girl she was a participant at Camp Jered, which is the subject of the film "Crip Camp."  The link has a trailer for the full-length movie, which is excellent.

Miscellaneous humor

Selections from an assemblage at Bored Panda.

Addendum:  An expanded version of the Venn diagram, found by reader Mike Z:

The problems with American political parties

An excellent longread article by Andrew Cockburn in Harper's Magazine reviews the writings of Walter Karp, "a passionate scholar of American political history who offered a bracing antidote to the popular beliefs of his own era."  Here are some salient excerpts:

Karp firmly believed that the actions of party leaders can be explained only if one understands that they are primarily motivated by the pursuit and retention of power; any suggestion that national interest, or even ideology, drives their decisions he considered delusional. Karp once wrote that “we can judge the character of public men only by what they actually do,” which all too often involved betraying the platform that got them elected, almost always to further their own political fortunes. In his estimation, Democrats and Republicans therefore had much in common; by prioritizing their own rule, the two parties operated on a principle of collusion—“for without it neither party organization could long survive.”..

Overall, Karp argued, the enduring goal of our dominant political institutions is to maintain control of the parties, a goal that can supersede even their supposed objective of winning elections. “The whole purpose of party organizations at every political level,” he wrote in his 1973 book Indispensable Enemies, “is to sift out, sidetrack and eliminate men of independent political ambition, men whom the party bosses cannot trust.”.. Those who argued the contrary were suggesting that, regardless of their actions, those in high office are essentially “men of goodwill,” which he deemed a “farfetched theory indeed.”..

On the “left,” one need look no further than the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the body that oversees election efforts for the House of Representatives. ...Its chair, always a Democratic House member chosen by party leadership, selects the DCCC’s executive director and other senior staff. This little-known group exercises immense power in deciding which campaigns receive the party’s blessing...

While the Democrats regularly provide textbook confirmation of Karp’s relevance, the Republicans’ record appears more complicated, given that their insurgency has seemingly triumphed. Mitch McConnell and the establishment he represents have long struggled to quell the mutiny that flowered in the 2010 election and continued through Donald Trump’s presidency. The effort continues to falter, partly thanks to the Democratic establishment’s failure to convict Trump, no matter the production value of the January 6 hearings... Part of the insurgents’ success may be attributed to a factor that Karp did not anticipate: the enabling of dark-money mega-donors, such as the Koch brothers and tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, thereby loosening party control over finances, a vital tool for enforcing discipline. Nevertheless, the beleaguered leadership has done its best to combat what former house speaker John Boehner derides in his memoir On the House as a “freak show” of “lunatics” overly endowed with independent political ambition and difficult to control. ..

The year before, disaffected Republican voters in central Virginia defeated the House majority leader Eric Cantor, an oligarch if ever there was one, in a primary upset. The victor, the conservative college professor David Brat, outspent forty times over by his well-heeled opponent according to some calculations, ran a populist grassroots campaign focused on the federal deficit, opposition to “crony capitalists” in politics, and immigration. Few outside the district had paid much attention. One who did was Donald Trump, who arrived via helicopter at a Brat fundraiser around six weeks before he himself unveiled his presidential run. “Dave Brat is onto something,” he told organizers.

The Republican establishment reacted with fury to the defeat of one of its favorite sons. “They really hated Brat,” recalls a former Republican staffer who requested anonymity, “especially after he was a ringleader in overthrowing Boehner.” In 2016, Brat’s constituency was redistricted, losing Hanover, a Republican county...

Lately, however, a threat to the machine has emerged. In recent elections, Philadelphians have been voting for progressives in both city and state races... To fight the challenge, he garnered hefty financial support not only from his Democratic colleagues, but also from Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass...  “Think about that,” Holbrook said. “The Democratic machine was willing to go to Republican PACs to hold off a progressive challenger.”..

Meanwhile, in this year’s Senate Democratic primary, the [Pittsburgh] city machine endorsed Conor Lamb, a corporate-friendly congressman beloved by the national party. Lamb ran unsuccessfully against John Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor. Fetterman, a Sanders supporter, ran on a progressive social platform, supporting government-funded health care, legalized cannabis, and a reformed immigration system. (Fetterman has dodged attacks from pro-Israel PACs, having promised to “lean in” and strengthen relations with Israel.) His success, as well as Lee’s, surely gives the lie to the mantra that “progressives can’t win.”

I always feel badly about excerpting too much from a source, but there is lots more at the Harper's article.

FWIW, in my view the article is spot-on about the intentions and powers of the major political parties in this country.

A sweet memorial

Park bench in Brighton, via Bored Panda.

A butterfly field trip in Wisconsin

To be clear, this is not how a "typical" afternoon of butterflying goes.  This was filmed at a prime location by an experienced butterfly enthusiast.  But it does give the newbie a sense of what butterflyers do, and might serve as a stimulus for someone to locate and visit their local club, because field trips are great recreational and social experiences.

One more video to share for citizen scientists eager to learn about the subject matter:

Skywriting misadventure (Photoshopped)

Via the Sydney subreddit, with a hat tip to an anonymous reader.  Here is the original:

JWST update

Butterflies of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest

Modern social life

Should boys be routinely "redshirted" in grade school ?

Excerpts from an interesting article in The Atlantic:

The idea of a delayed school start—often referred to as “redshirting,” a term borrowed from athletics—got a burst of popular attention in 2008, when Malcolm Gladwell presented evidence in his book Outliers that children older than their classmates do better on academic tests and in life generally.

The value of a later start, which many teachers and administrators call “the gift of time,” is an open secret in elite circles. And it’s a gift overwhelmingly given to boys. In the past few months, I’ve interviewed dozens of private-school teachers, parents, educational consultants, and admissions officers, largely in the D.C. metro area. I learned that a delayed school entry is now close to the norm for boys who would otherwise be on the young side. One former head of an elite private school who now consults with parents on school choice and admissions told me, “There are effectively two different cutoff dates for school entry: one for boys and one for girls.”..

The reason little boys wear almost all of the red shirts is not mysterious; the fact that boys mature later than girls is one known to every parent, and certainly to every teacher. According to a Rand survey, teachers are three times more likely to delay entry for their own sons than their own daughters. The maturity gap is now demonstrated conclusively by neuroscience: Brain development follows a different trajectory for boys than it does for girls. But this fact is entirely ignored in broader education policy, even as boys fall further behind girls in the classroom.

On almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgrad, boys and young men now lag well behind their female classmates. The trend is so pronounced that it can result only from structural problems. Affluent parents and elite schools are tackling the issue by giving boys more time. But in fact it is boys from poorer backgrounds who struggle the most in the classroom, and these boys, who could benefit most from the gift of time, are the ones least likely to receive it. Public schools usually follow an industrial model, enrolling children automatically based on their birth date. Administrators in the public system rarely have the luxury of conversations with parents about school readiness...

Once boys begin school, they almost immediately start falling behind girls. A 6-percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to an 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade. In a study drawing on scores across the country, Sean Reardon, a sociologist and education professor at Stanford, found no overall gender difference in math in grades three through eight, but a big one in English. “In virtually every school district in the U.S., female students outperformed male students on ELA [English Language Arts] tests,” he writes. “In the average district, the gap is … roughly two-thirds of a grade level.”..

But I believe the biggest reason for boys’ classroom struggles is simply that male brains develop more slowly than female brains—or at least those parts of the brain that enable success in the classroom. The gaps in brain development are clearly visible around the age of 5, and they persist through elementary and middle school. (As Margaret Mead wrote of a classroom of middle schoolers: “You’d think you were in a group of very young women and little boys.”)..

Lastly, they found that the younger classmates of redshirted children suffered no negative consequences. If anything, they wrote, there were modestly positive spillover effects. That’s one reason to believe that girls would only be helped by this shift—having more mature boys in classrooms would likely improve the learning environment. In schools with high rates of delayed school entry for boys, such as the private schools in the D.C. area that I examined, the girls appear to be doing very well...

There is one major drawback: Delaying school entry would put pressure on parents to provide child care for another year. This is no doubt one reason low-income parents are less likely to redshirt their children now. In my view, any large-scale redshirting program would need to be paired with public investments in child care and pre-K. 

That's a long excerpt, but there is lots more info at The Atlantic.

Clearly drinks

Clearly Drinks is a soft drink manufacturer in the U.K.  Via Bored Panda.

What time do Americans eat their evening meal?

Methodology and discussion of results at FlowingData.

Addendum:  data for Europe found by reader Bicycle Rider:

Highly recommended

Via Le Cafe Wittypoots.  DVD requested from our library.  Has any reader seen it?  Care to offer comments?

Addendum Aug 21:  Just watched it tonight.  Absolutely superb acting all around - especially by the young boy (BAFTA-nominated as Best Actor in a Supporting Role for this performance).  Thought-provoking content.  I rated it 4+

Reposted from 2022 to accompany the post on Beau is Afraid.

Watch this even if you don't like soccer

Via my old favorite Le Café Wittypoots.

The Curious Case of the Egg on the Sidewalk

For the past 3-4 years we have had a robin's nest in a small crabapple tree that I walk past every day on the way to the mailbox.  This year I was surprised one morning to find on the sidewalk a perfectly-formed and fully intact baby blue robin's egg. The oddness of the situation lay in the fact that this location was not underneath or even near the nest; it was a good 20-30 feet up the sidewalk.  How did it get to this location?

A few days later when I looked at the nest, I saw not a robin looking back at me, but rather a female cardinal:

Did she evict the egg from the nest?  I can't believe that beak fashioned for cracking seeds could grasp an intact egg.  Some days later I held my cell phone over her empty nest to see what was in it...

I can't identify unfledged baby birds, but suspect that is a young cardinal, since the mother continued to visit that nest.  Meanwhile, the robin (or at least a robin) is now nesting over the security light by the garage door.

And the egg on the sidewalk remains a mystery.  Could it have been laid on the sidewalk in desperation because the nest had been taken by a cardinal?  It sat there for 4-5 days and then disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived.  I'd be glad to hear informed opinions.