I went to the Monarch Grove this afternoon. That’s the little grove in (brace yourself for another “grove”) Pacific Grove, very near Point Pinos and the lighthouse, where migrating Monarch butterflies gather for a rest on the trip. It’s very cool.

They’ve moved to the other side of the path. They used to clump in some trees on the south side of the path, but now they clump in a Monterey Pine on the north side.

After looking at them there through the binoculars for awhile I took the docent’s advice and went down the little hill where she said they were fluttering around, and so they were, as well as perching singly on pine trees and a bottle brush tree.

They’re butterflies. Butterflies. Fragile as kleenex, and they fly thousands of miles.

Wonderful life.

It turns out the gangrape of Jyoti Singh Pandey was as much her fault as it was the rapists’. A self-declared “spiritual guru” called Asaram Bapu says so.

Addressing his followers recently, Asaram said that when the girl encountered six drunk men “she should have taken God’s name and could have held the hand of one of the men and said I consider you as my brother and should have said to the other two ‘Brother I am helpless, you are my brother, my religious brother.’

She should have taken God’s name and held their hands and feet…then the misconduct wouldn’t have happened.” [Read more…]

Sixteen years ago, in India, there was an extended gang-rape…by 42 men, to be exact, over a period of 40 days.

In the Suryanelli case, a 16-year-old was abducted by a bus conductor who raped her, then passed her onto others, some of who were powerful and well-connected in Kerala at the time.

She was then discarded with no money and in no condition to return home – she couldn’t sit or stand because of her injuries. [Read more…]

Oy. I saw some of this on Twitter yesterday, but was too disgusted and short on time to say anything about it beyond Twitter. But Stephanie said anything, and said it damn well.

Summary: Greta bought a pair of dress shoes for professional occasions. Can you guess what came next? [Read more…]

Update: I changed the title. It was meant as angry irony, but – well I can see why it didn’t work.

And in Uttar Pradesh – a teenage girl resists “eve teasing” and the guy who was “eve teasing” her, i.e. demanding sex from her, throws kerosene on her and sets her on fire.

She died.

The girl, who suffered nearly 90 per cent burns, was rushed to the District Hospital and later she was referred to Aligarh Medical College for better treatment. [Read more…]

The barmaid asks Mo a crucial question.

And wham, he falls into her trap.

A very wise guy said on Twitter a few hours ago –

The desire to carve up the world into people-like-us (righteous) and people-like-them (unrighteous) is utterly pervasive. Nobody escapes it.

Yes. (Or almost yes. I wonder if it holds for psychopaths? They simply don’t care about righteous/unrighteous, so they wouldn’t carve up the world that way, would they? For them it’s just Self and everything else.) Yes, but – that desire isn’t always salient. It’s far from always salient. It depends. [Read more…]

The NY Times has an editorial on abuse in religious groups.

 the truth is, there are not two kinds of religions — the enlightened and the medieval. Every religion has evildoers stalking its corridors. They just survive, and thrive, with different strategies.

Take Zen Buddhism, the paragon of open, nonhierarchical spirituality. [Read more…]

Carmel beach again this afternoon, but a completely different kind of day – it’s cloudy, and it was very windy there. It was fantastic! Dramatic, and turbulent, and beautiful – also, oddly enough, more conducive to lingering. On a sunny day it actually gets glarey after awhile. No glare today, so I was able to walk all the way north on the beach, where it’s directly below the Pebble Beach golf course. You have the beach, and then these bluffs rising sharply out of it, and on top of the bluffs is the course.

I can see a surfer from here. [looks through binoculars] Gosh, the surfer is using a paddle. I didn’t know they did that. It looks like lousy surf – practically flat.