I try not to abuse my soapbox here by proselytizing too often, given that this is a topic on which hordelings have deeply divided points of view. But sometimes a warning is just far too important not to share.
I’m not moralizing here. What you do with your own body is between you, your conscience, and your connection. But an informed choice is always the best choice. I urge you to pay close attention to this Public Service Announcement.
It’s been a stressful couple of weeks for me, and I know it has been for a lot of you as well. I thought we could all use a little help as we head into the week to focus inward, let the stress dissipate, and get generally get grounded. So here’s a relaxation video via Ron Sullivan.
I feel more serene already.
If you’ve heard any history of the California desert at all, you’ve likely heard of the Owens Valley Water War.
Here’s the canonical version of that War: The Owens Valley is watered by runoff from the immense snowfall from the Sierra Nevada to its west, much of which runs into the Owens River when it melts. The Owens Valley is an endorrheic basin: it has no outflow. The Owens River never reaches the ocean. Instead, it flows into Owens Lake, in the valley’s lowest point at its south end.
Late in the 19th Century a thriving network of agricultural communities was developing due to the river’s water, growing a vibrant local economy along with their crops. Enter the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, led by engineer William Mulholland. DWP quietly bought up water rights throughout the Owens Valley in a series of deceptive land deals, then built a 223-mile aqueduct to bring Owens River water to Los Angeles. The aqueduct was finished in 1913 — 100 years ago this November — and farms started going out of business in the decade after. Owens Valley farmers dynamited parts of the aqueduct in 1924, but the rebellion was short-lived. Owens Lake, which had been a rich habitat for waterfowl, dried up and is now the single largest point source of particulate matter pollution in the U.S.
As canonical histories go, it’s pretty accurate. Or at least more accurate than the version a lot of people have in their heads due to the film Chinatown, which was based on the Owens Valley story. But it’s a woefully incomplete history nonetheless. The history of the Owens Valley didn’t start in the late 19th Century. Before the first European settlers arrived there were people living in the Owens Valley for thousands of years. The Owens Valley Paiute took advantage of the relatively well-watered landscape by gathering seeds, hunting the Valley’s abundant game, and — though this hardly ever gets mentioned in any of the formal histories — diverting the water of the Owens River and its tributaries to irrigate their crops.
Journalist Jenna Cavelle wants to correct the canonical history to include the Owens Valley Paiute, who are still very much alive and shaping the valley:
This film documents the history of Paiute Native Americans who constructed 60 miles of intricate irrigation systems in Owens Valley for millennia long before LA secured its largest source of water through modern engineering a century ago. After the Indian War of 1863, surviving Paiute returned to the Valley from the Eastern Sierra and White Mountains to find their ancient waterworks taken over by white settlers. Today, over 150-years later, the Paiute continue to fight to save their waterworks, which are remnant in the Owens Valley landscape, along with water rights the city of LA never granted. PAYA (“water” in Paiute) stands to recover both Paiute history and water rights by increasing awareness through the powerful medium of documentary film.
She’s working to put together a set of resources, centering around a documentary film, before the last remaining Paiute elders who have some tenuous personal knowledge of their ancestors’ irrigation systems aren’t around to document anymore. Here’s Cavelle’s Kickstarter trailer:
She’s halfway to her goal with half her fundraising period left. This project combines history, the California desert environment, and social justice, so you won’t be surprised that I really want to see it happen. I’m scratching together a few bucks to throw Cavelle’s way: maybe you’ll want to as well.
Hey, remember New York Times reporter John Eligon? The one who crafted this bit of drunk-shaming apologetic for a couple of alleged rapist NYPD officers? Eligon’s piece, which followed shortly on the heels of this notorious victim-blaming piece by James McKinley, Jr., helped reinforce the Times‘ reputation as a media bastion of rape culture.
And now he’s done it again, in his profile of rape and sexual assault in Williston, North Dakota:
The rich shale oil formation deep below the rolling pastures here has attracted droves of young men to work the labor-intensive jobs that get the wells flowing and often generate six-figure salaries. What the oil boom has not brought, however, are enough single women.
It turns out, according to Eligon, that scarcity economics applies to that commodity Amanda Marcotte refers to as “vaginal access” [content warning applies]:
I’m really upset. I mean, I’m not in this activism thing for the recognition, but being deliberately excluded like this just gets old. When I woke up, word was going around that some subliterate PUA name of “Roosh,” which probably rhymes with something funny, had compiled what he no doubt considers an exhaustive list of The 9 Ugliest Feminists In America. [Update: we may have killed his server, which, you know. Dang. Here’s the Google cache.] So I went, first thing waking up this morning, to take a look.
Pharyngula is not responsible for broken monitors
Just seeing the title, I was pretty sure I had a lock on at least Mister Congeniality. But no. Despite the inclusion of several of my friends not only was I not included, but there is not a single feminist man in the entire list. I feel so very left out — not to mention offended on behalf of my gender. I mean, come on: look at this photo of yours truly. Tell me seriously I don’t deserve a spot on that list.
And yet, in his bio, the author claims to be all about the menz:
Roosh has been blogging for several years over at RooshV.com about travel and women. He has also authored several books on how to get laid in the United States, South America, and Eastern Europe. He launched Return Of Kings in October of 2012 to serve the needs of masculine men.
I just don’t get it. My needs have not been served here.
It’s worth noting as both observation and trigger warning how quickly the comments devolve into anti-semitism. What a shock that antifeminists can also hate people who aren’t all necessarily women!
Joshua tree, Grand Wash Cliffs in background, Meadview AZ
In the course of writing a piece this week for KCET on the possibly upcoming Joshua tree mating season, I found a paper entitled “Asymmetric hybridization and gene flow between Joshua trees reflect differences in pollinator host specificity,” published in the most recent issue of Molecular Ecology*. You know the feeling you get when your area of expertise gets upended and you have to fit a new, fun piece of information into your worldview? This paper did that for me.
I thought I’d break the news here first: I have incontrovertible evidence against human evolution. To wit: my lungs are persistently filling up with fluid over the last few days. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is pretty much the opposite of what they are allegedly evolved to do. I mean, what possible advantage could that have provided on the savanna? Aside from possibly repelling predators with weaker stomachs. Hear my mighty and productive coughs, o puny lion, and slink away revolted! Or something.
Why did we even bother to lose the gills, again?
This is becoming an annual tradition I’m not so sure I approve of: I was sick last year on my birthday as well. (Yes, today. 53. Thank you.) Last year Annette bought us a room in Tucson to celebrate, and we spent the day enjoying the city and eating lunch with friends, and then by the time we were halfway back to the Coachella Valley I was wracked with fever and hoping for truck stop soup.
I have to say, from the perspective of increasing age, that coughing fits aren’t nearly as fun as they used to be when I was a kid. And dextromethorphan is definitely becoming my least favorite recreational drug ever. Between this and PZ’s nosebleed, you all may want to cover your monitors with dental dams for the next few days. When do the Obamacare Death Panels kick in again? I’ll happily take my Socialist Suicide Pill if they cut it with some codeine.
Anyway, I do have a few interesting things to report that have accumulated over the last few days:
I think that last item means I’m gonna have to get over this goddamn cough the hard way.
Biologist Carl Woese has died of pancreatic cancer at age 84:
Carl and his colleagues wrote two papers published in 1977 that overturned a universally held assumption about the basic structure of the tree of life. They reported that the microbes now known as Archaea were as distinct from bacteria as plants and animals are. Prior to this finding, scientists had grouped Archaea together with bacteria, and asserted that the tree of life had two main branches – the bacteria (which they called prokarya), and everything else (the eukarya). The new discovery added Archaea as a third main branch of the evolutionary family tree.
Woese was one of those guys who overturned a paradigm and became a founder of the succeeding paradigm. And he lived long enough to see the “dogma” he helped establish start to be undermined by new information, like recent suggestions that the common ancestor of all eukaryotes was likely Archaean, thus suggesting that having two main branches of life really does work as a model.
If there’s a better definition of success in a scientific career, I don’t know it.
…was, mostly, having houseguests. And falling behind on my writing, but in a good way. One of the perks of living next door to a National Park is that there’s an easy default option for entertaining friends who come to visit. It’s especially good if that National Park has climbable rocks to allow visiting kids to burn off a little energy.
It took some doing to get out of the house, though, because my guests were birders, and we’ve got some here.
Always make sure your houseguests have better camera equipment than you do.
Via Ron Sullivan, who posted a link on the Great Blue Evil, an amusing story about a visit to Big Bend National Park in which the ranger in residence turns out not to be from around there:
Bob Hamilton 65, is a retired biology teacher and high school principal from Carlisle, Pa. He works six months a year in Big Bend and five more in Yellowstone.
I ask him where he was principal. He says York. I ask what school. He says Dover.
My eyes must’ve been wide as dinner plates. My insides roiled with barely contained glee.
My unexpressed response: No shit!
What I say: “The infamous Dover High School?”
That’s this Dover, the school district in Pennsylvania where creationists pressured the local Board of Education to introduce “Intelligent Design” into the high school biology curriculum in January 2005. Parents sued the Board, which subsequently got its collective ass handed to it in court. The judge’s 139-page opinion on the case called the change in curriculum “breathtakingly inane,” for instance.
Apparently, the inanity was taking people’s breaths for a few years before 2005:
Hamilton, who retired as principal of Dover High School in 2002, stood on the ground floor of Dover’s Intelligent Design era. He saw the storm brewing.
“Don’t quote me on this, but I knew that board was going to get us in trouble,” he said.
There was no doubt I was going to quote him on this. I think he realized this. I hope so, anyway.
“There are great kids in the community,” he says. “The kids in the community in no way reflect the ideas coming out of that school board. None of those people had any connection to the kids.”
According to Hamilton, then-school board president Donald “Daddy” Bonsell used to haunt his office and harangue him on behalf of the burgeoning wingnut conspiracy. Bonsell badgered Hamilton to do his part to get Intelligent Design into the Dover curriculum.
“He came in one day, and finally I told him, ‘OK, I’ll put Intelligent Design into the curriculum … if you start a petition and get all the local ministers in the community to sign it saying they’ll allow the teaching of evolution in Sunday school,’” Hamilton says.
I like the fact that this guy “retired” by continuing to teach kids about science on the National Park Service’s dime. Good for him.
