SCHOOL’S OUT FOR SUMMER!

Last class today; I’m not giving any finals, but I do have some term papers coming in on Monday evening. I’m wrapping this thing up in short order.

This week my eco devo course has been nothing but student presentation. I encouraged them all to be creative, and one student gave us a grand finale with a song. Here it is!

Hex here! And welcome to “hi I made another song for a school project because I can” 2 electric boogaloo.

Context for the regulars on this channel, the Ecological Development class I’m taking this semester has some rather lax requirements in that like- It has to be 15-20 minutes, but I could do music and such.

So I’m doing a presentation on allergens because I discovered I’m allergic to cats and wanted to know WHY when I’ve been around cats all my life. Sadly, my research didn’t give me any good news, and in fact I might’ve developed worse allergies from being around so many cats for a solid 18 years of my life before spending the past few years in college.

As for this song? Basically me incorporating some of my research into a song that’s basically me being like “WHY AM I ALLERGIC TO CATS WHEN I LOVE THEM SO MUCH???”

Anyways, now onto the classmates who might be watching this. Hello! These aren’t humans singing. They’re vocal synthesizers! The feminine vocal is Mai, and the masculine vocal on the harmonies is Kevin. I had no reason to pick them other than Mai is cute and then Kevin gets used for memes.

If y’all are curious about exploring my channel or commenting, just remember to avoid breeching my privacy when you do. I do not share any of my personal information like my name on this channel for safety reasons.

A frustrating news article

I read this article, “Where seas are rising at alarming speed”, with rising exasperation. Look: the Gulf Coast is slowly drowning at a rate that is now obvious.

It’s great at explaining how the consequences of climate change are harming people right now, and they’re only getting worse, but…WHY is the Gulf Coast in particular experiencing this rapid rise? The article doesn’t say. So I had to look elsewhere, like NASA.

Although the average acceleration of global sea level rise has also increased over the decades, it was mainly due to melting ice in regions like Greenland. For the Gulf Coast, the team used tide-gauge readings and satellite data from NASA missions like GRACE to rule out a few potential causes.

“We checked vertical land motion, for instance, and could relatively quickly say no,” he said. “We looked into the ice-melt component but it couldn’t explain the magnitude of the change that we have seen in that particular area.”

This left them with one other possibility: sterodynamic sea level, or the combination of ocean-water expansion in response to warming, saltiness, and ocean circulation. The team found that beyond Cape Hatteras, this acceleration extended into the North Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea.

But what is the source of this shifting circulation? According to Dangendorf, climate models reveal two factors at play.

“Approximately 40% of the acceleration that we have seen since 2010 can be attributed to man-made climate change, but there’s a residual 60% that we couldn’t explain with climate models,” said Dangendorf.

The remaining percentage was caused by natural wind-driven ocean circulation unique to the Southeast and Gulf Coast, the researchers found.

“It’s a region bounded by the western boundary current, or the Gulf Stream, so that makes it very prone to fluctuations and therefore we can see these massive changes on decadal time-scales,” said Dangendorf.

OK, now I can read the WaPo article without looking for a causal explanation, and truly appreciate how screwed the citizens on our southern coast are. It’s not just that the seas are creeping into their streets and basements, but that there are no practical solutions available — they talk about exorbitantly expensive pumps, but where are they pumping the water to?

Do I need to point out the irony of all those oil refineries on the Gulf Coast that are not being shut down, while proposing to build water pumps (that would probably be driven by coal and oil fired power plants)? That’s not to diminish the tragedy and struggle of all the people who have to deal with these consequences, but to point out that we need to stop thinking about stopgap solutions in the short term.

The University of Minnesota stands down

The encampment on campus has been disbanded. It didn’t require the police, or the National Guard, or any tanks — representatives from the administration met with protesters, listened, and negotiated an agreement.

You can read the negotiated settlement.

I don’t know. For such a ferocious gang of militant radicals, they gave in fairly easily. Most of the administrations concessions are things like allowing students to meet with the board of regents and present some formal demands, or to “explore” new programs, or to disclose more budget information. Meanwhile, the students promise to not disrupt commencement. It’s not very exciting stuff, and mostly just defers actual changes to some later date, maybe.

Other universities should pay attention. The students are actually reasonable, but the university had better follow through.

University of Minnesota grad student Taher Herzallah’s family is from Gaza, and he has lost nine family members due to the violence since October of 2023. “We are prepared to disrupt,” he says in reference to the university keeping its promises.

Bad books

Here’s a short blurb promoting a podcast, If Books Could Kill.

If Books Could Kill focuses mostly on the impact many of these books had on society, and through multiple episodes has broadened their scope to examine how the authors of these books are impacting society in many negative ways. Although it always feels good to hear a bad book eviscerated — there’s a reason we all read the 1-star reviews of our most hated books on Goodreads, right? — hearing the motivations behind these self-help superstars is enough to make you raise your eyebrows. IBCK covers the exploits of Robert Kiyosaki and his years-long real estate grifts, the cringeworthy gender essentialism behind John Gray’s Men Are From Mars series, or the head-scratching evolution of conservative politics after reading William Frank Buckley, Jr.’s 1951 book, God and Man At Yale. And as a listener and a skeptic of self-help generally, it feels so good to understand why exactly these books are so obnoxious.

I remember John Gray from my college years — we had a copy of that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus crap somewhere in the house, getting kicked around but never read. It looked terrible. I wouldn’t be caught dead reading Buckley, and Kiyosaki is one of those investment gurus who endorsed Trump. These aren’t particularly interesting topics to me, but maybe they are to you.

Then it mentions a book by Jonathan Haidt. I’ve met that guy…didn’t like him, but would I be interested in reading his book? No, I don’t think so.

I was personally affected by one of these books. As a high school graduation gift I was given the bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, warning me against the “brainwashing” that I was sure to encounter in university. I read it — I make a note to read every book I am gifted, damn it, it’s the right thing to do — and there was something about it that didn’t feel like it was adding up to me. Surely, I thought, in the midst of all this fearfulness about how my generation is going soft, there had to be something more than punching down on student activists rightfully making their voices heard? To then encounter IBCK discussing exactly why the arguments of the book don’t hold up — such as how it misrepresents recent student protests — are vindicating.

But I was still curious, so I turned to the summary on Amazon. Uh-oh. It was worse than I thought.

Something is going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and afraid to speak honestly. How did this happen?

I’m not afraid to speak honestly, and I’m not walking on eggshells. I think some speakers should be shouted down, or better yet, not even invited on campus. These sound like fictitious problems. They sound like what right-wing Fox News viewers imagine is going on at college campuses. I read further, skeptically.

First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths are incompatible with basic psychological principles, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. They interfere with healthy development. Anyone who embraces these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—is less likely to become an autonomous adult able to navigate the bumpy road of life.

Whoa, what kind of horseshit is this? Their three terrible ideas are not part of any standard educational curriculum I’ve ever encountered.

what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker: Nope. That’s nonsense. I do believe that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is false, but that doesn’t mean their inversion of the cliche is true. In what context is anyone teaching that terrible idea? I don’t know where a discussion of the merits or dangers of exposure to something that almost kills you would come up.

always trust your feelings: Oh hell no. Feelings are valid and feelings matter, but they are also treacherous things that you should be wary of. Test your feelings, maybe? Investigate them? Try to figure out the source of your feelings? This is another Great Untruth that no one is teaching.

life is a battle between good people and evil people: Amazing. You know how every conservative accusation is actually projection? I thought us liberal wimps were all talking about shades of gray and rainbows and rejecting that black-and-white dichotomy. But now Lukianoff and Haidt are saying we explicitly teach it? Madness.

This is just confirming my opinion of Haidt — he’s railing against imaginary dangers. I guess that’s one tactic for drumming up sales.

Another demonstration of the relationship of money and intelligence

In my previous post, I suggested that there was an inverse correlation between intelligence and wealth. Look! I got another data point!

i don’t know who needs to hear this but having children is *literally* free
can we please stop with the “kids are expensive” nonsense?
your lifestyle is expensive, not children
Elon Musk: Exactly

Speaking as a parent, we basically drained our life savings to raise three kids. And that was with public schools and a lower class lifestyle.

Speaking as a biologist, there’s a vast literature on energy budgets and the cost of reproduction.

Children have never been free. Maybe they seem free to billionaires for whom the expenditures on food and nannies and private schools and so forth are a tiny fraction of their ill-gotten wealth, but they really aren’t.

Maybe really rich people think their kept women pop out larvae that scuttle off into the woodwork to forage on pigeons and rodents, only to emerge years later with a magical trust fund, but that doesn’t work for the rest of us.

The Silicon Valley venture capitalists are not all right

There’s a twisted, deformed culture of rich capitalists in California who come up with some of the worst ideas and get lauded for them, and one of the wackiest is a guy named Balaji Srinivasan. You know he’s bad when he’s endorsed by Marc Andreessen.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

So he hates democracy and wants all the rich people to leave the US and establish independent countries (where?) that they can control. If he’s building his own little fiefdom, though, he’s going to need a population to rule over, one that he’s denying any political influence. How will he entice people to join his movement and work for him? He has a vision.

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s building?”

Oh. He’s fantasizing about an authoritarian cult. Raise your hand if you want to put on a gray shirt covered with corporate logos and surrender your autonomy to a pampered class of cops who obey a tiny group of rich boobs!

Is becoming a demented sociopath a prerequisite to becoming rich? It sure seems like it.

Nice anti-Abrahamic rant

Brian Cox (not the astronomer) is an actor who often plays brusque, rude, loud characters, and he’s usually, at least superficially, a bad guy. So of course he turns out to be an atheist in real life.

Now, he’s got some spicy words for the Bible and religion, which he ultimately calls “stupid”—mostly because of the “patriarchal” lens it puts on the world.

“We created that idea of God and we created it as a control issue,” he continued on the podcast. “It’s also a patriarchal issue. That’s how it started and it’s essentially patriarchal. We haven’t given enough scope to the matriarchy and I think we need to move matriarchically.”

“We have to go more towards a matriarchy because the mothering thing is the thing which is the real conditioning of our lives,” he explained. “Our fathers don’t condition us ‘cause they’re too bloody selfish, but our mothers have to because they have an umbilical [cord],” he said, adding that women’s “umbilical relationship” to the their children contrasts a father’s: “Men do not have that, they’re just sperm banks—moveable sperm banks that walk around and come and go.”

A “matriarchal” society makes a lot more sense, Cox said, but the “propaganda” in the Bible gets in society’s way of this world view. “It’s Adam and Eve,” he continued, “The propaganda goes right the way back—The Bible is one of the worst books ever, for me, from my point of view because it starts with the idea that Adam’s rib—that out of Adam’s rib, this woman was created. I don’t believe it… ‘cause they’re stupid.”

Instead of this patriarchal worldview taken from the bible, Cox said, society should “honor” women and “give them their place.”

He ultimately concludes that people “need” religion because “they need some kind of truth,” but “they don’t need to be told lies.” And The Bible is “not the truth,” he stressed.

That’s all a bit overly simplistic, but he was on a roll.

Maybe the other one, Professor Brian Cox, will get crankier as he gets older and less pretty and grows into his name?

Credentialed leftist at work

Somehow, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this accusation is true.

Jerry Coyne SPIT on me yesterday. This man is a professor at @UChicago and a biologist and the university has been letting him spit on students and protestors. I just heard reports that someone matching his description was roaming the camp spitting on/near students last night

In his defense, in this article from 6 years ago, his leftist “credentials” are unimpeachable. OK, man, if you say so.

Very leftist. Very free speech.

The scene at UW Madison

My daughter works here!

I notice the wall of cops with shields lined up against a group of students sitting quietly, watching the spectacle. Who has shown up prepared for violence?

Administrators claim they are “balancing students’ right to protest with a desire to minimize disruptions to their campuses and enforce a state rule banning encampments”. I don’t see much evidence of “balance” when one side brings in hired guns to enforce their will.

While my daughter is somewhere on campus, I’m pretty sure she’s nowhere near the protest. She had knee surgery a short while ago and is only able to hobble…so as much as I support the protest, it would be unwise to face off against brutal enforcers who wouldn’t be at all averse to compounding her current problems with a little violence.