‘Tis the season for office holiday parties

The science and math party is on Monday, and I had to figure out what to bring. I don’t want to be the lazy drone who brings a six-pack or beer or some cookies from the store (there’s nothing wrong with my peers who do that, I’m aiming for just one step higher), but I also don’t want to spend a lot of time on something more challenging, so I googled for a traditional, simple, healthy, vegetarian food associated with the holidays. My search returned something called a green bean casserole — it’s common enough that I’ve heard of that as a typical midwestern food, and it really is pretty basic.

One catch: although it’s supposedly traditional, I’ve never had it, let alone made it. I’m a bit like an alien trying to fit in, but I decided to try it out. It’s just green beans in a matrix of canned mushroom soup, with a few little extras. So I whipped up a concoction from a recipe this afternoon to see if I could produce something edible…a test run. Then I put it before my guinea pig test animal wife to see if it was OK.

This is the end result.

She’s never had it before either, but she and I managed to consume it. I have no idea if it tastes like an authentic green bean casserole, but I guess I’ll try it on Monday. Maybe all the native born midwesterners will recoil in horror, but my midwestern ancestors didn’t rise from the graveyard to curse me. Yet.

You need some more spider information

We just struggled to figure out how to put fitted sheets on a split-top bed, so I’m too tired to do it. Here are a few videos to do the job.

This first one is looking at spiders from an evolutionary perspective — it’s at a basic level, since the first thing it has to explain is that spiders aren’t insects.

This second one is more about spider cognition. It has a similar problem, since what it says isn’t really new. I took a grad-level physiology course from Michael Land in 1980 that focused almost entirely on jumping spiders, and we talked about similar things.

That course was the highlight of my first year of grad school. I guess it’s not surprising that I returned to spiders here in my dotage.

Krampus lives here

It’s Krampusnacht!

This is appropriate in my household, for a couple of reasons. OK, one reason.

  • We are having our new fancy adjustable bed moved in!
  • This meant that we had to clear a path from the driveway door to our bedroom. Our house is a bit twisty on the inside, so I had to wonder how we got our current bed in here, almost 25 years ago, when I was the mover.
  • We are a little concerned about our very own Krampus, the evil cat. She’s going to be locked in the basement all morning, because with strangers going in and out, we don’t know what wicked chaos she will unleash.
  • I got a bit distracted, because when we lifted the mattress off our box frame — which was genuinely a box, the interior walled off top, bottom, and on three sides, I discovered the most amazingly elaborate cobweb filling the interior space. I’m impressed. It could not have been a rich hunting ground, but somehow this pholcid, or generations of pholcids, made it a comfortable and fancy home.

The movers are at the door! I’d better show them the way.

Streaming series belong in the upside-down

I tried, despite my misgivings. I tried watching this new season of Stranger Things.

I made it a half hour before giving up.

I have noticed that inevitably these expensive streaming series that suck up your time for 8 or 10 or 12 episodes in their first season decline precipitously if the powers that be decide to give them another year. They’ve already had over 8 hours to tell their story, and they couldn’t do it? So now you give them 40 or 50 hours to stretch out the story? If they couldn’t do it the first time, they’re going to definitely fail the fifth time. If I’m going to watch something, I prefer to search in the movies section, where we have directors and producers who comprehend the economies of narratives. The blight of the streaming series has produced a generation of storytellers who only know how to dither and babble and stretch out profits for as long as possible.

I know I’m old, but that’s how I felt about Stranger Things even before I took a taste. Lowest possible expectations.

But even setting that aside, the show was terrible to a degree that you can only get with a massive budget ($480 million!!!) and the confidence that comes from building on a foundation that has churned out 4 previous years of incoherence. This one has another handicap: a massive, tangled cast of bad actors. They started out as child actors who got by with innocence and fresh approaches, but now they’re all gawky young adults who never had to take their craft seriously, and it shows. They’re in this to milk one more payday out of the franchise before they age out totally.

That’s what killed the first episode for me. I couldn’t stand watching these actors trying to awkwardly reprise a children’s dark fantasy story. It wasn’t much of a story, either: evil monster Vecna is scheming to turn our world into a hellscape, and somehow the same gang of kids have to frustrate him, probably by splitting up and doing magical psychic things.

No thanks. Nope. I’m outta here.

Mission for our next president: institute the damnatio memoriae

In yet another pointless sop to his ego, the president has renamed the Institute of Peace after himself.

The Trump administration has renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace after President Donald Trump and has planted the president’s name on the organization’s headquarters despite an ongoing fight over the institute’s control.

It’s the latest twist in a seesaw court battle over who controls the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on peace initiatives. It was an early target of the Department of Government Efficiency this year.

On Wednesday, the State Department said it renamed the organization to the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace to “reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” The new name could be seen on its building, which is near the State Department.

This is the first I’ve heard of the US Institute of Peace — apparently it was founded by Reagan, has floundered ineffectively for decades, and was recently gutted by DOGE, so I can’t be too wound up about this renaming. It’s still yet another transparent ploy by Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize, and I’m disgusted by the game he’s playing.

Our next president had better be motivated to expunge the Trump name from every building and every document, unless it is to damn him to hell. Our national shame is being advertised everywhere, and I hate it.

I see presentiments of my future fate

Sometimes, students earn a failing grade. I hand back essays or exams with zeroes on them, and inform students that they aren’t passing the course…and suggest that we meet so we can work out the problem. At the end of the semester I might log into the Peoplesoft database and put an F in a little square box, and the students are clear about who’s putting the black blot on their transcript — it’s me, not them. So I still worry that they might hate me or take action with the administration to get me in trouble. It’s part of the job.

Sometimes you have to evaluate a student’s performance, and sometimes they fail. And now we have a new generation of entitled and ignorant students that think they can just go over the instructor’s head to demand that their biases get approval.

The University of Oklahoma has placed a trans graduate instructor on administrative leave after a student received a zero on a psychology assignment that described transgender people as “demonic” and asserted that gender roles are “Biblically ordained.” The dispute has quickly escalated into a statewide political flashpoint.

The controversy began when junior Samantha Fulnecky submitted a 650-word reaction paper for a course on how social expectations shape gender. Instead of addressing the assignment’s questions using data, her essay claimed society is “pushing lies” about gender, warned that eliminating strict gender roles would be harmful, and described transgender identities as “demonic,” Them reports.

You can read Fulnecky’s essay for yourself. It’s terrible. It might pass muster in Sunday School, but this was submitted to the University of Oklahoma, which has somewhat higher standards. It contains no data, unless you count quoting the Bible poorly as data (you shouldn’t). The central theme of the essay is that you shouldn’t question conservative interpretations of the the Bible.

I do not think men and women are pressured to be more masculine or feminine. I strongly
disagree with the idea from the article that encouraging acceptance of diverse gender expressions
could improve students’ confidence. Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and
everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth. I
do not want kids to be teased or bullied in school. However, pushing the lie that everyone has
their own truth and everyone can do whatever they want and be whoever they want is not biblical
whatsoever. The Bible says that our lives are not our own but that our lives and bodies belong to
the Lord for His glory. I live my life based on this truth and firmly believe that there would be
less gender issues and insecurities in children if they were raised knowing that they do not
belong to themselves, but they belong to the Lord.

The TA’s evaluation was spot on, and Mel Curth should have a bright future in academia, although maybe this experience will sour her on the career.

Graduate teaching assistant Mel Curth, who graded the paper, wrote that the zero was based on academic criteria, not retaliation for the student’s religious views. Curth wrote that the essay “does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.” Curth also noted that portraying a marginalized group as “demonic” is “highly offensive,” and urged the student to use empirical sources rather than doctrinal statements when critiquing course material.

Does Fulnecky learn from this instruction? No. She immediately turned to Turning Point USA to advocate for her, filed a religious discrimination complaint with the university, and got the governor of Oklahoma to intervene. You’d think he has better things to do with his time.

Fulnecky wasn’t penalized for her beliefs. She was penalized for not doing the assignment and using her biases instead of data.

The university has bent the knee and removed the TA from the class and put a full-time professor in charge (I wouldn’t want to be in their position — imagine taking over a class with cocky students who have learned that they can get rid of instructors who don’t give them the grade they want.)

A state representative is demanding that Curth be fired.

To use academic power to punish or pressure a student simply because she stood firm in her faith and cited real science in her essay is not leadership. It is inappropriate, unacceptable, and should be investigated for discrimination.

The University of Oklahoma must address this. This individual should not be teaching in higher education — period.

Take another look at Fulnecky’s essay. Can you find where she cited any science?

I’m trying to avoid imagining a student in my genetics or evolution class complaining that a known atheist was teaching about stuff that contradicts their religious beliefs. It could happen, it has happened, but so far it’s always been confined to private meetings in my office, with me reassuring them that I don’t care what they do on a Sunday morning, but that the course content is well defined by the textbooks and the evidence.

And afterwards I thank God that I don’t live in Oklahoma.

If you care about getting a good education, don’t go to the University of Oklahoma. Go further north.

A good editorial from the Star Tribune

It is fair-minded in pointing out that while Minnesota has done a poor job of preventing fraud, it doesn’t justify the racist comments Trump has made. He’ll probably declare it fake news.

Minnesota finds itself in a harsh spotlight as President Donald Trump revs up his attacks on Gov. Tim Walz, an old political foe, while simultaneously expanding his demonization of Somali Minnesotans.

After unleashing torrents of foul language against Walz last weekend, and then this week referring to Somali Americans, including U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, as “garbage,” Trump reportedly dispatched additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota. Their orders are yet uncertain, but Trump suggests they will patrol a specific class of people, Somali Americans. In other words, strict racial profiling will now extend to our neighbors.

To read some online discourse, including that spewed by Trump in a feverish late-night troll session of more than 160 posts, Minnesota is a den of fraud perpetrated solely by immigrant hordes. This rhetoric is divisive, racist and wrong.

Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali community. These residents are our colleagues, friends, law enforcement officers, public servants, neighbors and taxpayers. That Trump would demonize an entire diaspora — the vast majority of whom live here as legal citizens or permanent residents — is beyond reprehensible. It’s dangerous.

As Trump amped up his verbal and online assault of Somalis last week in the wake of the slaying and critical wounding of two National Guard members by an Afghan immigrant in Washington, according to charges, the president was asked what Somalis had to do with the deadly encounter. Trump’s response was revealing and toxically xenophobic.

“Ah, nothing. But Somalis have caused a lot of trouble,” he said.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue that the president has opportunistically seized on: the amount of fraud that occurred in Minnesota during and after the pandemic. It’s an issue that won’t go away until it’s fully addressed.

Here is the truth, however: Our elected leaders and government officials can prevent and prosecute fraud without villainizing law-abiding Minnesotans or relying upon racist stereotypes.

Yes, Minnesota demonstrated a serious problem with oversight of state dollars during the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting economic calamity. In a well-meaning effort to help people, Walz and his administration fell short.

In the case of Feeding Our Future, the state trusted that nonprofits and other third parties would honor their responsibilities. This enabled the theft of public resources meant to feed the hungry. While most of the perpetrators were Somali, the alleged mastermind was a white woman, Aimee Bock. This crime wasn’t a product of race or ethnicity, but opportunity and criminal greed.

But that’s not the only fraud. In an October commentary in the Minnesota Star Tribune, former Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles detailed the lack of safeguards that enabled fraud in other programs, many of which have led to indictments and prosecution.

Thanks to prosecutors under Democratic and Republican administrations, criminals have faced vigorous prosecution. This is not enough. The public deserves assurances that systemic reform will prevent this from happening again.

Absent this, the state will be unable to credibly launch needed programs to address the growing economic strain on Minnesotans as the cost of living increases and the rate of unemployment is again on the rise.

That said, no specific instances of fraud should ever be used to castigate an entire class of Minnesotans. Minnesotans with German American backgrounds were persecuted as traitors during World War I. Italian Americans were stereotyped as dirty criminals during the 1920s. Hmong immigrants in the 1970s faced distrust and harassment over mistaken assumptions and racial profiling.

Waves of nativist fear have met every immigrant group, and when individuals within those groups committed crimes, they were pinned unfairly on everyone. The answer now is the same as before: Fix the system and police the crime while embracing the individual potential of every Minnesotan to enhance our shared society.

Meantime, any lectures on fraud should come from leaders who want to prevent it, not those who cast slurs and demonize the poor, hapless and innocent. Minnesotans will render their judgment at the polls next year. If our choices are between mushy inaction and spiteful rhetoric, we all lose.

Judging from the responses I’ve seen around this state, people are outraged at Trump’s blatant racism. If he’s planning on running for a third term (unconstitutionally!), he probably shouldn’t count on winning in Minnesota.

This is what stupid rich means

So…Donald Trump got an MRI, but he’s really stupid about it.

Trump added Sunday that he has no idea on what part of his body he got the MRI.

It was just an MRI, he said. What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it.

Doctors typically order an MRI to help with diagnosing symptoms or to monitor an ongoing health problem. So-called “preventive” cardiac and abdominal MRIs are not part of routine screening recommendations. What Trump’s doctor called an “executive physical” generally refers to adding extra, non-routine tests including MRIs to pricey and lengthy exams, not covered by insurance, that are marketed to wealthy people.

I can speak authoritatively from a patient’s perspective on MRIs, because I’ve had two of them in the past year. The first was for a knee problem, and the second was that the doctors wanted to rule out that I was having a stroke after a blood vessel in my eye popped.

First thing I can say is that MRIs are expensive and you don’t get them routinely. The doctors have to get approval from the insurance company, which is maybe not an issue for a stupidly rich person. But they don’t just give them to you on a whim — they have a medical reason for checking you out, and they tell you why they’re doing it. Even if you are so rich you can afford to just do it, it’s going to take a substantial chunk of time, maybe an hour or more, so doctors do try to justify it to you.

The second thing is that you know what’s being scanned. For my knee, they braced it with a couple of padded clamps to hold it in place. For my brain scan, they fitted a plastic helmet around my head to limit movement. Only an idiot would fail to recognize what the instrument was for.

Thirdly, afterwards the doctors tell you what they found. In one case, they found I had a torn meniscus; in the other, no evidence that I’d had a stroke (that must be what getting a “perfect” MRI means). They both discussed it with me in person and sent me an after-examination document that spelled it all out. They also noted some deterioration of the cervical vertebrae, but my knees, other than the meniscus, were flawless.

Is Trump so out of it that the doctors treated him as a dumb piece of meat, sending him off for tests without explanation, stuffing him into a noisy tube without explanation and no preparation, and then not bothering to let him know the results? Did he just sleep through the whole procedure?

Fourthly, you don’t “ace” a cognitive test, and it’s mostly separate from MRIs. I had an MRI but I’ve never taken a cognitive test — the doctors have no suspicion that I’m cognitively impaired, so they don’t bother testing. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t get an MRI because she wasn’t exhibiting those kinds of physical symptoms, but she was exhibiting behavioral symptoms, so they gave her a basic cognitive test, like the ones Trump has previously described (she did fail parts of the test, which was heartbreaking to see). Passing a cognitive test only means that you’ve retained basic mental skills, like having short-term memory and being able to draw a clock face.

You get a cognitive test when there are grounds to suspect a patient is having mental problems. I’ve never had one, but Trump has had a couple of them, with good reason, I think.

You get MRIs when there are physical symptoms that warrant a closer look. Trump seems to be getting trundled off to all kinds of exceptional tests, suggesting that doctors are concerned.

Of course, it’s also possible that he has hired a team of unethical, incompetent doctors, similar to his usual hiring practices, and they see Trump as a healthy mark with more money than sense that they can gouge for all kinds of unnecessary testing.

I was already predisposed to mistrust dollar stores

The town I live in has a spreading plague of dollar stores — we’ve got two (in a town of 5000 people!) and a third one is under construction. I’m not keen on them — they seem to be sloppily managed and underpay their workers — so they’re a sign of a crumbling economy and are just jumbles of cheap plastic junk. But OK, they do serve a growing population of the poor, so I’m not going to lobby to have them shut down.

Except, maybe, they’re lying about providing lower cost goods.

The dollar-store industry, including Family Dollar and its larger rival, Dollar General, promises everyday low prices for household essentials. But an investigation by the Guardian found that the prices listed on the shelves at these two chains often don’t materialize at checkout – in North Carolina and around the country. As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it – customers who often don’t even notice they’re overpaying.

These overcharges are widespread.

Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.

That we have 3 of these bottom-of-the-barrel stores in progress here in Morris, Minnesota suggests that they are extremely profitable, and one way they become profitable is by gouging the customers who can least afford it.