Why is a sitting president having a campaign rally 3½ years before the election?

Without even getting into the antic, hateful content of his demented speech, why is he even having this rally? He has accomplished nothing but chaos, and alternates between golfing and having ever-shrinking crowds cheer him.

Today is the first day of classes. I’m thinking I shouldn’t bother presenting a coherent lecture on the basic chemistry of organic molecules, but should just go around the classroom and demand the students tell me how much they love me. And then I’ll go play video games for the rest of the day.

Creationism at the movies

Eric Hovind has been working on (and raising money for) a movie called Genesis: Part 1: Paradise Lost: 3D or something like that. It’s supposedly a 3D animated retelling of the Christian creation myth, as interpreted by modern apologists. Hovind is constantly pumping it up as a big time real movie release.

Only…Paulogia does an interesting analysis of the expenses and what has been said about it over there in Hovindland, and it sounds like it won’t be a genuine movie distribution deal — it’s more of a one-shot promotion involving theater rentals and bused in crowds of churchgoers. It’s the usual. Just as they pretend to be scientists, they pretend to do movie production.

They should try to book the Morris Theater for their one-night release. I know there are a lot of believers in this town who’d attend, and at least one skeptic. I’d also mention it to my students and encourage them to show up and think critically, so I’d probably manage to drum up a few more for their attendance figures. Here’s the theater contact info, Eric! Make it happen!

Get ’em while they’re young

That old Jesuit motto, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” is significant, although the age is arbitrarily specific. Shape them early and you can do all kinds of rotten things to the adult. Fundamentalist Christians also know this; we’ve seen the consequences here in the US, where they’ve invested a huge amount of time, money, and effort in school boards and corrupting the educational system. Creationists don’t just spontaneously appear, they are the product of years of indoctrination.

So what do we do about College Republicans? The school year has started, my university has over a hundred clubs (anyone can start one, for any cause or reason), and there are first year students signing up this week for the College Republicans, in a sincere belief in conservative values, and they’re going to stumble right into a toxic atmosphere.

Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer. In the age of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics? Do you think it’s a fervent belief that Paul Ryan knows the optimal tax policy to spur economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely to be something else?

Ha ha, no.

Our two-party system has us locked into this weirdly limiting binary dynamic, where power is driven entirely by the party qua party, both for the Democrats and the Republicans — we might as well rename the factions the Blues and the Greens. Unfortunately, it means party membership is driven more by gamesmanship and identity and hatred of the opposition than by policy and civil service and sensible leadership. The next generation is not looking any better, either.

Meanwhile, the only people entering the Republican Party candidate pipeline in the Trump era almost have to be allied with the alt-right, because the alt-right absolutely comprises the only effective and successful youth outreach strategy the GOP currently employs. The future leaders of the GOP aren’t the hooded Klan members or Nazi-tattooed thugs who presented the most cartoonish faces of hate in Charlottesville, but they are their clean-cut fellow marchers, and the many young right-wingers around the nation who sympathize with their cause.

Alex Pareene makes a terrifying prophecy.

This is the state of the GOP leadership pipeline. In a decade, state legislatures will start filling up with Gamergaters, MRAs, /pol/ posters, Anime Nazis, and Proud Boys. These are, as of now, the only people in their age cohort becoming more active in Republican politics in the Trump era. Everyone else is fleeing. This will be the legacy of Trumpism: It won’t be long before voters who reflexively check the box labeled “Republican” because their parents did, or because they think their property taxes are too high, or because Fox made them scared of terrorism, start electing Pepe racists to Congress.

It’s sad. There are some optimistic young people entering the university, and one of the mistakes they’ll make is to join CR and breathe the mind-rotting poison, and next thing you know, they join the staff of the Morris North Star (or its equivalent; it seems to have gone belly-up, but we’ve had a succession of right-wing rags with different names and different editors, all the same) and start writing bigoted drivel to qualify themselves for the wingnut welfare program.

And I can do nothing. The people who ought to be cracking down on this malignancy are the mythical Responsible Republicans, who believe in cautious conservative values, but who, it seems, don’t actually exist. Conservative has become a code word for racism and misogyny.

But it’s only a calculation and numbers

Richard Dawkins used his recently much calmer Twitter account to snipe at something he doesn’t seem to understand.


All humanity should be proud of Newton & the precision of eclipse forecasting (oh but surely an eclipse is only a social construct?)

The first part is true. We can predict these things thousands of years in advance; yesterday’s eclipse was announced years ahead of time, maps were produced that told everyone precisely when and where it would be visible, and presto, they were correct, as everyone rightly expected! There are brute facts about the relative movements of 3 astronomical bodies that can be calculated with impressive precision.

But why the snide remark about a “social construct”? The eclipse was also a social construct! We attach a value to witnessing these events, and also to conversing about them to our friends and families, and on social media. People felt awe when the sun was obscured by the moon. They wrote about it, they took pictures. They traveled long distances to witness it, and felt the effort was worth it. Some of us didn’t bother, because what we individually value is also a social construct. Eclipses would continue to happen if humanity managed to eradicate itself; the shadow will continue to move across a planet of smoke and ash and crumbling skeletons, but this other cultural dimension will have vanished, and we wouldn’t have science communicators feeling proud of their accomplishments, they wouldn’t be explaining how it occurs, and we wouldn’t be telling their children about it.

Did you know we can trace the path of totality by mapping the traffic jams afterwards? Newton did not forecast that. He couldn’t, despite the fact that traffic patterns are also a brute material fact. Because it was a consequence of the social construct built around the eclipse.

It was also weird to see that put-down of the importance of social structures in interpreting astronomical events because just a few hours earlier, he wrote this:


“Listening to the eclipse” http://bit.ly/2vh3u51 I journeyed to Austria for 1999 eclipse. There was a moving wave of human yells & whoops

What? Why did he travel all the way to Austria to watch a highly predictable shadow? Why did the humans in attendance yell and whoop, when all that happened is that it got dark for a few minutes? Stay home. Run an astronomy simulation and get the numbers and parameters. The rest is only a social construct.

Scientism is also a social construct, by the way.

Proof that Trump can’t take good advice

During the eclipse, the Donald was yelled at to not look directly into the sun, and what does he do?

You’d think, as a billionaire, he could afford the very best protective eyewear, and as the President, surrounded by security and advisors, he’d be informed that a squint is not going to help. What a dumbass.

Could someone please tell him that he can’t fly, and leaping off the top of the Trump Tower would be a very bad idea? Please?

FIRST WEEK OF CLASSES!

I met with my first group of new student advisees this morning. I think we’ll keep them.

Also, totally irrelevant: we’re supposed to have begun the partial eclipse here in Morris, but unfortunately the sky is a uniform sheet of light gray cloudiness — I can’t even see the sun anywhere. Maybe the moon ate it.

I’m on another list

It’s the “full list of antifa members” on 8chan. I had no idea my application had been accepted! (Actually, I had no idea where to send the application, and hadn’t even written one, so apparently antifa has the power to read minds). It’s a very long list, though, so it’s no particular distinction.

I do find their little Hitler-loving dwarf mascot amusing, though. I also appreciate being on a list of people who detest fascists who revel in Nazi sloganeering. I wouldn’t want to not be on such a list.