Don’t get your hopes up

Donald Trump is in the courtroom again, accused of 34 counts of falsifying business records.

“The People of the State of New York allege that Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” Bragg said in an announcement at the time. “Manhattan is home to the country’s most significant business market. We cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct. As the Statement of Facts describes, the trail of money and lies exposes a pattern that, the People allege, violates one of New York’s basic and fundamental business laws. As this office has done time and time again, we today uphold our solemn responsibility to ensure that everyone stands equal before the law.”

He’s guilty, guilty, guilty. Everyone knows it, but all it will take is one Trumpian idiot to get on the jury to get him off, and even if he is convicted, he’ll most likely get nothing worse than probation. Go ahead, talk about violations of basic and fundamental business laws — we know that the only real fundamental law is that if you’re rich enough, you’ll get away with it.

I’m not going to pay any attention to this trial. I don’t see the point.

How pathetic do you have to be to be ignored by the press?

The Washington Post gave a lot of attention to Kali and Joshua Fantanilla today, for reasons I can’t comprehend. It’s another example of the press featuring otherwise unnotable nobodies with far right views and giving them a neutral treatment.

The story is about a couple who were, once upon a time, public school teachers who were so offended at the liberal agenda of the schools that they quit their jobs, moved to Florida, and founded their own online Christian school. They were “displeased by some colleagues’ embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement, which both thought was wrongheaded and hateful for what they saw as its anti-police stance.”

So now they offer a YouTube curriculum for $2000-$8000 a head which, to my surprise, is accredited and offers the equivalent of a high school diploma. I don’t know how they get away with it — is Prager U going to be handing out diplomas soon?

There are way too many red flags in the article, like this photograph caption.

Joshua Fontanilla became a Seventh-day Adventist after researching dozens of faiths online. He was drawn to his religion partly for its Bible prophecy.

“Researching” “online” — those two words together are already a problem. The second sentence gives his game away. He was just looking for a religion that would accommodate his prior beliefs about the Bible, and was looking for the religion that would support his conclusion. And then to settle on the Seventh-day Adventists, one of the more batcrap looney Christian sects that certainly does promote prophecy…let us immediately call into question his rationality.

Furthermore, his concerns with the public school system were petty and bigoted.

Around the same time, Joshua Fontanilla said he was also spotting what he perceived as bias at school. His suspicions stirred, he said, when he noticed his high school always announced meetings of the Gay-Straight Alliance club over the loud speakers — but not those of other clubs, like his chess group.

Joshua then began combing through the “American Dream” unit of the English curriculum, researching the politics of every author. He concluded that too many (at least 12 of 19) were “left-leaning,” including — as Joshua saw it — “leftist” historian Studs Terkel, “socialist” poet Langston Hughes and “Dem” Walt Whitman.

You know how you get your club meetings announced on the morning PA? You request it. You go to the school secretary and hand them your meeting details. I’m pretty sure schools aren’t biased to favor the Gay-Straight Alliance — if my local school is any example, school boards try to ban such organizations. The GSA was just a more activist organization than the chess club.

As for his categorization of authors he didn’t like — those are McCarthy-ite tactics. If you oppose indoctrination in the schools, don’t charge in and start banning authors whose politics you dislike.

Here’s another red flag:

The couple have ambitions to scale up: Kali and Joshua hope to eventually cross 1,000 students, at which point, they calculate, they will no longer have to pursue side jobs like Kali’s current gig as a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank. So far, Kali has found most success attracting clients through Instagram, despite the fact her account is regularly suspended for “community violations,” she said.

The Capital Research Center is an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, funded by well-heeled conservative millionaires and billionaires. She has a “gig” there? What does that mean? What does a “Senior Fellow” to a right-wing think tank do? I’m just wondering if there were a left-wing think-tank that would pay me a living wage for doing the equivalent of whatever the fuck Kali Fontanella is getting paid for. Somehow, I don’t think those kinds of sinecures exist on my side of the political fence, but I could be wrong. Let me know!

Every one of their complaints are absurd and pathetic, like this one:

…Kali passed a series of posters featuring student artwork, erected every spring as part of a public art installation. This year’s iteration included a painting of a book in chains — and another of a student wearing earrings that each bore the slogan, “ASK ME ABOUT MY PRONOUNS.”

It was just one more reason, Kali told herself, to pray. She sat beside her husband and closed her eyes. Together, they bent their heads to thank God.

Right-wing freaks are so easily perturbed by the most trivial phenomena. I guess praying is the modern substitute for the fainting couch.

I’m just left wondering what the point of the whole article was. I don’t care about the Fontanellas, I don’t want them arrested, but I also want them to fail and stop corrupting children’s education. I don’t think their story is particularly interesting, except as an example of America’s terrible standards for education. But yay, they get a front page feature in the WaPo!

That lost weekend

I think I’m recovered from my horrendous Shingrix vaccination — still a bit wobbly and fatigued, but progress has been made. The terrible thing is that we had a sunny, 25°C weekend, great for spiders, and I mostly missed it, and now we’re about to have a couple of days of heavy rain.

I will say that if you’re at risk of shingles you should get this potentially temporarily debilitating vaccine because shingles is so much worse.

It’s a shingrix kind of day

Yesterday, I got my second shot of the shingles vaccine. “Shingrix” is the right adjective to use for my late night and day — I have all of the symptoms, every one of them, struck with sledgehammer blows.

The worst was the muscle weakness. I tried to get out of bed four times, and every time I realized that the spaghetti noodles my legs had turned into couldn’t to the job, so I just flopped over and went back to my fitful sleep. If anyone is dreaming of beating me up, this would be a great day to do it.

I wasn’t surprised at all

Read this little story.

A New Hampshire county chair for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign lost his job as a police officer in 2006 after he threatened to kill his colleagues and rape the police chief’s wife in retaliation for his suspension for having a relationship with an underage high school girl, according to an internal report released last week upon orders from the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The findings regarding former Claremont police officer Jonathan Stone, which came to light due to a right-to-know lawsuit filed by InDepthNH.org, appeared to catch Trump’s New Hampshire campaign chair, Stephen Stepanek, by surprise. “I just found out about it this morning,” he told Huffington Post Wednesday. “He’s been a Trump supporter for a long time, and he’s been a state representative, and he had, as far as we were concerned, what looked like a great background.” Stone, who won a seat in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2022, was terminated from the Claremont Police Department after making the threats. He would go on to work as a Vermont prison guard and would open a gun store, according to InDepthNH, and gave Trump an AR-15 during his 2016 campaign. Neither Stone nor the Trump campaign’s co-managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, responded to queries from Huffington Post. Stepanek said a decision on Stone’s future with the campaign was pending: “I think it will be handled by Mar-a-Lago, in consultation with me.”

Now tell me how surprised you are by every sentence about Jonathan Stone.

The apes are acting funny again

The dingbats of Arizona were up to shenanigans recently. Here they are, speaking in tongues before denying women basic health care.

Although, you’ve got to have the right perspective on this bizarre behavior. It’s just signaling to their fellow apes that they belong, and that they’re not a member of that other ape clan. We tend to overlook the weird things other groups do.

Did you know most of our legislative bodies begin their sessions by talking to an invisible being they call a god? They’ve labeled this behavior “prayer,” and most people take it for granted as a perfectly normal behavior. Some few of us, like me, have our own distinctive behaviors, like refusing to “pray,” and it sets us apart and makes us look weird to the prayer people and the tongue-speaking people.

We need to look deeper. What, besides some goofy ritualistic behaviors, bonds these people into a group? What are their goals? Then we see people like Anthony Kern and Paul Gosar behind it all, and we should recognize that it’s not the silly babbling that matters, it’s the bigotry and authoritarianism. We should read that behavior as a flag to the rest of us, too — don’t let the speaking in tongues bother you as much as the bad ideas simmering underneath.

Look at that photo. Aren’t the red baseball caps also a signal? What about…neckties?

It’s aposematism all the way down.

Too much social media

Once upon a time there was Twitter, and it was fine. There was much to dislike about it, but it had the advantage of being the one central repository of all the chatter, for good and ill, and I coped with the badness by doing a lot of blocking.

Then it became “X,” and it was terrible and vile, and Elon Musk is a neo-Nazi idiot, so I left, cleanly and completely. That was a good decision on my part. So I started exploring the other social media options.

I got on Mastodon. It’s a bit clunky, and I still don’t understand some of the details, but I’m comfortable there. I like the diversity of content. Sometimes people are too weirdly judgmental, but it’s not my site, so I’ll adjust. It’s still on my recommended list.

I’m also on BlueSky, which is probably the most like the old Twitter. It’s more centralized than Mastodon, good ebb and flow of topics, and there’s actually a Science Bluesky. I’m sticking with it longer, we’ll see how it shapes up.

Then there’s Threads. I don’t know about Threads. It has a very different dynamic — people take the name literally, and there are a lot of threads, where they go on and on over multiple comments, and it’s beginning to bug me. Shouldn’t you just start a blog? People do write a lot, which is a positive. It’s a Zuckerberg production, which is a COLOSSAL NEGATIVE. I killed Facebook long ago, that was enough.

So, anyway, there can be only one, and I’ve decided to axe Threads. That means that in my head it is now a duel to the death between Mastodon and BlueSky.

Who else is on social media? What do you prefer? Don’t bother to tell me to abandon it all, I’m accustomed to my frequent tiny blips of interaction.

OJ Simpson is dead

Good.

He murdered his wife in 1994, when I was working at Temple University. Every day, every single goddamned day, I had an hour-long commute each way by bus and subway from my home to the university, and I’d grab a copy of the city tabloid, the Philadelphia Daily News, and read the sordid stories semi-obsessively. I grew to despise OJ. I was freed of that ugly habit when the trial ended in his acquittal — and the only good thing about that decision is that the newspapers and TV stopped being full of trial news. Of course, OJ wasn’t done yet.

The former football star, who later enjoyed a successful acting career until he was charged with brutally murdering his estranged wife and a male friend of hers in 1994. Although Simpson was acquitted of the murder charges, he later served nine years in a Nevada prison for a botched kidnapping and armed robbery in a Las Vegas hotel room.

Unfortunately, another vestige of that era is the Kardashians. I ignore them utterly.

The end is nigh!

I can see it. It’s coming. It will happen. The semester is almost over, winter is over, the spiders are stirring.

I’ve got 3 weeks to go, and they’re all mapped out. Next week the eco devo course will culminate in my last big effort, to summarize evo devo. Then the two weeks beyond that will be all about student presentations of specific topics. I get to just sit back and enjoy the communication of interesting science by a group of informed students, so it’s a bit of slack for me.

My two science writing courses are a bit less slacky — I’ve got 8 term papers dropping into my lap in the next few weeks. I warned them. I told them at the start that they’re probably worried about having to write ten pages, but I assured them that by the end of the term their concern will be about trimming the 20-30 page behemoth they’ve written down to a tight 15 pages. It’s all coming my way shortly. I’ve got three red pens waiting to be burned through.

Then summer arrives. I have big plans.

Next fall, I’m teaching a shiny new interdisciplinary course for non-majors titled “The History of Evolutionary Thought.” It’s also in the category of “writing-enriched,” which means about half the course hours are dedicated to student writing and training in writing. The genre we’re going to be pursuing is creative non-fiction — we’ll see if the students can handle that odd subset of essay writing. We’ll see if I can handle it too, so I’m going to have to be doing a lot of prep this summer.

Oh also…spiders. I’m going to stake out a couple of one meter square patches of my weedy yard and do weekly intensive species counts, and then similarly sample a few other locations and get a better feel for diversity. I’m going to be on my knees with a hand lens counting everything with 8 legs. I’m also going to be preparing a few sheltered locations, under rocks and logs, that I can survey with an endoscopic camera, get some background data, and then return to look them over in winter. I’m hoping we have a real winter next year, not the dry warm boring winter we had this year.

Before all that, though, grading. Lots of grading.

Also, on Monday, a performance with the Theatre discipline, sort of. I’m not acting, I’m discussing, on a stage. I’m not qualified to discuss the physics, but I think this is more about ethics.

Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen: A Play Reading and Discussion
Monday April 15th, 7:00pm in the George C. Fosgate Blackbox Theatre in the HFA

Join us for a reading of Act One of Copenhagen by Professor Ray Schultz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre, Lana Sugarman, and UMM Theatre alum Brennan Bassett followed by a moderated discussion with Dan Demetriou, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Peter Dolan, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, and Paul Myers, Associate Professor of Biology. This collaboration was inspired by Laura Chajet, Assistant Professor of Physics.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a Tony-award winning play that examines a meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941 Copenhagen.Though they revolutionized atomic science in the 1920s, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a world war.

It’s free and open to the public if any of you are hanging out in Western Minnesota.