Another kind of profiling

The story of Shadi Petosky makes no sense to me. She’s a transgender woman — a perfectly normal thing to be — who was trying to take a flight — another perfectly normal thing to do. TSA freaked out at an “anomaly”, the fact that someone presenting as a woman happened to have a penis. Apparently, like shoes, there’s a fear that one of those might be loaded with high explosives, although no one has ever stopped me from boarding an airplane because of my dangerous genitals.

She was screened and searched and probed multiple times, and taken aside to one of those featureless little rooms where they stash the suspicious people. She missed her flight, and they seemed downright truculent about helping her get another one. And then there’s the business of telling her to “get back in the machine as a man or it was going to be a problem”, whatever the hell that means.

It all seems to have escalated absurdly. They needed two police officers, four TSA agents, and an explosives expert to wrestle with their own ignorance about what genitals are supposed to look like.

You can follow Shadi Petosky on Twitter if you want to see how it all turns out (it looks like she’s not home yet).

I guess TSA needs to learn that trans bodies are not anomalies.

And then there were eleventy-seven

walker

One down, one swarm of stupid to go. Scott Walker is no longer running for president, not that any of the other Republican candidates are better qualified. But I did like this summary of the Walker Experience.

The New York Times says Walker once was “seen as all but politically invincible,” which seems maybe a tad overstated in reference to a shrimpy, pallid, balding twerp with a face like mashed potatoes and the oratorical skills and personal charisma of a jellyfish. It’s true that he was regarded as something of a rising star of the right not so long ago, thanks to his proud and endless cruelty to and contempt for workers and vulnerable people. He all but killed Wisconsin’s public-sector unions with his “budget repair bill,” then pulled a hit on private-sector unions by signing a right-to-work law he’d denounced while campaigning; he needlessly turned away millions of dollars in federal food aid to his state’s poorest residents; he rammed through a (not-even-all-that-) crypto-racist voter ID law; he diverted state school funding from public schools that educate the poor to private ones that educate the wealthy; he tried to eliminate the weekend! This is how one becomes a darling of the right in the United States. Unfortunately for him, though, an elected official will never be as good an avatar for America’s hatred of the poor as a pure capitalist—if nothing else, settling for a governor’s salary implies less than total commitment to the cause—and so he found himself outflanked by both Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina (failed capitalists both!) on the only front he had.

Who’s next to go? I’m guessing it’ll be any of them that said God called them to run, because that old fart gets everything wrong.

I wonder what the pharmaceutical companies think of Shkreli

There’s a standard response when people feel the sticker shock at seeing the prices on brand new drugs: that cost is necessary to subsidize the expense of drug development. And that’s true! Bringing a new drug to market takes a lot of time and money and multiple levels of testing and clinical trials. It hurts to pay it, but you’re paying all the costs of development (would that companies that tear up the environment had to obey the same principle).

But now Martin Shkreli comes along, and ruins the whole defense. Shkreli bought the rights to a drug, Daraprim, and immediately jacked up the cost from $13.50/pill to $750/pill, all for a drug that cost him $1/pill to manufacture.

[Read more…]

Anthropology is so entertaining!

John Hawks makes a very good case that Homo naledi is a distinct species from H. erectus. He persuaded me, anyway, and it’s well worth reading.

Also entertaining. There is some savage snark in there aimed at Jeffrey Schwartz (oh, man, I’ve long known Schwartz as a hack, not for his anthropology, but for his atrocious abuse of genetics) and Tim White. Data, evidence, and inside baseball!

My brain just exploded

queenlizard

Join me in a journey to the gibbering throat of conspiratorial madness: a Breitbart article on Ahmed Mohamed and Irving, Texas.

This story isn’t just the usual whine that the “clock” (it’s now always in quotes — because although it was actually a clock in a pencil box cannibalized from an old Radio Shack clock, that is only its outward seeming, and in truth, it was a portent heralding the rising of an ancient evil) was not really an “invention”, therefore Mohamed was a liar. No, that was a circuit board of destruction!!!

It appears, the “clock” Mohamed brought to school this week was not the first of his circuit boards to look ominously like an improvised explosive device trigger. In fact, a photograph of one circulated by the Dallas Morning News was virtually indistinguishable from a circuit board used in a commercially available device used to train law enforcement and military personnel regarding how to identify IEDs.

[Read more…]

Humanity is ridiculous

cameronpig

Once upon a time, I watched a bit of a British television show called Black Mirror — it was, I was told, a series of scary stories about a dystopian near-future. The one episode I watched in full was about a politician forced by a terrorist to have sex with a pig, and most of it was reaction shots of this guy as he was contemplating the horror of this act. I started to watch a second episode, and it was something about another contrived scenario of public humiliation, and I lost interest. I came to the conclusion that where an American scary story might involve getting chased by zombies or giant spiders or something equally life-threatening, a British scary story was about finding oneself in an embarrassing situation that hurt one’s dignity.

Little did we all know, my assessment was accurate, and the show was written by a psychic. The latest news that seems to be consuming the British public is that…well, here’s the calmest description I’ve seen.

[Read more…]

Hoax? Fraud? Fooled?

I cannot do a facepalm big enough.

godzillafacepalm

After that last post (and now that I’m home from Winnipeg), I discover that Richard Dawkins has joined in the chorus of right-wing loons, like Sarah Palin, accusing Ahmed Mohamed of some kind of nefarious scheme. Dawkins claims that the kid was lying and committing fraud and exaggerating his accomplishment…when last I heard, Mohamed had only said he put together some circuit boards in 20 minutes before school. What did Dawkins imagine, that he’d built his transistors from scratch, etched the circuit boards, and invented The Clock?

That this was some wild Wile E. Coyote scheme, where he’d ordered parts from Acme in a brilliantly convoluted plan to get invited to the White House?

This is nuts.

People are noticing that self-proclaimed leaders of atheism are targeting a 14 year old boy — for being enthusiastic about electronics?

I’m fast learning why “movement” is a synonym for “shit”.

If Trump is going down, why not Ben Carson?

A few people have been arguing that Trump’s tolerance of anti-Muslim bigotry will kill his campaign at last; I doubt it. If so, though, shouldn’t Ben Carson be washed up?

Responding to a question on “Meet the Press,” the retired neurosurgeon said, I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.

He also said that Islam, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution.

Carson, who is near the top of several early presidential polls, said a president’s faith should matter depending on what that faith is. If it’s inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter, he clarified.

The first amendment to the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It’s also in article VI of the body of the Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

I guess Carson hasn’t read it, if he thinks he can claim that someone holding a particular religion can be prohibited from holding office.

Although it is an interesting idea — I think Christianity, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution. Can we tell all the presidential candidates to go home now?

The evolution of the Ahmed Mohamed story

The shifting rationales in the story of the Texas kid who brought a jury-rigged digital clock have been amazing. There’s been a steady progression of new excuses brought up to excuse throwing him in jail.

Early on, it was that it was simply precaution — they had standard procedures for dealing with potential threats. That’s patent nonsense. A standard response to a potential bomb would not involve throwing the “bomb” into the police car with the “bomb maker”. The school and the police knew it wasn’t a bomb from the beginning.

Then the complaint was that he didn’t properly explain what the device was. Simply not true: he said over and over precisely what it was, and all it was: it was a clock. Demanding that he say that it was something more when it wasn’t is absurd.

Then the yahoos all came out of the closet and said it sure doesn’t look like no clock to me. Yep. It was a collection of components strung together with wires, it was ugly and not too practical, but functionally, all it was was a clock. Sorry you don’t know much about electronics.

Then there were the detailed deconstructions of the clock, from the few pictures we have of it. This bit came from here, that bit came from there, here’s a dangling wire that has no purpose, there’s a cable that could be used to tap into the signal output from the clock. A terrorist could use this to set off a bomb! Sure. But they could also buy a $5 travel alarm from Wal-Mart even more easily to do the same thing. Can we arrest Wal-Mart now?

Then there were the nay-sayers: the kid was lying. He didn’t invent anything. This is true: a lot of us tinkered with old electronic components when we were his age, and assembled basic gadgets. I built a crystal radio, and made electric motors (looping those thin copper wires around and around was tedious). There was nothing revolutionary and lot that was clumsy in the clock. He disassembled and reassembled a Radio Shack digital gadget, nothing more. But so what? He’s 14! It’s excellent that he’s curious and is experimenting with technology, and is also enthused about it. That’s how scientists and engineers get started.

And now, at last, that lunatic Sarah Palin weighs in:

Friends, consider the kids disciplined and/or kicked out of school for bringing squirt guns to school or taking bites out of a pop tart until it resembled (to some politically correct yahoo) a gun, Palin rambled. Or the student out deer hunting with his dad early one morning who forgot he had a box of ammo in his truck when he parked in the school’s lot later that day. Kids humiliated and intimidated for innocent actions like those real examples are often marked the rest of their lives and made to feel really rotten. Whereas Ahmed Muhammad, an evidently obstinate-answering student bringing in a homemade “clock” that obviously could be seen by conscientious teachers as a dangerous wired-up bomb-looking contraption (teachers who are told “if you see something, say something!”) gets invited to the White House.

I thought we’d reached Peak Paranoia with Palin, until I read the comments on her post.

Guys, can’t you see between the lines? This was nothing less then a dry run, to test school security, had no one noticed it, next time, it would be the real thing

This little Muzzie was practicing his bomb making skills not “inventing a clock”.

It was a dry run to see how far they could get. They use their kids to bomb all the time in their country. They don’t care if their child dies in the process.

So now the demented right wing is convinced that Ahmed was actually planning to make a suicide attack on the school.

I’d like to believe we’ve reached the limit on this evolving set of excuses, but I’m not going to shortchange the astonishing imaginations of the American people.