But of course he is

Sweden had a mass murder attempt and school killing! The killer, Anton Lundin-Pettersson, walked into a school with a sword and managed to kill two people and wound another two. If only he’d been armed with rifles and handguns, he might have gotten a better score.

Horrible as this person was (he was shot by the Swedish police), he has another distinction: he’s another godless heathen. In fact, his favorite youtuber seems to have been that lovely fellow, The Amazing Atheist.

Indeed, it’s telling that the Trollhattan killer’s favorite YouTuber (if the account attributed to him is really his) was the noxious rager who calls himself TheAmazingAtheist. Lundin-Pettersson subscribed not only to TAA’s main channel but to his personal channel as well, and he favorited dozens if not hundreds of TAA’s videos (I stopped counting). Unlike some atheist activists, TAA doesn’t devote much time to trashing Islam; he’s far more interested in bashing Anita Sarkeesian and other supposed SJWs.

But TAA affects a hyperbolic “mad as hell” persona that, despite its obvious theatricality, seems to be rooted in a good deal of real anger. I can barely make it through a single video of his, and can only imagine the corrosive effect that watching dozens of his rage-filled videos would have on someone’s soul.

Remember when we used to tell ourselves that atheists were such mild, harmless people, unlike those religious fanatics? It was quite a long time ago — maybe a whole year or two — so it might be understandable if you’d forgotten.

Don’t worry! I’m sure someone will be along soon to explain that he couldn’t have been a True Atheist™ because he once babbled something about spirituality or linked to an Asatru web page, or because he was ideologically fascist or whatever excuse someone can come up with — odds on favorite is that he might have been an atheist, but he was “mentally ill”. One thing I’ve learned is that atheists are getting really good at padding the statistics, but somehow the tally always manages to exclude the bad people.

I’m not from here. Really.

mnnice

Paul Kix explains the essence of the Midwest — he starts with the inevitable discussion of the movie Fargo, which is how most outsiders are exposed to our exotic inscrutable ways.

What Fargo nails, in other words, is Midwestern Nice, the idiosyncrasies of a steadfast populace that appear banal and maybe even bovine to the uninitiated, but in truth constitute the most sincere, malicious, enriching, and suffocating set of behaviors found in the English-speaking world.

Read the whole thing. I’ve been living here for 15 years now, and I’m only sufficiently familiar with the culture to be simultaneously entranced and horrified. It’s even: I sometimes seem to shock the natives with my blunt and awkward ways, too.

To be fair, though, at least I had a transition. My mother was born in Minnesota, and her family were all tried and true Scandinavian Minnesotans, so I moved here as a sort of mongrel Midwestern/Western hybrid. I also see a lot of my mother in that essay: she’d never say an unkind word about anybody, and tends to be quiet rather than snarky. Not that she’s unaware, though — she always knows exactly what’s going on.

TONMOCON VI (#tcon6) is on youtube

The whole dang conference is available in one giant 8 hour video, and here it is.

That’s kind of indigestibly huge, so I’ve been going at it in small pieces. I started with Gabrielle Winters at about 5 hours in, with Cephalopod Neurogenomics: Insights into the Evolution of Complex Brains, just because that’s what I’m most interested in. It’s a conference for general audiences, so it starts off with a good basic overview of cephalopods and neuroscience and molecular biology, and then, just as it starts getting interesting, the sound cuts out at 15 minutes…and doesn’t resume for another 15 minutes. Aaargh. You’ll have to get the sense of it from the slide text, and I guess I’ll have to wait for the paper.

I did get the take home message, though: cephalopods have evolved complex brains independently of ours, and the answer to this question is…

convergentevo

No. Cephalopods have evolved novel molecular mechanisms to solve problems in learning and memory similar to ours, which is actually kind of cool. Convergent evolution may lead to similar outcomes, but looking at the underlying mechanisms will expose the different evolutionary histories.

I’ll work through other talks as my time allows — it’s actually rather nice to have a day long conference available so I can just fit it to my schedule — but hey, if you’ve got a quiet weekend, go ahead and watch the whole thing.

Remember the days when crackpots were crackpots?

Rather than running major political parties? This story made me yearn for more harmlessly flamboyant goofballs.

Simon Parkes, who until April was a Labour town councillor for Whitby in North Yorkshire, claimed “psychopathic” members of a group of world leaders, known as the Illuminati by conspiracy theorists, were hellbent on using the huge atom colliding machine to open a vortex that would allow them complete control over all of us.

Don’t worry. Mr Parkes stopped the Illuminati from conquering the world with the LHC…by meditating. I know, you were worried.

But this is the story I want to hear more about.

Mr Parkes, who has earlier made national headlines after saying his mother was alien, and he lost his virginity to one, was the key speaker of the event organised by the UFO Academy at High Elms Manor in Watford, Hertfordshire.

Oh, please. Do tell.

dotell

Also, I have a secret. I do love a good media non sequitur.

In Confessions of an Alien Abductee, Parkes, who is also a qualified driving instructor, said he had an alien family with an extra-terrestrial lover.

I knew there was something discombobulating about always driving on the wrong side of the road.

Benghazi is a conspiracy to get Hillary Clinton elected president

The true meaning is at last revealed. I watched bits and pieces of Clinton’s hearing yesterday, and it all became clear.

Years ago, undercover operatives within the Republican party exploited a tragic, deadly attack in Libya. They stirred up some of the dumbest people in the party with a story: Benghazi is in a foreign country, and everyone knows that the Secretary of State is in charge of the foreigns, and so master manipulator Hillary Clinton must have done sumfin’ to rile up the brown people. And then all the dumb people started howling “Benghazi!”, further derailing their party, and getting the people who howled loudest into prominent positions, and sucking up millions of dollars for an “investigation”.

And then they put a guy with a funny name and an even goofier haircut in charge of the whole thing, and every third-rate sour, bitter Republican they could on the committee, and they staged a show trial in which posturing clowns asked stupid questions and Hillary Clinton could demonstrate god-like patience and look like the only grown-up in Washington DC.

It was brilliant. The Republicans look like twits, while Hillary Clinton looked presidential. It was the Kennedy-Nixon debate all over again, with Clinton as the telegenic, good-looking one, and the entire Republican party looking thuggish.

I heard the siren song. I found myself thinking that maybe I should vote for Clinton, too — never mind that Sanders is closer to me politically, man, I could picture President Hillary Clinton so easily.

And in case you missed it all, here is a most accurately abbreviated transcription of the whole thing.

We read books, out here on the prairie

I always notice these things at the last minute, and I should pay more attention to all the excitement that goes on around Morris. I just learned that the Prairie Gate Literary Festival starts tomorrow.

We hope you will be able to join us for the 5th Annual Prairie Gate Literary Festival this weekend, October 23-24. Events start on Friday night in Briggs Library with a reading by Hugo and Nebula award nominee Emma Bull at 7pm. Saturday morning sign up for a writing workshop with one or two of the writers and then stick around for lunch with them (included in the registration fee). Saturday afternoon starts with a panel discussion/Q&A session with the authors and is followed by a reading from YA writer Eric Smith at 2:30pm, Translator Ebba Segerberg will share her work at 4:15pm. After dinner stop by at 8pm for a reading by Minnesota Book Award nominee John Hildebrand and poet Vandana Khanna. All readings are free and will be held in Briggs Library.

Whoa, Emma Bull is going to be in town? I know where I’ll be on Friday evening.

Soooooooup

soup

I’m giving an exam on Friday, so I’ve offered the students extended office hours today and Thursday, so that they can stop by and get any questions answered. Many hours of office hours. Hours in which I cannot leave. So I’m noodling about on the internet a bit, because of course none of my students have come by, and I run across this little article about Oprah Winfrey, and her new project, a show about Belief. “Oh god,” I thought, “please let a student come by to ask me lots of questions. Even to offer lots of excuses. Anything to prevent me from reading any of this.” But no students came by.

There is no god.

Free of any responsibility or obligation, my eyeballs involuntarily swiveled to the open page, and my brain slurped down the anecdote Winfrey offered. I couldn’t help myself. I read everything. I can’t not read something. I’m like a rat, who eats but has no emesis reflex, so the toxin just enters and simmers there, in my head, making my consciousness regret ever waking.

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