I think I’m done with humanity today

A little story from a big city hospital:

“When you work on the east side of our hospital, psychiatric patients are a dime a dozen,” he said.

But this patient is different. She’s put together. She’s lucid. She’s got an incision.

A group crowded around the computer to see her x-ray.

“Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice,” he said. “But it’s there. It’s unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that’s saying something.”

It turns out this 20-something woman was being pimped out by her boyfriend, forced to sell herself for sex and hand him the money.

Yeah, some days, you start to see the virtues of extinction.

Matt Walters: racist misogynist, and proud of it

mattwalters

Matt Walters of Houston, Texas looks so normal and ordinary.

And then you read the abusive message he sent to a black woman he didn’t know on Facebook, in which he goes on and on with a violent fantasy in which he kidnaps her and tortures her gruesomely for months before killing her, and you realize that he’s simply a bad person. A horrible human being. A disgrace walking about in nicely groomed skin.

This is where free speech as a principle starts conflicting with the reality of the human condition. He is allowed to ramble to strangers about hanging them upside down in the dark and cut them and burn them, but at some point someone ought to take them aside and get them some help, and maybe explain to them that that behavior is inappropriate and vile, and that they should stop doing it. And while it may be nice for him to get off on telling people about the graphic abuse and mutilation and murder stories playing out in his head, it’s distressing to others and raises legitimate concerns about whether he is a threat to their safety.

He was quite reasonably reported to the police. They “brushed it off”. His target reported him to Facebook. They informed her that it violated no “community standards” (what community is that? The community of psychopathic assholes?). And then, when she shared his nightmare stories with others, Facebook blocked her for a week.

I guess all I can do is use my power of free speech to spread the word that Matt Walters is a nasty piece of work. Oh, and that his brother Buddy Walters is a barely literate dumbass.

I call that an anti-endorsement

I’m trying to reconcile myself to the likelihood that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, when along comes an announcement from a horrible fellow.

Conservative economist Ben Stein revealed on Wednesday that he was considering voting for Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders because Donald Trump was going to “sink” the Republican Party.

“I went to law school with Ms. Clinton so I’ve always had a kind of fondness for her, she was always a very nice young woman,” Stein told CNN’s Carol Costello. “I admire the fact that Bernie Sanders has a single-payer national health plan.”

I think he’s trying to scuttle everyone.

The “mystery of the Church and Priesthood”

The grand jury report on the Catholic sexual abuses in Altoona-Johnstown is available for reading, and I’m sorry, it’s practically pornographic. What these people were doing to the children of their community, with the compliance of the police who turned a blind eye to their behavior, is obscene.

In 1971, Father John Boyle groped the genitals of a 15-year-old boy in the basement of St. Edward’s Church in Barnesboro, Pennsylvania on numerous occasions. Boyle also kissed the boy and performed oral sex on him. The boy was confused. He could tast the alcohol on Father Boyle’s mouth. He concluded that what was happening to him must be what the Church called the “mystery of the Church and Priesthood.”

It goes on and on like that for 145 pages. I could not bear to read much of it. But it’s clear that the diocese was knowingly shuffling pedophile priests around, doing nothing about them, and basically enabling the rape of children for decades.

They even had a pay-out schedule for offenses when they were caught at it!

payout

That’s a lot of money. It’s telling that the church hierarchy was willing to fork over that kind of cash rather than actually punishing and stopping their bad priests — and that tells you the whole thing was rotten, root and branch.

The human hand is good at grasping. Therefore, God.

PlosOne has published an article on the Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living. There’s nothing wrong with the data that I can see, but the authors do make a surprising leap in the abstract and conclusion.

In conclusion, our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years. Moreover, functional explanations for the mechanical architecture of the muscular-articular connection of the human hand can also aid in developing multifunctional robotic hands by designing them with similar basic architecture.

The paper is a technical structure and function analysis of the bones and muscles of the human hand. There’s nothing in the paper that probes the creator for their intent and goals of proper design, or that assesses the the hypothesis of design vs. evolution — in fact, they seem to want to have it both ways, ascribing its functional adaptedness to both.

The authors are from the Institute of Rehabilitation and Medical Robotics, State Key Lab of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. Engineers. Somehow, I am not surprised.

But be prepared: this is the kind of thing creationists love to cite, and I expect it will make it to the Discovery Institute’s list of ID-friendly scientific publications. Just note that it says nothing to support the god hypothesis at all.

I did like one of the comments there.

Humans occasionally use their hand as a tool of masturbation, one of “a multitude of daily tasks” performed “in a comfortable way”.

Clearly, the divine purpose of the human hand is masturbation. I look forward to their analysis of the proper design by the Creator of the human tongue. Unfortunately, all the evidence says the human penis was a botched design, as the development of multifunctional robotic penises has completely abandoned the original inspiration and seems to be pursuing an evolutionary path rooted in the Hitachi Magic Wand.

Are university administrators in a war against education?

Sometimes it seems that way. The latest example comes from the College of Saint Rose, where the president, Carolyn Stefanco, has won an award. What great accomplishment deserved recognition?

Stefanco, the president of Saint Rose, received the award two months after announcing the elimination of 23 faculty positions — many of them tenured — and 12 academic programs. She pitched the cuts, part of an attempt to fix a $9 million deficit, as a way to save money while investing in the college’s more popular programs.

Oh. “Popular” programs. I’m in one of those! Good thing I don’t have to worry about biology being shuttered, and it’s that other side of campus that’s more at risk. Who needs foreign languages, for instance? Or in another trend I see a lot of, let’s bugger philosophy. What a joke major! Don’t you know the purpose of college is to get a high paying job, to cite a recent exchange.

The award was for being a “disruptor”. It comes from…business. Of course.

“Disrupter,” a word native to start-up culture, typically describes someone who balks at conventional wisdom and comes out ahead. A disrupter discovers newer, better ways to run businesses and manipulate industries.
“To flourish in business these days is to make disruption and change work for you and your business,” Mike Hendricks, editor-in-chief of the Review, wrote when the paper announced the winners. “You have to recognize the need and opportunity for change and risk the status quo.”

We do need better ways to support higher education — I think faculty would welcome innovators who could shake up the status quo, because we’re getting worried. The problem is that a university is not a business, and our goal isn’t to make money — it’s to teach and learn. Coming in and disrupting education to make more money kind of ignores the whole function of the institution. It would be as if a business hired me, an academic, to “disrupt” their status quo, and I declared that I was going to “disrupt” that whole crap about profits and economics and instead redefine their purpose to be all about giving their expertise to the community. I don’t think it would go over well with the stockholders.

Unfortunately, the people who’ve been handed the reins of our universities are too often sitting their with a stockholder mentality.

Unsurprisingly, the faculty had a no-confidence vote on Stefanco. Also unsurprisingly, the board of trustees affirmed their confidence in her.

I voted!

Just got back from the caucus — the turnout was YUUUUGE. Long lines snaking into the meeting place, crowds of people everywhere. We voted and left instead of staying for all the politicking just because it was standing room only and we felt we had to leave to give more people a chance to come in.

Now we just wait for the returns.

You should watch the election returns on the Guardian. Not so much for the quality coverage, but for the mesmerizing little cartoon candidates zipping back and forth to paint in the county results.