Especially since it has such nice illustrations of the possibilities.
I also have to point out that cephalopods don’t have these awkwardnesses. Tentacles solve a lot of mechanical difficulties.
You know, I really think we ought to burn the Republican party right down to the ground, salt the earth it stands on, and stand by with flamethrowers in case anything should sprout from it ever again. I was surprised, though, to see that Ann Coulter and Jason Chaffetz might be slowly creeping towards the same conclusion — at least, the title of the article says that ‘We need to disband the entire Republican Party’: Ann Coulter flattens her own party, which sort of implies that we’re converging on an agreement here (also, please, Raw Story, stop with they hyperbole in your headlines — no, she hasn’t flattened anything).
But then I read why they are unhappy with the GOP.
You see that with the left and the elite conservatives in the Republican Party that don’t want an honest dialogue about the successes of this president,said Chaffetz.Instead of joining together and moving forward with specific goals to restore getting wins in the midterms, they are being disruptive in a haphazard way.
Holy fuck. They’re unhappy with Republicans because they are insufficiently fawning and sycophantic to Trump.
They are a prime example of how the problem isn’t just Trump, but the whole damn Republican party and the fools who vote for them.
I get the impression that our Republican overlords read Lord of the Rings from a slightly skewed perspective — they seem to think that Mordor was the ideal fantasy state. I would just like to offer a few correctives.
You are entirely correct that you will deter immigration by earning a reputation as a domain of unparalleled evil. It is an effective strategy for warding off elves and dwarves who might want to settle on your plains. But what’s wrong with elves and dwarves?
Turning your plains into “a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume” will also dissuade immigration, so I can sort of see the logic of Scott Pruitt. I think, though, that you’ve forgotten the health and happiness of your residents.
Putting up walls is rather redundant. You’ve got your natural barriers, your Mountains of Shadow, what’s the point of building a Morannon or Cirith Ungol? No one wants to get in, anyway, and they just turn into convenient nesting grounds for unspeakable horrors.
You want orcs? Because this is how you get orcs.
It’s not even going to stop immigration. You’ll still get sneaky hobbitses coming in, only it won’t be to till a nice farm or build a homey little inn for weary travelers — they’ll be coming in with the intent of toppling your citadel of evil.
This part should chill you the most: when they succeed, the world won’t look on them as terrorists, but as brave heroes who saved the world. They’ll write books about them and make movies and cosplayers will dress up as them, and Mordor will be reviled as the cruel, foul land that was righteously overthrown. And they won’t be wrong.
Pointing out these comparisons won’t change anything. Unfortunately, Stephen Miller is quite enjoying being the Mouth of Sauron, and they’ve got a line of sadists eager to be transformed into Ringwraiths. Besides, they’re really into pissing off those smug, snooty elves.
All 3 of my kids have checked in with fathers’ day reassurances, so I guess everything is OK.
I haven’t called my father because I’ve outlived him, but here’s a photo of the old man and my mother…and me, at age 9 months.
At least I can say I haven’t forgotten him.
There are creationist “museums” all over the place — I’ve been to ones in Kentucky, Washington state, and Missouri, and maybe a few others, but they’re all rather forgettable. I haven’t been to the the Big Valley Creation Science Museum in Alberta (how could I, what with the Royal Tyrrell right nearby?), but someone visited it and posted a summary. Harry Nibourg, the guy who runs it all, sounds like an enthusiastic glad-hander who is happy to give anyone a tour of his personal garbage heap. But I think these tourists summed it up well.
While I was there, a retired English couple had been making their way around the exhibits. As they reached the end, Harry asked them what their professions were. Turns out they’re retired biology teachers.
Harry asked,” Did you understand what you were looking at, and did it change your minds?
In the polite manner that only the English can achieve, the husband replied, “Well, you see, I think your museum is a crock of shit.”
Harry offered that they should “agree to disagree.”
That last line…is there any other phrase that is a better example of passive-aggressive truculence and an admission of a failure to defend one’s ideas than “agree to disagree”? Hate it.
I changed my plans about what to talk about, and was uncertain about what to do, and then I realized, “It’s freakin’ Fathers’ Day, duh!” So go ahead, bring your tales of great dads and bad dads to the discussion today at noon central time.
That’s the conversation starter, anyway. I imagine we’ll degenerate into random topics before the end of the hour, and that’s OK.
It’s also OK if you skip it altogether because you’ve just been reminded to call your dad or be a dad.
At least Clyde Magarelli isn’t molesting students, I don’t think, but William Paterson University in New Jersey has a real clunker in their sociology department. He’s teaching conspiracy theory nonsense instead of sociology. It’s the usual stuff: the Holocaust was exaggerated, the moon landings were faked, etc.
“We can’t land on it [the moon] and get back. We’ve never landed on it, you didn’t know that?” he says in one clip.
Magarelli also claims that the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, only engaged in torture during the “last part of the war.”
In another video, he tells his students that Native Americans are not indigenous people.
“We call them Native Americans but those that have their own government outside — they were never considered part of the system,” he mumbles. “They had their own tribal system.”
Magarelli also believes that the Irish were the first slaves in America — a theory debunked by Irish experts who said their indentured servitude was “in a completely different category from slavery,” according to the New York Times.
Video clips of the guy saying stupid stuff can be found on this Twitter thread.
He is a full time, tenured associate professor at the university, and has been teaching there since 1967 (!!!).
Now this is a case, though, where academic freedom does come into play. He’s saying stupid, wrong, ignorant things, but the whole point of tenure is you’re protected — you can defy the orthodoxy in all sorts of ways. He’s doing it. You can’t fire him for that.
But the flip side is that he has a job — he’s supposed to be teaching young people sociology, and he’s failing to do that. Academic departments have ways to deal, though: from the clips, it seems he’s teaching a first year course called “Social Problems”, which is almost certainly not part of the core curriculum. I’m going to guess that what the functional part of the department has done is shunted him off into non-critical electives, because you certainly can’t expect him to prepare students for other courses in sociology, and are limiting the harm he can do as much as possible. The curriculum can be thought of as a network that routes around damage, and deadwood faculty — he looks like the very definition of the term — are interpreted as damage and shuffled off to the side until they get around to retiring, or die.
The students should view him as a practical exercise in dealing with bad ideas.
The greatest harm he is doing, though, is that he’s taking up space that could be used more productively and creatively with a new faculty member — and he’s probably getting paid more than he’s worth. But that’s one of the inherent flaws of the tenure system.
What is this? Another case of academics behaving badly? And specifically, academics involve in neuroscience research?
The Psychological and Brain Science department at Dartmouth is experiencing a bit of upheaval, again based on sexual misconduct. The stories have all been a bit vague on the details, but it was serious enough that one faculty member’s tenure was about to be revoked, and two others are under investigation.
Psychological and brain sciences professor Todd Heatherton has elected to retire immediately following a recommendation from Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Elizabeth Smith, upheld by the faculty-elected Review Committee, that his tenure be revoked and his employment terminated. Smith’s recommendation follows a review of Heatherton by an external investigator for sexual misconduct. Professors Bill Kelley and Paul Whalen of the PBS department, who are also under investigation for sexual misconduct, remain under review.
In a press release provided by his lawyer Julie Moore, Heatherton stated that he retired because he thought it was best for his family, the College and the graduate students involved in the investigation.
Oh, that familiar song. “I was a reprehensible shit for years, but now I’m committing a selfless act of career suicide for my family’s sake, so forgive me.” Late-in-life remorse is such a useful card to play, especially when the hammer is about to come down anyway.
This has been building for a while — there were reports months ago about a growing criminal investigation.
Three tenured professors from the psychological and brain sciences department at Dartmouth College—Todd Heatherton, Bill Kelley, and Paul Whalen—are targets of a criminal investigation, according to official statements from Dartmouth’s president and the New Hampshire attorney general on Oct. 31. The school, which has variously described the allegations as referring to “serious misconduct” and “sexual misconduct,” had already launched its own internal investigation of the three men. Heatherton, Kelley, and Whalen are all on paid leave with restricted campus access, according to the statement from Dartmouth’s president. Heatherton also lost his affiliation at New York University, where he had been a visiting scholar since July.
Again, the details are lacking, but whatever they were, they were sufficient to prompt 15 students and post-docs to make a complaint and bring in outside law enforcement. University administrations hate bringing in the law from outside, and that more than anything tells me there is an awful lot lurking beneath the official statements. And also that they’re actually revoking tenure for at least one professor.
The professors — Todd Heatherton, Bill Kelley and Paul Whalen — are under investigation by both college and law enforcement officials for sexual misconduct.
“We wish to dispel any sensational or inaccurate accounts of these allegations and to counteract any efforts to minimize their severity,” the statement reads. “In our collective experience, these professors have all created a hostile academic environment in which sexual harassment is normalized.” (Scroll down to read the statement in full.)
Beyond the written statement, several students also described to the paper a culture of drinking where the line between professional and personal interactions was often blurred.
OK, I confess: I’m also a graduate of a neuro program, the Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. Also, for many years it was a tradition for the lab to stroll over to a nearby bar late on Friday afternoon and shoot pool and share a pitcher of beer, and faculty were often there, socializing. That’s a good thing. But there was no drinking to excess, no sex talk, and I honestly cannot imagine my advisor, Chuck Kimmel, behaving in any way other than with respect and kindness to his students.
OK, sometimes he could get a little cranky. There were a few clashes. But nothing where we ever felt a lack of decency in our treatment.
While informality and social interaction are good, there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed — lines that are there to protect students and faculty together. Dartmouth PBS seems to have made a practice of crossing them.
Let’s check in on the ongoing saga of T. Florian Jaeger, shall we? He’s a computation linguist working in the cognitive sciences department at the University of Rochester whose tenure so far has been a real shitshow, and also a familiar story. He’s a sexist pig who doesn’t recognize boundaries or any limits to his behavior. One of the stars of the place, Richard Aslin, resigned his position over the ongoing behavior of Jaeger, the former president of the university, Joel Seligman, resigned the day the investigative report was published, and other faculty, like Jessica Cantlon and Brad Mahon, followed suit. Now Celeste Kidd and Steven Piantadosi have quit.
That is a department in a shambles. The wave of resignations sends a very clear message that this is not a place where you want to work — you’d have to be desperate to take a job in the cognitive sciences at Rochester. And that means they’re going to get worse, and not the least because the rot, Jaeger, is still there, supported by the administration.
Kidd and Piantadosi made public their resignation letter. Ouch.
University of Rochester President Richard Feldman has declined to sanction, much less fire, T. Florian Jaeger, a professor who sent an unwanted picture of his penis to a student; made insulting and objectifying comments about female students’ sexual desirability, appearance, and vaginal taste; used drugs at a lab retreat with students, and had sex with an undergraduate student, among many other unethical behaviors. These are not accusations. These actions were confirmed by the University of Rochester’s own investigation. The University also verified that such behavior led at least ten women to avoid Jaeger to the detriment of their careers.1 President Feldman declines to take responsibility for his own refusal to punish Jaeger, instead blaming the faculty senate, a body which he knows has no authority to impose sanctions. Unbelievably, Former President Joel Seligman and Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department Chair Greg DeAngelis both publicly defended Jaeger’s tenure — to the media and faculty senate respectively — by an appeal to the sanctity of “academic freedom”.
Holy crap. That’s not what academic freedom means. It does not mean that professors get to rob banks on the side with no repercussions on their career; it does not mean you get to fuck up a required part of your job, teaching, and no one can fire you for dereliction of your duties. This is the kind of thing that gives tenure and academic freedom a bad name when it is badly abused.
The university administration is also failing to do their job. They’ve got faculty resigning right and left, they’ve got ten women whose careers have been harmed, the university’s reputation is wrecked, and they’re trading all that to keep this one man, T. Florian Jaeger, in his job. I’m going to take a wild guess that Jaeger is also viciously litigious and has let the admins know that he plans to be an expensive headache if they don’t defend him.
Oh, and there’s a footnote to Kidd’s and Piantadosi’s letter.
1President Feldman returned Jaeger to teaching undergraduates shortly after the University’s own investigation defended with the argument that “A combination of Jaeger’s harsh and demeaning language, flirtatious behavior, use of sexual innuendo, promiscuous reputation, open relationships with students and blurring of social and professional lines all contributed to some extent [to students avoiding him], but we cannot unravel the degree to which women avoided Jaeger because of the sexual elements in his conduct, as oppose to other simply offensive or unappealing aspects of his personality.”
Wow. So his repellent personality so thoroughly blends in with his despicable attitude towards women that they can’t be sure which of the two makes him a terrible colleague and bad teacher, so they’re restoring his undergraduate teaching duties. Does this make any sense at all? All aspects of his performance are equally awful, masking which bits are due to sexism and misogyny, so hey, let’s put him in a classroom with 18 year old men and women.
But here’s the most chilling part for the future of Rochester.
Jaeger is not named in the federal lawsuit against the university and has said he believes the department, and his lab, are “worth rebuilding.” He will resume teaching in the fall after spending the 2017-18 school year mostly away from campus.
Now that he’s driven away the ethical, principled faculty, T. Florian Jaeger’s way is clear to rebuild the department in his own image.
Easy. This’ll do it.
I notice that Scott Adams still has a job, as does every unfunny hack cartoonist who inherited a syndication slot for a cartoon invented 60 years ago.
