It always sounds fancier in Latin

“Death of Spartacus,” drawn by H. Vogel. 19th-century illustration depicting the death of Spartacus, a gladiator who led a slave rebellion in Rome during the 1st century B.C.

Steve Bannon has always wallowed in the slime. He was in charge of that muckraking online tabloid, Breitbart. He was an advisor to Donald Trump. He was a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, that data analysis firm that scraped the scum off the Facebook barrel to skew elections. He was an investment banker, the lowest of the low.

He seemed to have reached the bottom. He could go no lower. So to meet that challenge, he teamed up with the reactionary Catholics behind an organization called the Dignitatis Humanitas Institute — you can tell it’s a con by all the pretentious Latin. The motto is also a giveaway: Defending the Judaeo-Christian Foundations of Western Civilisation through the recognition that Man is made in the Image and Likeness of God. Bite me, Bannon.

This Judaeo-Christian nonsense is always a dead give-away that you’re dealing with frauds. They also have a Declaration that is full of arrogant pieties and annoyingly capitalized words. The deeper a guy is in the cesspit, the harder he strains to elevate himself by calling on God as his bestest buddy.

A. whereas the true nature of Man is that he is not an animal, but a human being made in the image and likeness of God, his creator,

B. whereas it is precisely the imago Dei that Man acknowledges within himself with such profound awe and respect to call human life sacred; and to which the moral sense testifies certain properties as being inalienable; indelible in every single human life from conception until natural death,

C. whereas these properties have come to be known in the modern, secular state as ‘fundamental human rights’,

D. whereas the most complete expression of human dignity is therefore to be found only in recognising Man’s true anthropological and existential nature, and that this recognition lies at the foundation of all that the world calls civilisation,

E. whereas in recognising Man’s rights as intrinsic to his being, and not the product of legal charters is essential to sustaining liberty in a free society, work done to promote such a view of human dignity thereby promotes the foundation of all human rights,

F. whereas it is impossible to deny the source of Man’s transcendent dignity, and at the same time maintain that such dignity exists, yet the school of humanism tried to do just this, and with its inevitable failure, Man has been left in the precarious state of having no inherent rights other than those which the social community deigns to confer on him,

G. whereas belief that the State is the source of our human rights might be called inauthentic human dignity,

H. whereas that which is most sacred about Man is beyond human description because it comes from God – image and likeness – who is himself ineffable, and that international charters can only leave Man diminished by the attempt to literalise the ineffable,

I. whereas these insights are needed to maintain the balance between the rights of the individual and the power of the State, and that therefore recognition of Man’s dignity affects society’s ability to organise itself in a virtuous way politically, so that this balance never crosses the tipping point,

J. whereas the proper relationship between the individual and the State is that the latter exists to serve the former, not vice versa,

K. whereas it is the recognition of the dignity of Man that is most lacking in our society, not rights, and that this imbalance must be redressed,

L. whereas the mutuality of the parallel concepts of human rights and human dignity, and their interdependence, is definitively institutionalised in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”,

Noble sentiments that rest entirely on the fiction of the Christian god. Too bad they’re paid for by a crude thug.

Anyway, Bannon was planning on buying up a medieval monastery in Italy — further attempts at desperately buying up some class, which he has always lacked — calling it a “gladiator school for culture warriors”. Oy, it sounds like Spartacus, only not the good movie by Stanley Kubrick, but the cheesy Starz series with oiled muscular bodies, naked slave girls, slow motion gore, and everyone yelling and making an “O” face. The whole thing reeks of over-compensation.

Alas, Bannon’s dream is not to be. Italy is evicting Steve Bannon. O Ignominy! The only thing left is for Bannon to strip, oil up, and fall upon his sword.

Steven Anderson now has something else in common with snakes

He has been driven out of Ireland.

Pastor Steven L Anderson, who founded the Faithful Word Baptist Church in 2005, in Arizona, USA, was set to deliver a sermon in Dublin on May 26 as part of a short tour of Europe.

The Minister for Justice and Equality, Charlie Flanagan, has signed an exclusion order ‘with immediate effect under Section 4 of the Immigration Act 1999 in respect of Mr Steven Anderson, aka Pastor Steven L Anderson’.

(Note: this is cruelly unfair to snakes, who are much nicer than Anderson. Also, it’s a myth that snakes were driven out of Ireland, they never took up residence there in the first place.)

The Indian Wars never ended, they just changed tactics

It’s all about raising awareness of the wave of crime against Indian women.

For last weekend’s Washington State 1B track and field championships, Rosalie Fish painted a red handprint over her mouth, the fingers extending across her cheekbones. On her right leg, she painted the letters “MMIW,” standing for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

It’s an epidemic right now. Imagine if a town the size of Morris, Minnesota were wiped out every year…but these deaths are scattered and spread out among a neglected population.

MMIW seeks to address the issue of the thousands of indigenous women who are missing or were murdered. According to a report by the Urban Indian Health Institute, 5,712 of these cases were reported in 2016, but only 116 were put into the U.S. Department of Justice database. With 71 cases, Washington was second only to New Mexico, which had 78 cases of murdered or missing indigenous women.

I can imagine it: the reservations in Washington state are in many ways isolated, populated with poor people, but at the same time penetrated with highways and outsiders are encouraged to visit to buy cheap cigarettes or gamble, so some of the worst people from the outside are cruising through the place. Then there’s the problem of jurisdiction…if some predator is looking for prey no one with power will care about, reservations are targets of opportunity.

Hey, Canada! You too!

The thousands of Indigenous women and girls who were murdered or disappeared across the country in recent decades are victims of a “Canadian genocide,” says the final report of the national inquiry created to probe the ongoing tragedy.

The report, obtained by CBC News and verified by sources, concludes that a genocide driven by the disproportionate level of violence faced by Indigenous women and girls occurred in Canada through “state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies.”

Colonialism isn’t over yet, it seems — it’s still exacting a toll.

First, kill all the professors. Second, reap the rewards of knowledge.

Did you know that PC insanity may mean the end of American universities? I sure didn’t, and I’m living in the middle of one. There is no “PC insanity” going on, for one thing — political correctness is merely a right-wing bugaboo, an invisible specter to rail against whenever some idea escapes the shackles of conservative fear and ignorance. Most of what goes on in universities is this weird thing called learning, and what riles conservatives is that learning doesn’t look anything like the indoctrination they’re used to.

So what has inspired that ridiculous headline? A philosophy professor speaking at a European nationalist conference declared that he dislikes those fractious liberal arts, and therefore we can expect the demise of American education at any moment now. Woo-hoo.

People used to talk about the ends of the university and how the academic establishment was failing its students. Today, more and more people are talking about the end of the university, the idea being that it is time to think about closing them rather than reforming them.

“More and more people are talking”…who are these people? Are there specific policy proposals? This sort of vague hand-waving about those people over there, not cited, just “talking” about an idea that no one seems ready to stand behind is bad journalism. Give me sources. Give me plans. There are always assholes babbling about something they don’t like.

This article does narrow it down to one person at least.

Last month at a conference in London, the distinguished British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton added his voice to this chorus when responding to a questioner who complained of the physical ­violence meted out to conservative students at Birkbeck University.

We’ll get to him in a moment, but first…what violence against conservatives at Birkbeck? This is the first I’d heard of it, so I went searching for news about something going down at Birkbeck. There doesn’t seem to be much of anything. Perhaps some of our UK readers can let me know if there is some specific incident being addressed. The closest thing I could find was an article from a year ago in Vice that interviewed some students to find out What It’s Like to Be a Tory at a Left-Wing University, in this case Birkbeck. There’s the usual moaning about how girls don’t want to date them when they find out their political leanings, and then this complaint:

As President of the Conservative Association, after I requested a debate with the Labour Society president, in the style of the mayoral hustings, I received threats of violence from student union officers, including in writing, a threat to “destroy” the office I work at and verbal threats to kill me. The officer who made this threat resigned after I threatened legal action against the student union. I was marched off campus by university staff for “threatening the safe space” after I set up the pre-approved Conservative stand, with a Union Jack backdrop. Labour students, who clearly display no appreciation of free speech promoted by J.S. Mill, tore up posters and burst the Conservative Party branded balloons.

OK, death threats and threats of destruction are bad, don’t do them. At least the culprit in this case was compelled to drop out, which seems a more than adequate punishment. I’m so sorry about your balloons, Mr Tory.

But this is the worst incident I could find. Maybe the person at this event with Scruton had personal knowledge of some more terrible event that didn’t make the international news, but this is still so much nebulous anecdote, and it’s still just background noise on the level of “humans, in every kind of social group, sometimes suck”. They don’t warrant the kind of nonsense Scruton proposes.

There were two possible responses to this situation, Sir Roger said. One was to start competing institutions, outside the academic establishment, that welcomed conservative voices.

You mean like Liberty University? Sure, as long as you don’t mind seeing political figures turned into minor deities, and you think it perfectly reasonable to teach creationism in biology classes. The thing is, there is no political litmus test for getting into a secular university. We don’t screen our students for enforced liberalism, we don’t dismiss students for voting Republican. It’s one of those things that is orthogonal to the academic mission.

It is true that university faculties tend to lean left of center, but there’s a reason for that: entering the professoriate is not a path to fortune and glory, and the only reason to be here is because one loves teaching, or loves research, or both. There’s no ulterior motive. There is definitely no political motive. There’s a kind of professional idealism at work here that means we have to love learning and teaching, which isn’t exactly high on the list of conservative values. We’d never say, “get rid of universities altogether,” unlike certain other people.

The other possibility was “get rid of universities altogether.”

That response was met with enthusiastic applause.

Now that’s chilling. Who was the audience? It’s odd, but many of the rags reporting enthusiastically on Scruton’s remarks don’t bother to say what conference, but I finally found one mention that it was a conservative nationalist conference.

This conference also featured Anna Maria Anders, Phillip Blond, John Fonte, Nile Gardiner, Dan Hannan, Daniel Kawczynski, John O’Sullivan, Balazs Orban, Melvin Schut, Marion Smith, and more. Sponsors included the Bow Group, Common Sense Society, Danube Institute, Institute of World Politics, International Reagan Thatcher Society, Polish National Foundation.

It’s a bunch of European conservative think-tanks and individuals I don’t know anything about, except that I can tell from the name that I’d be wearing a necklace of garlic and carrying a crucifix if I had to do anything with the International Reagan Thatcher Society. It looks like an unpleasant bunch from my perspective, I hope they didn’t put up any balloons, because they might well have been popped.

Flippantly proposing eradicating all universities is rather unseemly for a Cambridge graduate. He doesn’t have an alternative proposed, either, nor does he have a good reason. He does make the usual qualification, though.

Sir Roger went on to qualify his recommendation, noting that a modern society required institutions to pursue science and engineering. But the humanities, which at most colleges and universities have devolved into cesspools of identity politics and grievance studies, should be starved of funding and ultimately shut down.

My science is not your shield, you demented coward. I really get tired of these clowns saying the sciences are OK, because they want their medicines and their airplanes and their cell phones, but all those unproductive disciplines that teach mere art and literature and philosophy are garbage that can be thrown out. A scientist or an engineer with no knowledge of themself or their culture is an unimaginative drone — a mere technician shaped to serve their master. Don’t fall for this crap.

There are at least two ironies here. Scruton is a philosopher, that is, a discipline of the dreaded humanities. Did he get his learning in a cesspool? He’d probably argue that in the Olden Times it was better, but it really wasn’t. Universities have always been despised for their abrasive effects on societies, it’t just that most of us aren’t wearing rose-colored glasses when we look behind us.

Then there’s the hypocrisy of complaining about identity politics at a goddamned nationalist conference. You’re soaking in identity politics, Scruton, and you seem to be enjoying it.

Whenever I see people yapping about eliminating all the universities, except in those few disciplines that meet their approval, I think of the Great Leap Forward, and the Killing Fields, and Siberian work camps, all places and times where academics met an unpleasant end. Perhaps Scruton and his cronies are actually closet Old School Communists? Their ideas about social engineering seem just as crude and blunt.

Cringey Sunday

Yikes, after the visceral horror of mismanaged lab work, I needed a finisher of extremely cringey behavior, and the Internet provided. It’s this guy.

He rushed the stage at the California Democratic party convention to snatch the microphone away from Kamala Harris, because he wanted to talk about some “big ideas” — apparently, he’s concerned about extinctions, which I can sympathize with, but in this case the guy with the man-bun was inappropriate and disruptive and making his cause look bad.

I was impressed with how it was handled, though: no tough-guy threats, no violence, they just smoothly shuffled him off the stage and took him to the exit — they didn’t even press charges. I don’t know if that was a mistake, though, because the perpetrator seems completely clueless about what he has done wrong and will learn nothing from his behavior. He doesn’t even seem embarrassed, just smugly confident.

Laboratory nightmare!

I remember my wild man days, when I might have as much as 5 or 6 cups of coffee during the day — to be honest, I was never particularly wild, but I would get the caffeine shakes and feel a bit edgy. I’m now down to one cup in the morning, and if I’m feeling crazy, two. But never have I consumed the equivalent of 300 cups of coffee in one sitting, like these unfortunate students.

The students had volunteered to take part in a test in March 2015 aimed at measuring the effect of caffeine on exercise.

They were given 30g of caffeine instead of 0.3g, Mr Farrer said.

Death had previously been reported after consumption of just 18g, he told the court.

The university had switched from using caffeine tablets to powder, he said.

“The staff were not experienced or competent enough and they had never done it on their own before,” he said.

“The university took no steps to make sure the staff knew how to do it.”

The calculation had been done on a mobile phone, with the decimal point in the wrong place, and there was no risk assessment.

Caffeine is a potentially dangerous drug, and anyone working with it needs to be aware of that fact. I’ve had students experiment with it in our cell biology lab, and I always preface providing the purified drug to students with the warning that it is almost certainly the most dangerous chemical in the lab at that time, that they shouldn’t let familiarity with it as an ingredient in coffee and soft drinks let them be casual with playing with it.

I probably looked like a gaffed fish while I was reading that. It was appallingly sloppy practice.

  • They were dosing students with this drug, not mice or some other animal model.
  • They didn’t have competently trained staff monitoring every step.
  • They changed the reagent from over-the-counter pills to purified powder, which ought to have had everyone triple-checking the concentration.
  • They didn’t have their protocol vetted by an experienced pharmacologist.
  • They relied on a calculator.GIGO. I’ve been nagging my students to do more estimation, because I’ve noticed that calculator-dependent students easily make errors that are many orders of magnitude off, and they are completely unaware.

In our introductory labs, when we have students calculate concentrations, we have a little check box in the write-up — they have to get a TA or instructor to sign off on the calculations, and that’s for safe procedures, like adding an indicator dye to a tube of yeast. Every year when I’m grading lab reports, I keep an eye open for egregious errors in concentrations. One year the record was set by someone being off by 31 orders of magnitude.

I know students are easily capable of bone-headed errors in arithmetic that they aren’t experienced enough to notice, and to do it in an experiment in which students are the subjects…no. Just no. Now I’m going to have nightmares.

At least in this case the two poisoned students survived, and the university was fined £400,000. They all got off easy.

Twinkle, twinkle little spacelink

I’m happy to see the new, revitalized Skepchick, and I’ve been checking in every day. I’m recommending you all read Nicole’s recent post on the Spacelink intrusion. I guess Elon Musk just decided for all of us that we needed a few thousand satellites cluttering the sky, so he spewed a bunch of them upwards to get in the way of astronomers. Nicole gives a, I guess you could say, balanced perspective, but even at that she doesn’t have much good to say about this commercial venture.

Get your hands dirty for mental health?

I was getting worried. My wife is on a gardening kick, fencing off a part of the backyard and tilling and planting and weeding — she’s been coming into the house with disgustingly filthy hands, and has been suggesting that I should get out there and dig in the muck, too. For a moment, I was afraid this article on “Healthy fat hidden in dirt may fend off anxiety disorders” might give her more ammunition in her battle to get me to help out with the weeds. Fortunately, after reading it, I think I can argue it’s irrelevant.

You’ve all heard of the hygiene hypothesis, which suggests that exposure to diverse neutral and pathogenic organisms from an early age might play a vital role in shaping our immune systems. Further, there’s the idea that we might also pick up beneficial organisms from soil that evolution has shaped us to use in regulating our immune systems, so that being away from dirt is throwing our physiology out of balance in subtle ways.

“The idea is that as humans have moved away from farms and an agricultural or hunter-gatherer existence into cities, we have lost contact with organisms that served to regulate our immune system and suppress inappropriate inflammation,” said Lowry, who prefers the phrases ‘old friends hypothesis’ or ‘farm effect.’ “That has put us at higher risk for inflammatory disease and stress-related psychiatric disorders.”

Lowry has published numerous studies demonstrating a link between exposure to healthy bacteria and mental health.

One showed that children raised in a rural environment, surrounded by animals and bacteria-laden dust, grow up to have more stress-resilient immune systems and may be at lower risk of mental illness than pet-free city dwellers.

OK, that sounds plausible, although I’d say that there are so many differences between growing up on a farm vs. in a city that it’s going to be hard to persuade me that exposure to Bacterium X is the crucial variable. The only way to find out is to read the original paper. So I did.

This particular paper does no evolutionary testing. It doesn’t compare farm kids to city kids. It doesn’t look at human stress disorders at all. It tests the effects of a molecule found in cell bacteria on cells from mice isolated in culture. Basically, they synthesized and purified 1,2,3-tri [Z-10-hexadecenoyl] glycerol, 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid and tested it on cells loaded with receptor and recorder constructs so they could determine its mechanism of action — the bottom line is that this molecule under these conditions seems to have a potent effect in reducing activation of an inflammatory pathway. Here’s their summary of the results:

The free fatty acid form of 1,2,3-tri [Z-10-hexadecenoyl] glycerol, 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid, decreased lipopolysaccharide-stimulated secretion of the proinflammatory cytokine IL-6 ex vivo. Meanwhile, next generation RNA sequencing revealed that pretreatment with 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid upregulated genes associated with peroxisome proliferatoractivated receptor alpha (PPARα) signaling in lipopolysaccharide-stimulated macrophages, in association with a broad transcriptional repression of inflammatory markers. We confirmed using luciferase-based transfection assays that 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid activated PPARα signaling, but not PPARγ, PPARδ, or retinoic acid receptor (RAR) α signaling. The effects of 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid on lipopolysaccharide-stimulated secretion of IL-6 were prevented by PPARα antagonists and absent in PPARα-deficient mice.

That represents a lot of work, and I think that result sounds reasonable and potentially useful — who wouldn’t want another anti-inflammatory compound? But all that stuff about evolution and mental health and the hygiene effect were extraordinarily hand-wavey, and none of that was tested here at all. Which is a relief if my wife comes to me to say I should do some gardening so I could stock up on 1,2,3-tri [Z-10-hexadecenoyl] glycerol, 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid and be less stressed and grumpy, because I’ll just tell here that the effective dose in a handful of dirt hasn’t been found, the connection to mental health is speculative, and I am not a mouse.

Smith, D.G., Martinelli, R., Besra, G.S. et al. Psychopharmacology (2019). https://doi-org.ezproxy.morris.umn.edu/10.1007/s00213-019-05253-9

Whoa, his name really is “Randy Rainbow”?

His father’s name was Gerry Rainbow, and they named him Randy. It’s not a stage name. That’s the least of the trivia I learned from this profile of the YouTube star.

I think he’s fabulous, and all of his videos are entertaining…that’s the important thing. He also says he’s not very political, which I can believe. He’s just a normal guy with considerable musical talent who is just expressing a normal, ordinary perspective on the current odious absurdity. Check out his channel if you haven’t already.

Godzilla, king of big dumb fights

I saw the new movie, and it was classic stuff: ever more gigantic monsters trample on cities, while po-faced humans project their gnomic interpretations of the monsters’ intents on them, and while the monsters thrash at each other and go “GROOONK” as they stand atop rubble. If that’s all you need, you’ll enjoy it. It brought back memories of old Saturday matinees with Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah, all awful, but all marching through the same schtick, just like this one.

What did Boston do to deserve to be the locus of monster destruction, though?