Neil deGrasse Tyson said something stupid

It happens. We all say stupid things now and then. But this gaffe was spectacularly ill-timed — he’s trying to diminish the emotional response to our Weekend O’ Mass Murder.

Yes? And? If I’m told someone died of a medical error, I will be distressed and say we should reduce the frequency of those errors, and doctors and hospitals will agree and point to efforts to prevent them. Those same doctors will tell you about vaccination and treatment programs to reduce deaths due to flu. There are suicide hotlines and therapists who strive to help people who want to kill themselves. We require licensing and training before you are allowed to drive a car, and we pay fleets of police to enforce traffic laws. The police are also paid to prevent criminals from killing people and to arrest those who do. Those terrible deaths? Society is trying to do something about them.

Mass shootings, not so much. People are grieving and terrified and even, dare I say it, emotional about these incidents because they are so arbitrary, because we would be helpless in those situations, and because nothing is being done to prevent them. Limited regulation, gun manufacturers gleefully peddling instruments of destruction to the public, and a criminal organization, the NRA, dedicated to opposing all restrictions on gun availability…so people are rightfully angry at this continuing madness. Don’t try to minimize it. Placidity in the face of preventable horror allows it to continue, while anger gets shit done.

That was a bad tweet. But there’s something even worse: Tyson’s apology. Oh my god. It’s horrible. For one thing, it’s not an apology. He regrets nothing he did, but gosh, all you other people — you should appreciate the information he has bestowed upon you.

“My intent was to offer objectively true information that might help shape conversations and reactions to preventable ways we die,” his note read. “Where I miscalculated was that I genuinely believed the Tweet would be helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America. What I learned from the range of reactions is that for many people, some information –-my Tweet in particular — can be true but unhelpful, especially at a time when many people are either still in shock, or trying to heal – or both.

“So if you are one of those people, I apologize for not knowing in advance what effect my Tweet could have on you,” he continued. “I am therefore thankful for the candor and depth of critical reactions shared in my Twitter feed. As an educator, I personally value knowing with precision and accuracy what reaction anything that I say (or write) will instill in my audience, and I got this one wrong.”

Don’t you realize that he was trying to be helpful? He admits he got something wrong…how his audience would react. He still doesn’t appreciate the difference between a flu death statistic and a specific event in which a racist murders a group of people for the color of their skin.

Neil, you need to learn how to apologize. Here’s a helpful video. I apologize in advance if it triggers resentment on your part, and for not knowing how you will react to helpful advice.

Or perhaps you’ve already researched the topic of how to make an apology and encountered this video.

If so, I have to tell you that that one is satire. It’s what not to do. Your apology seems to follow the template with surprising accuracy, unfortunately.

The new Lysenkoism

Some science conflicts with Republican ideology, so it must be suppressed.

One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice is losing nutrients because of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised serious concerns for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also tried to minimize media coverage of the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances last year.

I don’t think it was that groundbreaking. When I got here to UMM twenty years ago and started listening to plant biologists, this was a common and accepted conundrum: plants grown in CO2 enriched atmospheres would thrive happily but they were making more carbohydrates, which require only carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight, but things like proteins, which also require nitrogen, were being synthesized at the same or lower rate. You’d get loads of carbs at the expense of all the other nutrients we like in our food. Ziska may have been one of the plant physiologists who first advanced this concern — I wouldn’t know, it’s way outside my field — but what he is saying is not controversial or unusual now.

Well, not controversial to scientists. To politicians with an ideological anti-science axe to grind, it’s data that must be buried.

Ziska, in describing his decision to leave, painted a picture of a department in constant fear of the president and Secretary Sonny Perdue’s open skepticism about broadly accepted climate science, leading officials to go to extremes to obscure their work to avoid political blowback. The result, he said, is a vastly diminished ability for taxpayer-funded scientists to provide farmers and policymakers with important information about complex threats to the global food supply.

Ziska, or “Lew” as he’s known to his colleagues, has researched plants at USDA across five administrations, Republican and Democratic, contributing significantly to the country’s understanding of how rising carbon dioxide levels and changing temperatures affect everything from crops to noxious weeds and even plants grown to make illicit drugs.

The shifts in the USDA seem petty and trivial now, but they all add up to an effort to promote obscurantism when the science contradicted the political dogma of the right.

“We were careful,” he said. “And then it got to the point where language started to change. No one wanted to say climate change, you would say ‘climate uncertainty’ or you would say ‘extreme events.’ Or you would use whatever euphemism was available to not draw attention.”

Ziska said there was never a department memo that directed legions of USDA scientists to be more careful with their language, it was simply well understood.

The signals to scientists have been subtle but frequent. For example, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which funnels hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to colleges and universities for food and agriculture research has dropped the term “climate change” from its requests for applications from scientists. Instead, the agency uses “climate variability and change.”

Practically every science textbook in the country — every one I’ve ever used, anyway — will have a section on the history of genetics that will mention Lysenko, the Soviet politician who was convinced that he could adapt any plant to the harsh Russian winters by vernalization, treating the seeds with exposure to cold so that they would acquire cold resistant traits. It didn’t work, but that didn’t stop him from promoting his wishful thinking, and getting the Soviet administration to censor (and imprison) people who pointed out the evidence was against him.

It’s interesting that we were all trained on this lesson with an example that involves climate and biology, and yet here we are, led by people who apparently never cracked an introductory science textbook, or they’d realize they’re repeating history.

Tricksy arachnologist. They lies, they do!

I know, I said I probably wouldn’t do any spider posts today. It just goes to show you should never trust a guy who thinks like a spider. Anyway, we finished day 1 of the phase III spider survey early — I tell you, it’s a real joy when you’ve got a couple of well-trained students who know what they’re doing and can rip through a garage at lightning speed, identifying all the spiders lurking in shadowy corners. Preston and Maya got 10 houses done before 2:00! To celebrate, Mary and I decided to check out a couple of places right here in the little town of Morris where Argiope was rumored to reside, and we found her! Down by the railroad tracks, near the Cenex gas station on the south side of town, we found a couple of them.

I also had an ulterior motive for looking for them. We captured this one and carried it home, and I released it into a patch of native prairie plants that Mary had planted for local pollinators. It’s only fair to include local predators, as well. We’ll see if she survives and thrives and maybe spawns a local line of noble Argiope in my backyard.

You may be spared any spider posts today

I know you’re going to miss them. Today is the start of our August spider survey, so shortly my students and I are going to start rummaging around in grungey garages and sheds, counting spiders, and we have to push hard because it’s a short week, since I’m flitting off to Missouri on Thursday. That means a long day and getting home all dirty and sweaty and bleary-eyed.

Maybe if I see some weird and exotic specimen, I might shoot a photo, but mainly we expect hordes of our familiar theridiidae and pholcidae, and I’ll just be ticking off tallies. It’s data, though!

Racist and stupid

Wow. Case in point that racists have been emboldened by the current culture: Parker Mustian. He’s a high school student who made hate videos and shared them with his classmates. He happily expresses racist views, brandishes a rifle, and threatens to shoot up his school.

“Howdy, I’m Parker Mustian and I hate black people,” the teen begins in the first clip. “They’re the worst. They’re stinky and they just suck. They’re just bad people.”

Mustian proceeds to fire a weapon at what he claims are “a box of Jordans – the favorite pair of shoes for a black man.”

“I’m going to show you what I think of a black man,” Mustian says, unloading his weapon at the box of shoes.

“F*ck all n*ggers,” he says after firing.

Mustian is in South Carolina, which may contribute to his attitude…but he’s also wealthy and connected, so he apparently thought he was immune to all consequences.

Mustian is the grandson of Richard Quinn, the prominent South Carolina political strategist whose empire recently collapsed as part of a multi-year corruption probe. That probe is ongoing, in fact, as Quinn was arrested earlier this year and charged with eleven counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation.

Mustian is the son of prominent Columbia, S.C. attorney Ben Mustian, who is Quinn’s son-in-law.

Nice family you got there, Parker. It must be a strain to have to live up to their reputation.

The one good thing is that it used to be that people would think these same horrible thoughts, but they’d be reticent about announcing them in public. Not any more! Now we get to see shit for brains on display all the time.

Here be monsters, and we’re lacking in heroes

I remember being a young couple in our 20s, with wee little babies. We would have done anything — we would have willingly died — to save those kids, but we didn’t have to. Jordan and Andre Anchondo did.

Jordan, 24 and Andre, 23, were among 20 victims killed in Saturday’s mass shooting at a Walmart and shopping center in El Paso, leaving their infant son without parents as they died protecting him, their family told The Post. Jordan’s death was confirmed Saturday. Family members confirmed Andre’s death to The Post late Sunday night, after waiting more than 24 hours to find out what happened to him.

Tito and other family members said they believe Andre died trying to shield his wife and son from the gunfire.

Jordan’s sister, Leta Jamrowski, told the Associated Press that based on the baby’s injuries, Jordan died shielding their baby.

“He pretty much lived because she gave her life,” Jamrowski, 19, told the AP.

Jordan was holding him in her arms when she died, Jamrowski said. She fell on him as she collapsed onto the floor, breaking some of his bones but keeping him alive, her sister said.

They left behind two other kids who are asking where their parents are now. This is a horror story beyond my imagining, but it’s happening for real. People are killing other people over an imaginary threat. The reason Jordan and Andre died defending their child is racism, plain and simple.

John F. Bash, U.S. attorney in the Western District of Texas, said the case is being treated as domestic terrorism. A manifesto that authorities believe Crusius posted on the Internet forum 8chan includes attacks against Latino immigrants and rants about a “Hispanic invasion.”

“This Anglo man came here to kill Hispanics,” El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles wrote in a statement. “I’m outraged and you should be too. This entire nation should be outraged. In this day and age, with all the serious issues we face, we are still confronted with people who will kill another for the sole reason of the color of their skin.”

Why is this crisis coming to a head now? The answer is plain and simple: Donald Trump. People have been warning of the danger of our racist president before this weekend’s massacres.

A white-nationalist presidency is untenable. Having to endure one while the man in the office has committed obvious crimes, such as obstruction of justice, is even worse. Add on the ever-increasing threat of white-supremacist domestic terrorism — which the FBI director warned about just last week and the administration’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric fuels like gasoline — and it is impossible not to conclude that the presidency is too powerful for someone as racist as Donald Trump.

In recent weeks, the president has again launched nakedly racist and demagogic attacks on a number of black and brown members of Congress, not to mention the black-majority city of Baltimore. When his cultish supporters responded to his attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with chants of “send her back,” Trump stood and watched and later referred to them as “patriots.”

So we’re supposed to be surprised or shocked that white nationalist violence is rising on his watch? That hate crimes against almost every minority group have increased since his election to the White House in 2016?

We are in an intolerable situation. The president is a white nationalist bigot, and the senate is controlled by another greedy bigot. The Democrats are in denial and are avoiding doing anything about the putrid, rotting elephant in the room — impeachment proceedings are vital at this point.

Since taking over the House, the Democrats have not sat idly, passing several bills that have signified where they stand as a party. However, the semantic Twister the House Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler is playing right now in order to avoid simply launching an impeachment inquiry when the number of House members in favor of one is now in triple digits is an insult to African American voters in particular, the Democrats’ most faithful and consistent constituency.

People will say it’s futile as long as Moscow Mitch cracks the whip in the senate, but I don’t care. The fight has to be made, and every delay undermines the fading moral authority of the opposition party. If you’re not going to fight against racism and murder, what were you elected for?

Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans will never allow a conviction, I know. However, the other main Democratic arguments against impeachment are bunk: the effort against Richard Nixon united the country, they currently enjoy sufficient public support, and they can do all the business that the people require in Congress while putting Trump on trial for the crimes that they crow on Twitter all day that he committed. Again, what was the point of bringing Robert Mueller to testify before the American people if you weren’t going to do a single thing with his report other than tell us to go vote our conscience once we read it? What if we live in a state where Republicans take that vote away? What if Trump does something else even more disastrous before the election that makes all of this moot? And don’t tell me that it isn’t possible, because, please.

It seems to me that telling the electorate to have the conscience our representatives lack is the “thoughts and prayers” of the Democratic party.

Nothing Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote should be perpetuated for another generation

No. No. No. Making a series of A Princess of Mars is a terrible idea.

The Internets have been in an uproar over the conclusion of HBO’s Game of Thrones television series, which ended after eight seasons in 2019.

Despite the potential for multiple spin-off series, fans are of course disappointed to have the adventure and drama come to an end. To be certain, it’s a bummer on the same scale as being decapitated – but wait, hold the door!

There is another literary fantasy series, with an equally amazing monarchical atmosphere of politics, drama, action and incredible beasts – with stories that are loved by thousands, including George R. R. Martin himself, and that undoubtedly inspired the GOT author to become a writer. I’m talking about, of course, John Carter of Mars!

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoomian series would be the perfect replacement for Game of Thrones. Despite the unjustly maligned 2012 film, John Carter (of Mars, dammit), the serialized Martian stories were made for the type of adult adaptation that HBO specializes in, and they would undoubtedly appeal to the GOT audience that will be soon be suffering from sword-and-sorcery withdrawals.

Oh my god. Has this person even read those books? I have. The whole lot. The Mars books. The Venus books. The ones about space pirates and the moons of Jupiter. The hollow earth stories. Tarzan. I am not proud of this fact. As an excuse, I offer up the fact that I was a child at the time, and that my father happened to have a collection of first edition, hardbound Burroughs novels (which I scribbled all over in crayon before I was old enough to read them), so I was deeply steeped in the lore before I was old enough to know better…which was when I was 12 or 13.

In their favor, I will admit that they are rip-roaring fast-paced pulp with chapters that end in cliffhangers every time, so you can’t stop. They are classic serialized pulp fiction of their time, which was about 1915-1940. They are perfect representatives of a genre that is now dead, dead, dead, and they simply won’t work anymore.

For one, they are terribly written. I’m talking newspaper prose, straightforward descriptive text, “enriched” by a liberal sprinkling of words scraped from a thesaurus. Burroughs was a hack. His strength was an ability to churn out words at a rapid pace. He did not put any thought into his stories at all; George RR Martin should be embarrassed at the comparison.

For another, these are not complex stories. There is almost no depth at all to them. Every single Burroughs novel follows an identical template: an aristocratic white man finds himself stranded in an exotic land (Mars and Africa were equally exotic to Burroughs) where the natives are barbaric and warlike. By virtue of his intrinsic superiority to these primitives, the hero conquers all and eventually finds himself a beautiful woman to be the object of his chivalrous attentions, but who is actually a maguffin to be used and reused in multiple sequels in which brave White Man must rescue her from brutish perils.

The racism and misogyny implicit in this formula ought to be obvious to all. It made them wildly popular in a more racist and misogynistic era (and to young children who didn’t know better), and the idea gets revived now and then to make them the foundation of a new franchise — the John Carter movie was an example of that — but they’re always going to founder on the fact that the source material is shallow, simplistic, and mindlessly bigoted, so you don’t have that rich vein of complex lore that Martin (and Tolkien, and other good fantasy authors) based their stories on. I thought the John Carter movie did a good job of skating over the bad stuff in the story, but as a franchise, it was doomed. I’m impressed it made it through one entire movie without collapsing on its flimsy framework.

The one thing that would make it good HBO fodder, though, is that in the Mars stories everyone was always naked except for jeweled harnesses or a sword belt or some such skimpy thread of leather. Burroughs did not dwell on the sex or nudity beyond tersely mentioning it and allowing the readers’ imaginations to work, but I’m sure HBO could turn it into a non-stop tits and asses show.

Odd geek out

Uh-oh. I just got a look at the workshop schedule for Skepticon, and there I am, up against a 2 hour block from American Atheists, and at the same time as Callie Wright. Callie Wright! I know where everyone is going to be. I want to go to their session on podcasting. If no one shows up for mine, can I just go next door?

Also, I seem to be the only person doing anything vaguely sciencey this coming weekend. I’m feeling awkward and out of place. I hope no one laughs at me.

12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Stories to Tell: Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges by Putting a Human Face on Atheism
Nick Fish, American Atheists track

Perhaps the most important goal of the Atheist community is to take away the negative connotations associated with the word Atheist. Nick shares some of his experiences and offers tips as to help us get past the label to see the people behind it.
Colonnade A

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Understanding Phylogenetics
PZ Myers

What’s a phylogenetic tree, and why do they keep changing on us? Come build a phylogenetic tree from evidence (with help!) and learn how it’s done.
Colonnade C

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
How to Make Your Podcast AWESOME
Callie Wright, Secular Women Work track

Anyone can put together a mediocre podcast these days, and lots of people do. Come find out what you can do to make your podcast stand out and be a joy to listen to.
Colonnade B

It’s OK if you’re going to Skepticon and choose to skip my workshop. I’ll understand completely.

It’s Argiope Day!

Over on the iNaturalist site for Spiders of Minnesota, we’ve been tasked with finding Argiope. I hadn’t seen any in Minnesota before (and I’ve been living here for almost 20 years), but as usual, once you start looking, and once you see a few, suddenly their presence just leaps out at you. We found a bunch of them today!

These are among the biggest spiders in Minnesota, and the first one I found, the pictures weren’t so great. I’m used to itty-bitty little beasties, so I’ve got multiple extension tubes in my camera, and all I got were EXXXTREME closeups. Today I popped out most of those tubes. These guys really are monstrous huge, and vividly colored. Once I tweaked my camera, they were also easy to photograph.

We found them in the unmowed drainage ditches all along the highway through town. Well, honestly, Mary found them — she spotted the first, I moved in with the camera, totally focused on the specimen, and she had to yell at me that I was about to walk into another one. She was keying in on the stabilimenta, the thickened zig-zag bands that form a line in the webs, and once she spotted one, she was seeing them all over the place. It got to the point that she’d say “one here, one here, another one here” and point and I’d just go where she commanded.

I’ve put a little gallery below the fold. Get out into nature and open your eyes!

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