Hates SJWs, decides to live in SJW Land

Daniel Povey, the Johns Hopkins professor who was fired for an assault with boltcutters against protesting students, was moving to Seattle to work at Facebook. His plans have changed.

Daniel Povey, the research professor whom John Hopkins University fired for trying to break through a student sit-in with bolt cutters, won’t be working at Facebook after all, according to The Baltimore Sun. Facebook previously confirmed that it had hired Povey and he was soon set to work there. But Povey now says that he isn’t prepared to work at Facebook because its “progressive ideas” parallel those of academe.

Facebook? Progressive? The privacy-obliterating, money-grubbing-capitalist, information-selling organization was too progressive for him? Jeez. That says a lot about Povey’s commitment to freedom. As does his alternative.

He plans to work with an unnamed Chinese company or university in speech recognition and machine learning, the Sun reported. “There are several operations in the Seattle area who do this kind of thing, so I wouldn’t even have to move,” Povey said. “I will feel more relaxed among the Chinese because they don’t have American-style social justice warriors.”

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong…

Let’s see him storm those protests.

Also, the Pacific Northwest is full of angry progressives. Is he even aware of where he is going?

Fierce mama

Yesterday, we let Iliana play in a cardboard box. But before we could do that, we had to clear out the spiders that had rapidly colonized it first, and that’s how we caught this nice Parasteatoda. Last night, while we slept, she spun an egg case and laid a lot of eggs in it, and then today, I had to put her in a different container. She would not go. I tried every trick in the book to separate her from her egg case, and she would frantically scurry back up into the vial. Then I tried removing the egg case; no go. She had it tethered, and as soon as I got it away, thwip, she’d reel it back up. I had to give up and let her stay with her eggs. These spiders are extraordinarily maternal.

Nope, I’m not going to battle that to get her treasure. My party is going to have to level up a lot more.

We have a plethora of spiders now!

I’ve got one baby at home, and today when I came in to the lab we found even more babies…cute little spider babies. It seems this was the weekend almost everyone decided it was time to emerge from the egg sac, and seven egg sacs spewed out clouds of spiderlings.

This is a little overwhelming. I spent a few hours separating out spiderlings and trying to spread out the masses to more containers.

Here is the maternity ward. See all those vials with foam plugs? Each one contains a female spider and one or more egg sacs. If you look closely, you can see lots of little dots, and that’s the cloud of new babies. That’s probably a thousand spiders you’re looking at.

Let’s zoom in a little on one of the vials.

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Dismantling a right-wing myth about transgender children

This is an amazing video, well worth an hour of your time. It’s an example of the kind of humane skepticism I wish we saw more of.

To summarize, if you don’t have an hour: there is a news story that is circulating on right wing media of a “liberal mom forcing her son to be transgender” — the parents are divorced, and the child dresses as a girl at mom’s place, and as a boy at dad’s, therefore the story of gender dysphoria is all made up and a ploy to torment the father by a bitter, liberal mom, and gosh, isn’t it evil how the Radical Left uses children as pawns? The video creator digs deep into the story, tracing it back to court transcripts and the actual statements made by the principals in the case, and discovers it’s all taking place in opposite world. The father is the one forcing the child to dress as a boy, motivated by conservative religious beliefs, and it’s the mother who is happy to let the child choose for themself. All the horrors of the story have been conjured into existence by right-wing ideologues.

I guessed how this was going to turn out when I learned that the primary source for the skewed story was Walt Heyer, and that the father was supported by the American College of Pediatricians. Don’t trust that organization! Peak irony was reached when some of the father’s friends in the video urge parents to only go to pediatricians who are members of the ACP, because other organizations are ideologically driven.

Also, the video is beautifully done and the presentation fair and sympathetic. Really worth watching. The ending will make you sad.

What kind of job is it to work at a student medical center?

I find this whole idea disturbing and alien. Daniel Kelly, an MD who worked at USC and UCLA, is currently under investigation for sexual abuse of a large number of gay and bisexual men who received ‘care’ from him — he seems to have been fond of overlong, invasive rectal examinations, and of prolonged fondling of patients’ genitals. He would, for instance, give a rectal exam if a young man had symptoms of a cold.

But that’s not what bugs me — if found guilty, he’s just another sick abusive man, and we’ve got evidence of plenty of those. No, the bothersome bit is how the university handles these situations.

Kelly joined UCLA in 1980. In 2002, he stopped working there, signing a confidential settlement that paid him $68,320 and barred him from seeking employment at any University of California campus. In a statement, UCLA said the settlement was “unrelated to allegations of sexual misconduct.”

He did something that got him banned from any UC campus, but it was all wrapped up under a confidentiality agreement, and he got paid? I don’t get it. I keep my nose clean my whole life, I do my job, and my university never takes me aside and hands me a big check while telling me I can’t talk about it. I’d happily not talk about it for that much money!

Especially when that much money is just about exactly what I need to pay our lawyer.

But no, it always seems to get paid to creeps who objectify and abuse students, and nope, I’m not willing to do that. Why is it always corruption and crime that are so lucrative?

Anyone who claims a medium is “apolitical” is lying

Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, withdrew a foreword to a Marvel comic collection because he was asked to edit out a political reference. Don’t you know that Marvel Comics is “apolitical”? What a crock. Marvel Comics lies.

Everything is political. Abstaining from comment on the deepest political crisis of our time is a rabidly political act that takes an offensive stand on racism, corruption, and misogyny. They wanted to remove a disparaging reference to Donald Trump, because, apparently, Marvel Comics never ever took a stance against fascism.

Too political, I guess.

Meanwhile, the chair of Marvel Entertainment, Isaac Perlmutter, is a close confidant and supporter of Donald Trump.

Not at all political.

Fortunately, Spiegelman’s essay will be even more widely read now, since it’s been published in the Guardian, where you can read it for free.

Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.

He has also expanded it a bit, since this closing story was irresistible.

I turned the essay in at the end of June, substantially the same as what appears here. A regretful Folio Society editor told me that Marvel Comics (evidently the co-publisher of the book) is trying to now stay “apolitical”, and is not allowing its publications to take a political stance. I was asked to alter or remove the sentence that refers to the Red Skull or the intro could not be published. I didn’t think of myself as especially political compared with some of my fellow travellers, but when asked to kill a relatively anodyne reference to an Orange Skull I realised that perhaps it had been irresponsible to be playful about the dire existential threat we now live with, and I withdrew my introduction.

A revealing story serendipitously showed up in my news feed this week. I learned that the billionaire chairman and former CEO of Marvel Entertainment, Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, is a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s, an unofficial and influential adviser and a member of the president’s elite Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. And Perlmutter and his wife have each recently donated $360,000 (the maximum allowed) to the Orange Skull’s “Trump Victory Joint Fundraising Committee” for 2020. I’ve also had to learn, yet again, that everything is political… just like Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw.

Hail Hydra, Ike.

Portland seems to have weathered the neo-Nazi rally just fine

Much credit has to go to the Portland Antifa, who turned up in numbers to mock and dissipate any action by the racists. Eric Ward summarizes the day on Twitter, as does Robert Evans, with lots of photos. It sounds like the Proud Boys rally mostly fizzled, although there was a scattering of arrests and weapons confiscated. I think the best sign that they failed, though, was that they were reduced to arguing that they won because Go look at President Trump’s Twitter. He talked about Portland, said he’s watchin’ antifa. That’s all we wanted.. Your victory is getting Donald Trump to blab some nonsense on Twitter? That’s what he does every day while sitting on the toilet.

Here’s a great overview of events from Ward:

Today’s white nationalist rally in Portland, Oregon was a complete rout.

The largely non-Portland crowd was mostly abandoned by its leadership the night before. People arrived with no places to sleep and calls to cell phones went unreturned. This morning found hate group members without places to eat, water and access to restrooms. An increasing number of businesses (like the one pictured) were denying service.

The promised five hour hate rally lasted about 45 minutes; participants were forced to rally underneath a bridge and then had to beg police to escort them out (a very long walk) over year another bridge. Rally leaders then quickly took to their cars to allegedly attend a BBQ that just happened to not be in Portland.

Other remnants of the rally were forced to walk around downtown Portand for nearly two hours as they searched for their cars. I heard at least two Portlanders give them wrong directions. Tired, thirst and walked out; people started to drift away in droves, leaving a dejected looking Joey Gibson (leader of Patriot Prayer) with an increasingly smaller and smaller crowd around him. Not getting the physical confrontation he sought and contemplating his growing civil and criminal legal woes, Joey was very subdued today.

After analysis?

The social pressure and evolving diverse and incredibly fun tactics of PopMob; the seriousness of the Portland Police; and the number of city, civic and business leaders mobilized seems to have taken serious steam out of the white nationalist/alt right protest.

It’s clear from the speeches and comments today that White nationalist/alt right leaders are wary of the increasing civil suits led by the Oregon Justice Resource Center and criminal liabilities they are facing from disrupting communities.

Really proud of Portland today. Super impressed, from the leadership in the streets to city hall. Folks will be back to political positioning and eating each other alive tomorrow, but hope everyone gives each other a small nod of respect tonight

You are an amazing community Portand and you showed up this month and it mattered. Community and leadership made this happen and you showed up with a lot of both. Goodnight from the Rose City. #OurCityOurHome

Keep up the pressure. It’s great when the pinnacle of success for the Proud Boys is getting a pat on the head from Daddy Trump, and nothing more.