Tomorrow is #ApostasyDay

It’s not exactly a day of celebration. Apostasy Day is a time to reject oppressive dogmas.

22 August is being chosen as Apostasy Day because it is the UN Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief. Moreover, late August marks the start of a second wave of mass executions of apostates in Iran in 1988 after brief “trials”. Thousands who responded negatively to questions such as ‘Are you a Muslim?’, ‘Do you believe in Allah?’, ‘Is the Holy Qur’an the Word of Allah?’, ‘Do you accept the Holy Muhammad to be the Seal of the Prophets?’, ‘Do you fast during Ramadan?’, ‘Do you pray and read the Holy Qur’an?’ were summarily executed.

On the newly established Apostasy Day, we renew calls for the:
• commemoration of the victims of apostasy laws
• an end to the criminalisation and the death penalty for apostasy in countries under Islamic laws
• an end to shunning, threats and honour-related violence from families of apostates
• affirmation of freedom of thought, conscience and belief as well as opinion and expression in compliance with the United Nation Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 18 & 19).

Speak out! You can add your name to the list of signatories, at the very least.

The inevitable news about Steve Bannon

He’s been arrested for fraud. Is anyone surprised?

Federal prosecutors in New York on Thursday unsealed criminal charges against Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, and three other men they alleged defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors using an online crowdfunding campaign that was advertised as raising money to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico.

In a news release, prosecutors said Bannon and another organizer of the campaign, Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, claimed that they would not take any compensation as part of the campaign, called “We Build The Wall,” but that was a lie. Bannon, prosecutors alleged, received more than $1 million through a non-profit he controlled, and Kolfage received more than $350,000.

I think the president and his cronies face the same prospects after the election. The whole kit and kaboodle ought to be arrested now for a lifetime of grift, but somehow, it’s not happening.

Manifesting a vision of hell

I’ve been skipping the Democratic National Convention altogether, since I know exactly how it’s going to turn out, making it a farcical charade, and they’re also bringing on a few people who would do nothing but diminish what little fervor I have for supporting the Democrats at all — so have you seen anything interesting or worthwhile? Any substantive policy discussions, or is it just a long-winded coronation?

Unfortunately, I think the Republican National Convention is going to be far more entertaining, like a reality TV show about passengers on a train hauling full used septic tanks chugging towards a toxic chemical plant fire. I’m almost tempted to tune in.

The Aristocrats!

I’m only halfway there, I guess

I stopped believing in gods, but I haven’t yet acquired an appreciation of the cunning work of Satan. I’m kind of liking the view from the intermediate point of evolution, so I don’t know that I’ll ever move on to satanism.

You know the arguments against design are pretty good at defeating Satan, too, right? Maybe we should use that as a selling point more often: “Get an education, Satan hates science!”

Can the Wehrmacht be absolved?

They were just soldiers fighting for their country, right? Not Nazis. Comrades in arms, brave fighters, etc.

Three Arrows says no, and I learned a lot of things. The Holocaust and WWII were not separate things.

The officer class was fully enrolled in the antisemitic agenda, and were explicitly committed to genocide and enslavement. They kept their soldiers informed of the same, and they all knew exactly what they were fighting for. In particular, you have to sympathize with how Russia was shaped by this event: the Eastern Front wasn’t just a war, it was a campaign to exterminate the native population and enslave the few survivors to serve as captive labor to German colonizers. The Wehrmacht knew this. How could they not?

Don’t get cocky, fellow Americans. He ends on this quote from an American president.

Ow.

Lovecraft as useful instruction in the ways of evil

Dinesh D’Souza consistently proves himself to be one of the dumbest political commentators on the planet. He’s gone on the attack against Kamala Harris. His weapon of choice is racism.

A shocking claim was made by American conservative author and commentator Dinesh D’Souza some days ago when he claimed, or, in his words, ‘revealed,’ that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee for the post of Vice President, is a descendant of one of Jamaica’s slave owners. This has, as expected, caused a storm, especially on social media.

I do have to wonder if the marriage of the white slaveowner to the black woman who was his slave was the social event of the season on Jamaica that year? Or if his black descendants are proud to trace their lineage back to a rapist? As the article points out, though, the relationship is a bit ambiguous, because tracing ancestry through the tangled lines of unacknowledged children of rape is no doubt tricky. Not to D’Souza, though!

Has anyone been watching Lovecraft Country? Phenomenal story, great acting, horrifying monsters, all the stuff we want from Prestige TV on HBO. It’s also centered on the relationship of a black family to a deeply racist community, HP Lovecraft and Lovecraft fans — oh wait, no, I accidentally slipped into the meta dimension there for a minute. The first episode has ended with three black characters, bold people who travel about writing travel guides for other black people, ending up at the door of a mysterious grand mansion deep in a small rural town after harrowing experiences a sundown town, a sadistic sheriff, and a swarm of many-eyed monsters. They are greeted by the whitest, most Aryan-looking dude at the door.

I’ve read the book, so I know what’s next, so I’m about to spill the most minor of spoilers.

[Read more…]

I don’t know that I like being on the other side of the microscope

Nature puts an uncomfortable twist on our current situation: Millions of students are returning to US universities in a vast unplanned pandemic experiment. Gosh, I guess I am like a big flask of hot agar, fresh out of the autoclave and getting poured into petri dishes for the students to contaminate. Let’s see what grows, OK?

Bringing so many university students to crowded campuses is uniquely risky in the United States, which has seen the largest number of deaths to COVID-19 of any country and has active community transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the pandemic. Other large countries with surging infection rates, such as India and Brazil, are not opening up campuses to the same degree.

According to the College Crisis Initiative, a research project at Davidson College in North Carolina, more than 1,000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States will bring students back to campus in some form, with 45 operating “fully in person”, another 446 as “primarily in person”, and nearly 600 offering various combinations of online and in-person classes as of 7 August. But plans change daily, with many universities that boldly planned to hold in-person classes deciding at the last minute to switch to virtual versions.

Yay! We get to bear the brunt of American exceptionalism this time around! My university is one of the 600. Yesterday I had my first student write to me to say they won’t be able to attend our in-person lab because they’ve been exposed and are in a two-week quarantine period. I’m glad they’re responsible about it all, but what am I going to do if (when) more students drop out of the lab? I’m definitely not going to penalize anyone for not infecting me, but all of the plans in our great unplanned pandemic experiment are going to crumble fast.

oh god oh god oh god

Classes start tomorrow. I’m looking at my pile of notes and lecture material and plans and thinking, “I’ve got this,” like I do every year, but now I have to do everything over Zoom, which is a real monkey wrench in the proceedings, and I’ve got the specter of disease and death hovering overhead, and who knows, maybe a political coup coming up midsemester, with forces in government working to destroy my profession, and I have to sit through a great long division meeting this morning where we’ll all pretend everything is normal and hear administrators go “wah wah, wa-wa wah wah” because I won’t be able to parse what they’re saying, and I’m going to be trying to finish up my syllabus with Zoom acting as little more than a distraction interfering with getting my actual WORK done, and cops are killing people and other people are gasping out their life on respirators while I’m merely suffering acute anxiety as the world burns, but hey, the flames will get to me soon enough to bring sweet oblivion and no one will care because there are more important things than a story about an old guy’s heart exploding and brain liquifying in an isolated office in the middle of midwestern farmland, so now I’m wondering if my headphones will stopper up my ears enough to prevent the brain goo from dribbling out and making a mess on the carpet.

That’s my workday ahead. How’s yours?

#InverteFest is coming

This weekend! If you’re wondering what Invertefest is, it’s an excuse to crawl around and get on your knees and get dirty rummaging around your house and yard and the park, looking for all kinds of miscellaneous invertebrates. If you’re on the coast, get out to the beach! The whole point is just to notice all the bugs and spiders and jelly fish and worms and beetles and grubs and flies that surround you. The instructions:

  1. Find invertebrates. This can be in your basement, your yard, the local park, the beach, an alley or anywhere near where you live.
  2. Share observations. Share photos, videos or art of your discoveries on Twitter using the hashtag #invertefest.
  3. Interact. Search the #invertefest hashtag for tweets and share, comment and learn.
  4. Bonus – citizen science. To contribute your observations for science, upload your photos to iNaturalist.

Huh. I do all that all the time already. I guess I’ll just do it more this weekend.

Well, that was quick

UNC opened for in-person instruction just one week ago; they have announced now that they are switching to entirely online instruction.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the largest schools in the country to bring students to campus for in-person teaching, said Monday it will pivot to all-remote instruction for undergraduates after testing showed a pattern of rapid spread of the novel coronavirus.

Officials announced the abrupt change just a week after classes began at the 30,000-student state flagship university.

They said 177 cases of the dangerous pathogen had been confirmed among students, out of hundreds tested. Another 349 students were in quarantine, on and off campus, because of possible exposure to the virus, they said.

What kind of magical, miraculous prophet could have foreseen such an outcome?

I mean, even with that example right in front of our face, no one could possibly predict that all the other universities that are the process of opening up might anticipate a similar result.

I really hope none of those students comes down with a serious case of COVID-19 with long-term consequences. Is UNC prepared to handle the moral and economic effects of that?

Hey, is the University of Minnesota ready?


An appropriate response from the UNC student paper.