Problem solving!

Teaching is a whole new world nowadays. I faced three different problems today.

One of our sports teams has been exposed to COVID-19, and they’ve been quarantined and can’t come to class.
Solution: I’ll be recording my lectures for a while and passing them on to the affected students. Also, we’ve been working through some genetics problems, so I’m forwarding those for them to work on in their isolation chambers.

A student had a serious family crisis and had to miss the last exam, and is panicking over it.
Solution: For them, I’ll pretend that exam never happened, and their final grade will be based on the average of four exams, rather than five, like the rest of the class. The exams are cumulative so it’s not like they won’t be evaluated on part of the class.

One of my international students has been abruptly drafted into the military service for a certain Eurasian country, and is flying away from the US prematurely.
Wooo. I wouldn’t want to be in that situation. Solution: I am arranging to email them a take-home final exam so they can get credit for the course, and I hope come back to finish up their degree.

I’m thinking now that I actually have it pretty easy. My job is to make everything as smooth and doable for the students who don’t have it so easy.

All we have to do next is end the pandemic, all other health problems, and end war, and teaching will get easier.

Oh no! It’s THURSDAY!

The most evil calendar would be one where every day is Thursday.

I made the mistake of looking at my calendar for the day.

Doom, doom, doom, doom.

Every gap in my schedule is filled with appointments. I’m about to go in, won’t emerge into the light of day again until sometime after 6.

Wiccan Communists turned my child into a gay transgender revolutionary!

This silly little Halloween commercial for Twix candy has the creationists coughing up all kinds of bizarre ahistorical nonsense. It features a goth nanny with witchy powers who is non-judgementally taking care of a little boy who is wearing a princess dress. The non-judgmental bit is clearly anathema to fundamentalist Christians.

Answers in Genesis discusses it in their weekly “news” show. I learned many things from this segment. You don’t need to watch it, I’ve transcribed the relevant bits, but if you must, the bullshit is flowing at around the 8 minute mark.

Patricia: It’s pretty incredible the messages it is promoting. One of the things I noticed is that actually if you take that narrative that is happening it basically summarizes the key principles behind Marxism. So that whole idea is that you have this minority that is being oppressed so then the solution to that, to make everyone live happily ever after, is to violently overthrow the oppressor, commit some kind of revolution, forcibly remove them, and then everything is good. And that’s actually what you are seeing in this commercial. So that’s an interesting connection to Marxism there.

Tim: And that’s what we see historically with Marxism. Every time there’s a revolution, everything is perfect afterwards and nothing ever goes wrong. It’s utopia.

Patricia: That’s the idea, but it’s not going to work in a sinful world.

Tim: And it never has worked.

It is November, which puts us about four months after the Fourth of July, so I guess we just pinned down a measure of how far back into the past a creationist’s mind can reach. About 4 months. Which explains a lot about the whole young earth notion, I guess.

It’s a bit of a reach to call it Marxism, though. So the key principle of Marxism is for oppressed minorities to have a revolution, period? I’m no expert on Marx or communism, but I’m sure there’s slightly more to it than that. By that definition, the United States is Marxist.

Oh, but she’s not done. It’s also the key principle of Wicca, which is the same as Marxism, a connection I’d never seen made before.

Patricia: She’s teaching him the main principle of Wicca, it’s called the Wiccan rede, it says “an ye harm no one, do what you will”. So throughout this video she’s encouraging him to wear this dress because he wants to. You know, that sounds OK because you’re not harming someone, but actually civilizations have tried that in the past. One civilization that tried it said that “liberty consists of the freedom to do everything that injures no one else.” You might think that sounds pretty good, but what civilization was this? It was revolutionary France, where they tortured and guillotined thousands and thousands of people because, without God, a creator as your source for absolutes in truth and morality, you can define harm however you want, you can define human rights however you want, these were all things that were seen happening in this culture, and the commercial, unfortunately, summarizes that pretty well.

Wait wait wait…the French Revolution was run by Communist witches? I’m a little confused by the contradiction here: the Wiccan rede says “harm no one”, and according to AiG, that was the cause of a bloody revolution with guillotines lopping off heads? It seems to me that if the revolution were actually inspired by Wiccan principles, there would have been no bloodshed.

Remember: the French Revolution was an act by Marxist Wiccans.

The AiG show goes on with more instances of idiocy. They are also upset by another commercial, “Doritos made this ad for the Mexican market where a dead guy’s ghost comes back to tell his family he has a gay lover in heaven”. Yeah, it’s the Gay Agenda again. They’d don’t like it.

Curiously, almost all their sources for these stories is a crappy conservative sort-of-humor site, “Not the Bee”, which is a spinoff of the not-at-all funny Babylon Bee. That tells you something about the depth of their research. One exception is that they comment on an article from Science Daily, “DNA tangles can help predict evolution of mutations”.

In that article, the authors describe how loops or tangles in unfolded bacterial DNA can act as hotspots for mutations. It’s basic research into the mechanisms of evolution and discusses how identifying these hotspots can lead to better predictions about likely new mutations in a line of bacteria.

You can guess how deeply Ken Ham discusses this topic. “They’re still just bacteria.” Done and done.

Damn, those people are stupid. I’m sure they’re sincere in their deeply held beliefs, the problem being that their beliefs are so idiotic and ignorant.

This life isn’t sustainable

Everything is coming down on me right now — I think it will ease up around Thanksgiving, but that’s three weeks away. I’m coming home bleary-eyed and worn out.

I think the problem is that teaching is a performance, requiring me to present myself as enthusiastic and cheerful…and when that isn’t how I feel, the performance becomes increasingly difficult. If I can get rid of this stupid boot on Friday, and get my students through the next few weeks of rehearsals for their seminars, and if I can avoid coming down with anything else, the load will get lighter and maybe I won’t have to pretend as much.

Until then, don’t talk to me, I’m a bit snarly and bitey in the evenings.

Hmmm. I actually found this short video kind of helpful in giving me perspective.

Here’s the deal. I have enough. I’ve got a nice house, a stable income, good health care, and I feel zero pressure to make more money. I have no desire to be rich. Middle class is fine.

But then there’s the concept of precarity. I’m fine now, but will I be fine in the future? I can’t afford to retire, because then that income plummets, and worst of all, my health care goes away (isn’t this a screwy system, where health care is tied to employment, so if you retire at a time in your life when you’re most dependent on it, you lose it?). I also have to be concerned that when I retire, and when I die, I’m just abandoning my obligations to my partner. It’s also screwy that I can be co-equal and co-dependent with someone my entire life, but as soon as I die, she is left high and dry.

I think maybe that’s what makes me most anxious right now.

Proud to be that twit’s enemy

My favorite part is when JD Vance announces “The professors are the enemy,” and then smiles smugly and pauses to let the applause roll in.

He’s trying argue that National Conservatism needs “wisdom”. I’d love to know how he defines that word, because as he uses it it seems to be synonymous with “ignorance”. A society that belittles learning and knowledge is doomed.

Also, JD Vance is a colossal, gaping asshole.

What do you mean, “November”?

I remember a time when it was considered tacky to put up your Xmas decorations before Thanksgiving — the invention of Black Friday by the stores was the starting bell to signal when you should let slip the rabid dogs of capitalism. Now it’s basically all of November, and I’ve seen incursions into October. Christmas displays before Hallowe’en aren’t just graceless and kitschy, it’s a sign that you’re obsessive and intrusive. Stop it now.

Besides, what with the pandemic and all the supply chain problems and rampant cost-cutting by employers, only the millionaires and billionaires will be celebrating Capitalist Christmas. The rest of us will be shunning the shopping malls and having a quiet holiday with family at home. Which sounds rather nice, actually.

(Related: there’s a house in my neighborhood that goes all out with giant inflatable decorations in their yard. They know what they’re doing: the day after Hallowe’en, all the monsters and tombstones and skeletons are whisked away into storage, and the inflatable turkeys appear. The day after Thanksgiving, ziiiiip! the turkeys go away and Santa starts bobbing over their lawn. Calendars exist, use them.)

Yes, I do know why spiders curl up when they die

We’ve had several frosty mornings and even a brief snow flurry, so spiders have been dying off all over the place. I watched this video because I thought it would be more morbid, but it’s actually pretty cheery, with lots of short clips of beautiful spiders. It’s also very basic, but hey, I need to see more spiders!

One quibble: the narrator disses grass spider webs, saying they’re “not fancy”. I sense a bias favoring orb webs! Grass spiders build these slick platforms for prey to land on, with the sheet funneling back to an elegant cozy tunnel where they lurk. They’re very nice.

I could also make a case for cobwebs, which look chaotic but are actually 3-dimensional structures, unlike those planar 2-D orb webs.

The water-logged corpse of JFK jr did not appear in Dealey Plaza

I am so disappointed. I just got home from the lab and the first thing I had to check was whether John F. Kennedy Jr had shown up in Texas.

He did not.

It turns out his father was also supposed to appear. He did not.

You know who else was a no-show?

The Dallas QAnon believers had become convinced the Kennedys would unveil themselves on Nov. 2 around 12:30 PM Central time, right around the timing of Kennedy’s assassination. But they then began to add on other dead celebrities, convinced that they, too, would appear, having faked their deaths to avoid the deep state.

They began to pick out random people they encountered in the Dallas area as celebrities in disguise, claiming one man was comedian Robin Williams and another comedian Richard Pryor.

Also…

“I just can’t wait to see Kobe Bryant!” the new woman said.

The list of returning celebrities grew long, coming to include not just the Kennedys, Bryant, and Williams, but also actress Debbie Reynolds and racecar driver Dale Earnhardt.

“Yes, there’s been a rapper here, we’re not sure of his name,” said one man livestreaming from Dallas.

“Tupac, maybe?” asked one helpful listener.

None of them showed up, which may have been a good thing given one concern.

One Dallas resident pointed out that no parade permits had been obtained for the parade of dead celebrities that was supposed to follow on Tuesday afternoon.

Yes, I’m sure that would have been embarrassing if the cops turned up to hand out tickets to John F. Kennedy, his son Jr, Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Kobe Bryant, Debbie Reynolds, Dale Earnhardt, and Tupac.

What? No love for Biggie Smalls?

Forgive me, for I have sinned

In my last post, I linked to a source in Newsweek. I should not have done that. Newsweek, like other such weekly news magazines, such as Time and US News & World Report, is garbage. It’s part of the grocery store media ecosystem, that collection of glossy magazines on racks near the checkout stand, living on impulse purchases by bored shoppers waiting in line. Newsweek is not to be trusted.

Writing in The Columbia Journalism Review last year, Daniel Tovrov depicted Newsweek, once one of America’s most distinguished magazines, as a shell of its former self. All that was left was clickbait, op-eds from the likes of Nigel Farage and Newt Gingrich, and a general sense of drift. “Nobody I spoke to for this article had a sense of why Newsweek exists,” Tovrov wrote. “While the name Newsweek still carries a certain authority—remnants of its status as a legacy outlet—and the magazine can still bag an impressive interview now and then, it serves an opaque purpose in the media landscape.”

Last week, Newsweek suggested one possible purpose: The legitimization of narratives straight out of the right-wing fever swamps. An op-ed written by John Eastman, a conservative lawyer and founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, coyly suggested that Kamala Harris, who was born in California, may not be eligible to serve as vice president because her parents were immigrants. It was, as many pointed out, a racist attack with no constitutional merit, on par with the birther conspiracy theory that claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Within a few hours, Eastman’s op-ed was being brandished by President Trump, who told reporters he had “heard” Harris may not be eligible to serve.

I’ll avoid them more thoroughly in the future.

Bargain basement second coming

Anyone in Dallas today? There is a small crowd of wackaloons gathering at AT&T Discovery Plaza to await the resurrection, the second coming, the beginning of a new era. It’s not Jesus Christ they eagerly await, though — it’s John F. Kennedy Jr..

JFK Jr died in a plane crash at sea in 1999. His decomposing body and that of his two passengers were recovered after 5 days of decay and marine scavengers had been at him. I don’t think he survived.

QAnon followers have gathered in Dallas, Texas, where they believe John F. Kennedy Jr. will reappear and announce Donald Trump is president.

A large crowd of QAnon believers descended on the AT&T Discovery Plaza on Monday, ahead of the supposed return of the deceased JFK Jr. before midnight today.

The Daily Beast contributor Steven Monacelli shared several photos that showed a dozens-strong crowd, with some wearing t-shirts that said “Trump: JFK Jr. 2024.”

Right, “dozens”. I think we’re seeing the fringe of the fringe.

You might be wondering what else they believe.

Conspiracy followers also believe the clocks will go back an hour, that people will adopt the Julian calendar and that the date will go back to October 20.

The QAnon conspiracy, which originated on online message boards, holds that an elite global cabal of Satanic pedophiles is engaged in mass child sex trafficking and that, somehow, former President Donald Trump will expose this group and order its members arrested and sentenced to death.

They are sort of right about one thing: the clocks will be set back an hour next Sunday. The rest? I don’t think so.

But wait! There’s more!

But there is a section of the QAnon conspiracy movement that has also latched onto the belief that John F. Kennedy Jr. will reveal he did not die in a plane crash in 1999 and will help usher in a new period of American prosperity.

The outlandish theory posits that JFK Jr. has been in hiding for more than two decades and would return as Trump’s vice president.

A popular QAnon Telegram account with more than 100,000 subscribers echoed the conspiracy in a Monday post and said Trump would be reinstated as president and JFK Jr. would be named his vice president.

The post continued to claim Trump would then step down, meaning JFK Jr. would become president and name Michael Flynn as his vice president.

It continued to push a messianic narrative, with the post adding Trump would “most likely” become king of kings, failing to elaborate on what that would entail.

Their iconography is amazing.

By the way, I found that image, and many more, in a “Donald Trump is Jesus” group on Facebook, which is still a major vector for spreading bullshit, like anti-vaccination memes.