I listened to an “evil” song and survived

I heard a little buzz about the Grammy awards last weekend — there was one song performed that infuriated the culture war conservatives. It got Ted Cruz mad.

“This… is… evil,” Cruz wrote on Twitter, the ellipses perhaps representing the breaks he took to consume more pornography. His post was a re-tweet from conservative commenter and former OANN presenter Liz Wheeler, famed for having the kind of brain you normally find in an aquarium. “Demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan,” she wrote. “I could throw up.”

Well, then. As an atheist in good standing, I had to look this performance up. Here you go, everyone can watch the Sam Smith and Kim Petras song, “Unholy.”

They lied to me. Oh, sure, Sam Smith wears a top hat with devil horns, but the song isn’t about Satan worship, it’s all about people of ambiguous and not-so-ambiguous gender gyrating on the dance floor at a hot club, with lots of lascivious behavior. Anyone interrupting the proceedings with a sermon about Satanism would be a killjoy, and would probably be thrown out. It wasn’t about God or Satan at all, it was about sex.

That’s what make the conservatives uncomfortable — it’s simply their current obsession with changing mores about sex, and the fact that a singer wears a hat with horns allows them to claim it’s all about their religion. It’s not. Christians have sex, too. Some of them are gay or trans even. All that’s going on is that they’ve got an excuse to exercise their authoritarian purity culture.

Let’s see what notorious libertine and Catholic League president Bill Donohue has to say about it all.

Kim Petras is a man who thinks he’s a woman, or what is today called a “transgender person” (they really don’t exist, but that’s for another day). He said he “personally grew up wondering about religion and wanting to be a part of it, but then slowly realizing it doesn’t want me to be a part of it.”

He did not say who told him he could not be a part of whatever religion he was talking about, or why. But he did admit that “as a trans person, I’m kind of already not wanted in religion.” He did not explain why that might be.

Wow. Donohue has always been an ugly little man, but he really embraces the hatefulness. Also obliviousness.

Petras says she (a person who really exists) was sympathetic to and curious about religion, but was rejected by religion. Donohue then stupidly complains that she didn’t say who or why she was told this religion would not accept her, or why she might not be wanted by that religion. I mean, read what you wrote, Bill. You are a shining example of the problem.

Man, I haven’t read anything by Bill since those long ago days when he was happily hating me. I think he’s gotten worse.

By the way, about the song: I didn’t much care for it, and it won’t be getting much play around my house, and that’s OK! It’s not evil, it just wasn’t to my taste. If you liked it, that’s OK, too! This shouldn’t be about the song, but about authoritarians who want to dictate your personal preferences.

No atheist groups have stooped this low, have they?

We’re always getting accused of being steeped in sex and godless hedonism, but then…have you seen the New Glow Baptist Church?

The New Glow Baptist Church has taken a bold step in advertising their services in a way that is unique and controversial. Their Instagram page is filled with images of women dressed in revealing outfits, with captions that invite newcomers to “Come As You Are” and “There Are No Dress Codes Here.” The bio section of their page also makes it clear that there is no dress code at the church.

You don’t need to check out their instagram page, I can summarize it with a safe-for-work image.

I strongly suspect this is not a real church and lacks any formal affiliation with any Baptist denomination, but is instead a scam. They want you to join their patreon account for $11.99 a month. Also I definitely believe this: the women they use are AI-generated.

According to information obtained by MandyNewsm.com, some the photos that have been circulating on social media are not real but are in fact generated by an AI.

I wonder if the combination of fetish porn and religion can really be that profitable?

Could we come up with a more boring title?

This weekend, it’s time for another Podish-Sortacast, and this one is called “Organizations”.

OK, I’m falling asleep already. It’s all a ruse, though, to lure everyone into a false sense of security: the plan is to talk about all those organizations that have failed us, discussing things like the Andrew Torrez case.

Uh-oh, I just realized…Freethoughtblogs is an organization, of sorts. A very loose organization, with me as the nominal head. This could take an ominous turn, becoming a revolution and a coup, all in real time during the broadcast. Maybe it’ll be painfully exciting after all!

Science fiction isn’t gendered anymore

I like reading space opera when I have the free time, but did not realize how many space operas were written by Cisgender Women, Non-Binary, and Trans People. That link will take you to a spreadsheet listing 750 authors meeting those criteria.

I’ve got a lot of reading to do.

Maybe I should have been aware, because looking over the list I’ve read a lot of Cherryh, Wells, Jemisin, Martine, Leckie, Okorafor, Bujold, and Hurley, and my taste runs to a lot of non-cis-male writers. And now I have more to read!

I remember a time when most of the popular SF writers were men (with notable exceptions). I think the tide has changed.

Uteruses are scary, so protect them!

I did not sleep well last night. I made the mistake of reading this story of a traumatic birth just before bed, and all I could think of was how my wife had three children, and how much could have gone wrong, and how lost I’d be if she hadn’t survived, and how much our kids would have missed, and it gave me unpleasant, morbid dreams. It’s well written, but don’t read it if you like being complacent. I need Mary around, and it smacked me right in the what-could-have-been anxiety center!

If you choose to avoid the tale of emergency surgery and blood and exposed organs, you should at least get the main message.

When Senator Lindsey Graham showed his hand and proposed a national abortion ban, he condemned an entire population to medical trauma. When he and his GOP cohort grandstand about “preserving the sanctity of life,” they do not seem to include the onslaught of death from placental abruption, placenta previa, uterine rupture, ectopic pregnancy, chorioamnionitis, stroke, preeclampsia, amniotic fluid embolism, cardiomyopathy, suicide from PTSD or postpartum depression, and various other freak shit shows that happen to those of us in stirrups.

The “culture of life” is a cult of maternal death. To claim otherwise is to turn away from medical fact, which, of course, has been the right wing’s entire modus ever since Trump decided face masks were itchy. To entrust reproductive healthcare legislation to the same politicians whose criminally negligent pandemic response killed over a million people is to sign the death warrants of untold Americans.

Those vile right-wingers who claim to be pro-life are wrecking medical education, shackling doctors’ hands, and condemning women to death. Don’t let them get away with it.

Heed the octopuses’ warning!

Here’s a story that has sex, octopuses, population genetics, and climate change, all at once.

What should catch your eye, after the octopus sex, is the shift that enabled those populations to meet across the vast (currently) frozen mass of ice of the Antarctic: a 2°C increase in temperature relative to the modern day. Just 2°C will cause an ice sheet collapse, dramatic rises in sea level, and an increase in the frequency of extreme weather.

Earth scientists continually emphasize that humanity isn’t inescapably doomed by the coming, inevitable disruptions to the climate. It’s just the opposite. Society still has an extraordinary amount of influence in the matter: The more warming, the worse the impacts. But Earth’s inhabitants should be aware that a 2 C world has extreme effects. It’s all the more reason to avoid any warming above 2 C.

The Earth has been there before. It’s not a world we’d enjoy living on.

“just a little bit fascist”

Jewish citizens of Israel are organizing watch parties, standing on hills to observe bombs and missiles exploding in Palestinian communities. This woman talks about the only solution, to wipe out their entire city.

Lady, I think you’re a lot fascist. The phrase “never again” ought to be universally applicable to all peoples, but Israel has a rather narrower interpretation.

No evil deed goes unrewarded

I wrote about David Sabatini last year, the molecular biologist who’d left a string of failed positions, being fired, dismissed, cut loose, kicked out of multiple prestigious institutions for publishing fake data, repeatedly harassing women, and running his lab like it was Animal House. Then it looked like he was going to be hired by NYU, which left me gobsmacked. I had even made a prediction.

David Sabatini, the molecular biologist who sexually harassed students and faked data, was first fired from HHMI and the Whitehead Institute, and then resigned from MIT as his behavior was exposed. We’re done with him, right? He’ll go get a job in construction or pharmaceutical sales and we won’t have to worry about his unpleasant influence on academia anymore.

Sabatini has proven himself unsuited for the profession multiple times. For most people, losing one position makes landing a second one exponentially more difficult (this is a career that judges you harshly), and here was this guy who’d lost one, two, three positions — and didn’t get hired by NYU. This was a scientist who’d been the subject of a scathing exposé by the Boston Globe and various independent probes.

The controversy over Sabatini was reignited recently when The Boston Globe published a two-part investigation into the scandal. But it first erupted in August 2021, when Sabatini resigned from Whitehead after an investigation it commissioned from outside lawyers. At the time, Sabatini ran a lab of nearly 40 people and was an HHMI investigator and the lead scientist on five National Institutes of Health grants totaling nearly $2 million.

The Whitehead probe concluded that Sabatini fostered a sexualized lab environment in which he rewarded those who participated in sexual banter, threatened retaliation against lab members if they raised questions about his conduct, and threatened another faculty member who refused to hire a young visiting scientist whom Sabatini would later marry. It also found that he and Knouse carried on a sexual relationship against Whitehead rules.

She was a new Whitehead scientist operating in an educational program he supervised and for whom he would be expected to write recommendation letters. Their relationship began before Knouse arrived at Whitehead, when she was an MIT graduate student. That was a breach of an MIT policy that had recently been announced with fanfare.

Knouse has said she was coerced into the relationship, but Sabatini has argued otherwise and said the Whitehead investigation was flawed and unfair.

That man is a walking disaster. No sane institution would take on someone with that kind of record, but they did, repeatedly. And now he has fallen upwards once again, thanks to an asshole billionaire or two.

David Sabatini, the prominent biologist who was fired by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and resigned from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in 2021 after a probe found he committed sexual misconduct, is getting a second chance. Billionaire Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, and another, anonymous financial backer will each give Sabatini $2.5 million annually for the next 5 years to relaunch his research on cell signaling, cancer, and other topics. The move is stirring controversy.

The biologist, who also resigned from a tenured faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year, is a scientific reviewer for Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation. Ackman, meanwhile, is among a vocal contingent of Sabatini supporters who have argued that his punishment has been disproportionate. Ackman’s move “sends the message that some high-profile and ethical people are willing to support David Sabatini reengaging his brilliant career as a scientist and mentor of other scientists, despite the risk that by doing so they themselves will be falsely attacked,” says Jeffrey Flier, an endocrinologist at Harvard Medical School and former dean there.

$5 million/year for five years!!! For a failed bad boy of molecular biology! What kind of connections does Sabatini have with billionaires? It’s a catastrophe that we’re going to reward such rotten behavior — the rich are going to make an end run around peer review and install terrible, abusive people into positions at institutions of higher education where they can poison and squash the careers of young women.

Ackman made a curious statement, too.

As to whether his investment in Sabatini telegraphs that powerful men help other powerful men land on their feet, never mind their misdeeds, Ackman said: “If the situation were reversed, we would be backing [Knouse]. It’s not bro culture backing up the guys. That’s really really important.” Then he added: “By the way, it’s my wife and I who made this decision.” Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a designer and former MIT professor, serves as a co-trustee of the Pershing Square Foundation.

So he’s saying that if there were a powerful woman who was an abusive bully and who faked data, he’d also be supporting her? That’s not reassuring.

The only good news so far is that they haven’t actually announced where this pampered incompetent is going to work — they’re just handing him $5 million for his first year and telling him to set up a lab somewhere, anywhere and start churning out data. That’s not how it works. You don’t work alone, science is highly collaborative, and it’s silly to think you can build up a successful lab from scratch. With that much money, I suspect some wealthy university is going to ignore any scruples and find him a spot, though, despite the fact that it will bring them much shame.

Wait…I have an idea! They need a shameless institution (which is sort of true for any rich, elitist college), but the one that leaps to mind is…The University of Austin! There’s a match made in Hell, it’s perfect.

This is not normal

Do you get days off? It’s sort of sinking in that what I take for granted might be a little odd to most people.

I spent all day Saturday preparing my lectures for the coming week. That’s routine. I’ve heard rumors that most people can relax on weekends.

This morning I went into the lab early. I needed to feed the spiders and shuffle the males around to new females and replenish their water supply and check on the egg sacs (there was a new one today!), and then I’ll spend the time crunching data. This is Sunday, the day of rest, I hear?

Weekends are just the time I don’t have committee meetings or classes or lab sessions or meeting with students so I can get all the work done I’ll need to have complete for the weekdays.

It’s not all pain, though. I’m setting aside time to watch The Last of Us at 8pm tonight, and I usually read for half an hour to an hour before I go to bed.