Art is going to disappear when the Puritans take over

In the face of declining ad revenues*, we have decided to become a full-time porn blog. You’ll find an example of our new content to the right.

You might say that’s not porn, that’s art…but pornography is in the eye of the beholder, and that’s porn in Florida**.

On Thursday, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that the principal of a local charter school, the Tallahassee Classical School, was forced to resign after three parents complained about an art teacher showing a picture of Michelangelo’s 16th-century sculpture of David. “Parental rights are supreme, and that means protecting the interests of all parents, whether it’s one, 10, 20 or 50,” the chair of the school’s board, Barney Bishop III, told the paper. To figure out exactly how this happened, I called Bishop, who is also, according to his biography, a consultant, a lobbyist, an “outspoken advocate for the free enterprise system,” and an Eagle Scout.

I notice that “educator” isn’t on his CV, but that never stops anyone from taking control of a school board.

You should read the whole thing — Barney is totally bonkers. He’s got strongly held opinions, that’s for sure, but he seems to be using “classical” as a synonym for Desantis’ version of conservatism. He also has peculiar ideas about education.

He denies that the principal was fired over showing the statue. No, they were fired because they didn’t send a note to the parents warning them about it.

So the issue, Dan, isn’t whether children should see these pictures or not. Gosh, we’re a classical school. Why wouldn’t we show Renaissance art to children?

Right. We should expect that the students would see Renaissance art already (warning: some of it has boobies in it, too). Apparently, though, Florida parents are too stupid to be aware of this, so they have to be sent trigger warnings.

Dan, 98 percent of the parents didn’t have a problem with it. But that doesn’t matter, because we didn’t follow a practice. We have a practice. Last year, the school sent out an advance notice about it. Parents should know: In class, students are going to see or hear or talk about this. This year, we didn’t send out that notice.

He also says the statue is not a problem, but they’re going to have to do age-related censorship.

We’re not going to show the full statue of David to kindergartners. We’re not going to show him to second graders. Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age. We’re going to figure out when that is.

And you don’t have to show the whole statue! Maybe to kindergartners we only show the head. You can appreciate that. You can show the hands, the arms, the muscles, the beautiful work Michelangelo did in marble, without showing the whole thing.

He also wants to disregard teachers, and give all control to parents — you know, the parents who need to be informed that a class on Renaissance art might include some nude images. Educators, pfft. They know nothing. Barney is the expert. He was an Eagle Scout!

We’re not gonna have courses from the College Board. We’re not gonna teach 1619 or CRT crap. I know they do all that up in Virginia. The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids. Teachers are the experts? Teachers have all the knowledge? Are you kidding me? I know lots of teachers that are very good, but to suggest they are the authorities, you’re on better drugs than me.

Barney is a confused individual who defends his regressive views with contradictions. He also mentions that they use the Hillsdale College curriculum. Hillsdale is a conservative and extremely Christian institution, and I expect the only consistency we’ll find is dishonesty and dogma.

Maybe all those repressed weirdos will start reading my blog for the porn now.

*Wait, what ad revenues? We’re ad-free!***

**Maybe they won’t find it pornographic down around Miami. I can’t forget the time I attended a conference in South Florida, took a break and sat down with my laptop on the beach, when an attractive young lady in front of me stood up, stripped naked, and started oiling herself down. I couldn’t get any work done at all. That wasn’t pornographic at all, that was art.

***Maybe when I start showing the spider porn and visits surge, we’ll be able to overcome the lack of ads with volume.****

****I know nothing about economics. Does it show?

Rising, so far

I woke up this morning, dreading the day — I have so much work I need to get done, and I have doubts that I can get it all done. But I must! I fired up iTunes while I was getting ready, and the first random song is Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi is Dead”, which calmed me right down. Second song: Patti Smith, “Horses,” which fired me up and I’m ready get things done.

Then I opened up the Washington Post, and there on the front page is an honest, positive article about trans people, “Most trans adults say transitioning made them more satisfied with their lives”. Yeah, obviously. About time a national paper was brave enough to say it.

Transgender Americans experience stigma and systemic inequality in many aspects of their lives, including education, work and health-care access, a wide-ranging Washington Post-KFF poll finds.

Many have been harassed or verbally abused. They’ve been kicked out of their homes, denied health care and accosted in bathrooms. A quarter have been physically attacked, and about 1 in 5 have been fired or lost out on a promotion because of their gender identity. They are more than twice as likely as the population at large to have experienced serious mental health struggles such as depression.

Yet most trans adults say transitioning has made them more satisfied with their lives.

“Living doesn’t hurt anymore,” said TC Caldwell, a 37-year-old Black nonbinary person from Montgomery, Ala. “It feels good to just breathe and be myself.”

That’s what we should want, that people feel good about being themselves, and that we should be aware of the discrimination some people suffer. Let’s fix that. It’s especially welcome to see that kind of recognition after the embarrassing, awful Richard Dawkins/Piers Morgan interview (I’ll have more to say about that later, after I get an exam assembled and after I figure out how to recover from a disastrous turn in my genetics lab.)

Good morning! It doesn’t take a lot to get a little uplift to start the day.

Famous person found to have ordinary genetic history

It’s only about 200 years old, pulling a DNA sequence out of a hair sample is a piece of cake. So Beethoven’s DNA has been sequenced. He even gave permission!

In 1802, German composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote a heart-wrenching letter to his brothers, describing the deafness that forced him to “live like an exile” and yearn for death. Beethoven kept going for another 25 years, propelled by his music, but he begged them to have his hearing loss studied and publicized, so that “so far as possible, the world may be reconciled to me after my death.”

Two centuries later, a team of international researchers has answered that plea by sequencing Beethoven’s DNA, preserved in locks of his hair that collaborators and fans collected as treasured keepsakes.

The central ailment of Beethoven’s life was his hearing loss, which began in his mid-20s. He also suffered from debilitating gastrointestinal symptoms and attacks of jaundice. An autopsy revealed that he had cirrhosis of the liver, pancreatitis and a swollen spleen. Medical biographers have debated what killed him and whether his liver disease was the result of excessive drinking or some other cause.

There are limits to what you can do with DNA. They found no genetic evidence for his hearing loss. They did find signs of a susceptibility to liver disease, and that he had hepatitis B. There is absolutely no indication of a genetic source for his musical talent. I’d go so far as to say it is silly to select a 19th century person for a genetic analysis on the basis of musical ability, which is mostly going to be due to circumstance, rather than intrinsic nature (there may be exceptions, like the heritability of perfect pitch, but even that is pretty wobbly.

They did discover something that ol’ Ludwig Van would not have anticipated and probably wouldn’t want advertized.

The analysis also yielded a surprise: Beethoven’s Y chromosome didn’t match those from living relatives. The common relative they all share was Aert van Beethoven, who lived in the 16th century. Somewhere in the seven generations between Aert and Ludwig van Beethoven, a woman in the family tree had a child with an unknown man, and Beethoven seems to be a descendant of that pairing.

We’ve probably all got evidence of ancestral indiscretions in our genes, though, so that shouldn’t reflect on Beethoven, or on his unidentified female ancestor.

Extremism leads to more extremism

Answers in Genesis isn’t just that annoying collection of stupid people and con artists anymore — they’re embracing hate and bigotry as fervently as they have ignorance, and it’s getting worse. Dan makes an interesting discovery while trying to track down the source of some recent hateful articles on the AiG website.

What’s curious is that AiG is trying to hide the source — there are these articles that are currently anonymous, but the Wayback Machine reveals that they were initially posted under the byline “Harry F. Sanders, III”. Why is AiG actively trying to conceal the authorship? And further, “Harry F. Sanders, III” is itself a pseudonym for someone named “Emory Moynagh” (probably also a pseudonym) who had a YouTube channel (now deleted) called “In His Image”, where he was an extremist antisemitic conspiracy theorists. And now AiG is trying to launder his history while giving him a bigger platform to peddle that extremism. Also interesting: AiG is taking a very hard line on their version of creationism, letting all those other creationist organizations know they are heretics and blasphemers. Ken Ham’s ego is totally in charge, I imagine he considers himself a modern-day patriarch who must chastise all those who deviate from his dogma.

This is a common problem in authoritarian worldviews, you know. We’re witnessing a predictable acceleration as AiG fully embraces its cult nature. It’s only going to get more feverish and vicious.

If you’d rather not listen to a 14 minute video, here’s the conclusion:

Ken Ham is going all-in on the culture war
And he’s decided to go all-in against other YECs
He’s enlisted Harry F. Sanders, III/Emory Moynagh as the primary author of this series
Harry/Emory has a history of articulating extreme positions, including borderline incitements of violence, antisemitism, and conspiracies
This is dangerous and irresponsible, especially considering Ham and AiG’s recent aggression towards the LGBT+ community and the trend of right-wing violence

Feature, or bug?

I wonder what their CEO thinks of this statistic: Antisemitism on Twitter has more than doubled since Elon Musk took over. I’d want to do something about that, if I were in charge, but maybe the billionaire thinks it’s a good thing.

In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but.

Rather, antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took charge, according to research that I and colleagues at tech firm CASM Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank conducted. Between June and October 26, 2022, the day before Twitter’s acquisition by Musk, there was a weekly average of 6,204 tweets deemed “plausibly antisemitic”—that is, where at least one reasonable interpretation of the tweet falls within the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of the term as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.”

Personally, I don’t understand how anyone can fear and hate a particular ethnicity, or maybe all ethnicities other than their own. Do these people just sit around seething about the existence of Jewish people, people they probably don’t even know? Do they need a scapegoat for their own problems? Have they considered that maybe it’s their own brain that is screwed up, and that they should get therapy?

Here’s another thing I don’t understand.

Antisemitic tweets directed at Jewish investor and philanthropist George Soros warranted its own category. He was mentioned more than any other person in our data, over 19,000 times, with tweets claiming he was a member of a hidden globalist, Jewish, or “Nazi” world order.

One would think there should be little confusion about whether someone is Jewish or Nazi. Those seem to be mutually antagonistic categories.

Also, I can go days to months without even thinking of George Soros, he has so little influence on me. The only time I am reminded of his existence is when some antisemitic weirdo tells me I’m his puppet.

Never ever read your email

I’m in trouble now. I was late reading some official email, and learned (was reminded) yesterday that I have to submit my annual report describing what I’ve been doing for the past year. The report is due on 20 March…oh. Yesterday.

You’d think I’d learn. This has been a bureaucratic ritual every year for 23 years, and I should learn to expect it. First comes my birthday, which is OK; then comes my wedding anniversary, which is very nice; then comes spring break, which is excellent; and then…darkness descends on my consciousness, and my brain averts away from the cursed next step of administrative paperwork.

OK. I’ve pulled up the form on my computer. Now I have to go through my old records and remind myself of what I did in 2022. Then I have to justify my existence, despite the howling void at my core telling me that I don’t deserve to live and nothing I have ever done matters.

I’ll get it done today somehow.

Florida of the North!

“We prize and our rights our liberties we will maintain”? What? No wonder Iowa is screwed up.

The Washington Post noticed. Even as Minnesota has been progressing and enacting common sense legislation to improve the life of its citizens, our neighbor to the South, Iowa, has been going insane.

Republicans in the Iowa legislature, empowered by the state’s recent “red wave,” have embarked on an ambitious new agenda that includes a costly school choice bill and legislation targeting the LGBTQ community, a historic divergence from Iowa’s history as a civil rights bastion.

Even as teens draped in rainbow flags crowded into the Capitol rotunda chanting “We say gay” on March 8, Iowa lawmakers quickly passed three bills related to gay and transgender rights, culminating with a measure to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth that is awaiting Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds’s signature.

The votes were not only emphatic but were also a sharp reversal for the state: Iowa has veered so far to the right in recent years that its political landscape is virtually unrecognizable from the centrist place that chose Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and was one of the earliest states in the country to affirm same-sex marriage. A joke among statehouse reporters is that Iowa is becoming the “Florida of the North” — without the beaches.

Once you let Republicans get a toe-hold in your state, they start screaming and fostering a climate of hatred and paranoia that takes over, and next thing you know you’re getting compared to Florida. I don’t understand this transformation myself, but somehow, working class people in Iowa have absorbed a lot of Republican propaganda and have gotten the idea that Trump was a hero.

Political analysts in the state say that Iowa’s swing has solidified over the past seven years as reliably Democratic working-class voters abandoned the party in favor of Donald Trump’s message, and the state’s large percentage of independent voters also moved toward the Republicans.

Trump’s message? What the fuck is Trump’s message? And why does it appeal to anyone? The article doesn’t say. If that “message” is represented by Governor Kim Reynolds, well yuck — it’s all hate and ignorance.

At a February appearance at a raucous town hall co-sponsored by Moms for Liberty — the Florida-based group that has campaigned for book bans across the country — Reynolds celebrated her school choice victory and portrayed herself both as a grandma of 11 and a warrior against the “radical left.”

“They think patriotism is racist and pornographic library books are education,” Reynolds said, speaking over shouting protesters and supporters chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A.” “They believe that the content of our character is less important than the color of our skin. They believe that children should be encouraged to pick their gender and the parents, well, they’re just in the way.”

Love how the one thing Republicans have stolen from Martin Luther King Jr. is that one line, and they’ve twisted it to support their assertion that white people are discriminated against. She’s got everything backwards, though: Republicans think racism is patriotism and education is pornography.