Murdered man identified

We now know a few things about the man killed by federal agents.

The man fatally shot by federal officers in Minneapolis this morning has been identified as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Pretti, 37, has an address listed in south Minneapolis.

At a news conference, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the man who was shot was a 37-year-old white man with no serious criminal history and a record that showed only some parking tickets. Law enforcement sources said Saturday their records show Pretti had no serious criminal history.

O’Hara said the man was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit. Records show that Pretti attended the University of Minnesota. State records show Pretti was issued a nursing license in 2021, and it remains active through March 2026.

So they’re killing law-abiding white people? This isn’t part of the white nationalist agenda, I thought.

Meanwhile, CBP, Republican Tom Emmer, and Donald Trump are blaming “rhetoric” for the death.

Minnesotans are going to be insufferable for a while

Deservedly. This was the scene in Minneapolis yesterday:

The rabble are roused

Donald Trump fantasizes about crowd sizes like that. This one turned out in opposition to him, and they did it on the coldest day of the year so far. You tell Minnesotans that it’s going to be -20°F, and they shrug and pull another layer out of the mud room closet.

And not just Minnesotans: here are my sisters in the balmy Pacific Northwest (and my brother, who isn’t in the photo), declaring what they think in solidarity with the entire nation.

There’s a good feeling that comes with doing the right thing, and people across the country should be feeling that right now. There’s also a feeling of righteousness that comes with being a victim of injustice, and that’s rising hard here in Minnesota. We don’t deserve to be harassed and beaten and searched and murdered because we had done something wrong — those things are being done to us because 1) we are a blue state that voted against Trump in every election, and he takes that personally, and 2) because we have been welcoming to immigrants, and he (and Stephen Miller) are bigots who are lashing out at our friends and colleagues and community members. Punished by professing Christians for being kind to our neighbors, imagine that. It’s what I’ve come to expect from any vocal Christian.

OK, to be fair…

The decency of Minnesotans is mirrored in Lutheran churches seeding what has become the largest refugee population per capita in the United States. Minnesota has had a labor organizing movement since before it became a state. Minnesota created the first high-risk pool in the country to insure “the uninsurable” in 1976.

A word of warning: this isn’t over. We had a one day long general strike, and we can expect reprisals from the federal government. One day is not enough — we’re going to have to tighten our belts for a more prolonged effort, and this needs to spread beyond one state. I’m confident others will join in, because our enemy is a bully who doesn’t respond rationally, or in the best interest of the citizens.

Most importantly, know that what Trump is doing to Minneapolis is the template for what Trump wants to bring to your hometown next.

Minnesota’s general strike should be our template for how we respond nationally.

I’m going to stock up on dried beans and canned vegetables. My father was a blue collar union man, and we knew how to prepare for a strike.

The least we can do — do better, University of Minnesota

There is a planned walkout and protest statewide for 23 January, tomorrow. We want ICE out, and the hope is that a little poke in the pocketbook might send a message. The University of Minnesota sent out the message below to all students and employees.

Dear faculty, staff, and students,

The University is aware of the recently announced call for civic action on Friday, January 23, during which Minnesotans are being encouraged not to attend work, school, or participate in commercial activity in response to federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota.

We fully support the right of faculty, staff, and students to engage in lawful civic expression. We also must ensure continuity of operations and meet our responsibilities to students and the University community.

For all employees
Employees, including students with University jobs, who plan to be away on January 23 must use vacation or personal holiday time with the supervisor’s advance approval. Sick or Earned Sick and Safe Time (ESST) cannot be used for these absences. Unapproved absences, including walking off the job or failing to report to work as scheduled, may result in corrective action in accordance with University policies and collective bargaining agreements.
Course delivery and attendance
As was noted to instructors last week, classes are expected to proceed (UMD-specific policy) as scheduled. Instructors who are considering not holding January 23 class sessions must work with their dean’s office to make appropriate alternate arrangements, including notifying students of these changes.

Regarding excused absences (UMD-specific policy), students must notify instructors of the circumstances causing them to miss a scheduled class meeting in advance or as soon as possible. University policy describes circumstances for excused absences and the opportunity for makeup work. Instructors may grant excused absences for reasons not listed in University policy, but those decisions must be made in a viewpoint-neutral way and in concurrence with your academic unit. Students will not be penalized for excused absences.

We appreciate the professionalism, care, and respect our employees demonstrate during moments of heightened community concern. University leaders and supervisors should offer flexibility where feasible, while also ensuring appropriate arrangements to maintain vital services.

If you have questions about time away, attendance, or supervisory responsibilities, please contact your local HR lead. Please note that we are also tracking potential weather impacts on Friday, January 23. Should there be any operational changes, your campus will communicate. Please connect with your Dean’s office for further guidance on instruction.

In short, they support our right to engage in lawful civic expression, but you better not participate in this one unless you’ve consulted your dean and filled out all the paperwork and you have a good excuse!

Too bad. I’ve emailed all my students and told them to join in the protest. I haven’t consulted my dean or filled out any paperwork, but my excuse is that the entire country has been seized by an incompetent fascist cabal, and a brief work stoppage is the least we can do. We ought to have a nationwide general strike for a period of time sufficient to let the ruling junta know that we mean business.

I wish my university had the conviction and the moral courage to speak out, rather than sending out long weasely excuses for doing nothing.

I…yet…live…sorta

Every year I tell my genetics students that once we start our crosses they are on fly time — you schedule your lab work around when the flies produce eggs and pupate and start breeding again, forget the registrar’s schedule. Now I have live by that, too. My gastrointestinal stress is over, I hope, but I’m feeling drained and exhausted, and am feeling intimidated by the need to put my socks on, but I must go into the lab today. The flies are calling to me.

Just to compound the difficulties, we had a blizzard and a white-out yesterday, and I don’t want to go out there. The temperature is supposed to drop to -21°F tonight, and I’m going to come home later to pick my wife up at work, because she doesn’t want to walk home when it’s that frigid.

And then I’m going to lie down under warm blankets and not move for a day.

Adventures in enterocolitis

That wasn’t fun at all. I went to bed last night, and then at 11, like a magical evil switch being flipped, I was suddenly vomiting. I was puking all night long. Even worse was the diarrhea. I was so incapacitated that I was just lying in my slimy filthy effluvia all night as my gastrointestinal tract tried to turn itself inside out with peristalsis.

The heaving subsided by morning, but I was exhausted, barely able to think or move, and my wife told me I needed to go into urgent care right away. I said no, I’m too tired. She said yes and chivvied me out to the car and got me checked in. Good thing she did, too: my blood pressure was 60/40. That was an odd experience, to be so low on energy that I could barely move and not even interested in moving.

The doctors pumped me full of IV fluids and finally let me go home when my bp was 106/70.

I missed today’s class, I’m hoping to make it to lab tomorrow.

The lesson learned: have a partner who can kick you into gear when your engine isn’t ticking over, and who is willing to do the most disgusting load of laundry I’ve ever seen.

Death to Star Trek!

I’ve got a busy, messy morning of bottle washing ahead of me — the first fly lab of the semester is on Thursday, so I’ve got to get that teaching lab in shape. The flies are ready to go, but the glassware? Nope.

So I’m going to leave you with something important to wrangle over: Stephen Miller thinks Star Trek is too woke and wants to put 94 year old William Shatner in charge of the new show. Way to go, presidential advisor: you are stupid and wrong, and you propose a stupid solution to your imaginary problem. That is so perfectly Trumpian.

I’m going to mostly agree with this video — Star Trek has always been idealistic, to a sometimes corny degree. That’s why people watched it.

But I also kind of hope it happens. I was a huge fan of the original Star Trek, and I used to beg my parents to let me stay up late to watch it. I was 12 years old. As I got older, my taste changed, and I wanted something better — The Expanse was probably my ideal for a while (in spite of the magic engines that propelled the whole show), but I don’t even want that to continue on. New ideas are good! Star Trek has been in a rut of familiarity for 60 years. I didn’t even care much for Star Trek the Next Generation, not because it was different, but because it wasn’t different enough.

It’s been running on dual fumes from two sources: people like comfortable familiarity and will complain about any change, and in case you haven’t noticed, capitalism loves a profit-making franchise, and will keep shoveling cash at a reliable series, even if it is getting creaky and as crotchety as William Shatner. I watched about 20 minutes of the latest iteration, Star Fleet Academy before giving up. It has the good idea of galaxy-wide collapse of the old Federation, making it a total reboot…but then I could tell they were using it to reconstruct the same old framework, as if total societal collapse wouldn’t be interesting unless it was about restoring the old story.

Miller is a fool who is wrong about everything, but I think demolishing Star Trek, as his ideas would accomplish, has some virtues. Move on, please.

Related: I see HBO has created a new spin-off of Game of Thrones, a prequel set 100 years before the events in that catastrophically ended original series. Once again, capitalism wants its cash cow back. I’m not tempted to watch even a minute of that.

Also, at the end of the above video, they give a Hero of the Week award to the citizens of Minnesota. I’m one of those citizens! Thanks, I’ll wear the badge with pride and use the cash award to heat my house. There is a cash award, I assume?

Trump doesn’t get a consolation prize

Look at that shit-eating grin as Trump is given a Nobel prize by María Corina Machado, who doesn’t have the authority to award Nobel peace prizes.

It’s another embarrassment for the United States, that we elected this childish buffoon to the presidency. No, Donald, holding someone else’s prize does not mean you won it. I once got to briefly hold Harold Kroto’s Nobel, it does not mean I’m one of the premiere chemists of the age, and I would not go around smirking because I’d received a great honor. This is more like a spoiled child demanding a toy at the store, and a grown up getting tired of his whining and giving it to him. It’s more shame than honor.

Apparently, Trump has been hectoring Norwegian PM Støre to give him the award. The Nobel Peace Prize is not issued by the Norwegian government, but is handled by an independent committee, and Støre has nothing to do with it. The Nobel Foundation has since posted a rebuke of Trump’s nonsense, plainly stating that NO, he has not been awarded a Nobel prize. Naughty child. Keep crying and you’ll be sent to bed without your supper.

Statement from the Nobel Foundation
One of the core missions of the Nobel Foundation is to safeguard the dignity of the Nobel Prizes and their administration. The Foundation upholds Alfred Nobel’s will and its stipulations. It states that the prizes shall be awarded to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind,” and it specifies who has the right to award each respective prize. A prize can therefore not, even symbolically, be passed on or further distributed.

Compounding our humiliation, is now complaining to Støre that he has to give him Greenland. Støre does not have the authority to bestow Greenland on anyone — that’s a possession of Denmark. Denmark and Norway are two different countries. So he sent of this stupid letter.

Dear Ambassador:
President Trump has asked that the following message, shared with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, be forwarded to your [named head of government/state]
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, | no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. | have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

The country of Norway does not give Nobel prizes, Trump has not stopped 8 wars, Russia and China are not threatening to take over Greenland, we are. Well, Trump is — the majority of American oppose taking it over. Complaining that their only claim is because a boat landed there…well, yeah, that’s colonialism for you, and it’s the only basis for American ownership of this part of the continent.

This whole thing is the logic of a greedy baby.

Seriously, we need to get rid of this demented narcissist. And if Republicans can’t see reason, we need to get rid of them, too.

Old man babbles about the Bible as science

IMPORTANT CHANGE: the article was not written by Marc Siegel, but by someone named Michael Guillén. I was fooled by the fact that it is topped by a large photo and video of Siegel touting his new book about modern day medical miracles. Now that I’ve read that, I feel like I should also spend some time criticizing Siegel’s idiotic bullshit about miracles, but for this article, redirect your contempt at Guillén.

Dr Marc Siegel (he really is a doctor, a medical doctor) writes an article for Fox News that makes me question his competence. He is the Fox News Senior Medical Analyst, so keep that in mind when assessing future medical info from Fox News.

When our son was 4 years old, he asked my wife and me: “Can you drive to heaven?” Out of the mouth of babes, right?

It’s a question only a child would ask, but it raises a very adult question: Where exactly is the heaven described in the Bible?

As a scientist,

Stop right there. I dislike that phrase — it’s usually a prelude to an argument for authority. We don’t need to see an MD or a PhD to address an argument by a four year old, so why bring it up?

Probably because he’s conscious that he’s about to make an incredibly stupid argument. It’s actually the second worse As a scientist argument I’ve ever heard.* But this one is pretty bad.

Also, as an adult, I will say that “where is heaven” is not a particularly adult question.

I understand the importance of definitions. According to the Bible, the lowest level of heaven is Earth’s atmosphere. The mid-level heaven is outer space. The highest-level heaven is what we’re talking about: It’s where God dwells.

Yikes. The Bible is not a scientific source; he may have some ideas about definitions, but he knows nothing about the importance of sources. But OK, according to the Bible, where does the Bible talk about the atmosphere? Where does it even mention outer space? The ancient authors of the books that would be incorporated into the Bible thought we lived in a bubble of air encapsulated in a solid firmament, embedded in a universe that was full of water. It’s a bad idea to reference the Bible when trying to describe the cosmic geography.

The best you can get from the Bible is a vague notion that God is above us.

As for heaven’s location, the Bible contains many verses that describe us as looking “up” at God in heaven, and God as looking “down” at us on Earth.

Stop there. That’s good enough for a child; God is somewhere in the sky, so no you can’t drive there. Done. Unless you want to get into a serious discussion about whether Heaven even exists as a physical space, or whether a god even exists. That would be a bit challenging for most 4-year-olds.

It’s way above what your average Fox News reader can comprehend.

But no! Siegel starts talking about pop physics.

Imagine boarding a nuclear-powered rocket and traveling straight “up” into deep space. Will you ever reach a point far enough “up” into space that you finally reach heaven?

Before you laugh off the idea, consider this.

In 1929, American attorney-turned-amateur astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies are rushing away from one another like so much shrapnel from a bomb. Hubble also discovered there’s a definite pattern to how galaxies are rushing away from each other, namely: The farther “up” in space a galaxy is located — the farther away it is from Earth — the faster it’s moving away from Earth and everything else. It’s called Hubble’s Law.

What does this have to do with the existence of, the nature of, or the location of heaven?

But, here’s where it gets really interesting.

Spoiler: no, it doesn’t.

Theoretically, a galaxy that’s 273 billion trillion (273,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away from Earth would move at 186,000 miles per second, which is the speed of light. That distance, way “up” there in space, is called the Cosmic Horizon.

That means you and I can never reach the Cosmic Horizon — not even aboard the most souped-up, nuclear-powered rocket imaginable — because, as Einstein explained in his theory of special relativity, only light and certain other non-material phenomena can travel at the speed of light.

The cosmic horizon is the maximum distance from which light from particles could have traveled to the observer in the age of the universe, which I think (not being a physicist myself) is about 16 billion light years away. Galaxies at the horizon are not moving at the speed of light. We cannot reach it because it is constantly receding, but…

Hey, what does this have to do with the location of heaven? Does the Bible also incorporate general relativity?

So, then, where is heaven located, exactly? It’s entirely possible heaven is located on the other side of the Cosmic Horizon. Here’s why.

Oh god. He’s not going to shut up.

One: According to modern cosmology, an entire universe exists beyond the Cosmic Horizon. But it’s permanently hidden from us because we can never reach, let alone cross over, the Cosmic Horizon.

Two: Our best astronomical observations — and Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity — indicate that time stops at the Cosmic Horizon. At that special distance, way “up” there in deep, deep, deep space, there is no past, present or future. There’s only timelessness.

Three: Unlike time, however, space does exist at and beyond the Cosmic Horizon. Which means the hidden universe beyond the Cosmic Horizon is habitable, albeit only by light and light-like entities.

Four: According to modern cosmology, the Cosmic Horizon is lined with the very oldest celestial objects in the observable universe. That means whatever exists beyond the Cosmic Horizon predates these oldest objects… predates the so-called big bang… predates the beginning of the observable universe.

One: none of that is in the Bible; two: physics would tell us that we don’t know what’s going on beyond the cosmic horizon, or that our time and space dependent notions of “what’s going on” even apply; three: but Siegel thinks physics claims that there is a habitable universe beyond it; four: what amazing bullshit.

I pity that small child getting this lecture.

Finally, Siegel sums it all up, and brings the Bible back into the discussion.

1. Heaven is, indeed, located “up” there — way above our heads and way beyond the visible, starlit universe — just as the Bible indicates.

2. Heaven is inaccessible to us mortals while we’re alive, just as the Bible indicates.

3. Heaven is inhabited by nonmaterial, timeless beings, just as the Bible indicates.

4. Heaven is the dwelling place of the One who predates the universe — the One who created the universe — just as the Bible indicates.

The Bible doesn’t say any of that.

Is this the sophisticated theology believers are always telling me about?

* The worst As a scientist claim I’ve ever heard was from Lawrence Krauss defending Jeffrey Epstein, As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people. That remains the champion among bad As a scientist claims, now and possibly forever, and it even includes two As a scientist phrases in one sentence.