“Republican” is a synonym for “petty and stupid”

I’ve driven by Fort Snelling, the park and the gigantic military cemetery, an uncounted number of times — it’s right by the airport, so if you’ve ever flown into the Minneapolis/St Paul International Airport, you’ve gone by it yourself. It’s right there at the intersection of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, so it’s been an important landmark even before the airport was built; even before Minnesota was a state; even before European settlers invaded the territory.

Guess what has our Minnesota legislature — at least, the Republican side — in an uproar now? Historians have added a word to the sign at the visitor center: “Fort Snelling at Bdote“. They haven’t changed the name of the place, they’ve only added an acknowledgement of the Dakota word for this meeting of the two rivers, which sounds like a lovely addition to me, and one that does no harm to the European side of the history, but only extends it to include the longer Indian record of residence.

Unbelievably, Republicans consider this an assault on their version of history.

“Without any public input that I am aware of, the Historical Society has changed the name of historic Fort Snelling, which is a military installation, to historic Fort Snelling at Bdote,” Sen. Scott Newman, R-Hutchinson, told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS.

He said he’s also heard from veterans who are upset by the signs, and consider it “revisionist” history.

“I think it’s a rewriting of our history and I’m not in favor of it,” he said.

It’s not just a myopic reading of history, the Republicans are planning to punish the historical society by cutting their budget by millions of dollars, possibly costing the loss of as many as 80 jobs (which is fine with the Rs, I guess).

I’m just surprised a little bit that anyone would object to adding a little more historical information to a sign at a historical site. There’s no reason to complain, unless you’re so deeply racist that you resent any mention of the people the European settlers displaced to take over this region. Seriously, how can anyone be upset by this word?

But I shouldn’t be surprised. This cheerful message sparked a lot of online anger.

A great many white people flooded the comments to insist pointedly that that wasn’t Lake Bde Maka Ska, but Lake Calhoun, despite the fact that the name was officially changed. Calhoun was a Southern politician and vociferous advocate of slavery at the time of the Civil War, and it was totally inappropriate to honor him by naming a beautiful lake after him, but apparently some people think that it’s better to memorialize a white traitor who isn’t from this area than to use a pretty Dakota name that actually describes the lake.

If you’re wondering how it’s pronounced, it’s like it’s spelled. And that’s really what the lake is named on the maps.

OK, here’s Joe Bendickson demonstrating how to say it. Bendickson, by the way, has something in common with me: we’re both on Turning Point USA’s list of Dangerous Professors, which is entirely my honor.

Occasional reminder

We’re still paying off our lawyer in that ridiculous SLAPP suit by Richard Carrier — his case went down in flames, it’s over as far as we’re concerned, but man, legal fees certainly do stack up fast. Our GoFundMe page is still open. And before you tell us we should have counter-sued, we’re not interested in sinking more time and money into that futile pursuit, and unlike the people who just wave the flag of Free Speech, we have no interest in silencing anyone.

I will also remind you that if you had any doubt that Richard Carrier was a serial harasser, all you need to see is that he’s been harassing me, Stephanie Zvan, Amy Frank-Skiba, Lauren Lane, and the organizations of FtB, Skepticon, and the Orbit to the tune of many tens of thousands of dollars in a pointless, punitive lawsuit; he’s also failed all of his friends from whom he sucked away an equivalent or greater sum of money. And yet he’s still getting booked for appearances around the country. It’s amazing how being a petty scumbag only enhances your reputation in the atheist community.

Who benefits from increasing healthcare costs?

Maureen Walsh, the Washington state Republican who thinks nurses are lazy and don’t deserve humane working conditions, got another royal smackdown from a nurse. Maybe there’s a reason nurses are overworked.

Hospital administrators pull down enormous bonuses- and most are not required to be disclosed to the public. Nonclinical healthcare wages- as in hospital administrators- increased 30% over the last decade to $865 billion (Bryant, 2018). Furthermore, salaries for nonprofit CEOs far eclipsed those for nurses. Over the past decade, salaries for hospital CEOs jumped a whopping 93% (Clinical Orthopedics and Related Research 2018). Average salaries for hospital CEOs skyrocketed from $1.6 million in 2005 to $3.1 million in 2015. In fact, salaries for nonclinical workers are a major factor in skyrocketing national healthcare spending. In 2017, 84 of the largest nonprofit hospital systems boasted total annual profits of $14.4 billion — resulting in a 2.7% operating profit margin (Bryant, 2018). Are you telling me that hospitals can’t afford to hire enough staff to allow nurses to get legally mandated breaks? Please, Senator Walsh, show me that math. Sounds like you’re being played by the lobbyists and that you’ve been too lazy to do your own research. Shame on you.

I do have to wonder what those CEOs are doing to earn $3 million salaries. Do they actually work 50 times harder than I, or one of their nurses, do?

I suspect the CEOs are in turn only a small part of the problem. I wonder how much of the money flowing into hospitals is sucked away by insurance companies?

We can just post the same article over and over again!

Like this one, from The Nation a bit more than a year ago.

Judging by the headlines, pseudo-scientific racism is making a comeback. Nineties-relic Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) is popping up on campuses and in conservative media outlets, much to the delight of those who think his graphs confer legitimacy to their prejudices. Atheist philosopher and podcaster Sam Harris is extolling Murray’s highfalutin version of racist graffiti as “forbidden knowledge.” New York Times’ increasingly off-the-rails op-ed page gave genetics professor David Reich the opportunity to write that “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races.’” And Andrew Sullivan, as ever, is fervently repackaging Gilded Age eugenics for a 21st-century audience.

Wow. Nothing has changed. Those same people are still pontificating away over the same tired bigotries.

You might be saying, “It’s only been a year, change takes time,” and I’d agree with you…except if you read the rest of the article, it’s all about the long history of racist pseudoscience. If a year isn’t enough, is a century?

Names like Alexis Carrel, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and Ernst Rüdin mean little today. But a century ago, they were in the top tier of public intellectuals—the Neil deGrasse Tysons and Carl Sagans of their age. They stood at the confluence of three popular trends at the turn of the century. One was scientific racism—the attempt to leverage reason and the scientific method to “prove” the inherent superiority of the white, northern European race (a conclusion that conveniently doubled as the premise). The second was eugenics, which represented the misappropriation of Darwinian evolution to human social outcomes. Third was rising apprehension at the immigration feeding the transition of the United States from an agrarian backwater to an industrial colossus.

Apparently not. All three of those trends are still going strong.

I guess I’m going to have to cling to life for at least another century to see the headlines change.

Comic-book movies treat arachnophobia!

Good news, everybody! We can reduce arachnophobia with just a seven second clip from a Marvel movie!

Fear of insects, mainly spiders, is considered one of the most common insect phobias. However, to date, no conducted studies have examined the effects of phobic stimuli exposure (spiders/ants) within the positive context of Marvel superheroes movies, such as “Spiderman” or “Antman”. A convenience sample of 424 participants divided into four groups watched different clips. Two intervention groups (Spiderman/Antman) and two control groups (Marvel opening/natural scene) were measured twice (pre-post intervention). The measures comprised an online survey assessing socio-demographic variables, familiarity with Marvel movies, comics and phobic symptoms. Reduction in phobic symptoms was significant in the Spiderman and Antman groups in comparison to the control groups. Seven second exposure to insect-specific stimuli within a positive context, reduces the level of phobic symptoms. Incorporating exposure to short scenes from Marvel Cinematic Universe within a therapeutic protocol for such phobias may be robustly efficacious and enhance cooperation and motivation by rendering the therapy as less stigmatic.

Unfortunately, they don’t tell us what specific clip they used, so I can spam it everywhere and teach people to appreciate spiders. I kind of doubt that it’s this one, at the 1:37 mark.

Also, it’s Spider-Man and Ant-Man, both hyphenated. I can’t imagine how that slipped past the editors. Additionally, since there is a new Spider-Man movie coming out in July, I’m hoping for a spider renaissance this summer.

University cracks down on predation in the lab, more like it

Predators object. David Adam has written an article about a policy change at Princeton University. I’m not too impressed with it.

Romantic relationships between university professors and their students are becoming less and less acceptable.

Hang on there, Mr Adam. When were they ever acceptable? Not in my day. They were always recognized as creepy. The terrible professor who slept around with his students has been a stock figure of contempt in literature and movies for a long time.

But OK, on with the specific news.

Many of the new university policies that have emerged in the last few years have focused on undergraduates and how to better protect them, typically with a campus-wide ban on staff dating undergrads. But a number of universities also demand that faculty members do not start relationships with graduate students they supervise. This month, Princeton University went further and declared that faculty members were no longer allowed to date any graduate student—even if the couple works in different departments. Pre-existing relationships are exempt from the new rule.

Announcing the policy after it was approved by a faculty vote on April 1, Dean of the Faculty Sanjeev Kulkarni said in an email to faculty members that the rule would “create a safe, respectful and equitable learning environment for everyone on campus.”

“I think it’s practical and I think it’s prudent,” Rebecca Burdine, an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton who voted on the measure along with the rest of the faculty in attendance, tells The Scientist. Most importantly, she says, the graduate students asked for it, because faculty members often have huge power over a graduate student’s career and this can create an unequal and unhealthy power dynamic in personal relationships that emerge.

So, the group at the lower end of the power differential is asking for this behavior to end, making quite clear that this has never been about real love and partnerships.

And how does The Scientist title this article? Universities Crack Down on Love in the Lab. Well, that makes their bias crystal clear, anyway.

Then, of course, they have to include criticisms of the policy. The two men claim that there is no asymmetry of power and object to a decision that might shrink the dating pool. The one woman argues that it might mean a person in computer science might not be able to take a course in art history, because they’re dating an art history professor? What an odd concern.

Meanwhile, the people who are breathing a sigh of relief that one more pressure has been removed from their student career are not interviewed, and probably don’t want to be, because that might involve exposing the unpleasantness of some of the faculty they’re depending on to get the heck out of there.

Holy crap. The guy who thought prohibiting professors dating students would be too costly is…the Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life at Cornell.

Dueling irrelevancies

What is Trump fretting over now?

On Tuesday, President Trump hosted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in the Oval Office for a closed-door meeting, during which the leader of the free world spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about lost Twitter followers, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

There’s a big problem with Twitter right there — you know weird ol’ @jack really cares about keeping his buddy @realDonaldTrump happy, and @realDonaldTrump really cares about the big number of followers. So much so that this must sting:

Yep, 59.9 million vs 106 million. Don’t tell Donald that at least half his followers are hate-reading him.

Relax, there aren’t going to be any zombie pigs

I’m catching up on my dramatic reading, so of course I had to dig into the latest mad science, a paper in Nature on the Restoration of brain circulation and cellular functions hours post-mortem. This is classic mad science: pig brains were collected from a slaughterhouse, hooked up to a carefully designed perfusion apparatus, and then flooded with an appropriate physiological solution to examine how well the tissue held up. The authors aren’t trying to raise the dead, though. Rather, it’s more of a quantitative study of what happens to the tissue in the hours after death.

The results are interesting, but not surprising. After all, no one expects that the brain immediately slumps into grey, gooey oatmeal at the instant of loss of brain activity — once metabolic support at the organismal level is lost, and once integrated overall activity in the functional networks of the brain fail, it’s going to take time for death at the cellular level to occur. This paper was looking at the progression of cellular loss, and also examining how their perfusion protocol could slow that decay, making some of the cells available for laboratory research. That should be clear from their conclusion.

These findings show that, with appropriate interventions, the large mammalian brain retains an underappreciated capacity for normothermic restoration of microcirculation and certain molecular and cellular functions multiple hours after circulatory arrest. In addition, this platform could offer investigators the opportunity to conduct prospective, functional ex vivo studies in intact brains that would otherwise be limited to static histological, biochemical, or structural investigation.

So what did they find? That the plumbing of the brain, the major arteries and veins and even portions of the capillary network, were still patent hours after death, and that the walls of the circulatory system were still responsive to pharmacological agents. That the general cytoarchitecture of the brain, that is, the major pathways and grey and white matter of the brain, remained largely intact for hours, although there were also scattered areas that dropped out. That individual neurons retained normal morphology, even to the level of synapse structure, and that their perfusion protocol reduced the swelling and apoptosis of individual cells. That glia persisted and retained some of their inflammatory properties. That when perfused, the brain as a whole still metabolized, taking up glucose and oxygen and producing carbon dioxide, and maintaining the pH of the fluid.

One thing they did not see was restoration of overall activity of the brain — consciousness, even at its most primitive level, is a property of a network of interactions, and that property was gone. That’s what death is to a multicellular organism, a loss of coordination and integration between its components, and finding that bits and pieces still retain functionality at a cellular level doesn’t mean that the whole has been restored.

The observed restoration of molecular and cellular processes following 4 h of global anoxia or ischaemia should not be extrapolated to signify resurgence of normal brain function. Quite the opposite: at no point did we observe the kind of organized global electrical activity associated with awareness, perception, or other higher-order brain functions.

A crude analogy: take a hammer to your computer. You open it up and find broken circuits and cracked connections. You can still pull out an IC and hook it up to an oscilloscope and find that the transistors and resistors and various subcomponents can operate to spec, but you know, that computer ain’t gonna be playing Fortnite no more, and isn’t even going to boot up.

And that’s how I see this study. It’s a useful exercise in salvaging components that could be useful in research, but this isn’t a resurrection protocol. The pig is irreversibly dead with wholesale damage across its nervous system, but some pig cells take longer to die. There’s an important distinction here between global meta-properties of the whole brain, and single cell properties, and you shouldn’t confuse the two. The authors don’t.

But then there’s all this foofaraw from people invited to comment on the study, where I’m not so sure that they see the distinction.

For example, “Pig experiment challenges assumptions around brain damage in people:The restoration of some structures and cellular functions in pig brains hours after death could intensify debates about when human organs should be removed for transplantation, warn Stuart Youngner and Insoo Hyun.” They report the important point that these brains are dead, but still seem to think that there’s hope.

Electrophysiological monitoring did not detect any kind of neural activity thought to signal consciousness, such as any evidence of signalling between brain regions. Nonetheless, the study challenges the long-held assumption that large mammalian brains are irreversibly damaged a few minutes after blood stops circulating. It also raises the possibility that researchers could get better at salvaging a person’s brain even after the heart and lungs have stopped working.

Except that it doesn’t challenge the assumption that large mammalian brains are irreversibly damaged by the loss of circulation. They saw zero evidence of brain function — the brains were dead. That pig wasn’t thinking, dreaming, or rising up in a blood-soaked orgy of zombie violence. It was a non-pig. Even when the researchers clearly saw a reduction of cellular damage with their perfusion technique, there was no claim that they had reversed death.

I also don’t see any offer of hope for clinical situations. What does it mean to “salvage a person’s brain”? If overall function has stopped, there’s no sign of electrical activity, that there’s been a loss of oxygen to the brain to the extent that signaling has been disrupted and lost, to say that some cells aren’t dead just yet does not hold out help for resuscitation.

This certainly does have ethical implications, though. I’m more concerned that some people might misuse this information to argue that resuscitation efforts were suspended prematurely — that a dying patient might cross that threshold into death, and someone will argue that because pyramidal neurons in the cortex of a decapitated pig could show electrical activity 10 hours after death, that’s cause to demand life support be maintained even longer.

And then there’s this one: “Part-revived pig brains raise slew of ethical quandaries: Researchers need guidance on animal use and the many issues opened up by a new study on whole-brain restoration, argue Nita A. Farahany, Henry T. Greely and Charles M. Giattino.” They also point out the obvious — these brains were dead — but they want to express reservations.

The work also raises a host of ethical issues. There was no evidence of any global electrical activity — the kind of higher-order brain functioning associated with consciousness. Nor was there any sign of the capacity to perceive the environment and experience sensations. Even so, because of the possibilities it opens up, the BrainEx study highlights potential limitations in the current regulations for animals used in research.

Most fundamentally, in our view, it throws into question long-standing assumptions about what makes an animal — or a human — alive.

Does it, though? Is this more dramatic than Luigi Galvani’s demonstration that a dead frog’s muscles would still twitch when an electrical current was applied? I’m sure it stirred up deep concerns in the 18th century, and could contribute to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but does it really change our understanding of life in the 21st? I know I’m untroubled. My sense of self isn’t cellular. When my brain can’t perceive the environment or experience sensations or think, I’ll be dead and gone, even if my cerebral vasculature can still dilate.

I am also unsure what changes in regulations are required. They bring up the fact that none of this research would be judged unethical, so they’d like to change the rules so that it becomes unethical? I don’t get it.

The pigs, having been raised as livestock, were exempt from animal welfare laws and were killed before the study started. In the United States, the 1966 Animal Welfare Act is the only federal law that regulates how animals are treated in research, and applies to either living or dead animals. It explicitly excludes animals raised for food. Meanwhile, the policies and regulations of the US Public Health Service, which funds most US research involving animals — mainly through the NIH — do not specify any protections for animals after their death.

I’d really like to know what protections for animals after their death ought to be implemented, when the majority of these animals are being killed in order to suffer the indignity of being eaten. That’s the greater ethical question, not whether we should be working harder to shelter a few fading cells inside an animal that has just had its throat slit, been gutted, and chopped up into little bits that are then packaged in styrofoam and plastic at the grocery store. This study doesn’t raise any ethical concerns that aren’t amplified a million-fold times in our farms and meat-packing industries and kitchens.

The authoritarian, profit-seeking people who want to seize the commons are the problem

I confess that I’ve never really thought deeply about the Tragedy of the Commons — it’s a story that we are all told early, and superficially, it seems to make a lot of sense. Sure, we have to worry that a shared resource might be exploited by selfish individuals. We have to be concerned about free riders. But do we really? And why is it that somehow the blame always falls on the weakest, poorest members of society? So I read Garrett Hardin’s original essay from 1968, and realized…it’s dreck. Why has this thing been so influential? It’s entirely about population control, nudging around the edges of eugenics, and yuck, I realized that the people who think this is great stuff tend to be the wealthy and deluded Libertarians. Look at this:

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own “punishment” to the germ line–then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state, and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.

Unfortunately this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United Nations. In late 1967, some 30 nations agreed to the following: “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.”

Oooh, ‘ware the improvident. They might use overbreeding to aggrandize themselves! I’ve never felt that way. It seems to me that those gigantic families are harming themselves, perpetuating self-destructive myths at best, and reducing resources to their own children. Those children aren’t cows, property that they can use to seize an unfair share of the commons; they are independent, educable individuals who, if given the opportunity, could learn to be cooperative members of society and who would see that their own self-interest is not served by dropping a baby every year.

Hardin’s own example of herdsmen overgrazing a shared pasture is full of limiting assumptions — his herdsmen not only fail to cooperate in managing a shared resource, they don’t even talk to each other. And this is a shared myth used to justify privatization and control of basically everything in the world?

What prompted me to dig into the source material was an excellent article on Hardin and his “tragedy” by Matto Mildenberger. Humans actually do not lack cooperative management tools; we don’t need authoritarian intervention to save us from ourselves.

But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else.

Many global commons have been similarly sustained through community institutions. This striking finding was the life’s work of Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics (technically called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). Using the tools of science—rather than the tools of hatred—Ostrom showed the diversity of institutions humans have created to manage our shared environment.

Of course, humans can deplete finite resources. This often happens when we lack appropriate institutions to manage them. But let’s not credit Hardin for that common insight. Hardin wasn’t making an informed scientific case. Instead, he was using concerns about environmental scarcity to justify racial discrimination.

About that last bit — yeah, Hardin was a nasty character, but his nastiness isn’t the reason we should reject his myth. It’s because he was wrong.

Hardin was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe. He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist. His writings and political activism helped inspire the anti-immigrant hatred spilling across America today.

And he promoted an idea he called “lifeboat ethics”: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water.
…
People who revisit Hardin’s original essay are in for a surprise. Its six pages are filled with fear-mongering. Subheadings proclaim that “freedom to breed is intolerable.” It opines at length about the benefits if “children of improvident parents starve to death.” A few paragraphs later Hardin writes: “If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” And on and on. Hardin practically calls for a fascist state to snuff out unwanted gene pools.

Or build a wall to keep immigrants out. Hardin was a virulent nativist whose ideas inspired some of today’s ugliest anti-immigrant sentiment. He believed that only racially homogenous societies could survive. He was also involved with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a hate group that now cheers President Trump’s racist policies. Today, American neo-Nazis cite Hardin’s theories to justify racial violence.

It’s always useful to the powers-that-be to claim that a crisis is inevitable, and that it’s all due to unavoidable Human Nature, because that obscures where the blame really lies: in the hands of a corrupt, rich few who have used their power and wealth to override the potential of the many.

…rejecting Hardin’s diagnosis requires us to name the true culprit for the climate crisis we now face. Thirty years ago, a different future was available. Gradual climate policies could have slowly steered our economy towards gently declining carbon pollution levels. The costs to most Americans would have been imperceptible.

But that future was stolen from us. It was stolen by powerful, carbon-polluting interests who blocked policy reforms at every turn to preserve their short-term profits. They locked each of us into an economy where fossil fuel consumption continues to be a necessity, not a choice.

You can find more on that anti-corporate perspective in this video from Mexie:

We’re not going to solve climate change or any of the other global problems harming humanity until we claw down the billionaires from their perches and enact laws that control their greed.