Insufferably credulous “journalists”

Ainsley Earhardt, one of the “Fox and Friends” airheads, is very excited about the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

We’re all excited about him. How wonderful is it that we don’t — might, we might not have to worry about our children with autism or our kids with, you know, developing cancer or, you know, just — it’s wonderful that he wants to clean up our foods. Our foods, in Europe, when we go to Europe, we can eat pasta, we can eat pizza, we don’t gain any weight. I know you walk a lot, but you don’t gain weight. You feel fresh, you feel clean. You come back here, you start eating pasta and you gain weight immediately.

Again, so there’s something wrong with our foods. It’s the pesticides, the chemicals. We want all of that out. We’re excited that he’s a leader. He’s very knowledgeable. He has said he’s going to give you choice. He’s not going to take away vaccines. Everyone’s not going to get polio. He said if you want a vaccine, you can vaccinate your kids, but I’m giving you choice. And he says he’s going to be transparent.

Yay! RFK will end autism and cure cancer by “cleaning up” our food. He’ll remove “chemicals” from our food!

Let’s not equate autism with cancer, but no, RFK is not going to prevent either of those. He’s not going to eliminate pesticide use. What’s driving our agricultural system is money: pressure to increase yields and lower costs, and corporate consolidation to make farms bigger and service Big Ag. These are Republicans. They aren’t going to change the system, but are more likely to amplify it.

You know, I’m pretty sure that Europe doesn’t have magical pasta and pizza with no calories (Europeans in the comments, tell me if I’m wrong.) What they do have is smaller portions, which, as a resident of the American midwest, I can tell you would elicit howls of protest here if we suggested that maybe you don’t need 3 pounds of carbohydrates with every meal. That’s not going to change, either. Also, another reason you might not get as fat in Europe is that European cities are much more walkable — you don’t drive to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Ranch. So sure, RFK is going to persuade Americans to drive less, walk more, eat less, and pay more for food from small family farms, and Fox News will call it “wonderful”.

Oh god. The future looks bleak.

Posturing buffoon

Trump wants to destroy the Department of Education. Can he actually do that?

Technically, yes.

However, “It would take an act of Congress to take it out,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Vox. “It would take an act of Congress to radically restructure it. And so the question is whether or not there’d be appetite on the Hill for abolishing the department.”

That’s not such an easy prospect, even though the Republicans look set to take narrow control of the Senate and the House. That’s because abolishing the department “would require 60 votes unless the Republicans abolish the filibuster,” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Vox.

So probably not. If it gets to the point that Trump’s whims of all sorts can be implemented, we’ll be so screwed that we’ll be praying for the Canadians to invade. If he did manage to get his wish, I don’t think he’s aware of the consequences.

Closing the department “would wreak havoc across the country,” Valant said. “It would cause terrible pain. It would cause terrible pain in parts of the country represented by congressional Republicans too.”

Much of that pain would likely fall on the country’s most vulnerable students: poor students, students in rural areas, and students with disabilities. That’s because the department’s civil rights powers help it to support state education systems in providing specialized resources to those students.

As usual, the Republican electorate was too stupid to realize that they were hurting themselves. Or maybe they think it was worth it to hurt their citizens who are handicapped, or gay, or trans, because while it is taking money away from them, it’s taking that money specifically from people they hate.

Even if the DOE isn’t abolished, they can worm their way into it and wreck all kinds of policies. For instance…

Trump officials could also attempt changes to the department’s higher education practices. The department is one of several state and nongovernmental institutions involved in college accreditation, for example — and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has threatened to weaponize the accreditation process against universities he believes to be too “woke.”

I’m at a university that I would generally class as “woke,” and that’s a good thing. I have so many students who I wouldn’t get to know if we were anti-woke, which generally involves only supporting straight white Christian men.

I think I see the problem here

An ironic slogan

As we get closer to the election, the frenzy of the media becomes increasingly apparent. All the stories about polls, about uncommitted voters, about wild rumors about immigrants, etc., it all has a purpose — to make us increasingly anxious and desperate for more “news”, that is, the stuff the media tells us will help us resolve our uncertainty. Except, of course, it isn’t what we need. I know how I’m going to vote, I informed my opinion on that by seeing what the candidates do and say, and all the caterwauling about how my neighbors will vote or how people a thousand miles away will vote doesn’t matter.

But that is what the media feeds on.

The machine is churning so fast right now that the works have been exposed. Sprockets have sprung, circuits are frayed, the housing is cracked, and the real engines of the news are exposed. It’s billionaires meddling.

The choice in the next election is obvious to every informed citizen, but the Washington Post went full chickenshit and decided this was the year they can’t make an endorsement. The publisher, William Lewis, had to twist himself into knots to justify that act of cowardice.

“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

In the name of ethics, the rule of law, and respect for human freedom, the paper nobly refuses to support the candidate who opposes a fascist with no ethics, contempt for the law, who wants to lock up and deport millions of Americans. That is such a chickenshit excuse. You know the real motivation: they are afraid Trump might win, and they are preemptively kneeling before the monster who’d abuse his power to silence media that is critical of him.

And, of course, the Washington Post is owned by a billionaire, Jeff Bezos, who is probably pissed off at the only reasonable (if flawed) candidate who is talking about mild policy that might cost him another yacht. The thumb is on the scales.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, another major newspaper, the LA Times, refused to endorse a candidate who opposes Trump, and has lost the support of much of its staff.

Mariel Garza, who was until days ago the Los Angeles Times’ editorials editor, said she resigned from her post in protest after the paper’s owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked an endorsement the editorial board had planned to make for Harris. Soon-Shiong appeared to push back in a social media post, in which he claimed the editorial board was asked to “draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate” so readers could make an informed decision, but claimed the board did not follow through. Editorial board members Robert Greene, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and Karin Klein also resigned in protest, with both citing their disappointment over the blocked endorsement.

Patrick Soon-Shiong is a South African billionaire who bought his way into a position of influence. I can think of another South African billionaire who is poisoning our democracy. Maybe we should deport them all?

There are things we can do — weak, belated things, but it’s something. You can write a letter to the editor of the WaPo. It probably won’t get published, but increasing the tally of people who state their contempt for the editorial cowardice can help. Do like Martin Baron.

Former Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron, who led the newsroom to acclaim during Trump’s presidency, denounced the decision starkly.

“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty,” Baron said in a statement to NPR. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Or even better, if you are a subscriber, cancel it right now. I did. The darkness approaches. Don’t expect the Washington Post to light a candle.

Debate schmebate

Great. We’re having a another presidential debate tomorrow. I predict it will be a debacle.

I won’t predict who will win, because that is going to be shaped by people’s subjective impressions and the way impressions will be shaped by the media. And one thing I can definitely predict is that the media will fuck it up.

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

This debate shouldn’t be happening, because in a functional democracy the senile narcissist running for the Republican party should have been repudiated long ago.

Retro gamers ahoy!

Back in the olden days, you know, the 20th century, I had a favorite computer game: Hellcats Over the Pacific. It was a flight simulator that ran on 68020 Macs; it was a simple, fairly crude game that was smooth and fun for it’s time. Most importantly, you could fire it up and do a mission in 20 minutes or so.

It took up 59K of disk space. How many games can you say that about nowadays?

To my short-lived joy, there is a Mac simulator that allows anyone to play the game on their browser. Check it out. See what glorious computer graphics enthralled us in the 1990s.

Oh gosh. Such flat terrain, 8-bit color, blocky objects made up of what, 10 or 20 polygons?

I can’t do it. Not after playing No Man’s Sky. It was still a great game in 1991, though.

Someday, I’ll learn to ignore Marvel movies

I had hopes. Deadpool is notorious for breaking the fourth wall and making sarcastic asides about the whole premise of comic book superheroes, so I thought maybe it would be funny. Maybe it was, but it was buried in over-the-top, nonstop violence — limbs lopped off, decapitations, multiple stabbings, and that was just in first ten minutes. The whole premise of the entire movie is that Deadpool has the superpower of instant healing, Wolverine is also able to heal any damage, and they didn’t like each other…so there were multiple overlong scenes which consisted of nothing but the two of them stabbing and chopping at each other in gruesome ways. I was bored.

Also, it’s a multiverse movie. I hate the multiverse concept. It erases the possibility of tragic mistakes, because you can just hop to a different timeline, or go back in time and fix an error, and it lowers the stakes. It also opens up the possibility of all kinds of cameos from other Marvel movies — even dead characters can pop in for a visit — and this movie worked that angle thoroughly and repeatedly to the point that I just stopped caring that so-and-so from an old superhero movie showed up.

It was not amusing when the culminating battle (it’s always a battle nowadays) was bringing in hundreds of alternate universe superheroes in a climax of pointless hacking and slashing. I was ready to fall asleep. The plot was also a mess, with two villains, neither of whom cared about the knifings and choppings going on, they were operating on a different plane of existence, apparently.

Skip it, unless you’re really into fan service.

Teaching kids to ‘OBEY’ is not education

This summer, when I haven’t been handed unhappy distractions, I’ve been working on a new course for the fall. I’m looking forward to it; it’s about the history and science of evolution, but it’s shaped by the requirement that courses in its category are equally focused on developing the discipline of writing in our students, so it’s going to be a combination of me lecturing briefly on the history of evolutionary theory, students discussing what they understand, writing exercises, and students explaining back to each other and me with essays. It’s not just a STEM course, it’s a STEAM course where the liberal arts pedagogy is folded into science content, and it’s all built around an epistemological approach to understanding where our ideas come from.

And now Angela Collier puts out a video about STEAM. It’s very good, especially since the last half or so is about how conservatives are openly trying to destroy progressive education and return us to the era of authoritarian instruction, where it’s so much easier to insert propaganda and lies into the curriculum. “Memorize this” is a much more useful tool for authoritarians than “question everything”, and it also would demolish good education.

This is not.a new problem. It’s clearly an issue since Reagan, the creature who corrupted everying about America, or at least, interpreted all the pustules of corruption as fashionable beauty marks for the fash.

Stupid movie

While I was waiting for it to get dark so I could run my disappointing experiment, I walked down to the local theater to see A Quiet Place: Day One.

My short summary: my god, this was a stupid movie.

Here’s the premise: a meteor shower drops a swarm of alien animals on Manhattan, which proceed to run wild and kill everyone. That’s not much of plot, I know, but the monsters are really, really stupid. They’re big and vicious and fast, but they don’t have eyes, and not even the dimmest sense of sight — people shine flashlights on their faces and they don’t respond. But make a noise, and these gnarly sensors open up on their head and they bolt towards the source. That’s the different feature of these monsters: they can’t see you, but you better not make a sound or they’ll kill you.

The problem is that they’re not particularly good at hearing. They don’t have echolocation or anything particularly sensitive, they just respond to ordinary, human-perceptible noises. Drop a book, they’re on you. Shout, and they attack. Walk quietly on the debris-covered streets, they don’t notice you. They’re not bats, that have a highly evolved sensory ability, they’re more like psychopathic grade school teachers with claws and teeth that will murder you if you don’t keep quiet during study hall.

And then, their response is stupid. They charge blindly at any source of sound and attack it. A car alarm goes off — a stratagem used more than once by the protagonists — and monsters will run from blocks away to jump on the car and flail at it. This behavior and their extremely crude sensory capacity raises many unanswered questions.

How did these pathetic brutes evolve? What kind of environment did they come from? One where all kinds of radiation was blocked or limited, so deep underground or an opaque atmosphere? They could hear, but that’s it, and they relied on obvious sound cues to find prey…not able to detect stealthy movement, but their prey need to make a loud squeak to be noticed.

And what kind of hunting/prey capture strategy is that, to blindly run at any sound, especially in a cluttered, dangerous environment like the ruins of New York? There should be dead, wrecked aliens impaled on fence posts and razor wire and traffic signs and spiky debris everywhere. Also, one fortified bunker, a couple of .30 cal machine guns, and you would have endless waves of monsters throwing themselves against the racket and getting shredded by the defenders.

They arrived in a meteor shower that did the initial destruction, exploding and smashing and punching holes in buildings. Why weren’t they deafened by all that noise? Wasn’t this a terrible delivery method for dropping off creatures that respond to noise?

Why? Why have an alien invasion that involved dumping a lot of stupid, cripplingly limited animals on a city? Who is doing this, because these were not intelligent aliens, who could make even idiotic space ships that exploded during landing?

There was also some pathos-filled story involving Lupita Nyong’o, a random stranger who was following her around, and an imperturbable cat, but I was so annoyed by the stupidity of the premise that I couldn’t care. Hey, Hollywood: next time you want to put out a science fiction/horror movie, the first step is to get writers who can assemble a coherent, intelligent premise. You spent $70 million on this sloppy trash, the writers working before you spend millions on expensive acting talent and sets and special effects are the cheapest part of the process, so get that bit right before the budget explodes.