Meth & mental illness

I’ve been off in a cramped little room yesterday and this morning — I got picked for jury duty! I’ve already been asked how a godless liberal college professor survived the screening to end up on a jury, and it was easy. In previous trials I got picked on by the prosecuting attorney about my opinions of police officers — I don’t trust them — and got excluded because there’s one thing prosecutors want, and that’s deference to authority. This time, they didn’t even ask me any questions, because they spent so much time filtering out prospective jurors who knew or were related to the defendant and the witnesses, and since this is a small town, everyone knows everyone, except me, because I’m a cloistered nerd at the university. I skated in based on my ignorance of local gossip, I guess.

It was an eye-opening experience, because I got to see the other side of town. This was a domestic violence case in a small rural midwestern town, so you can guess who I had to stand in judgment over: poor people intermittently employed in thankless, low-paying jobs, who have a history of meth use, and in the case of the victim, was also bipolar…but she’d given up on her meds and was instead self-medicating with methamphetamine (which doesn’t work at alleviating the symptoms of mental illness). It was a tawdry, ugly case, where the defendant had angrily and viciously punched his partner, and the partner wanted to retract her initial statement and claimed to have forgotten everything that happened that day because she’d been so high, and also she really loved her man and wanted to get back together with him.

We were in one of those situations where the only just recourse would have been to separate these two, give them intense but caring treatment for their addictions, and find them productive, stable employment and a life where they could better themselves, but nope, all we could do is say on the basis of the evidence presented in court whether the guy was guilty or not guilty on two counts of abuse. We found him guilty of one (there was a photo of a nasty, fist-sized bruise taken the day of), and not guilty of the other (we could see he was capable of the crime, and probably did it, but without physical evidence we couldn’t say that the state had made its case).

We learned afterwards, and this was definitely not a factor in the decision, that this guy had prior convictions for domestic violence, making this a felony, and that he’s probably going to spend a handful of years in prison for it. All because I raised my hand in the deliberation room. Well, and because he was in the habit of punching and choking his partner.

So how was your day? I’m going to have to find something uplifting to cheer me up. I may go into the lab and tend to spiders, or something.

Israel has become a sacred cow, and you can guess what I think of such beasts

Unbelievable. The state of Texas requires people to affirm a loyalty oath to Israel in order to be employed in education.

A children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told she can no longer work with the public school district after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation.

This is an attempt by lawmakers to coerce citizens to hold certain political views. It’s an odious law and a disgrace to any country that tries to enforce it. But it’s not just Texas: 17 states have passed similar laws, including the blue state of New York.

The law, known as HB 89, charges the Texas Comptroller’s Office with making a list of “all companies that boycott Israel” and provide the list to state agencies. Those agencies will then be barred from contracting with those companies. State pension funds are also prohibited from being invested in firms involved in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

The bill passed the state House 131-0 and the state Senate 25-4.

Texas is now the 17th state to pass such a law, with other such states ranging from California to South Carolina. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo implemented a similar measure by executive order.

That is sickening. How can such a law have such overwhelming support from legislatures? What next? Laws demanding that you be fired if you don’t eat beef, that you have to hold a concealed carry permit to be a teacher, that Communists can be blacklisted…oh wait, they already tried that one.

I had to look to see if any of the usual Freeze Peach Warriors had anything to say about this story. Not much; 4chan has a long ugly thread about it, in which a few people do stand up for principle, reluctantly, but the majority are screaming slurs and insisting that no Muslims ought to be allowed to even exist in America. Sam Harris has just resigned from Patreon…because they banned a couple of racist, misogynistic scumbags, Milo Yiannopoulos and Sargon of Akkad, from their service, so we can guess what side he’d take, and we know what he considers pressingly important — the privileges of bullies and racists over the rights of citizens.

Sneaking political commentary into science papers? Glorious!

Via Jonathan Eisen, a simple exercise.

Please take a minute to experience for yourself one of the greatest scientific Easter eggs in a long time.

Step 1: download the PDF of this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20427-9

Step 2: Go to Page 3.

Step 3: Zoom way way in on the turd in Figure 1.

Step 4: Enjoy and share.

The article is titled “Methylation-based enrichment facilitates low-cost, noninvasive genomic scale sequencing of populations from feces”, in case you’re interested.

For those of you who don’t want to take the trouble, I’ll put the illustration of a baboon turd below the fold. You never know, someone might decide to insist on having it redrawn.

[Read more…]

The death of expertise continues apace

We know Donald Trump despises the UN, so I’m interpreting this as an act of spite: he’s appointing to the post of UN Ambassador one of those interchangeable blonde Fox News talking heads, Heather Nauert. She’s not a diplomat, she’s had no real training from the State Department (she has been a spokesman), and she seems to be prone to gaffes. But we all also know what Trump considers “qualifications”.

She has been a strong defender of Trump’s at the podium, something he has clearly noticed.

She’s excellent, she’s been with us a long time, she’s been a supporter for a long time, Trump told reporters on Nov. 1.

Sycophancy has replaced competence as the key requirement for high positions in government. The other day I saw a Jordan Peterson clip in which he was babbling about how Western culture was a meritocracy and how hierarchies in society were a reflection of degree of competence. I laughed. He has no idea at all.

New York Times, goddamn

Ross Douthat has written an essay in praise of George Herbert Walker Bush, and WASP values, and the New York Times published it. No editor stepped in and said, “this is absurd” and refused to taint the opinion pages with more garbage. The publisher didn’t worry about the reputation of the paper, and suggest that maybe something so bigoted shouldn’t be run. Nope. They just went with it. I guess since they already gave ol’ Catholic argle-bargle Douthat a column, they were already wrecked, so let the guy babble.

So they’ve published a column about pinin’ for a White Aristocracy, which was so good and kind and generous and self-sacrificing.

So if some of the elder Bush’s mourners wish we still had a WASP establishment, their desire probably reflects a belated realization that certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion — and that the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive.

Those virtues included a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety that went beyond the thank-you notes and boat shoes and prep school chapel going — a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country.

The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it, because for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.

And somehow the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship — one that from the late-19th century through the middle of the 1960s was arguably unmatched among the various imperial elites with whom our establishment contended, and that certainly hasn’t been matched by our feckless leaders in the years since George H.W. Bush went down to political defeat.

Seriously? Noblesse oblige is unironically presented as a virtue? And enacting laws that oppressed the poor and gave them more tax cuts is called personal austerity?

Oh, my. When was the last time we had a wealthy white man running the country…oh, look, right now. No, he means the last time a True White Old Rich Guy, not this nouveau riche pretender, was in charge and leading us “virtuously”. That was in ancient times, way back in 2008, when the son of the guy he’s eulogizing stepped down from the throne. The last time we had a WASP running the country, not counting the crass toad now in control, was a whole ten years ago, and we’ve been missing them because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

Right. I think he meant to use the singular rather than plural — “successor” — because it was one black (i.e., diverse) guy, who actually did a pretty good, if imperfect, job as president, and was definitely superior to either Bush. Yet somehow Douthat wants to imply that Obama “ruled us” neither wisely nor well?

Just the use of the phrase rule us is rather revealing, don’t you think?

Douthat does have some regrets. He thinks the WASPs should have done a better job of training the next generation, maybe, If ethnic balance is important to meritocrats, they should engineer it into the system, raising up a few brown people or Jews to follow in their righteous path and preserve the domain of the upper class. But the bottom line is that we need an aristocracy.

If we would learn from their lost successes in our own era of misrule, reconsidering this idea — that a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly — might be a fruitful place to start.

The only virtue of an aristocracy is that, because they set themselves apart, it makes it easier to tell who deserves to be put in the tumbrel.

P.S. to Ross and the New York Times: You know that WASP is an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, right? It’s a reference to race, ethnicity, and religion, and that whole column is about saying one race, ethnicity, and religion should be allowed to rule the country. You did notice, didn’t you?

Where were the freeze-peachers when Minnesota Republicans took over?

I am amused. This is so typical. When the Republicans took over the Minnesota House, they installed a button to silence opposition.

The outgoing Republican speaker of the Minnesota House had the power to silence debate with the push of a button. His Democratic successor says one of the first things she’ll do when she takes over is remove the master mute button.

The GOP leadership quietly had the button installed on the back of the rostrum after the 2015 session came to a particularly raucous end. Labeled “chamber mute,” it silences the microphones at all of the other lawmakers’ desks simultaneously. Democrats became aware of it when Speaker Kurt Daudt pushed it during an acrimonious debate in 2016. They’ve been stewing ever since.

Now if only they could install a mute button to shut the electorate up — you know they want to.

There haven’t been any examples of media hagiography of awful people lately, have there?

I wouldn’t know. I was in the gym yesterday (it’s become the only place where I’m subjected to broadcast media) when I saw Karl Rove and other awful people from the 90s who I’ve tried to forget, and my brain shorted out, I saw a Tunnel of Light open before me, and my short-term memory flitted away like a cloud of butterflies. Still, I’m sure this is referring to something.

Former Cold War CIA director & tool of the elites writhes in Hell today

George HW Bush is dead, and there is no hell, so the best I can hope for is that he faded away on his deathbed despairing that his legacy, what there is of it, was thrown away by his fuckwit sons.

This is why I can never be president. Barack Obama was far more charitable and generous and diplomatic in his remarks.

One thing I’m hoping for is that Trump will deliver a eulogy. I’m expecting something that compares the relative sizes of their electoral college votes and inauguration crowds.