I’m sorry (not sorry). Minnesota’s new progressive surge might actually hurt universities in regressive states. We just passed some significant laws to help Minnesota students.

Minnesota this year passed the North Star Promise scholarship program, which will pay college tuition and fees for in-state residents whose families earn $80,000 a year or less. The program, set to launch in the fall of 2024, is projected to cost $117 million and would help about 15,000 to 20,000 students, according to the state’s office of higher education.

Wow, I wish we’d had that when my kids were going to college — I would have qualified, and it would have been a big help. Better late then never, though, and I’m happy to see a new generation benefit. The state to our West is not happy about it, though.

Minnesota’s ambitious plan to give lower-income residents free college has created a “crisis” in neighboring North Dakota, where higher education officials worry about a drop in enrollment from Minnesota students who can get a better deal at home.

North Dakota college leaders spoke at a meeting this week of the State Board of Higher Education, whose members brainstormed ways to prevent a flood of Minnesota students leaving North Dakota schools.

“This has catastrophic implications. This is a very serious situation for us,” David Cook, president of North Dakota State University, said at the meeting.

But why should North Dakota care about a benefit given to Minnesota residents? I was surprised to learn this:

More than half of North Dakota State University’s incoming class, and 45% of its undergraduate student body, consists of students from Minnesota, according to estimates presented at the meeting. Minnesota natives make up 24% undergraduates at North Dakota State College of Science, and 28% at the University of North Dakota.

NDSU and UND are both right on the state border — you can live in Minnesota and easily commute to either of those schools. There’s nothing wrong with those universities, and I can see how they might panic at the thought of a quarter to half their students suddenly transferring out. We’re all suffering with the effects of the pandemic, I sympathize with any university taking an additional hit.

It’s easily fixed, though. Just pass some progressive legislation in your legislature, Dakotans, and give students free tuition and spend money to improve your schools. Oh, your legislature is packed with Republicans, and your governor is a Trumpian entrepreneur who seems to be distracted by a futile attempt at a presidential run?

I am so sorry! Sincerely. You are so screwed.

The unfortunate residents of Virginia have been denied access to Pornhub. They might not notice in a state named after a Virgin Queen that is just maintaining their puritanical tradition.

The President Pro tempore of the Senate of Virginia, State Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), called out Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin after an age-verification law lead to Pornhub blocking access for everyone in the state.

The law requires pornography websites operating in the state to work more aggressively to find out whether a visitor is 18 or older to gain access to the site. One of the approved methods of verification includes requiring users to upload copies government-issued identification.

Brilliant scheme that I’m sure will be effective in preventing under-age kids from witnessing perversions.

Even easier: grab Dad’s wallet while he’s taking a shower. You can also get his credit card while you’re at it.

The rich really are different.

Tom the Dancing Bug

Have you ever felt like you spend all your time explaining the obvious to idiots who are going to reflexively reject the evidence anyway? That’s the discouraging thing about battling creationism, you’re fighting willful ignorance. Even more significant is the need to explain the importance of vaccines when we’ve got mush-brained cranks like RFK Jr. geysering nonsense into the discourse that the media treats gently as if he has something intelligent to say.

This has always been a problem, though. Today I learned that Minnesota had mandatory vaccination laws for school children in 1883 (Yay! Woo-hoo! You go, Minnesota!) but that they repealed it in 1903 (booooo) after…a debate.

Fucking debates. Anyway, they dragged Justus Ohage, a real physician and the public health commissioner for St Paul into a debate with a carpet-bagger from Indiana, WB Clarke, who proceeded to glibly gish-gallup all over the place.

Dr. Clarke spoke next for an hour. He called Edward Jenner’s research “bogus.” He threw out incorrect and cherry-picked examples. He claimed that Germany had compulsory vaccination but also had the worst smallpox outbreak in Europe in 1871…
He did not mention that the smallpox epidemic was caused by unvaccinated French troops in Germany fighting in the Franco-Prussian War and that the vaccinated Germans suffered far less than the French.
There was no way for anyone to rebut these claims as he was making them, and Clarke was a smooth talker. He spoke quickly and vividly ultimately comparing the “vaccinator’s lancet” to a “highwayman’s butcher knife” saying that people had a right to defend themselves against each.
When Dr. Ohage took the stage, he only had 15 minutes. He said he did not have time to offer a rebuttal of each of Clarke’s claims. Instead, he had to defend “the attitude he had taken” against the anti-vaccinationists. The damage was done.

The result: the Minnesota legislature repealed the mandatory vaccination law in 1903.

Wait, no, that was only the proximate result. The long-term consequence was that Minnesota was ravaged by a smallpox epidemic in 1924-25 that killed 500 people. Oops.

State law blocked a sound public health response. An 1883 state law had required all school-age children to be vaccinated against smallpox. But in 1903, the legislature repealed that law and made compulsory child vaccination illegal. Although smallpox vaccination is almost 100 percent effective, public health officers had no power to make people protect themselves. They could recommend, but not mandate, the vaccine.

Starting in November 1924, both cities launched free vaccination campaigns. Once the deaths mounted, the frightened public jammed the vaccination centers. As reported in the Minneapolis Journal, as many as 17,000 got their skin scratches in a single day. By mid-December 1924—according to public health officials—some 210,000 people in St. Paul and 350,000 in Minneapolis had been vaccinated.

Clarke was never called to account for all the people he was responsible for killing. The sheep of Minnesota were cheerfully duped by a smooth-talking liar, and stampeded into the vaccination clinics to save themselves from their own stupidity.

It’s 1902 in the United States all over again. I’ll make the bold prediction that in 20 years or less we’re going to have to pay the piper.

There’s nothing I can say about this. Russian bad guy Putin has pissed off Russian mercenary and bad guy Prigozhin, and now we’ve got what looks like a full-blown civil war, with Prigozhin marching on Moscow, while the Ukrainians stand in awe as their enemy looks to be killing themselves.

I don’t know how this will end! No one knows what will happen! People will die and cities will be devastated, but beyond that, it’s Godzilla vs. Ghidorah.

I think NATO might be flying bags of popcorn into Kiev, but otherwise, I’m just going to sit back and watch incredulously. Hmmm, I might have some popcorn around the house, myself.

Pose for the history books, ladies.

I think it’s useful for future generations to see that haters and bigots and morally reprehensible scumbuckets can look like quite ordinary people — middle-aged soccer moms are entirely capable of deep ignorance and hatefulness. It’s also the case that ordinary, respectable institutions can accommodate them, as the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia has done. That museum is hosting a Moms for Liberty event next week, betraying their own reason for existence.

Moms for Liberty lobbies for book bans and aims to dictate how history is taught, stripping it of any mention of slavery, racism, and LGBTQ people. The group got its start fighting mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory. It spreads anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, falsely labels LGBTQ people as “groomers,” and led Florida’s hateful campaign against LGBTQ teachers. It openly harasses transgender and nonbinary young people and their families, advocating new laws and policies to restrict their lives and freedoms.

The group claims an affinity with America’s founding, yet they have failed this test in historical symbolism. Revolutionary Philadelphia was at the forefront of scientific inquiry, education, publishing, medicine, and government — all things that Moms for Liberty lobbies against.

Read the whole article for more historical examples of how the Moms for Repression are wrong on every count.

Newspaper articles about the growing tension between the North American colonies and the British crown were reported alongside dramatic stories of “female husbands” — people assigned the female sex at birth who lived as men and married women. In May 1766, London’s Public Advertiser printed the notice from Lord Chamberlain’s office about the movement of “a quantity of ammunition, and Part of the Troops destined for North America” on the very same page that it also noted the death of “the famous Sarah Paul, who went thro’ a Variety of Adventures in Men’s Clothes, which made a great Eclat about seven Years ago, when she married another young Woman, and was distinguished by the Appellation of the Female Husband.” While living as a man, they went by the name Samuel Bundy.

North American papers embraced these accounts as well. The Pennsylvania Gazette, printed by Ben Franklin in the Franklin Court Printing Office, reported on Charles Hamilton, who was detained in Chester in July 1752 while en route to Philadelphia under suspicion “that the Doctor was a women’ in mens clothes.” Since there was no explicit law against cross-dressing, authorities reported they would only keep Hamilton in prison “till we see whether any Body appears against her, if not she will be discharged.”

It’s a real shame. When I interviewed in Philadelphia 30 years ago, one of the things that won me over is that I was just turned loose for a day in the historical district of Philadelphia, which is simply a wonderful place to wander. Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Benjamin Franklin Museum (but not the Museum of the American Revolution, which did not exist then), all in easy walking distance. Then, in a bit more substantial stroll, you could walk up Market Street to the city hall, and visit all the science and art museums arrayed along Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The heart of the city is a bit old-fashioned in that it’s designed for people walking places, rather than freeways.

And now these horrible people are moving in. You know, if I were interviewing for a position in Philadelphia, and my visit were marred by an encounter with the dishonest harridans of Moms for Liberty, I probably wouldn’t take the job.

Look at that fish!

It’s beautiful. That’s the only thing I care about in this photo — I want someone to buy me a fishing junket to Alaska. My dad managed to make a few salmon fishing trips in his last years, and I think they made him happy.

By the way, the guy on the right is a supreme court judge. He got flown on a private plane to this fishing camp, with a billionaire, Paul Singer, footing the $100,000 bill. It paid for Singer to do that, since he had several cases before the court, and got favorable rulings. That fish is a bribe.

It’s looking like Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society goon, is hooking up each Supreme Court appointee with their very own billionaire sugar daddy. Clarence Thomas got one, Sam Alito got one, I wonder whose patronage each of the other judges got? Somebody had to have paid off Kavanaugh’s loans. I’d like to know who. Let us know who bought each member of the Supreme Court.

Still, that is a magnificent King Salmon. That’s the price of a corrupt judge? OK, maybe some ethics rules would be good.

I have an unfortunate history with CFI and The Skeptical Inquirer. I ought to be aligned with the principles of skepticism, but too often organized skepticism has been this stodgy, hidebound dinosaur that is more interested in conserving the privileges of a narrow group of people than in actually implementing productive change. So I abandoned it, writing this in 2011.

[Diversity] has long been an issue with the skeptical movement. I used to subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer, a very good magazine with well-written and substantive articles on skeptical issues, but I let my subscription lapse. It was a strange thing that prompted it; several years ago, there was an issue lauding the leaders of the skeptical movement, and it had a nice line drawing of four or five of these Big Names on the cover: and every one was white, male, and over 70 years old. I looked at it, and I wasn’t mad or outraged — every one of them was a smart guy who deserved recognition — but I saw it, sighed, and felt that not only was this incredibly boring, but that organized skepticism was dead if it was going to turn into a gerontocracy. I didn’t let my subscription lapse in protest, but out of lack of motivation.

Then, a few years ago, they fired Kavin Senapathy, a huge self-own. I commented on that:

That refusal to deal with the biggest social struggles of our time is what has always left me infuriated with the skeptic movement — oh, sure, let’s debunk ghosts and chupacabras and UFOs, but racist and misogynist beliefs are just too hard. They love the magic tricks and tests of dowsing, but eugenics? No one in organized skepticism seems to be smart enough to cope with that.

Merging with the Richard Dawkins Foundation didn’t help, and actually made it worse.

Kavin revealed some rather obvious inside information:

Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.

You get the idea. It’s the whitest, most oblivious skeptical organization, although Shermer’s group is competing well with that status. Worse, they aren’t at all interested in broadening their perspectives and getting better. I publicly announced my departure from the organized skepticism movement over these sorts of differences years ago.

Well, now we have achieved the merger of skepticism with the aggrieved privileged conservative crowd. The Skeptical Inquirer has published an article by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja titled The Ideological Subversion of Biology, which is full of bogus nonsense about how the Progressive Left is strangling science. It’s the same silly crap as that loony In Defense of Merit in Science paper that Coyne coauthored a while ago, and it’s a perfect fit for the Inquirer.

The title is an interesting choice — it’s a blatant call-back to anti-communist hysteria, and will strike a chord with Republicans and MAGAts all across the country. Once upon a time, it was the kind of thing the John Birch Society or Lyndon LaRouche would publish.

It’s really bad. Jerry Coyne has successfully transitioned from respected senior scientist to angry, bitter crank finding common cause with the worst right-wing academic grifters. It’s sad to see.

I’m working on a response to it. Coyne has written a long gish gallop of a paper, so it’s going to take a while, and another thing that’s not helping is that I’m flying off to a 4-day conference this weekend. I’ve also written to the Skeptical Inquirer asking if they’d be interested in publishing a response — I kind of doubt that they will, given their ideological predilections and the fact that they published a load of nonsense in the first place.

Stay tuned. With a few long days at the computer, I might finish a response before my flight on Sunday.