Bat!

I startled my wife into wakefulness by shouting “BAT!” in the middle of the night.

Alas, I am no Laszlo Cravensworth, and I was not announcing my transformation into a bat — I was merely noting that there was a winged mammal doing circles above the marriage bed. We leapt up, throwing on robes, and started leaping and waving our arms to convince it to move elsewhere. It did. It flapped into the hallway, and we closed the bedroom door and resumed our dance there. Then it moved into the living room where it could whirl about at a greater radius, and we added broom waving and towel flapping to our repertoire. It flew into our kitchen, and at that point we had it.

Our strategy was to chase it into increasingly confined spaces, closing doors behind us and opening them in the direction we wanted it to go. From the kitchen, there was one way out, to the outside world, and while it fluttered frantically about us, it was defeated. Like a Turk at Lepanto, it at last realized it was either going to be crushed between the two terrifying flailing wings of our wedded partnership, or flee up the center. It chose wisely.

These intrusions have been occurring rather too frequently of late. We are debating what to do next: I suggested acquiring a large cannon and loading it with grapeshot to teach them a lesson, but Mary’s proposal to purchase a good-sized butterfly net has won out. At least for the next round in our no doubt continuing battle.

schadenfreude for hippie-wanna-bes

So sad. A bunch of privileged people who wanted to be hippies for a few days while ripping up the desert went to Burning Man on the playa, and got a surprise.

It rained.

Everything turned to mud. They’re stranded because all the transportation is stuck, and they’re having to slog on foot through the glop, and they’re rationing the food.

Tsk, tsk. It’s another Fyre Festival. Maybe they’ll learn the lesson that fragile environments aren’t your playground? Nah.

Don’t put non-educators in charge of education

I encountered this little message on Shitter, and was appalled at all the comments that enthusiastically agreed. This is not a curriculum. It’s a hodge-podge of random topics that the creator thinks they have mastered, and shame on you if you haven’t.

Look, what educators do is design a program of instruction that builds the basics first, that the student can then build on to reach more complex topics. It’s a tree, where attention must first be paid to the trunk, and then the branches. The stuff in this cartoon is a collection of twigs…some useful, others specialized, others mostly irrelevant.

Look at the first one, for instance: taxes. You have got to be kidding me. Doing your taxes is an exercise in following somewhat arbitrary instructions, doing basic arithmetic a step at a time. In a sense, most education is already all about obeying a series of instructions, are you seriously suggesting that tax forms are an important or interesting part of your schooling? Fuck off.

Then, coding. I’ve noticed that a lot of programmers have an inflated sense of the importance of what they do — it’s useful, but not essential for most people’s lives. This is basically vocational instruction that’s not going to be at all useful unless you get into a career in IT. (I’m not an outsider looking in here: I spent about fifteen years of my life doing lots of coding for laboratory work. I enjoyed it, but I haven’t had to fire up a compiler in an even longer period of time.)

Cooking? Really? Schools already offer classes in cooking. It’s called home economics. It’s usually optional; in my education you could take either home ec or a shop class. I did both because I wanted to. I spent a year learning the skills I’d need to be a line cook (vocational ed again), and another year in shop, which at my school was largely about drafting and printing. Both were cool, I’m glad I took them, I acquired some simple skills I use even now, but mandatory? Students don’t have infinite time.

The rest are similar tiny twigs on the tree of education. Isn’t high school basically already a gauntlet compelling you to learn a combination of survival skills, social etiquette, and stress management? You think a class would be more effective than navigating the protocols and cliques of your first prom?

I notice what’s missing here: math, history, literature, art, science. Maybe they just assumed they’re already teaching those, but sometimes standards are terribly low. I remember learning US history, which is an important subject, but some of the students were lucky enough to get a teacher who was actually qualified to teach it (Hey, Mr Richardson, I saw what my peers got in that class, and I was jealous.) I got the basketball coach, and the class was a semester of pure jingo and superficial memorization of dates.

Forget this uninformed list of random topics, which was probably cobbled together by a programmer, and instead teach what educators say forms a good framework for learning, and maybe instead give teachers the resources they need and enforce good standards.

This looks like something an unqualified home-schooler would assemble, and that’s what I’m afraid of — that there are a lot of people thinking “basic home repaire” trumps spelling and math and civics.

I don’t think Facebook understands the word ‘privacy’

They’d probably fail the vocabulary section of the SAT.

Many students have no choice about working with the College Board, the company that administers the SAT test and Advanced Placement exams. Part of that relationship involves a long history of privacy issues. Tests by Gizmodo found if you use some of the handy tools promoted by College Board’s website, the organization sends details about your SAT scores, GPA, and other data to Facebook, TikTok, and a variety of companies.

Gizmodo observed the College Board’s website sharing data with Facebook and TikTok when a user fills in information about their GPA and SAT scores. When this reporter used the College Board’s search filtering tools to find colleges that might accept a student with a C+ grade-point average and a SAT score of 420 out of 1600, the site let the social media companies know. Whether a student is acing their tests or struggling, Facebook and TikTok get the details.

No one should be surprised that Facebook and TikTok are stealing their users information. No one should be surprised that the College Board is pulling this crap, too. It’s cute that they were flat out caught lying.

“We do not share SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok, and any other third parties using pixel or cookies,” said a College Board spokesperson. “In fact, we do not send any personally identifiable information (PII) through our pixels on the site. In addition, we do not use SAT scores or GPAs for any targeting.”

After receiving this comment, Gizmodo shared a screenshot of the College Board sending GPAs and SAT scores to TikTok using a pixel. The spokesperson then acknowledged that the College Board’s website actually does share this data.

Yeah, that’s the College Board all over the place. They’re a for-profit company(it claims to be a non-profit, but keep in mind the CEO makes over a million dollars a year) founded during the era of eugenics on the lie that a standardized test can be used to quantify the intelligence and ability of young people.

An excellent commencement speech

JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, gave the commencement speech at Northwestern. It’s pretty good.

The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. When we see someone who doesn’t look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us—the first thought that crosses almost everyone’s brain is rooted in either fear or judgment or both. That’s evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren’t familiar with.

In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges. I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.

Then the summary:

Be more substance than show. Set aside cruelty for kindness. Put one foot in front of the other even when you don’t know your way. And always try and appreciate the good old days when you are actually in them. And remember what Dwight Schrute said, ‘You only live once? False! You live every day! You only die once.’

Despair for humanity

Hey, remember the Fyre Festival?

The original festival promised luxury villas, a lineup with Blink-182 and Migos and advertised with models like Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber. But when people got there, they found no Jenner, no Biebers, no Blink-182; just “FEMA tents” and stacks of construction materials.

It was legendarily bad, so awful that two documentaries were made about it, and the organizer, Billy McFarland, went to prison over it.

Billy McFarland is out of prison already, and guess what? He’s planning a Fyre Festival II.

After teasing the follow-up festival earlier this year, 100 presale tickets went up for grabs on Aug. 21 for $499 apiece (technically $549.89 after taxes and fees). Tickets will continue to increase incrementally, with the last round selling for $7,999 each. For $1,500 less, you could get four VIP tickets to Coachella with accommodations in a “ready-to-go Lake Eldorado Tent.”

Those 100 tickets have sold out, according to an email from organizers and McFarland’s social media, despite the event having no lineup of artists, exact date or location.

I don’t think prison reformed Billy at all, and why should it? The marks are still out there, happy to be fleeced some more. They haven’t learned anything either.

That didn’t stop Victoria Medvedenko, 20, a nursing student in Arizona, from buying a ticket. In screenshots of a receipt shared with The Washington Post, it shows Medvedenko purchased one of the “The First 100” tickets for $549.89.

“I really don’t think Billy would want to go back to jail and he’s had a lot of time to think about it and prepare this time,” she said of her decision. “And I think the first time around it had a lot of potential. He just didn’t have enough time or the right mind-set.”

We can’t get people to support climate action that threatens their lives, but sure, we’ve got people who’ll spend hundreds of dollars on a ticket and thousands of dollars for travel, all for the promise of a bad cheese sandwich.

Elon Musk gets the Ronan Farrow treatment

Light up another one, Elon

Whoa. Cautious, fair, thorough…Ronan Farrow reviews Elon Musk’s life. Imagine an angel of utmost probity assessing his soul at the doorway to heaven, nodding kindly as he summarizes each decade, and then, sadly, pulling the lever that drops him into a blood-drenched flaming tunnel to Hell. It’s so satisfying.

Here’s a short sample.

“Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he tweeted last year. By the time he bought Twitter, he was urging his followers to vote along similar lines, and appearing to back Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy he helped launch in a technically disastrous Twitter live event. Although Musk’s teen-age daughter, Vivian, has come out as trans, he has embraced anti-trans sentiment, saying that he would lobby to criminalize “irreversible” gender-affirming care for children. (Vivian recently changed her last name, saying in a legal filing, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”) Musk started spreading misinformation on the platform: he shared theories that the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former Speaker of the House, had followed a meeting with a male prostitute, and retweeted suggestions that reports accurately identifying a mass shooter as a white supremacist were a “psyop.” Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift. “There was nothing political about him ever,” a close associate told me. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.”

See what I mean? Farrow doesn’t pass judgement, he just calmly describes Musk’s appalling history of imposing his awful ignorance on everyone around him.

Read the rest. You won’t enjoy it, but much respect to the writer’s skill.

The power of the ellipsis

I’ve pointed out before how creationists like to butcher quotes from scientists to completely change their meaning, in a practice called quote mining. Guess who else does this?

Jordan Peterson. Tell me you’re surprised.

He and his publisher spattered the back cover of his latest book, Beyond Order, with blurbs from reviewers that praised it highly…or did they?

Another objection came from The Times reviewer James Marriott, because the blurb included from his review quoted him calling the book “A philosophy of the meaning of life… the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has ever written.”

In a now-deleted X post, Marriott noted that the ellipse covered up that his full sentence was “A philosophy of the meaning of life which is bonkers.”

“My review of this mad book was probably the most negative thing I have ever written,” Marriott said. He later added that he was amused by the situation, “Though my amusement is tinged with annoyance at being misrepresented to the tens of thousands of people who will buy that book in paperback.

Oh man, you can’t trust Jordan Peterson? Shocking.