I think Twitter might be done

Today, Twitter rolled out a new feature for subscribed users: they can post 4,000 character long tweets now.

But what if I don’t want to read long blog posts on a micro-blogging site? What if I’d rather not deal with long-winded assholes clogging up the feed? I guess I don’t have a choice, except, of course, that I’ll instantly block anyone who posts a treatise.

Worse still, though, I just got this message:

Oh no! I must have been chattering up a storm today. Got carried away. I just couldn’t shut up. Supposedly, the limit is 2400 tweets/day. But I’ve been tied up in lab and classes all day! How could I have done that?

So I looked to see how much ol’ blabbermouth PZ had babbled today.

6.

It was 6 tweets, and that broke Twitter’s capacity.

OK, that’s fine, I can switch to my Mastodon account and go crazy. Maybe I’ll post 8 times today. 10 times if I feel like flooring the accelerator.

Could we come up with a more boring title?

This weekend, it’s time for another Podish-Sortacast, and this one is called “Organizations”.

OK, I’m falling asleep already. It’s all a ruse, though, to lure everyone into a false sense of security: the plan is to talk about all those organizations that have failed us, discussing things like the Andrew Torrez case.

Uh-oh, I just realized…Freethoughtblogs is an organization, of sorts. A very loose organization, with me as the nominal head. This could take an ominous turn, becoming a revolution and a coup, all in real time during the broadcast. Maybe it’ll be painfully exciting after all!

No evil deed goes unrewarded

I wrote about David Sabatini last year, the molecular biologist who’d left a string of failed positions, being fired, dismissed, cut loose, kicked out of multiple prestigious institutions for publishing fake data, repeatedly harassing women, and running his lab like it was Animal House. Then it looked like he was going to be hired by NYU, which left me gobsmacked. I had even made a prediction.

David Sabatini, the molecular biologist who sexually harassed students and faked data, was first fired from HHMI and the Whitehead Institute, and then resigned from MIT as his behavior was exposed. We’re done with him, right? He’ll go get a job in construction or pharmaceutical sales and we won’t have to worry about his unpleasant influence on academia anymore.

Sabatini has proven himself unsuited for the profession multiple times. For most people, losing one position makes landing a second one exponentially more difficult (this is a career that judges you harshly), and here was this guy who’d lost one, two, three positions — and didn’t get hired by NYU. This was a scientist who’d been the subject of a scathing exposé by the Boston Globe and various independent probes.

The controversy over Sabatini was reignited recently when The Boston Globe published a two-part investigation into the scandal. But it first erupted in August 2021, when Sabatini resigned from Whitehead after an investigation it commissioned from outside lawyers. At the time, Sabatini ran a lab of nearly 40 people and was an HHMI investigator and the lead scientist on five National Institutes of Health grants totaling nearly $2 million.

The Whitehead probe concluded that Sabatini fostered a sexualized lab environment in which he rewarded those who participated in sexual banter, threatened retaliation against lab members if they raised questions about his conduct, and threatened another faculty member who refused to hire a young visiting scientist whom Sabatini would later marry. It also found that he and Knouse carried on a sexual relationship against Whitehead rules.

She was a new Whitehead scientist operating in an educational program he supervised and for whom he would be expected to write recommendation letters. Their relationship began before Knouse arrived at Whitehead, when she was an MIT graduate student. That was a breach of an MIT policy that had recently been announced with fanfare.

Knouse has said she was coerced into the relationship, but Sabatini has argued otherwise and said the Whitehead investigation was flawed and unfair.

That man is a walking disaster. No sane institution would take on someone with that kind of record, but they did, repeatedly. And now he has fallen upwards once again, thanks to an asshole billionaire or two.

David Sabatini, the prominent biologist who was fired by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and resigned from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in 2021 after a probe found he committed sexual misconduct, is getting a second chance. Billionaire Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, and another, anonymous financial backer will each give Sabatini $2.5 million annually for the next 5 years to relaunch his research on cell signaling, cancer, and other topics. The move is stirring controversy.

The biologist, who also resigned from a tenured faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year, is a scientific reviewer for Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation. Ackman, meanwhile, is among a vocal contingent of Sabatini supporters who have argued that his punishment has been disproportionate. Ackman’s move “sends the message that some high-profile and ethical people are willing to support David Sabatini reengaging his brilliant career as a scientist and mentor of other scientists, despite the risk that by doing so they themselves will be falsely attacked,” says Jeffrey Flier, an endocrinologist at Harvard Medical School and former dean there.

$5 million/year for five years!!! For a failed bad boy of molecular biology! What kind of connections does Sabatini have with billionaires? It’s a catastrophe that we’re going to reward such rotten behavior — the rich are going to make an end run around peer review and install terrible, abusive people into positions at institutions of higher education where they can poison and squash the careers of young women.

Ackman made a curious statement, too.

As to whether his investment in Sabatini telegraphs that powerful men help other powerful men land on their feet, never mind their misdeeds, Ackman said: “If the situation were reversed, we would be backing [Knouse]. It’s not bro culture backing up the guys. That’s really really important.” Then he added: “By the way, it’s my wife and I who made this decision.” Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a designer and former MIT professor, serves as a co-trustee of the Pershing Square Foundation.

So he’s saying that if there were a powerful woman who was an abusive bully and who faked data, he’d also be supporting her? That’s not reassuring.

The only good news so far is that they haven’t actually announced where this pampered incompetent is going to work — they’re just handing him $5 million for his first year and telling him to set up a lab somewhere, anywhere and start churning out data. That’s not how it works. You don’t work alone, science is highly collaborative, and it’s silly to think you can build up a successful lab from scratch. With that much money, I suspect some wealthy university is going to ignore any scruples and find him a spot, though, despite the fact that it will bring them much shame.

Wait…I have an idea! They need a shameless institution (which is sort of true for any rich, elitist college), but the one that leaps to mind is…The University of Austin! There’s a match made in Hell, it’s perfect.

This is not normal

Do you get days off? It’s sort of sinking in that what I take for granted might be a little odd to most people.

I spent all day Saturday preparing my lectures for the coming week. That’s routine. I’ve heard rumors that most people can relax on weekends.

This morning I went into the lab early. I needed to feed the spiders and shuffle the males around to new females and replenish their water supply and check on the egg sacs (there was a new one today!), and then I’ll spend the time crunching data. This is Sunday, the day of rest, I hear?

Weekends are just the time I don’t have committee meetings or classes or lab sessions or meeting with students so I can get all the work done I’ll need to have complete for the weekdays.

It’s not all pain, though. I’m setting aside time to watch The Last of Us at 8pm tonight, and I usually read for half an hour to an hour before I go to bed.

Who was afraid of the big bad balloon?

I just couldn’t get worked up about it. It was an elegant, efficient piece of technology, but even if it was spying on the US, I don’t know what they’d see that their satellites hadn’t already shown them.

In fact, I’m all in favor of more transparency.

In case you were worried, though, the US has popped the balloon.

U.S. fighter aircraft, acting on an order from President Biden, downed a Chinese surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast on Saturday, the Pentagon said, ending what senior administration officials contend was an audacious attempt by Beijing to collect intelligence on sensitive American military sites.

OK, I guess.

POP!

America is safe once again.

Never mind the corpses, the pandemic is over!

Yesterday, I participated in a mundane committee meeting, one where we were making decisions on the distribution of in-house grant funds. It was fine, there were a fair number of really good proposals, we didn’t have to struggle over funding anyone’s work. However, at the end, someone made a comment about how we didn’t have to deal with COVID accountability anymore, and we weren’t going to have to provide extra money for COVID, because the pandemic was over.

My heart sank at that. People actually believe we beat the virus because a politician announced that we had. I’ve got news for those guys.

On Monday, the White House announced that it will let the Covid-related public health emergency declarations expire on May 11, 2023. Ashish Jha, Biden’s national Covid response coordinator, framed the announcement in true “accentuate-the-positive,” “we’re back to normal” fashion, tweeting that the emergency was being lifted because the country was “in a better place and “getting through the winter without a big surge or run on hospitals.” He even threw in the Biden administration’s favorite line: “We have the tools to manage this virus.”

Jha can tweet whatever he likes, but as I’ve said again and again, the numbers don’t lie. As Alyssa Bilinski and Kathryn Thompson from the Brown School of Public Health, along with Ezekiel Emanuel from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, wrote in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association in November: “The US continued to experience significantly higher Covid-19 and excess all-cause mortality compared with peer countries during 2021 and early 2022, a difference accounting for 150,000 to 470,000 deaths.” Last week, more people died of Covid than perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Don’t be fooled. The pandemic is not over. This is all about rolling back Medicaid coverage and little things, like not having to pay for the accommodations for COVID prevention that professors are expected to make. It’s about fostering political delusions — ‘vote for me, I ended COVID!’. It’s about unleashing the greedy fucks at pharmaceutical companies.

Lastly, both Pfizer and Moderna are hiking their prices on Covid vaccines. And this isn’t a little uptick in the price tag—both Pfizer and Moderna are proposing 400 percent increases. Again, this is going to put vaccines out of the reach of many low-income uninsured Americans, dissuade others from getting the jab, and sock insured people with potential premium increases as insurance companies pass on the pain to the rest of us. The White House has issued strongly worded statements about the price hikes, but many have called for bolder action against this predatory behavior. As of now, there are crickets from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

We failed to control the pandemic because the only thing we were committed to was half-assing it. The policy of neglect and denial will continue as thousands will die. They’re mostly old people, though, so who cares, and we’re all going to close our eyes and pretend long COVID isn’t a thing. We’ll just keep on riding the roller coaster.

Wheeeee!

Good luck with accreditation, New College of Florida!

This is how Ron Desantis wants to handle higher education: fire everyone! Kick the faculty and administration out!

He somehow seems to think that a university is just a collection of buildings, rather than people and traditions and a well-established curriculum. So he hires a couple of clueless goons, Chris Rufo and Eddie Speir, and tries to put them in charge of everything.

Somebody should explain to them that their accreditation is not a piece of paper glued to a building. It’s part of a process that involves active engagement with the faculty and administration — you know, all the people that they want to dismiss — and when they go, the institution evaporates. It’s gone. All the currently enrolled students are screwed. The university will have to start over completely from scratch, rebuilding a reputation and a curriculum that was just annihilated.

New College is a public liberal arts college that was founded in 1960. I’m at the University of Minnesota Morris, a public liberal arts college that was founded in 1960. I’m going to have to take this a bit personally.

Royalty is ridiculous

Creepy ol’ Prince Andrew, Epstein’s pal, is reportedly being evicted from Buckingham Palace. He’s been an embarrassment to the family — and embarrassing that family is an amazing accomplishment — especially since he settled out of court with Virginia Giuffre, who’d accused him of sexually assaulting her multiple times. It’s an unsavory, ugly story that so far has resulted in the death of Epstein in prison, the sentencing of Ghislaine Maxwell to 20 years for sex trafficking, and Andrew reduced to a shameful laughingstock.

But the ugly absurdity isn’t ending yet. Andrew wants to overturn that settlement, and is apparently doing some maneuvering to get it tossed out. Some of Maxwell’s friends have provided “evidence”, they claim, that proves the unsavory stories of Andrew assaulting Giuffre in a bathtub can’t possibly be true.

If the tub doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

Yeesh. That’s a rather roomy bathtub, so I don’t see what it demonstrates, other than that these people are idiots. So on top of his “I don’t sweat” defense, he’s adding “I don’t fit in a large bathtub”?

Oh well, it was printed in Britain’s Best Quality Newspaper, so it must be true.