It makes struggling to get evolution in the curriculum seem a bit irrelevant.

I approve of this strategy.

Pretty much, yeah. pic.twitter.com/eN4iDJZsFj

— Vics Summers ⫩ (@VicsSummers) August 4, 2019

The traditional sacred American ritual was performed in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio this weekend. I’m beginning to suspect that there’s some bloody Cabin in the Woods scenario being played out — to appease the blood gods spawned by the evil establishment of European hegemony in America, there must be a regular sacrifice of the innocent, and those gods are getting hungrier.

In any given week in America, you can watch as a different ritual of childhood plays itself out. Perhaps it will be in El Paso, at a shopping mall; or in Gilroy, at a food festival; or in Denver, at a school. Having heard gunshots, and been lucky enough to survive, children emerge to be shepherded to safety by their parents, their teachers, or heavily-armed police officers. They are always frightened. Some will be crying. But almost all of them know what is happening to them, and what to do. Mass shootings are by now a standard part of American life. Preparing for them has become a ritual of childhood. It’s as American as Monday Night Football, and very nearly as frequent.

The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.

A fundamental lesson of Sociology is that, in the course of making everyday life seem orderly and sensible, arbitrary things are made to seem natural and inevitable. Rituals, especially the rituals of childhood, are a powerful way to naturalize arbitrary things. As a child in Ireland, I thought it natural to take the very body of Christ in the form of a wafer of bread on my tongue. My own boy and girl, in America, think it natural that a school is a place where you must know what to do when someone comes there to kill the children.

I’d also add that 8chan is the holy scripture of its acolytes, a meandering screed that combines the mindless repetition of a manic prayer wheel with the ravings of the book of Revelation. Free Speech is its shibboleth.

Until law enforcement, and the media, treat these shooters as part of a terrorist movement no less organized, or deadly, than ISIS or Al Qaeda, the violence will continue. There will be more killers, more gleeful celebration of body counts on 8chan, and more bloody attempts to beat the last killer’s “high score”.

There’s a radical suggestion right there. If there were an online forum in which Muslim terrorists gleefully shared tales of glorious murder, urged each other to outdo each other in suicidal mass killings, and celebrated every time one of these incidents occurred, the FBI would be all over it, tracing communications and working to arrest the ringleaders. 8chan, though, is fueled by the frustrations of disaffected middle class white men, so no, nothing will be done. It will continue to fester and spread its toxins.

So, here’s my first radical suggestion. Only it’s not that radical.

• Shut down 8chan. Arrest anyone who tries to revive it. Publicly shame anyone who participates in it.

That’s just the start. Another obvious problem is ready access to guns. There is incredibly stupid resistance to any form of common-sense gun registration, background checks, etc., and so gun manufacturers continue to flood a willing market with weapons of mass destruction. We’re making no progress on rational gun laws. Therefore, let’s take a different tack.

• Criminalize gun manufacture. Lethal weapons can only be made under a license for sale to the military,
  and the military will be prohibited from allowing remarketers to sell their surplus. Hunting weaponry will also be licensed and the sale tightly controlled. The police will crack down on black market sale of guns; no more gun shows. Manufacturers will be held liable for the crimes committed by their weapons, so Glock, Smith & Wesson, and Remington will be the enforcers who regulate gun sales.

I’m just getting warmed up. People have been talking about revising the constitution to get rid of that useless vestige, the electoral college. Don’t stop there. There’s another political institution that does nothing other than enrich its members and allow a rich elite to throttle progressive laws.

• Abolish the Senate, or at least reduce it to a purely ceremonial function. Right now, the Senate is nothing but a relic of an elitist era, when it was considered important to preserve a version of aristocratic privilege, and power was distributed based on arbitrary property lines. It’s undemocratic. It needs to go. It’s not as if it will be doing anything to end the tyranny of the assault rifle in America.

Is that enough? I know it’s all unrealistic, and isn’t going to happen, unless there’s a revolution (which, at the rate we’re going, isn’t entirely unlikely). Basically, I’m suggesting that we correct the failings of the first American revolution, which wasn’t revolutionary enough, change our mindset to make capitalism accountable, and shut down the most extreme propaganda organ. It’s not as radical as it could be — a real socialist would suggest that the people should seize total control of the production of weapons, for instance, but I’ve become less trusting of the will of the people nowadays.

I’ll toss in one more, just for the heck of it.

• Outlaw the Republican party. Throw its leadership in jail, unless they repudiate all the principles of greed and bigotry that currently drive it.

That one might not be necessary if the other suggestions were implemented.

The governor has decreed a 40% cut in their budget, a devastating goal in itself. The university is trying to cope with this disaster by consolidating campuses and firing lots and lots of people. That isn’t going to save them. Look at what’s happening right now.

“It’s awful,” says Milligan-Myhre. “I had to turn away a student planning on starting in the fall because I just don’t know what the department or his degree would look like in a year or two.” She’s also encouraging her current students to graduate as soon as possible.

Imagine that you’re an Alaskan parent, planning to send a child off to college. Would you suggest the University of Alaska? No way. You’d have them send applications off to universities that are more likely to exist in four years, when they’d hope to graduate.

Imagine you’re a current student. You’d be planning to graduate as soon as possible, or to transfer elsewhere. Get out while you can, because the uncertainty is intolerable.

Enrollments are about to plummet, which is going to increase the financial hardship. 40% cuts is a torpedo below the waterline.

It’s not just teaching that is harmed, it’s the research side as well.

The budget cuts have already altered some researchers’ plans. Milligan-Myhre, who studies a native Alaskan fish called the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), has dropped out of a “once in a lifetime” ecological experiment. Dozens of researchers from across the globe plan to combine various stickleback populations in ten lakes that have previously been treated to kill all invasive fish. The idea is to track how differences in the lakes’ ecosystems influence a host of traits in the fish — from the composition of their gut microbiomes to characteristics of their brain tissue — over decades, revealing evolution in action.

Milligan-Myhre is using the time she would have spent on the experiment to hunt for work. “I just don’t have time to devote to this project because I’ve got to be writing my butt off the next few months,” she says. “I need to get as many papers out as I can to prep my CV for job applications, because I have no job security. [The university] can fire me with 60 days’ notice.”

That’s tough to explain to constituents because they’re just seeing an obscure little fish — it doesn’t even have commercial value — but sticklebacks are an important model system for studying evolution and development, because they are so common and diverse. Alaska is killing basic research for an undefined and self-destructive end.

The only solution is to recall the governor and about half the legislature. That’s almost impossible. The governor is making these cuts while promising to mail out large dividend checks to the general Alaskan population, so he’s basically buying support for the evisceration of Alaskan education and Alaskan health and human services.

Once again, Republicans are accusing Democrats of what they routinely do, draining the treasury to buy votes.

But it’s still nice to have an analysis that confirms that.

Woessner tells me that, when he first went into this field of research, “I came at this expecting to find evidence of discrimination, but the data didn’t support it.” Now, years later, having published a book and over a dozen articles on the topic, he concludes that college campuses, “are not a hotbed of ideological discrimination. There are challenges for any minority in the academy, and that includes political minorities and racial minorities,” Woessner says, and those challenges can lead some conservative students to “lay low.” But there’s just no evidence that college professors—who do indeed trend liberal in many departments—routinely discriminate against conservative students.

Though this broader finding is important, Woessner’s latest work has suggested some narrow correlations between ideology and grades that are worth considering. Students opposed to legalized abortion, for example, enter college with narrowly higher GPAs than pro-choice students, but lose most of that advantage over four years. Is this a sign that professors are discriminating against right-wing students? Probably not, according to the study: The authors argue that high school may play more to the strengths of conservative students, who often prefer a straightforward, right-or-wrong assessment style. Liberal students, the authors conjecture, fare better in the qualitative work prioritized in higher education, especially in the humanities. Over the phone, Woessner stresses that, in the end, he and his co-authors had “to engage in speculation, trying to map our possible explanation ranging from discrimination to skills to interests. [Conservative students] may be not as engaged” when it comes to the humanities, whereas “liberal students are much less happy with their math classes.”

Meanwhile, right-wing media outlets with a perennial grudge against professors have made the curious choice to report on this study as evidence of professorial bias. These reporters must not have read to the end of the paper, where the authors write: “[Our] results do not paint a picture of conservative students under siege. They remain largely satisfied with their college education, and perform nearly as well as, if not better than, their liberal counterparts.” And that’s just as it should be.

Yes! I go into a class with a set of objectives and rubrics; I establish the basis for grading on exams and papers and lab reports and basics like lab attendance, and I lay that all out in a syllabus. When grading time rolls around, I’ve got a spreadsheet with numbers in it that I crank through to spit out grades — I look at student ID numbers, not names. In fact, when I’m grading exams I scrupulously avoid looking at names until the grading is complete. It’s not a personal thing at all.

You could argue that my teaching style biases outcomes, but in intro courses I tend to lean towards basic lectures, occasionally coaxing students to engage in review, while upper level courses I tend to encourage more student-led engagement, where I’m a moderator helping students discuss the topic of the day. Either way doesn’t seem to discriminate against particular political perspectives and my methods aren’t at all radical.

You don’t want to tell me that it’s the content that disfavors conservatives. The most extreme cases where that is true are, for instance, people who show up to argue that the Earth is 6,000 years old. I’m not going to excuse that nonsense. The social sciences/humanities classrooms I’ve witnessed are far more tolerant of discussing alternative views than the sciences are, but none of us are going to stand by and allow ideas that conflict with reality to pass unquestioned. I presume conservatives are not going to use the defense that their more insane, off-kilter, wrong beliefs were criticized.

Donald Trump is one of the most Twitter-obsessed freaks I’ve heard tell of, but he doesn’t quite seem to understand how the medium works.

But the most eye-popping revelation from Politico’s dive into Trump’s reading habits is his decidedly analog method for “liking” tweets. First, a quick reminder of the accepted method for liking tweets: Click the heart.

Now, Trump’s method for “liking” tweets:

The president has even been known to sends printouts of tweets he likes. After he liked one Gaetz tweet, he had it printed by a staffer, signed it and requested that it be sent to Gaetz’s congressional office, where the now-framed tweet hangs.

Recalling Trump’s past as a hotelier, Gaetz said, “This is the proverbial Trump gift basket waiting for you in your suite or sent to you.”

He’s like a caricature of an old, out-of-touch grandpa. This is not how any of this works.

It’s also deeply bizarre that someone would frame a tweet and hang it on their wall.

In other general fucking rich people news, wealthy parents are transferring responsibility (on paper) for their kids to their poorer friends.

Amid an intense national furor over the fairness of college admissions, the Education Department is looking into a tactic that has been used in some suburbs here, in which wealthy parents transfer legal guardianship of their college-bound children to relatives or friends so the teens can claim financial aid, say people familiar with the matter.

They give an example.

One Chicago-area woman told The Wall Street Journal that she transferred guardianship of her then 17-year-old daughter to her business partner last year. While her household income is greater than $250,000 a year, she said, she and her husband have spent about $600,000 putting several older children through college and have no equity in their home, which is valued at about $1.2 million, according to the property website Zillow. She said she has little cash on hand and little saved for her daughter’s education.

Transferring her daughter’s guardianship was largely a matter of paperwork, the mother said. Her business partner attended a court hearing with an attorney. She, her husband and her daughter didn’t even need to show up, she said. Once the guardianship was transferred, the teen only had to claim the $4,200 in income she earned through her summer job, the mother said.

Today, her daughter attends a private college on the West Coast which costs $65,000 in annual tuition, she said. The daughter received a $27,000 merit scholarship and an additional $20,000 in need-based aid, including a federal Pell grant, which she won’t have to pay back. The daughter is responsible for $18,000 a year, which her grandparents pay, the woman said.

Whoa. When my kids were starting college, I was making $40K/year, and we didn’t even own a home — we were renting. Yet we managed to scrimp and save and get all three kids through four years of college. So that family is bringing in a quarter million per year, and they haven’t managed to set aside any money for their kids’ education? What have they been spending their money on? That kid is getting $20K that could have gone to someone who really needed it. The woman openly admitted to robbing poorer people, and she’s probably proud of her cleverness.

Close those loopholes, and publicly shame the rich. That’s all we can do.

If you’ve ever heard a conservative complain that those danged liberals at the danged liberal universities discriminate against conservative thought, using those magic words “viewpoint discrimination”, just tell them to go read this article by a former editor at the Liberty University campus paper, the Champion. They’ll see what real viewpoint discrimination is like, because it is clear that Jerry Falwell Jr is a petty tinpot dictator.

…when my team took over that fall of 2017, we encountered an “oversight” system — read: a censorship regime — that required us to send every story to Falwell’s assistant for review. Any administrator or professor who appeared in an article had editing authority over any part of the article; they added and deleted whatever they wanted. Falwell called our newsroom on multiple occasions to direct our coverage personally, as he had a year earlier when, weeks before the 2016 election, he read a draft of my column defending mainstream news outlets and ordered me to say whom I planned to vote for. I refused on ethical grounds, so Falwell told me to insert “The author refused to reveal which candidate he is supporting for president” at the bottom of the column. I complied. (Huff and the police department declined to comment on the contents of this essay. Falwell and the university did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

If only you knew what faculty at my liberal university think of our student newspaper — there has been many a facepalm at sloppy grammar, bad writing, and strangely inappropriate articles. But it’s because it is student-run, and they’re learning. I can’t quite imagine our chancellor or our faculty demanding control over what they can write.

But then, we’re not trying to run a “culture of fear” here.

What my team and I experienced at the Champion was not an isolated overreaction to embarrassing revelations. It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life. Faculty, staff and students on the Lynchburg, Va., campus have learned that it’s a sin to challenge the sacrosanct status of the school or its leader, which mete out punishments for dissenting opinions (from stripping people of their positions to banning them from campus). This “culture of fear,” as it was described by several of the dozen Liberty denizens who talked to me for this story — most of them anonymously to protect their jobs or their standing — worsened during my four years on campus because of the 2016 presidential election.

Falwell is a Trump fanatic. He endorsed Trump and promoted him before his election, and it’s just unbelievable that the president of a university would favor a guy who is functionally illiterate and who promotes ignorance, but then the article includes a video of Falwell giving a speech. He’s terrible. I’ve had first-year students give better, clearer, less stilted speeches in class than this guy — his delivery is flat, he stammers over his “jokes”, he looks like he’s constantly searching for an exit. He’s not charismatic at all. He’s a talentless yahoo who inherited a fake university from his daddy.

If the students are pawns, I don’t even want to imagine the status of the faculty.

The culture of Liberty is governed by lists of principles. According to the Faculty Handbook, for instance, professors are expected to “promote . . . free market processes” and “affirm . . . that the Bible is inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters.” One cause of perpetual insecurity at Liberty is the school’s militant refusal to award tenure to any faculty member (outside the law school, which must offer it for accreditation). Instructors are instead hired on year-to-year contracts; during the spring semester, they find out whether they will be coming back the next fall.

The result is constant, erratic faculty turnover. One recently fired teacher describes the spring as a cycle of stressed-out, fearful professors wandering into each other’s offices to ask if they had their contracts renewed yet. “If you’re a conservative Christian in the academic world, the chances of you getting a job are nil in many areas,” says Melton, who worked at Liberty as an associate professor for 15 years before resigning because of what he described as the school’s surveillance and fear tactics. “The administration knows that, and . . . they wield that very effectively, keeping people quiet.”

On the one hand, that is a horrible situation for an academic to be trapped in, and it’s not just Liberty University’s fault — the entire system is designed to devalue educators, with Liberty just the bottom of the fermenting barrel. On the other hand, Liberty is the apotheosis of conservative Christian principles…so why is anyone surprised that it’s an academic hell-hole?

Last week, our fool president went on another Twitter rant, in this case blaming Representative Elijah Cummings, who has been a thorn in his side by simply being an upright, moral human being, of being responsible for the “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” that is Baltimore. This is ironic coming from a New Yorker, home of Pizza Rat, but whole new levels of amusement are added when you learn that Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, is a major Baltimore area slumlord.

In 2017, Baltimore County officials revealed that apartments owned by the Kushner firm were responsible for more than 200 code violations, all accrued in the span of the calendar year. Repairs were made only after the county threatened fines, local officials said, and even after warnings, violations on nine properties were not addressed, resulting in monetary sanctions.

In an investigation by the New York Times and Pro Publica published earlier that year, tenants of Kushner properties reported mouse infestations, mold problems and maggots. A private investigator who looked into Kushner’s property management company, Westminster Management, described the managers as “slumlords.”

“Basically, [Kushner] has been creating a race to the bottom in terms of poorly maintained properties,” she said. “He’s been very, very deeply implicated.”

In the past two years, the Kushner firm and its affiliated entities have been sued multiple times by Baltimore-area residents who allege that the company has charged them excessive fees and used the threat of eviction to pressure them into paying.

I’ve been to Baltimore several times. It’s a fine city, with character and a beautiful downtown (I also like visiting New York), and it’s amazing how petty that demagogue Trump can get when he’s lashing out. He fully deserved what the editor of the Baltimore Sun wrote about him.

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

Impeach that monster. I can’t believe the Democrats have been dragging their heels about confronting a man so manifestly unfit for office.