I need to go to more conferences

I have been away for most of this week, at an HHMI conference. It was enlightening and informative, and I came away with many new ideas. It was also a packed schedule, starting early in the morning every day and going on until late at night, and I was not keeping up with the news, so I missed a few things.

Bill O’Reilly was fired for his sexual harassment antics? About time.

Jason Chaffetz is not going to run for re-election, and may even retire early? Well, that was unexpectedly good news.

Now I’m really sad that my conference ended, because my time offline was accompanied by the increasing crumbling of the Republican asshole edifice. If only this conference had gone on for a few more weeks, imagine all that could have happened: I’d have become a somewhat better biologist and teacher, the Republican leadership would have all retired, Ivanka and Jared would be arrested for corruption, Donald Trump would have been indicted and impeached, the tensions with North Korea and China and Russia would have eased, the Syrian civil war would have ended, world peace would have broken out, the Catholic church would take their vows of poverty seriously and divested, turning over all their assets to NIH and NSF, and I would have won a Nobel prize for not blogging.

HHMI clearly needs to schedule much, much longer conferences.

The Science March and partisanship

[Guest post from Sam Roy]

There is a lot of talk on the March for Science being “non-partisan” and above “politics.” Three points on this:

  • When science is under attack by the powers-that-be, the defense of science is a political act, and we should not shy away from this.

    What this regime has unleashed is potentially catastrophic in its consequences for humanity. Humanity confronts a warming planet, with rising sea levels, melting glaciers and extreme weather events causing droughts and famine; it is nothing short of a crime against humanity to accelerate this by denial of global warming, by muzzling of climate scientists, by de-funding this research, approving fossil fuels and oil pipelines, and effectively undermining any global response to this crisis. Humanity confronts increased incidence of global pandemics; it is nothing short of a crime against humanity to de-fund public health research. Let’s not forget Trump’s inhumane, mean-spirited and chauvinistic response to the doctors and nurses who went to Africa to deal with the Ebola crisis, tweeting, “The “US cannot allow EBOLA infected people back” and they “must suffer the consequences.” Imagine what his policies and response will be to the next pandemic outbreak!

  • The March for Science should be non-partisan, if that is to mean NOT favoring the “Democrats” over the “Republicans”.

    Let’s not forget that not a single prominent Democrat has come out and boldly proclaimed that evolution is a fact – all life on planet Earth evolved from common ancestors over nearly 3.5 Billion years. Democrats have constantly conciliated with Christian fascists and Biblical literalists who have waged well-funded and deceptive campaigns to undermine the teaching of evolution in schools. They did not oppose Betsy deVos, the Christian Fascist Secretary of Education, on this front despite her well-known and historic efforts to impose this worldview on society, denying generations of children the science of evolution and the scientific method. To rely on the Democrats to “save” and “defend” science is a fool-hardy enterprise.

  • But the March for Science should be Partisan – In the Name of, and For Humanity!

    The March for Science has a wonderful celebratory spirit in sharing science with the world.

    At the same time, let’s recognize that this regime – the Trump/Pence regime – is a fascist regime, posing existential threats to humanity, including with nuclear brinksmanship. Some say it may be true but it’s not useful or too scary or too polarizing. Imagine if some didn’t raise the alarm about AIDS, when the powers-that-be refused to even acknowledge it – because it’s not useful or too scary or too polarizing. Imagine if they knew in 1933 what we know now about Hitler and the Nazis. Let’s call scientific reality for what it is, let’s not make this mistake – for the sake of humanity.

    The terror unleashed on millions of immigrants in this country by this regime is very real, and is happening – right now! The world’s most devastating bomb short of nuclear was dropped – last week. Today they threaten an unbelievably catastrophic war against Korea. Imagine what harm this regime can do over the next few days, weeks and months with its levers of power, bludgeoning truth and repressing dissent as it carries out its horrors.

    We need to drive out this regime – at the soonest possible moment.

Here we go again

It’s body count time!

The number of Islamic State fighters killed by the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat by the United States military, dubbed the “mother of all bombs,” has risen to at least 94, according to Afghan officials.

We need a metric for success, so hey, let’s count up the corpses. More corpses, more winning, right? Except that we’ve been through all this before.

My friend Sazz [stderr] fought around the Vietcong tunnels at Cu Chi. I don’t write “he fought in the tunnels” because only a very small number of Americans went down in them; the rest waited up top to see what happened. One of the things he said was that the tunnel complexes were large, but also pretty small and shabby. They weren’t the kind of things Americans would build, with a Burger King and a Starbucks’ 14 stories down, and air conditioning and power generators – they were little hidey holes and they weren’t worth a damn thing to anyone; conqueror or conquered. That’s what the MOAB blew up.

When the invasion of Afghanistan was still brewing, the US marketed the idea that Osama Bin Laden had built gigantic terror complexes under Tora Bora – multi level, hydroelectric powered, and huge. Of course, such complexes did not exist.

They have never existed, unless you’re thinking about the complexes politicians build to hide from their mistakes. The gigantic MOAB probably collapsed some simple dirt tunnels (because ISIS is sure as hell not tunnelling in stone) The Vietcong at Cu Chi didn’t defend the tunnels when the Americans found them: they left and went elsewhere. The ISIS survivors of the MOAB are already gone to elsewhere, and they’ve added a few recruits from the local population, because the Americans have demonstrated what ruthless assholes we can be.

WINNING!

Why aren’t we boycotting CNN?

I’ve been wondering that for a while, but the question has become more acute recently. CNN keeps bringing on that lying boob, Jeffrey Lord, or the Disney villainesque Kelly Ann Conway. Wolf Blitzer has been promoted above his level of competence, I suspect because of his name — he belongs in a Joseph Heller novel. Everyone’s eyes seem to light up with dollar signs every time Trump says something belligerently stupid, and the whole network’s reputation seems to rest on the orgiastic celebration of military violence. It’s just plain awful. CNN only survives on a tabloid-like fascination with evil and the fact that it’s not as much of a propaganda organ for the Republicans as is Fox News. “Not quite as bad as Fox News” is a hell of an endorsement.

If you’ve ever felt like cutting CNN some slack, though, you need to read this profile of Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, and the sick media culture he fosters.

We can blame our own home-grown media organizations, especially CNN, for the elevation of Trump. Forget the Russians — Jeff Zucker is the real traitor.

CNN was hardly the only news organization to provide saturation coverage of the Trump campaign. The media-measurement firm mediaQuant calculated that Trump received the equivalent of $5.8 billion in free media — known as “earned media,” as opposed to paid advertising — over the course of the election, $2.9 billion more than Hillary Clinton. Nor is CNN the only cable-news network that has benefited from Trump’s incarnation as a politician. MSNBC and Fox News each had a surge in ratings during the election that has shown no signs of slowing since then. Fox, the president’s preferred outlet, is coming off the best quarter in the history of 24-hour cable news. MSNBC, the network of the resistance, has been thriving, too, often even beating CNN during prime time.

But CNN was the first major news organization to give Trump’s campaign prolonged and sustained attention. He was a regular guest in the network’s studios from the earliest days of the Republican primaries, often at Zucker’s suggestion. (For a while, according to the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Trump referred to Zucker as his “personal booker.”) When Trump preferred not to appear in person, he frequently called in. Nor did CNN ever miss an opportunity to broadcast a Trump rally or speech, building the suspense with live footage of an empty lectern and breathless chyrons: “DONALD TRUMP EXPECTED TO SPEAK ANY MINUTE.” Kalev Leetaru, a data scientist, using information obtained from the TV News Archive, calculated that CNN mentioned Trump’s name nearly eight times more frequently than that of the second-place finisher, Ted Cruz, during the primaries.

He isn’t a news person at all. There’s nothing about journalistic standards in his approach. It’s not a news network, it’s a circus.

What Zucker is creating now is a new kind of must-see TV — produced almost entirely in CNN’s studios — an unending loop of dramatic moments, conflicts and confrontations. “I’ve always been interested in the news, but I’ve always been interested in what’s popular,” Zucker says. “I’ve always had a little bit of a populist take on things. Which I know is interesting when you talk about Donald Trump.”

Every circus needs its clowns, and Zucker has hired at least a dozen of them.

Lord made his CNN debut in July 2015. Two weeks later, CNN offered him a job as the network’s first pro-Trump contributor. (CNN said it was already considering Lord and that Trump’s suggestion had no effect on their decision to hire him.) Today, he is one of 12 Trump partisans on CNN’s payroll and perhaps the network’s most reliable, if mild-mannered, provocateur; he recently defended Trump’s tweet that Obama had orchestrated a “Nixon/Watergate” wiretapping plot against him, saying that the president was just speaking “Americanese.” The network sends a black town car four days a week to ferry him to Manhattan from Harrisburg and back, a three-hour drive each way.

Stop. Just stop. Turn off the entire media spectacle of 24 hour news. It’s a failure. It’s worse than a failure. It’s led us to think that entertainment (of the worst kind) is information, and has paved the road to complete corruption and ineptitude in our politics. I’d like to think that print journalism, at least, isn’t completely dead — note that I’m citing a NY Times article here — but even there the signs are on the wall. Just look at their op-ed pages, which consists largely of a parade of over-paid idiots, to see the same rot growing there.

At this point I’m more reliant on European news sources. It’s not that they’re necessarily better, but that at least they’re outside looking in at the chaos in America.

But tune out CNN. They’re tainted.

The CNN mindset:

But Trump has the spokesperson he deserves!

Charles Pierce thinks Sean Spicer deserves to be fired for this:

You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons, Spicer said in response to questions about the implications of Assad’s chemical attacks.

Then he made it worse.

Hitler was not using the gas on his own people in the same way that Assad is doing.

His own people. On Passover.

That is an epic gaffe. If it were a hook, it would only be used for landing whales, and would require the power of a Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C to hoist it. Decades from now, people will remember where they were on the day Sean Spicer made Melissa McCarthy utterly superfluous; McCarthy is weeping right now, defeated, knowing she could never invent something as ridiculous, oblivious, and insensitive as that comment. Spicer will go to his deathbed regretting dropping that turd from his mouth. It’s going to be in his obituary afterwards. The only person praising the Lord for that remark right now is the CEO of United Airlines.

Since the invention of the spokesperson, there have only been five spokespeople that were rated the most incompetent, the most dishonest. This one left them all behind.

So yes, if Trump were a rational man who valued competence, Spicer should be immediately fired.

But Trump is not that man.

Are all Republicans just hateful scoundrels who like to hurt people?

It sure seems that way. Minnesota has been thriving under Democratic leadership for the last several years, and we had a bit of moderate progressive legislation passed…but the Republicans got a majority in the last election, and are bound and determined to eradicate all the successes of the past. It’s as if they just don’t like people.

Progressive policies enacted in Minnesota’s largest cities in recent years are at risk from Republicans who control the state Legislature as they seek to block, undo or change local ordinances on everything from sick leave and the minimum wage to plastic bags and bike lanes.

Sick leave? Minimum wage? Bike lanes? They don’t like bike lanes?!?! They don’t have any kind of positive intent or agenda, so they’re just going to tear down what previous legislators accomplished. Their justification is also as racist as fuck.

“Clearly the cultural values of Minneapolis are drastically out of alignment with greater Minnesota, so there’s going to be conflicts,” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, author of a bill that would block cities from passing their own labor rules.

Key words there: “greater Minnesota” is a phrase that refers to all of the state except for Minneapolis/St Paul. To put it in words more familiar to out-of-staters, he wants to block any support for the cultural values of those urban people, hint hint, nudge nudge.

He’s wrong, of course. There are a lot of us out here in “greater Minnesota” who have progressive values, and find these damned dumb regressive yokels to be an embarrassment.

We’ve got to work to kick these slugs out of office in the next election.