It’s a toasty 33°C (93°F) here in this northern state, and the White House has fired our researchers who contributed to the National Climate Assessment. 400 scientists abruptly got the axe. I guess if they destroy all the thermometers, we won’t notice how hot it’s getting.
Goddamn these Republican scumbags to hell. If and when violence arrives at their doorstep, don’t expect me to express the slightest regret or remorse.
Also, fuck all you Democrats who sat out the last election.
This first one is obvious and is a knife aimed at the heart of our country: the Trump administration is talking about suspending habeas corpus, and clearly their pet rat-weasel, Stephen Miller, is floating the idea to the press.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday that the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the right of a person to challenge their detention in court.
If carried out by President Donald Trump, the suspension of habeas corpus would be a dramatic escalation of his administration’s immigration policy by significantly curtailing a right enshrined in the Constitution.
This is what tyrants do — they want the ability to silence critics by throwing them in prison while denying them the right to defend themselves. Never mind that they are busy draping themselves in the corpse of Abraham Lincoln, because he suspended the right during the Civil War (we are not in a war, no matter how insincerely they insist we are being “invaded”), this is a fundamental attack on the rule of law.
The second sign of imminent doom is that Dan Three Arrows is returning to posting video essays. The United States is so fucked right now.
I predict that there will be blood in the streets before this is over; if he suspends habeas corpus, why not suspend the 2026 elections next?
If all that isn’t enough for you…
ADepartment of Homeland Security (DHS) official confirmed Saturday that arrests of Democratic members of Congress “is definitely on the table” following a confrontation at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Newark, New Jersey.
This statement comes after Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested on Friday at the Delaney Hall detention center, sparking a dispute over what actually occurred during the incident.
It’s embarrassing. Even the Aussies are being smug about being smarter than us.
Huh. I woke up this morning to do as I usually do, browsing the news and commenting on it, and I just can’t. Nope. Nothing inspires me today.
My mistake might have been first reading about RFK jr’s policies.
Death is the policy
I can’t expand on that. The man is a walking catastrophe, an incompetent buffoon who has been shielded from the consequences of his actions by wealth and privilege, and now he’s inflicting his uninformed, insane opinions on everyone else. He’s a madman, given control of HHS and NIH and dictating policy on everything from autism to infectious disease, while we sit around gawping at the spectacle. Our elected representatives are doing nothing to stop the disaster, and in fact rubber-stamped his appointment. What am I supposed to do?
I have to wonder how such a pathetic creature could acquire so much power. Naomi Klein explains that we must blame the rich.
What they want is absolutely everything
Klein recently co-authored an essay for The Guardian, sounding alarm about the dark worldview of politically insurgent tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Klein views these men — who are guiding Donald Trump’s presidency — as abandoning any positive vision for our collective future, and instead retrenching in preparation for a dark, nearly end times-level social collapse, from which they and other elites emerge unscathed, and all powerful. “The governing ideology of the far-right in our age of escalating disasters,” she writes, “has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.”
So the guys with billions of dollars are telling people like me, who is facing existential uncertainty about personal issues like retirement and health with virtually no financial backup, that we don’t matter, that there is nothing we can do, that we might as well die and get it over with. I’d be happy to do so if I weren’t so full of rage and frustration. Unfortunately, writing on the internet does not relieve my anger. We need to literally destroy these monsters of greed.
Today is the day everyone is required to have that RealID/enhanced ID if you want to fly anywhere. It’s an incompetently managed sham.
The DMV Experience
I applied for mine two months ago, when I went to the DMV to renew my driver’s licence. I’m still waiting. Today I received email from the DMV saying they were rejecting my application, because I hadn’t included enough bank account information. Apparently you now need a verified bank account to drive or travel anywhere, so I’m going to have to resubmit the entire application all over again, and wait a few more months. This is particularly galling because I did go in person to the local license bureau (not any problem at all, this is a small town, no waiting) and had everything verified right there. I have a valid passport, so I could fly if I wanted to, but the airports are so chaotic that I don’t want to.
My wife has been struggling to get her realID for a while now, but she keeps getting rejected. She showed up at the license bureau with her birth certificate, social security card, etc., but she made the terrible mistake of changing her name when she got married, so they won’t accept it. We ordered a certified marriage license from King County, but they just sent us a photocopy, which doesn’t count.
On the bright side, ladies, I guess I’m now single and available. Except you can’t travel anymore.
This nation with the impressive interstate freeway system and huge airports in every major city is now effectively killing travel within our borders. We’re also not going to be getting much traffic from international travel, either. Tourism, who needs it? Next stop will be armed guards at the boundaries for each state, and you’ll have to show your papers if you visit any city…except that you can’t, because the bureaucracy is too incompetent to issue them.
Stay home, everyone.
Mark your calendars. Donald Trump is planning a gigantic military parade — $90 million dollars sunk into rolling tanks and missiles down Pasadena Avenue — but the rest of us should be planning to rise up in protest on Saturday, 14 June, instead. There will be No Kings rallies all across the country on that day. Right now, the nearest event near me is in Fargo, so I’m planning on trooping north on that day to wave a sign and chant angry slogans. Look up the rally nearest you and try to hit the streets on that day!
It is now legal to go topless in public in Minnesota.
The Minnesota Supreme Court issued an opinion last week that holds that women can go topfree without violating the Minnesota indecent exposure statute as long as they don’t engage in sexual conduct.
In short, the Court unanimously held that a woman who is topfree is not acting lewdly merely by appearing in public with her torso unclothed. Since the indecent exposure statute only criminalizes lewd behavior, a woman with an unclothed torso is not commiting a criminal act unless she is also engaging in sexual behavior. In other words, a woman merely going topless is neither lewd nor sexual and it’s perfectly legal.
It’s only useful about 3 months out of the year, and in those 3 months you’ve got to worry about mosquitos.
The best thing about this decision is that it removes a pretext cops used to search and arrest people.
The facts in this case are short and undisputed: On July 28, 2021, the Rochester
Police Department received a report that a woman was walking around a gas station
parking lot with her breasts exposed. An officer responded to the call and saw Plancarte
in the parking lot with her breasts exposed. The officer recognized Plancarte from two
encounters earlier that week. During those encounters, the officer saw Plancarte exposing
her underwear on one occasion, and her breasts and her underwear on another occasion.
The officer stopped Plancarte and asked her why she kept exposing herself.
Plancarte replied, “I think Catholic girls do it all the time.” Plancarte then worried about
how she would get home and stated, “I dance at the biker club. I’m a stripper.” The officer
said, “Well, you can’t strip in the middle of public.” Plancarte responded, “Yeah, but they
should account for me at the club, shouldn’t they?” The officer arrested Plancarte and later
searched her purse, where the officer found a vial containing cocaine.
Yeah, this is an anti-cop decision. I approve.
The world population stands at 8.2 billion, and it’s continuing to grow. It is not shrinking. We are adding 70 million people each year. Some simple facts:
During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.
In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.
Because of declining growth rates, it will now take over 200 years to double again.
Does it bother you that it’s going to take 200 years to fill up the planet with 16 billion people? The 1970s were not that overcrowded nor was it empty. I don’t think we gained that much by adding 4 billion people since then, especially since so many of the additions are being exploited and are suffering to benefit relatively rich people like me.
I wonder if some people are confused by graphs. Here’s a plot of the growth rate, not total population, and yes, the rate has gone down (which is good news), but that does not mean we’re losing population.
But this graph keeps Elon Musk awake at night, because he’s a very stupid person.
Billionaire Elon Musk told Fox News recently that falling birth rates keep him up at night. It’s a drum he’s been beating for years.
Musk is one of the world’s most visible individuals to elevate this point of view. Vice President JD Vance also talks about wanting to increase birthrates in the U.S.
I am untroubled by it. I am more concerned about whether my grandchildren have a good quality of life and opportunity to personally live and grow, and whether all the other children living in the here and now also have equal opportunities. Increasing the world’s population does not increase our happiness — we should care more about the quality of life than creating bulk quantities of consumers.
I also have to ask…why are so many of the people advocating for increased growth rates such horrible fascists? There was a meeting of these “pro-natalists” back in March, and these weren’t people who just love children and want to build hospitals and daycares and open up more educational opportunities and expand vaccination, all things I would consider virtuous evidence of a true desire to help a burgeoning population…quite the opposite. The philosophy seems to be strongly tied to Nazis.
A natalist conference featuring speakers including self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science, apparently including the man behind a previously pseudonymous race-science influencer account, and the founder of a startup offering IQ screening for IVF embryos, will be held at a hotel and conference venue operated by the public University of Texas, Austin.
Details of the conference have emerged as a prominent supporter of pro-natalist positions, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, lays waste US government agencies under the banner of his “Doge” initiative, with the blessing of Donald Trump.
Natalism in its current often rightwing iteration encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers.
composite image of people wearing maga caps with red stars on their mouths
‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word
Read more
The Natal conference website embeds a Musk post on X, reading: “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.” Musk, who reportedly has at least 13 children by four mothers, was in recent days confronted on X by musician Grimes and the rightwing influencer Ashley St Clair over his alleged neglect of the children he has fathered with them.The conference, scheduled for 28-29 March, is being organized by Kevin Dolan, who the Guardian identified in 2021 as the person behind a Twitter account that was prominent in the far-right “DezNat” movement, and last year as the organizer of the first conference. It is the second time the conference has been held, and once again, the speakers roster runs from provocateurs who emerged from the “fascist fitness scene” to practitioners of “liberal eugenics”.
Uh, Elon…civilization will not end if we maintain a low, stable, sustainable growth rate. If you’re so concerned about too few people, open the doors of America to more immigration. More is better, right?
Also, eugenics is eugenics. Attaching the adjective “liberal” to it doesn’t make it beneficial, you’re still making value judgments on the worth of individuals. Whether you’re euthanizing them or hiding them away in institutions or giving special advantages to people who meet your subjective criteria, it’s all the same thing — it’s an attempt to short-sightedly dictate what kind of people will be allowed to thrive.
Here’s the organizer of that natalist conference.
KEVIN DOLAN: But the topic of demographic decline clearly matters to Elon Musk, JD Vance and many others in the Trump administration, which means that the great ideas developed here can get a hearing that would not have been possible last year.
HAGEN: Dolan left his data science job in 2021 after his anonymous Twitter account was exposed. Among other things, he’d used it to promote the racist notion that white men are superior to other races and women. After getting doxxed, Dolan continued sharing his thoughts about how society should be ordered on his podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DOLAN: We’re expected to lie about the existence of these hierarchies all of the time. And if our goal is to rehabilitate hierarchies of nature, then the best place to start is the most fundamental natural hierarchies, which are found in the family. And that brings us back to where we started, with selective breeding.
What natural hierarchies? Nature is more of an anarchist collective, without a big boss deciding who benefits from selective breeding. Nature does not follow any human ideology, so it’s fallacious to try and attach one to it, or worse claim that humans should follow your biased interpretation of how it ought to work.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Simone Collins, in her thick-rimmed, round glasses, is one of the more visible faces of pronatalism – on purpose.
SIMONE COLLINS: My whole entire, like, Etsy getup right now, it’s intentionally cringe.
HAGEN: She’s here at Natal Con in her signature look, which she describes as techno-puritan.
COLLINS: There should obviously be more cybernetics in my outfit, but we are combining, like, chunky hipster glasses and a lot of modern equipment with a bonnet and linen clothing.
Some of the more prominent faces in this movement are Malcolm and Simone Collins, a pair of dorks who complain about “demographic collapse” (whatever that undefined disaster is) while saying that oh, no, they have nothing to do with those horrible people running the conferences they attend. They gave the keynote speech at the Austin natalist conference!
Image is everything to them. The Collinses are quick to verbally denounce fascists and the far right, but then you have to look at what they do: they ally themselves with people like Charles Haywood.
CHARLES HAYWOOD: And generally, women should not have careers. They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.
HAGEN: That’s Charles Haywood at the first Natal Con a couple years ago. This year, he’s behind the scenes as a sponsor. He made his money as a shampoo magnate. Haywood blames birth rate declines on feminism and the overturning of what he sees as natural hierarchies of gender and race.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HAYWOOD: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever for the history of this nation.
They can tell me they’re progressive and good people when they get around to denouncing that guy and all the racist/misogynist/neo-nazi scum that form their audience.
I should also mention the incident that put them in the news a while back when Malcolm Collins slapped his son Torsten in the face.
Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face.
It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.
Oops, the mask slipped for a moment. It’s OK, it was never a very convincing facade that they’ve put up, anyway.
Harvard privilege + NY Times centrism gets this kind of crap published: I Teach Computer Science, and That Is All. It’s an op-ed by a clueless Harvard professor explaining that while it’s deplorable that Trump is dismantling the educational system in the US, the fault lies with those professors who bring their politics to work.
Nothing justifies the unwarranted attacks by the Trump administration on universities as a whole and on my institution in particular. I am proud of Harvard’s leadership for resisting the impossible demands made of it. I also believe these attacks are enabled by the lack of popular support for universities. We academics should look at how we contributed to this erosion of trust by allowing the blurring of the lines between scholarship and activism.
In recent years the mantra of bringing your whole self to work has replaced the old notion that you should leave it all at the door. This movement has had some positive outcomes. Ensuring everyone feels included and has access to mentors and role models can be crucial to attracting and retaining talent.
Some have taken it too far, letting the personal and political overtake the professional, which has led to pressure on businesses to take positions in matters outside their domain. Makers of business software weighed in on elections. Google employees staged a sit-in over Gaza. Right-wing activists began a boycott of Bud Light after it was featured in a transgender influencer’s promotional social media post. The result is that people who disagree with one another find it hard to work at the same company or buy the same products, increasing the problem of polarization.
Oh, yeah, the real problem here isn’t Republican politics, it’s that Google employees thought genocide was bad and Budweiser briefly featured a trans person in an ad. That’s polarizing! We can’t can’t confront and conflict with terrible ideas and actions, that’s not the university’s job. (Except…it is.)
It wouldn’t be a NY Times op-ed without a healthy dose of both-siderism.
On the extreme right, the same idea has taken hold in government, where the very notion of a nonpartisan public servant is threatened, and those deemed insufficiently loyal have been fired. Both versions, on the left and the right, are toxic.
On the one hand, having a trans woman in an ad; on the other, boycotts, death threats, and Kid Rock shooting up beer cans with an assault rifle. Both equally evil! On one hand, Google employees peacefully protesting their employers’ policies; on the other, Israel bombing and killing civilians. We’re supposed to be confused about these two entirely equivalent actions. I have to conclude that any idiot can become a Harvard professor, and the NY Times will happily publish any waffle they shit out.
And this is how he teaches.
You might think I can avoid politics in the classroom only because I am a computer scientist. This is not the case. Faculty members who are determined enough can inject politics into any topic, and after all, computer science has brought huge and significant changes to society. The interaction of computer science and policy sometimes arises in my classes, and I make sure to present multiple perspectives. When I teach cryptography, a topic at the heart of the tension between privacy and security, I share with my students writings by former National Security Agency officials as well as “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”
In fact, I believe that the lessons students learn from computer science (and science in general) can make them better citizens. Trying and failing to solve hard problems teaches students that there is such a thing as an objective truth and our first attempts to find it are often wrong.
Oh. So he’s the guy who has been teaching that imaginary pseudophilosophical claptrap about there being no such thing as truth. Now everyone can stop picking on post-modernism and go after the Harvard computer scientists instead. He teaches cryptography, a subject that he considers himself an expert in, but he can’t say anything about the dangers of crypto, because that would be political
, and professors shouldn’t have political opinions.
OK, I don’t know much about crypto, but then he gives examples I’m more familiar with.
All academics are experts on narrow topics. Even when they intersect with the real world, our expertise in the facts does not give us authority over politics. Scientific research shows that vaccines work and climate change is real, but it cannot dictate whether vaccines should be mandated or fossil fuels restricted. Those are decisions for the public, with the scientific evidence being one factor. When academics claim authority over policy, the result is not an increased effect on policy but decreased trust in academia.
That is insane. College professors do not have direct power, so the idea that they “dictate” anything is nonsensical — all we can do is inform and encourage people to use their knowledge wisely. Vaccines WORK, hell yes they do, and we can confront our students with the data and evidence and experiments that show that they are effective and save citizens’ lives, and further we can show that bad policy, like that perpetrated by that grand fraud, Robert F. Kennedy jr., will not work and will kill people, so for a biology professor to sit on their hands and refrain from stating the truth is a criminal neglect of their responsibilities. Hush now with that science and facts and history — it’ll make people distrust academia, because we keep saying that your misconceptions and errors are wrong.
But that is our job.
The author, Boaz Barak, is an Israeli, and serves on Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias (he seems to avoid saying where he stands on anti-Palestinian bias) so he’s a hypocrite. He’s happy to denounce all those academic activists who are eroding the public’s trust in the universities by taking a stance on the politics he disagrees with, but he himself thinks that his politics are great and good, and that no one should be offended by them.
I might disagree with his politics, but I don’t think he should be fired for holding them. I think he should be fired for being a colossal hypocritical dumbass who can’t think his way out of a soggy paper bag.
It’s from McSweeney’s. It’s a joke.
The all-gender bathrooms will be changed to “both-gender” bathrooms because, as biology tells us, there are only two genders.
(The biology department has informed us that this is not true.)
The biology department has been dissolved.
Ha ha, it’s satire that exaggerates a potential problem, therefore it’s funny. Ha ha.
Except…it includes a link to an article on the American Association of University Professors site.
Similarly, the University of North Texas administration recently censored the content of more than two hundred academic courses, including by mandating the removal of words such as race, gender, class, and equity from undergraduate and graduate course titles and descriptions.6 These actions were allegedly taken in response to state legislation banning certain diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and practices, even though the legislation specifically exempted academic course content. While university administrators and faculty members may be compelled to comply with legislation and court orders, even where these run counter to professional and constitutional principles, they remain free to register their disagreement. And under no circumstances should an institution go further than the law demands. Yet, the examples above depict an eagerness to obey on the part of administrative officers, portending a bleak future for higher education.
Wait…is this still satire? Should I keep laughing? Is the AAUP, normally a pretty damned serious site, joking?
No?
I tell you, don’t go to college in Texas. Get out of the state as quick as you can. There may be good colleges there, but the state government is certifiably insane and will be chopping the hell out of the education system there.
