UMM turns out good people, like Joshua Preston

Hey Josh! Good to see you in the news for the right thing!

Joshua Preston was a former student here at UMM, and he’s in the National Guard, and he spoke out against the lackluster response of the military leadership to the attempted insurrection.

A Minnesota National Guard soldier, after being nudged to remove a Facebook post that criticized the Guard for a tepid public response to last week’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, is raising questions with leadership about how the organization roots out right-wing extremism within its own ranks.

The soldier is also questioning how the military conflates nonpartisan speech with apolitical speech.

Spc. Joshua Preston of Minneapolis, a 30-year-old attorney and soldier in the Minnesota National Guard’s 2nd Combined Arms Battalion, 136th Infantry, was upset when the first statement to come from leadership after the Jan. 6 violence in Washington, D.C., was a vague reminder that service members “must remain apolitical.” He was particularly upset that leadership referred to the coup attempt only as “the timely events occurring on the national stage.”

He thought the organization should have been more forceful in its stand against the attempted coup.

Preston posted a Facebook response that Guard leadership should root out right-wing extremism in its own ranks. He was later contacted by a commander bringing up concerns about the post, though leadership did not officially order him to take it down.

I am proud to have taught him a little biology here.

I’m not the only person with reservations about Eric Lander

500 women scientists feel the same way.

…we can’t help but notice that the recently announced nomination of presidential science adviser Eric Lander fails to meet the moment. His nomination does not fill us with hope that he will shepherd the kind of transformation in science we need if we are to ensure science delivers equity and justice for all. We had high hopes that the Biden administration would continue its pattern of bold nominations when envisioning a newly elevated cabinet position of science adviser. There was certainly no shortage of options, with a deep bench of qualified women and Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) whose expertise and experience can transform the place of science as a tool for justice.

Lander, an MIT geneticist and former co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)—exemplifies the status quo. With this nomination, the opportunity to finally break the long lineage of white male science advisers has been missed. This was a chance to substantively address historical inequalities and transform harmful stereotypes by appointing someone with new perspectives into the top science adviser role. Despite a long list of supremely qualified people that could have held this position and inspired a whole new generation of scientists, the glass ceiling in American science remains intact.

While we can celebrate the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to science, we must recognize that Lander has a reputation among some scientists for being controversial, and colleagues have criticized him for his “ego without end.” We cannot forget that in 2016, Lander wrote a widely criticized history of the revolutionary technology CRISPR, dubbed the “Heroes of CRISPR,” that erased the contributions of two women colleagues. This conspicuous exclusion is emblematic of the forces in science that hold back women and scientists of color from attaining the level of prominence he enjoys.

They also reminded me of that time Lander toasted James Watson.

Whoops.

The article also has suggestions for how Lander could improve his role as a science advisor.

HE’S GONE!

He gave a farewell speech in which he blamed all the deaths on his watch on China, declared that his administration had given Biden a good foundation (he’s going to claim credit for any good that emerges in the next few years), threatened to be back “in some form” in the future, and then boarded a helicopter and flew away as Fox News played YMCA (???).

LET THE REJOICING BEGIN! No, not you, Joe. Get to work.

By the way, while you might want to sigh with relief that you made it through the last four miserable years, remember that 400,000 didn’t. They weren’t killed by China, either — they were murdered by Republican incompetence. Destroy that party. That’s your new mission.

If you must, here’s a bit of his speech, and that surreal send off to the tune of YMCA.

Now we wait for reality to slap his fans in the face, hard.

The latest Q fantasy

Now they’re thinking a very silly and unbelievable Nicolas Cage movie (sorry, guys, you can’t do near-instant transfers of faces from one skull to another) and imagining a Perpetual Trump.

I say we should lean into it. Yeah, Joe Biden is possessed by the malignant spirit of Donald Trump, so stand down, Proud Boys. Your president won. Put the guns away, accept everything the Democrats do and say, and start worshipping Biden the same way you did the petty tyrant of the last four years.

One problem: the original Trump is going to be running around screaming at the same time. That corpus is going to have to be…liquidated. Maybe we can just lock him up in some institution somewhere?

Who you gonna call when you’ve got a racist book to publish? REGNERY!

Oh yes, Josh Hawley lost his big book deal when he advocated insurrection, but he didn’t have to worry — there’s a publishing house that’s always ready to endorse the very worst in American politics. Now it’s going to be published by Regnery.

If I may quote myself…

Regnery Publishing has been on my radar for a long, long time. They’re the go-to publishing house for far-right-wing cranks everywhere: Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, every angry loon who mainlines AM talk radio, or babbles on AM talk radio, can turn to Regnery to take the fevered hash festering in their brains and turn it into ink on paper. I’ve been tracking their poison for so long because another collection of kooks using their services are the creationists. The Discovery Institute loves them some Regnery. Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design was published with them, as was Icons of Evolution. If you want to lie about science, history, or politics, Regnery will publish it.

The Regnery family seems to have been born of spawning slime monsters, but even they couldn’t deal with William H. Regnery II, who was squeezed out of control years ago. He has since been using his undeserved wealth to support all kinds of terrible projects.

By 1999, Regnery had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States. He began consorting with Ku Klux Klan apologists, Holocaust deniers, eugenics boosters, and immigration foes. He set up two white nationalist nonprofits and steered money into them. He published fringe-right journals and books. Through his family’s famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.

Who was supporting the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer? William H. Regnery II, via the National Policy Institute, which he founded. It seems to have been his hobby, creating racist organization and funneling money into it.

…Regnery founded a nonprofit dedicated to providing “a cultural home for our children’s children,” as he wrote in a founder’s statement. It was called the Charles Martel Society, commemorating an 8th-century Frankish king who turned back an Arab invasion—and thus, in the view of white supremacists, saved European civilization almost before it began. Regnery packed the society’s board with men who shared his racial concerns. They included the late Sam Francis, a former Washington Times columnist who suggested that white people could solve racial problems by “imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites.”

The Martel Society still exists, and even has its own magazine, The Occidental Quarterly, an excellent source for online racism. It’s edited by Kevin MacDonald, a prominent “race realist”, and also a vocal evolutionary psychologist (how surprising).

The whole dang family is rotten to the core.

The Regnery family’s political story starts with his grandfather and namesake, William H. Regnery, a Chicago textile magnate. He was a New Deal Democrat, but in 1940 he helped found the right-wing America First Committee, which sought to stop the United States from going to war against Nazi Germany. The committee, which attracted Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites, disbanded when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

The America First name, meanwhile, has experienced a renaissance as one of Trump’s leading mottos for his presidency.

White couples weren’t having enough babies, Regnery declared, and the government was allowing in hordes of nonwhite immigrants “as if to hasten our demise.”
After World War II, Regnery’s uncle, Henry Regnery, made the family a power in GOP politics through his publishing house, which was subsidized by inherited wealth. He printed the works of writers whom he called “giants of American conservatism:” William F. Buckley Jr. (“God and Man at Yale”), Russell Kirk (“The Conservative Mind”), and Robert Welch, co-founder of the John Birch Society. Regnery books—anti-communist, anti-big-government and pro-business—helped define what it meant to be a Republican in postwar America. Upon his death in 1996, he was eulogized as “the godfather of modern conservatism.”

William Regnery II’s cousin, Alfred Regnery, was an official in the Reagan administration’s Justice Department and then became president of Regnery Publishing. The imprint still exists, under new ownership: Among its recent best-selling authors are Ann Coulter (Adios, America!) and Trump (Time to Get Tough). Regnery himself plunged into conservative politics at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. As he wrote in his 2015 memoir, Left Behind, he joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonprofit set up to recruit Republican activists on college campuses. His family helped endow the institute, and Regnery remained involved for more than 40 years. On the institute’s board, he associated with GOP stalwarts, including former US Attorney General Edwin Meese, Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, and Buckley, founder of the National Review.

So now Regnery is publishing Josh Hawley’s book. Is Hawley even aware of the chains he is forging here?

Probably. He probably thinks they’re awesome.

$cience gets a seat at the table

We got some wonderful news from Joe Biden last week.

President-elect Joe Biden announced Friday that he has chosen a pioneer in mapping the human genome — the so-called “book of life” — to be his chief science adviser and is elevating the top science job to a Cabinet position.

It’s about time! It’s astonishing that we’ve gotten by without a science advisor to the president or congress, or when we do have one, they’re ignored, but that’s Republicans for you.

Then, this being Joe Biden, he just has to screw it up. He has nominated Eric Lander for the position. If I had to name anyone who is the personification of Big Science, of Corporate Science, of $cience, I’d immediately say Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute in Boston. I can see why he was chosen: he’s a successful player, a brilliant man, a knowledgeable molecular biologist, a fantastic organizer — he knows how to run a big lab and a big institute, and is going to fit comfortably into an even bigger position. The man is a machine, and is good at running other machines. One thing Lander has in buckets is ambition.

But…

(You knew that was coming, right?)

First, let’s get a minor issue out of the way. Lander had a brief, tangential association with Jeffrey Epstein. He was photographed attending a meeting at Martin Nowak’s office (Nowak was a significant recipient of Epstein’s largesse and should be looked at more critically), but I’m saying, “So what?” I’m sure Lander gets dragged into all kinds of meetings he’d rather not participate in, as the head of the Broad Institute. There’s no evidence of any other association with Epstein other than that a well-known Harvard professor invited him to meet, and Lander seems to have been uninterested in Epstein.

“Martin invited me to an informal sandwich lunch at his institute to talk science with various people,” Lander told BuzzFeed News by email. “I was glad to do it. Martin didn’t mention who’d be attending. I had not met Epstein before, didn’t know much about him, and learned that he was a major donor to Martin’s institute.

“I later learned about his more sordid history,” Lander added. “I’ve had no relationship with Epstein.”

I think it’s fair to say that Epstein went out of his way to brush shoulders with every big name scientist he could find, Lander is one of the biggest, so he tainted him along with a lot of others.

Far more concerning to me is his attitude towards other scientists who were not under his thumb. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2020 for their work on CRISPR/Cas gene editing, and only Doudna and Charpentier. Eric Lander was behind a massive campaign, using all his clout with science publishers and corporations, to promote Feng Zhang, who had also done work on CRISPR, but most importantly, was an employee of the Broad Institute. Lander really wanted the Broad to get the credit for such an important discovery.

So Lander wrote a paper titled “The Heroes of CRISPR” (I was already cringing at just the title) which downplayed the role of Doudna and Charpentier — barely mentioned them at all — and played up the role of others. Like Zhang. Like the Broad Institute. It was bad science and bad history, but it would have been great propaganda if it wasn’t so blatant that everyone caught on to what he was doing.

This controversy does not mean that the work on CRISPR-Cas9 was not initially motivated by a desire to advance scientific knowledge, as Lander asserts in his review. Prizes and patents pollute the story and increase what is at stake, but do not, it is to be hoped, prevent curiosity from being one of the wellsprings of scientific discovery and innovation.

What is new and remarkable is the form that Eric Lander gave to his participation in the debate: the writing of a comprehensive history. Many readers have already pinpointed some problems with this historical record, in particular factual errors. The emphasis Lander places on those involved varies: Zhang’s work from his institute receives a full-page description, whereas the contributions of Doudna and Charpentier are much more briefly described. Rhetorical strategies, such as positioning in paragraphs, were also used to emphasize the value of some contributions over others. For example, Doudna is first mentioned in the middle of a paragraph, as the direct object rather than the subject of the sentence. Charpentier’s name appears at the bottom of a paragraph.

Oh, and he was neck-deep in a patent dispute over CRISPR, a significant fact that he did not mention.

What that all means is that Lander’s reputation among scientists isn’t exactly glowing.

Current and former colleagues contacted by STAT described Lander as brilliant, prickly, and brash, as having “an ego without end,” as “a visionary” who “doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” and as “an authentic genius” who “sees things the rest of us don’t.” Lander won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 1987 at age 30. Since 2009, he has co-chaired President Obama’s scientific advisory council.

In case you’re wondering why Biden picked him, there’s a hint in the above sentence.

Lander was not present at the creation of the $3 billion project in 1990 [the human genome project], but the sequencing center he oversaw at the Whitehead Institute became a powerhouse in the race to complete it. Much of that work was done by robots and involved little creativity (once scientists figured out how to do the sequencing). Some individual investigators felt they couldn’t compete against peers at the sequencing centers in the race for grants.

“He became a symbol of plowing lots of resources into industrialized, mindless science that could be run by machines and technicians and so wasn’t real biology,” said one scholar of that period. “Eric came to embody Big Science in that way.”

More than that, Lander played an outsized role in the project relative to his background and experience. A mathematician by training, after he graduated from Princeton in 1978 and earned a PhD in math in 1981 at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, he taught managerial economics at Harvard Business School from 1981 to 1990. He slowly became bored by the MBA world and enchanted with biology, however, and in 1990 founded the genome center at the Whitehead. It was hardly the pay-your-dues, do your molecular biology PhD and postdoctoral fellowship route to a leading position in the white-hot field of genomics.

Maybe Lander is the future of Big Science, where the Little Scientists get replaced by armies of technicians marching through protocols with the goal of getting a patent and corporate sponsorship, but I don’t have to like it.

Rudy lives in a fantasy world

Oh man. Rudy Giuliani is wearing a wacky filter over his glasses — look at this bizarre comparison he made:

Earlier this month the New York Mayor whipped up a crowd of angry Trump-supporters shortly before they marched the Capitol in Washington DC, telling them ‘let’s have trial by combat!’ Speaking about the comment, which referenced challenging Democratic election officials attempting to count the votes and confirm Joe Biden as president, Giuliani said he was instead referencing the HBO series and its character Tyrion Lannister (played by Peter Dinklage). He told The Hill’s White House reporter Brett Samuels: ‘I was referencing the kind of trial that took place for Tyrion in that very famous documentary about fictitious medieval England. ‘When Tyrion, who is a very small man, is accused of murder. He didn’t commit murder, he can’t defend himself, and he hires a champion to defend him.’

I’m trying to wrap my head around the phrase “documentary about fictitious medieval England”. None of that works. Game of Thrones not a documentary, nor does it claim to be, and while loosely assembled from scattered bits of Western European history, it’s not about England. But what do I know, I’ve only been to that country like 4 times, which is not an adequate sampling. Maybe I just happened to miss the dragons, and I’ve only made a couple of forays north of Hadrian’s wall, are there gangs of wildings and zombies up there?

But that’s not even the most delusional thing he said.

Trying to make his comments seem any better, Giuliani – who went on to claim that antifa was behind the violence and that Mr Trump bears ‘no responsibility’ for the events – attempted to explain he meant a combat ‘between machines’ and not people. He went on: ‘It incited no violent response from the crowd. None.
‘The crowd didn’t jump up saying, “Lock him up, throw him to jail, go to hell.” I’ve had speeches where people jump up and say, “lock him up.” It was not an emotional — it was not an emotion-inspiring part of the speech.’

There was no violent response from the crowd, except that right after his speech they marched on the capitol, crashed through the fences, smashed windows, dragged policemen into the crowd and beat them, and killed a guy. Yeah. Not violent.

This has been a common assertion by right-wing news liars. Ben Shapiro has claimed it, so has Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, it’s a common refrain. But we’ve all seen the videos — that was a violent, angry mob, shrieking and wrecking and looking for blood. Read this harrowing account of the insurrection in the New Yorker.

“We have guns, too, motherfuckers!” one man yelled. “With a lot bigger rounds!” Another man, wearing a do-rag that said “fuck your feelings,” told his friend, “If we have to tool up, it’s gonna be over. It’s gonna come to that. Next week, Trump’s gonna say, ‘Come to D.C.’ And we’re coming heavy.”

Later, I listened to a woman talking on her cell phone. “We need to come back with guns,” she said. “One time with guns, and then we’ll never have to do this again.”

Although the only shot fired on January 6th was the one that killed Ashli Babbitt, two suspected explosive devices were found near the Capitol, and a seventy-year-old Alabama man was arrested for possessing multiple loaded weapons, ammunition, and eleven Molotov cocktails. As the sun fell, clashes with law enforcement at times descended into vicious hand-to-hand brawling. During the day, more than fifty officers were injured and fifteen hospitalized. I saw several Trump supporters beat policemen with blunt instruments. Videos show an officer being dragged down stairs by his helmet and clobbered with a pole attached to an American flag. In another, a mob crushes a young policeman in a door as he screams in agony. One officer, Brian Sicknick, a forty-two-year-old, died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. Several days after the siege, Howard Liebengood, a fifty-one-year-old officer assigned to protect the Senate, committed suicide.

…

During Trump’s speech on January 6th, he said, “The media is the biggest problem we have.” He went on, “It’s become the enemy of the people. . . . We gotta get them straightened out.” Several journalists were attacked during the siege. Men assaulted a Times photographer inside the Capitol, near the rotunda, as she screamed for help. After National Guard soldiers and federal agents finally arrived and expelled the Trump supporters, some members of the mob shifted their attention to television crews in a park on the east side of the building. Earlier, a man had accosted an Israeli journalist in the middle of a live broadcast, calling him a “lying Israeli” and telling him, “You are cattle today.” Now the Trump supporters surrounded teams from the Associated Press and other outlets, chasing off the reporters and smashing their equipment with bats and sticks.

No violent response from the crowd, my ass.

Think last week was stressful? Brace yourself for next week

The insurrectionists are back-pedaling frantically. Charlie Kirk is claim now that it was “stupid” and “unwise” to invade the capitol, but not criminal. They didn’t mean it! Another benefit of the collapse of Parler (and it’s sloppy coding) is that their plans in the runup have been exposed, and while I can agree that they are “stupid”, the intent is transparent. A sampling:

Is anyone surprised that Amazon and Apple removed all support for Parler?

What I find ominous, though, is that only a few in that sample mention the 6th of January — most were focused on the 20th, the day of the inauguration. Next week. Will the Washington DC police finally take these threats seriously? Will the bad guys try to sneak in by mingling with the inauguration crowds? Are some of the planning acts of terrorism against random people?

Maybe they just want to make sure that the inauguration is even smaller than Trump’s. Mission accomplished, I suspect: I wouldn’t recommend attending.

I sure won’t. That’s the day after my classes begin!