Louisiana is screwed. The second poorest state in the country has a $3 billion deficit, and no one is going to do anything about it, apparently. They’re in a race to become the poorest state, which will of course lock in all the citizens to the Republican party as they proceed to become more ignorant and angry about their condition, so it’s a political win for the Idiot Party in America.
Who’s to blame? You can guess.
More horrifying stories are emerging from the Altoona diocese. What needs to be kept in mind is that that area of Pennsylvania is perfectly ordinary and fairly conventional — it is no pit of depravity. It just happens to be a region where Catholic amorality is getting exposed.
“Father Francis McCaa was a monster,” the grand jury stated.
The investigation found 15 of his alleged victims, abused between 1961 and 1985.
“In some cases children tried to report their abuse to their parents … but were not believed … the grand jury aches at hearing the hopelessness these victims felt when being offended on by a pastor they were taught to respect and honor,” the report says. Some parents punished their children for accusing the “friendly” monsignor, the report says, though at one point the bishop at the time, James Hogan, was confronted by a group of “outraged parents” and promised action.
Hogan met with district attorney Gerald Long and assistant DA Patrick Kiniry, both now serving as judges in the area, the report says, though no charges were brought.
McCaa was removed from the diocese and replaced with a priest who is also named in the report as a pedophile.
McCaa retired in 1993 and died in 2007.
I guess he’s in heaven now. I wouldn’t be surprised if St Peter is in on the coverup.
I feel like I have to explain who Immanuel Velikovsky was, it’s been so long that he pinged on the radar. He was a crackpot who published a series of pseudo-erudite books in which he used a combination of bullshit Bible scholarship and bad physics to bamboozle audiences –and it worked, because physicists couldn’t address the claims about what the Bible said and the Bible scholars were cowed by the physics. But he had Venus erupting out of Jupiter and ping-ponging around the solar system at the time of the Exodus, and sailing past Earth to rain down manna on the Hebrews (turns out he couldn’t tell the difference between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, either). It was stupidity squared, but had a brief surge in notoriety when some scientists suggested that his book be banned.
Anyway, I hadn’t heard much about Velikovsky in years, and was thinking that was one kook who’d finally been forgotten, but now I learn that a remnant strain of Velikovskyism lurks in an unsurprising place: among the climate change denialists.
This doesn’t warrant a long article but it ended up being longish. It’s just to comment on the fact that Anthony Watts has published another article from Tim Ball, pushing Velikovsky’s crank ideas as science. Tim argues that scientists shouldn’t point out dumb and wrong notions posing as science. Tim calls such behaviour “scientific elitism”.
Anthony Watts gives an excuse (if you can call it that) for publishing such nonsense, saying that he promotes Velikovsky “in the context of learning” and seems to think the Director of GISS NASA is a coward for not doing the same.
Well, hey, Velikovsky does well among those who don’t understand physics or chemistry, so I guess it’s not unusual that he would thrive among the denialists. He has found his people.
Omer Aziz wrote an article critical of Sam Harris. So, as he likes to do, Harris invited Aziz to a “debate”. Without even considering the content, we can conclude that Harris is a dishonest clown. Take a look at the conditions he set:
So I accepted his offer and every onerous condition that came with it. Once again, all the terms were set by him: I would have to read the essay word for word, he could stop me whenever he wanted, I could not record the talk, and Harris reserved the right not to air it if it was “boring”—a standard to be defined only by him, and only after the fact.
They talked for four hours. Then, later:
A few weeks later, I was surprised then to find the following email in my inbox:
I just listened to our recorded conversation, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t release it as a podcast. Even if I took the time to edit it, I wouldn’t be doing either of us any favors putting it out there. The conversation fails in every way — but, most crucially, it fails to be interesting.
Better luck next time…
Sam
Francis Collins made a triumphant declaration about his plan to “end sexual harassment”! Hooray!
Read my @nature article w/Mike Lauer & @NIH_COSWD on ending sexual harassment in all #NIH-supported environments: https://t.co/OhsB9RwUxO
— Francis S. Collins (@NIHDirector) March 4, 2016
Only…it was initially published in a closed-access journal, Nature (the article has since been opened up). And, say, Nature is a UK journal — why is the head of the NIH publishing his grand proposal to end all harassment in NIH supported institution there? It struck a lot of people as weird and tone-deaf.
And then I read the “article”. Rarely have I read something so empty outside of administrative memos from high-ranking academic bureaucrats. It’s truly impressive. The physicist will be jealous that the biologists have managed to create the most perfect vacuum known to humankind.
Here it is, sprinkled with a few annotations from yours truly.
As the leading US government funder of scientific research, we at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are deeply concerned about sexual harassment in science (Nature 529, 255; 2016). With the help of colleagues in government, academia and the private sector, the NIH aims to identify the steps [Isn’t “aims to identify the steps” kind of an empty way to say “do something, but we don’t know what”?]necessary to end this in all NIH-supported research workplaces and scientific meetings.
In September last year, we restated our expectation that organizers of NIH-supported conferences and meetings should assure a safe environment, free of discrimination (see go.nature.com/zmukk8).
Over the next few weeks to months, we plan to work with governmental, academic and private-sector colleagues to identify potential steps [“we don’t know what”] to translating our expectations into reality. An important first step will be to gather as much data as possible [“we’re going to flounder around for a while, trying to figure out what we’re doing”] to more fully understand the nature and extent of sexual harassment among scientists. These data should guide us in determining what kinds of policy and procedure are most likely to help. [“not that we have any policy, obviously”] We will also work to determine what levers [“We’ll figure out something to kick some butt, but we don’t know what”] are already available to influential stakeholders — us as funders, as well as university administrators and departments, journal editors, and organizers and hosts of scientific meetings.[stakeholders=buzzword for everyone involved. “We don’t even know who we’re going to work on yet”]
We owe this [What do you owe?] to our colleagues and the public, who trust in our ability to make the biomedical research enterprise the best that it can be.
Yeah, that fluff was a great use of page space in a high-ranking science journal. How about sparing us the finger-flapping until you’ve actually got something to say?
Dinesh D’Souza is coming back to the big screen, with a new movie called Hillary’s America. It looks like a real loser. Watch for his persecution complex; the trailer includes clips of poor Dinesh in prison, surrounded by angry burly biker-type dudes, and looking rather pathetic. It all began when the Obama administration tried to shut me up,
he says. It doesn’t mention that it wasn’t to shut him up, but to punish him for blatant violations of campaign finance laws. It also doesn’t mention, perhaps because it would diminish the drama of those scary gangsta dudes, that his sentence was served on probation. He wasn’t put in prison.
It’s all about those perfidious Democrats. The first words:
Who are these Democrats?
Then come scenes of the KKK and Andrew Jackson and corrupt politicians (didn’t I already tell you that Neiwert had rebutted that lie?), and it ends with the liberals’ dramatic scheme.
What if their plan was to…steal America?
Hang on there, Dinesh. You do realize that liberals already have as much right to America as you do, don’t you? We don’t have to steal it, we just have to share it.
Oh, well. One more movie I can skip.
You might think that asking Donald Trump to expose himself is a joke, and it certainly has been treated as comedy.
But now, in all seriousness, Larry Flynt is asking Trump to submit proof.
So far we’ve only had your word that you have a huge penis. But there has been no objective authority who was made a verification of your claim. I am making you an offer that you must not refuse if anyone is to believe you. I have a team of doctors ready to contact the examination required to confirm your post. If you reject this offer, I can only conclude that you’re not the man you say you are and that you’re bragging about your penis size is this Friday at fraudulent as Trump University. Please contact me immediately. Sincerely, Larry Flynt.
I wish he hadn’t done that. Given the size of Trump’s ego, I’m afraid he might take Flynt up on that offer.
Hope Jahren has an excellent op-ed on sexual harassment in academia. I’ve always wondered how guys have the gall to even start these unsavory relationships, and she shares some of the email she’s received.
The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes. Sexual harassment in science generally starts like this: A woman (she is a student, a technician, a professor) gets an email and notices that the subject line is a bit off: “I need to tell you,” or “my feelings.” The opening lines refer to the altered physical and mental state of the author: “It’s late and I can’t sleep” is a favorite, though “Maybe it’s the three glasses of cognac” is popular as well.
The author goes on to tell her that she is special in some way, that his passion is an unfamiliar feeling that she has awakened in him, the important suggestion being that she has brought this upon herself. He will speak of her as an object with “shiny hair” or “sparkling eyes” — testing the waters before commenting upon the more private parts of her body. Surprisingly, he often acknowledges that he is doing something inappropriate. I’ve seen “Of course you know I could get fired for this” in the closing paragraph; the subject line of the email sent to my former student was “NSFW read at your own risk!”
I still can’t quite imagine it, but at least she has now spelled out the obvious warning signs.
And then, sadly, she describes the usual course of events, which is usually denial and blame from all the institutional resources that ought to be helping the student out. Here’s what she advises the women targeted by such behavior:
I teach her to draw strong professional boundaries and then to enforce them, not because she should have to, but because nobody else will. I insist that she must document everything, because someday he will paint this as a two-way emotional exchange. I wearily advise her to stick it out in science, but only because I cannot promise that other fields aren’t worse. And I hope that this is enough to make him stop. But it never, never stops.
Now that’s depressing.
Yeah, I know — that’s absurd. But people are actually throwing around this idea that racism is part of leftist ideology, usually while babbling some ahistorical nonsense about how the modern Democratic party is somehow still the party of segregation, despite the whole southern strategy political move that scooped up all the racists and drafted them into the Republican party. Anyway, David Neiwert debunks the whole “KKK are lefties” baloney with a hefty dose of history and politics.
Moreover, the Klan in every incarnation — its original, its second, and its current, has been a creature of right-wing politics. Consider its current program:
— Anti-Semitism
— Racial separation
— The quashing of civil rights for minorities
— The destruction of federal government power
— Anti-homosexual
— Anti-abortion
— Anti-immigration
Hearing conservatives trying to claim that white supremacists are liberals fills me with the same discombobulating dizziness that hearing religious zealots declaring that atheism is a religion does. Dudes, do you even listen to the words coming out of your mouth?
