Seriously? You’re going to blame the second law of thermodynamics for poverty?

Arguments from Natural Law are among my pet peeves — there’s nothing quite like reducing a complex sociological issue to a simplistic, naive causal relationship based on, of all things, physics. Steven Pinker commits this sin in discussing thermodynamics, which he seems to have a rather cartoonish perspective on, to the point where he decides that poverty is explained by entropy. Or rather, that poverty needs no explanation.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can not to become our food. What needs to be explained is wealth. Yet most discussions of poverty consist of arguments about whom to blame for it.

Yeah, rather than talking about exploiters and capitalism and historical inequities and all that messy stuff, let’s instead have a caricature of a physics explanation from a psychologist who apparently gets all of his understanding of thermodynamics from creationist web sites and pop psychology magazines.

I’m just going to wash my hands of this slime and let Blake Stacey explain it all.

University of Minnesota football coach fired

Good news, for a change. After Coach Tracy Claeys proudly supported his gang-banging football team, he got his just reward: he has been fired. That’s the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, the article ends on the really important tragedy: what about the football team?

Minnesota now faces an uphill battle as National Signing Day for high school senior recruits is less than two months away. The football program is in danger of losing several recruits and having to rebuild both the performance side and the reputation destroyed as a result of the alleged incident. But in the bigger picture, administration has delivered the message that whatever happened in the alleged September incident will not be tolerated now or ever again.

With Claeys, the Gophers won nine games in 2016 for the first time since 2003, when they finished 10-3. They also won a bowl game for the second straight year.

Rebuild your reputation by suspending all football games for at least a year. That also solves the problem of rebuilding the performance of the team — maybe they can focus on their studies for a while.

It’s nice to know one lawsuit is going to go down in flames

Oh jebus. Lucas Werner is gloating about winning millions of dollars in a lawsuit against Starbucks, because they wrongfully banned him when all he’d done is pass a “nice note” to a young barista he found attractive.

Unfortunately for him, a “nice note” of the kind he passes to people has been revealed.

There's this chemical in my body Telomerase. All men past 35 automatically become ideal fathers and husbands. It lends offspring strong DNA. It's been a year. It's been 5 years since I've had sex. Why do I feel this need to be inside you?

There’s this chemical in my body Telomerase. All men past 35 automatically become ideal fathers and husbands. It lends offspring strong DNA. It’s been a year. It’s been 5 years since I’ve had sex. Why do I feel this need to be inside you?

“Nice” is not the adjective I’d apply to that: “creepy” is more accurate. As a biologist, I’d say “WRONG” would also be good, although I think the barista is more reasonably going to feel that the former is the right word to use.

There is a disease eating the brains of Americans

It ain’t kuru.

It’s the disease of ignorance, Christianity, conspiracy-theorizing, and the kind of raging right-wing poison that inspires garbage like this.

kuru

Those are the symptoms of kuru — they just copied them off a med site on the internet. They do not apply. Hillary and Bill Clinton do not have kuru. I have a special contempt for assholes who try to assign specific medical diagnoses on the basis of simple prejudice and stupidity.

In case you’re wondering where the hell this lunacy came from, it’s Facebook, obviously, and a group called “Pizzagate”. You don’t want to go there. These are the worst human beings.

Give me a break

More mail, this time via the USPS, with no return address. I think this guy is strongly anti-Trump, but it took some cipherin’ to puzzle out a few fragments.

img_0445

You ever get the feeling that it is just total inchoate chaos out there swirling around, swelling and rising to a storm of destruction? Yeah, me too.

Public posturing on porn

It is entirely predictable that a Utah Mormon would lead the charge against online pornography, for a couple of reasons. A) Mormons are legendary for their hypocrisy in privately consuming vice while publicly condemning it, and B) ignorant legislation would be pushed by someone who takes pride in declaring his ignorance of what he’s banning.

Mormons have been in a furor for years over the disclosures about their paid-porn watching habits.

That’s the conclusion of a Harvard economics professor who tracked subscriptions to online porn sites. Utah ranks No. 1 in subscriptions, according to Benjamin Edelman, who reported his findings in the article “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?,” published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

The most porn-watching ZIP codes in Utah, “with unexpectedly high subscriptions relative to their population and broadband usage,” are 84766 in Sevier County, 84112 in Salt Lake County, 84018 in Morgan County, 84006 in southwest Salt Lake County, and 84536 in San Juan County.

A color-coded map in the journal article shows only two states with subscription rates higher than 3.6 per thousand home broadband users: Utah and Mississippi. Utah topped the list, with 5.47 users per 1,000. (Edelman says he took into account the amount of broadband access available in various regions and adjusted his data accordingly; porn users tend to favor high-speed data transfer that can download lots of the steamy visuals quickly.)

“Subscriptions are slightly more prevalent in states that have enacted conservative legislation on sexuality,” Edelman writes. In the 27 states where “defense of marriage” amendments have been adopted, there were 11 percent more porn subscribers than in other states, he reports. Use is higher also in states where more people agree with the statement “I never doubt the existence of God.”

Let me just say that when I lived in Utah, I was in the 84102 zip code. 84112 is the University of Utah, which is weird — to be fair, there is a higher proportion of non-Mormons there, but there aren’t a lot of people living there, outside of university housing.

Also, it’s a weird metric: there is so much free porn available all over the web, why would people pay for it? Perhaps this isn’t so much a commentary on Mormon porn habits, as it is on Mormon naiveté about online access.

I’m also reminded of the ubiquitous Mormon joke — even Mormons tell each other this one.

Why do ex-mormons always take two Mormons fishing?
If you take only one Mormon he drinks all your beer.

Todd Weiler is posturing in front of his congregation electorate, so of course he’s going to take the most sanctimonious position possible.

It’s simple, we kill the Batman

killthebatman

Why did no one think of it before? You’ve got a problem, a big meanie who enforces the law and holds the crooks up to scrutiny, so the first step before you begin your crime spree should be to exterminate the people who might catch you at it.

This is exactly what the Republicans have done: before they start (OK, accelerate) looting the country, they’ve killed the Office of Congressional Ethics. Never mind that it was an independent office that policed both Democrats and Republicans — when you’re poised for a historic treasure grab, you can’t have an ethics office notifying everyone of what you’re doing.

It still exists, but instead of acting as an independent entity, it is now subservient to the house ethics committee, which is stocked with partisan lawmakers who get to strangle any nosy investigations, and further, get to silence any mention of any probes. This action was also approved by a secret vote of the congressional Republican caucus — there was no discussion with those pesky Democrats, they didn’t even announce that they were considering it, they just did it and presented it as a fait accompli.

I’m impressed. A comic book villain couldn’t have done it better.

Josh Marshall recommends that you contact your representative to find out how they voted, if you live in a Republican district (I’m not; my rep is a blue dog Democrat, who I’ve never voted before until this last election when I simply voted straight DFL on every office). I don’t know what you can do about it, although I suppose it would be nice to know.

I get email…again

It’s been a remarkable day for email from idiots.

Prof. Myers, I have 3 questions about the evolution of humans that I have not been able to find the answers to. Could you offer your opinions?

1. If men prefer women who are less intelligent than they are does this mean there could have selection for lower intelligence in women?

2. Why haven’t women evolved to spontaneously shit themselves to deter rapists?

3. Why are women so annoying? Could they have actually evolved to provoke men into giving them a slapping?

Thanks,
Gary.

Happy to help, Gary!

  1. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

    In case you hadn’t noticed, women are members of the same species as men. You had a mother (she’s probably embarrased by you), and you inherited rougly half your chromosomes from her. It would require a remarkable degree of dimorphism to configure genes responsible for intelligence to be differentially expressed.

    Also, speak for yourself. Men don’t necessarily prefer less intelligent women. I happen to prefer a partner who is my equal. I don’t think it would have been advantageous in our evolutionary history to have half the population deficient in a trait that is responsible for our evolutionary success.

  2. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

    Why haven’t men evolved to find violent abuse of their partners repugnant? I suspect it’s more of a matter of random variation within the population producing some proportion of individuals who are more stupid and more violent than the mean. That’s you, Gary. You are noise. You are the unpleasant nasty detritus of chance variation.

  3. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

    As you so well demonstrate, some men are even more annoying.

Sadly, I cannot continue this enlightening conversation with Gary — I’ve blocked his email. If any of you would like to explain things more gently to Gary, you can write him at gary99@rocketship.com. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.