It takes a firm hand

We just got back from the Indivisible meeting in Glenwood, and it was…interesting. There was a good crowd of 40 or 50 people, I think, and there were a few protesters with their big blue “Trump/Pence” signs, and they did something clever. There were a handful of them easily spotted because of their signs, but there were a bunch more that blended in with the attendees, so that when we went around the room introducing ourselves and explaining our interests, we’d have 3 or 4 people who’d talk about the environment, or hostile immigration policies, or health care, or LGBTQ rights, and then we’d hit some gomer salted into the audience who’d whine at us. I think they had 3 primary arguments, and they were: 3) I hate big government and taxes, 2) the authoritarian “he’s our president, so we have to support him no matter what”, and 1) JESUS and the decline of our morality. It was aggravating. The organizers, Jeannette and Glen, handled it just right, though. Here they are:

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They let them speak! They got a minute or two, just like everyone else, and then they’d firmly insist on moving on to give the next person a chance. You can tell that chapped their hides, because at the end a couple of them demanded an opportunity to go on at greater length, and they just shut them down politely and insisted that we stick to the agenda. Good work. I was impressed. That’s how to get it done efficiently and get it done on time.

Then the meeting ended and, well, you know me. I’m a kook magnet. In the introduction I’d mentioned that I was a biologist, so a kook homed in on me afterwards. He thinks global warming is nothing to worry about.

So he told me he had a friend who was a submariner, and he said they sometimes got CO2 concentrations as high as 5,000ppm, (current CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is about 400ppm), and they were fine. The scientists don’t want you to know about that. To which I told him I’ve taught physiology, we go all over the partial pressure calculations, and we know that partial pressure of CO2 in the tissues easily gets around 40mm Hg, or about 60,000 ppm, so as long as you’re below that, you can offload metabolically produced CO2, although with decreasing efficiency, so yes we certainly do know all that basic stuff. Do you think the scientists and engineers who put people in submarines are unaware of the limits of tolerance to atmospheric gasses?

Besides, this isn’t about how much CO2 you can safely breath, it’s about the accumulation of greenhouse gasses causing global warming.

So he changed the topic. Of course. If you show the slightest sign that you know what you’re talking about, they flee.

Next, he asks me if I know what is in a can of Coke. I’m not sure where this is going, but I tell him flavorings, colorings, and carbonic/phosphoric acid. Yes, he announces triumphantly, and do you know what happens when you open a can of Coke? “It…fizzes?”, was my reply. Do you think the acid sinks to the bottom and forms a layer? NO! It escapes into the air! Ocean acidification is a lie! It can’t happen!

“Have you ever heard of the concept of equilibrium…”

Scientists are all liars! They’re idiots!

I’d had about enough of this raving nutcase. So I told him we were done with this conversation, good bye, move along. I was trying to follow the example of our organizers, but no, it wasn’t enough.

The Coke can makes it obvious! Scientists are all lying to us!

“Done. Stop. Go away, you’re a kook.”

LIARS! IDIOTS!

So I just told him, firmly to fuck off. It took a couple of tries before he did, finally, wander away.

These goons really have no idea of what boundaries are, let alone science.

Never, ever threaten a librarian

A nearby Indivisible group in Glenwood announced that they are having an information meeting today, at 10am, at the Glenwood library. This is good, I’m glad that these grassroots groups are springing up everywhere.

However, this group got threats. The Tea Partiers in the area are planning to descend upon their meeting.

The librarian was threatened if they didn’t cancel the meeting.

That last bit cannot be allowed. Many of us Indivisible associated people are going to express our solidarity by also showing up, so we’re bustling out the door this morning for a nice day in lovely Glenwood, on the shores of Lake Minnewaska. I’m bringing a camera. Lake views on a sunny day are so nice, aren’t they?

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Good grief, it’s embarrassing to be an American

Woke up this morning to learn that the current president* is tweeting out serious allegations against Obama.

And then, to top it all off…TV ratings.

Take his phone away and put that child on a timeout.

Tuam

Culture of life, my ass. More like a culture of Catholic hypocrisy.

A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday.

Excavations at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, have uncovered an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing “significant quantities of human remains”, the judge-led mother and baby homes commission said.

The commission said analysis of selected remains revealed ages of the deceased ranged from 35 weeks to three years old. It found that the dead had been mostly buried in the 1950s, when the facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unmarried mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961.

Let’s not even consider those unmarried mothers, locked away in isolation and virtual slavery.

If all those people complaining about Planned Parenthood wanted to do what’s right, they’d move their picketlines to the nearest Catholic church.

Are you still using Uber?

WTF is wrong with you?

Here’s yet another story about the sexist culture at that place. She’s recounting how a pig named “Mike#2” was allowed to run rampant.

Other female employees who were his seniors often discussed in private about his lewd comments and sexist behavior but no one was ever brave enough to complain to the senior management and HR because the management is known to ignore the complaints and many times punish the women by accidentally leaking the names of the women over private chat groups. Travis is well known to protect high performing team leaders no matter how abusive they are towards their employees. The HR team was known to be deftly afraid of Travis’s tendency to blame and ridicule the women and yell at HR whenever they went in with complaints of abuse. I heard about Travis personally congratulating Mike#2 for meeting strict deadlines months after I complained to HR about my abuse. It was clear to me that the regressive and abusive attitude towards female employees was trickling down from the top. After several months of this abuse and failed complaints to HR, I couldn’t stand it any longer. The animosity towards me got worse and in my performance reviews, it was noted that I was not a team player, not creative, directionless. There were days when I would come home from work and lie down in my bed till the alarm woke me up. I would cut my mom’s calls and reject meeting requests from friends. I would wonder why I went to grad school instead of wearing heels and marrying a rich guy so I would never have to work. It was then that I knew I had to stop this vicious environment from destroying my life. Within three days of my last performance review, I quit. I wore my New Balance sneakers to work, surrendered my employee tag, mobile phone and computer. I deleted the Uber app on my phone. Even though I don’t work at Uber any longer, the damage that was done to me by Uber’s work environment ruined my spirit. It damaged what was most precious to me : dignity and self respect. This abuse happened not because I didn’t wear heels or because I was directionless. It happened for the sole reason that I am a woman who told a man what she really thought.

And now the NY Times breaks a story about how Uber evades regulatory oversight.

Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement, or in some instances, had been outright banned.

The program, which involves a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from Uber’s app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these to evade authorities in cities such as Paris, Boston and Las Vegas, and in countries including Australia, China, South Korea and Italy.

Uber is unethical inside and out. I’ve never used it (not that there’s much opportunity in Morris, Minnesota) and never will.

What would happen if you made people who didn’t like science fiction anyway read really old science fiction?

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I think that would be a better title for this project, Young People Read Old Science Fiction & Fantasy. The premise:

Young People Read Old SF was inspired by something award-winning author Adam-Troy Castro said on Facebook.

nobody discovers a lifelong love of science fiction through Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein anymore, and directing newbies toward the work of those masters is a destructive thing, because the spark won’t happen. You might as well advise them to seek out Cordwainer Smith or Alan E. Nourse—fine tertiary avenues of investigation, even now, but not anything that’s going to set anybody’s heart afire, not from the standing start. Won’t happen.

This is a testable hypothesis! I’ve rounded up a pool of younger people who have agreed to let me expose them to classic works of science fiction1 and assembled a list of older works I think still have merit. Each month my subjects will read and react to those stories; I will then post the results to this site. Hilarity will doubtless ensue!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up well for a couple of reasons.

  • The sample size is small, and with a limited range of critical ability. Literary criticism actually takes some skill, you know.

  • None of the critics seem to like this particular genre. Any interesting generational difference is quickly swamped out by the fact that none of these readers are willingly reading this stuff by choice.

  • I’m an older reader and am predisposed to like SF, and if you hand me Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein now, I’m going to gak explosively. Genre fiction tends not to age gracefully. Why not torture them with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Hugo Gernsback if it’s hilarity you’re looking for?

  • One of the clues that will alienate modern readers is not the poor writing, but the casual racism and misogyny. Take a look at that cover of Amazing Stories I’ve put at the top right — you don’t even have to read anything to be saying “OMG, WTF?”.

  • Packaging matters. Star Wars is hugely popular, but it’s really the same crappy serialized soap opera with ray guns that E.E. “Doc” Smith was writing in the 1920s and 1930s, with the antique stilted dialog updated to modern stilted dialog.

Reading the reviews, I’d have to say that the Adam-Troy Castro Hypothesis is so far well supported. I have to question the sample size and the methodology, however.

A terrible beauty

The leather-working industry in Bangladesh and India is a nightmare awash in toxic chemicals and rotting flesh, and yet, the photography in this article about the leather tanning trade is arresting.

Women pluck hair by hand from goat hides soaked in an alkaline solution to loosen the fibers. This woman protects herself with gloves and a sheet of plastic wrapped around her sari as she works at a tannery outside Vaniyambad in the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu, India.

Women pluck hair by hand from goat hides soaked in an alkaline solution to loosen the fibers. This woman protects herself with gloves and a sheet of plastic wrapped around her sari as she works at a tannery outside Vaniyambad in the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu, India.

Read the whole thing, and then wonder where your shoes came from.

Bird killer

We’ve got this great big glass-fronted stadium in the Twin Cities, located near the river and on the migratory flyway for birds. Everyone said before it was built that it was going to kill lots of birds. Now that it’s looming there, people are patrolling around the base and looking for dead birds. And guess what? It’s killing lots of birds. Surprise!

I’m interested in how people respond to the confirmation of this prediction. The comments are predictably depressing.

Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America, also according to the National Audubon Society.

Yes! This is a big problem! We need better solutions to prevent bird and bat deaths by turbines, and no one is going to disagree with that. The story here, though, is that we have good solutions to the problem of birds hitting buildings, and they were even proposed during construction. As the article points out:

ird strikes with buildings are avoidable. Manhattan’s Jacob Javits Center, built in 1986, reduced collisions by about 90 percent by replacing reflective glass with a visibly patterned glass three years ago. American Bird Conservancy suggests using window films, decals, netting, screens and awnings to deter bird collisions.

So here’s a situation with a clear solution, which the owners of the stadium dismissed and did not implement, and someone is pointing to a completely different problem that lacks a good solution as an excuse to do nothing? Weird.

Do you really want to destroy what is suppose to be a revenue generator with bad publicity?

Did you know that stadiums don’t profit the communities they’re built in? They line the pockets of sports team owners, for sure, and you could argue that there are lots of intangible values that having an entertainment complex brings in…but please. Don’t argue for a non-existent profit.

Also, most troubling is the idea that we should be silent about bad ideas lest we discourage people from investing in them. That seems precisely backwards to me.

Those are the reasonable (by comparison) criticisms of the article. Are you ready for the unreasonable ones?

These crazy liberal democrat groups are nuts. They care more about 35 birds dying versus millions of human fetuses murdered by Planned Parenthood.

If you look at the statistics, less than a million abortions per year are performed in the US. These are not acts of murder. These are safe, legal operations carried out for the health and benefit of almost a million women per year. I actually do care more about the health and future of women than I do the safety of birds, but that is irrelevant. Putting a film on a stadium to reduce bird collisions will not increase the abortion rate, if that’s what you’re concerned about.

This next one, though, is just plain stupid.

Just put a big ugly Elizabeth Warren face up there with mouth open. That’ll scare crow those birds away if it doesn’t scare’em to death first.

It would actually work. Setting aside the bigotry and misogyny about calling Warren ugly, putting up a great big decal of any kind — you could even use Donald Trump’s lovely face — would disrupt the reflective surface that fools the birds and would solve the problem. A non-reflective film was what was originally proposed, which would probably be simpler and cheaper, but sure, slap a great big American flag across all that glass; an abstract pattern; pictures of bald eagles; whatever. This is not an insoluble problem.