This will not be the revolution I wanted

For-profit universities are a pox on the world — these are institutions that take advantage of the ambitious poor, people with aspirations who are trying to get an education, and who believe the lies of the promoters. And these things really are run by capitalists who consider quality last and getting paying bodies in to the often virtual door first.

Laureate Universities are part of the exploitive system, although, to be fair, everyone says “it is not considered among the worst offenders in the for-profit college industry”. Isn’t that reassuring? They also invest a smaller proportion of their revenues on marketing and advertising than Harvard, and their president gets paid less than the head football coach at Notre Dame, facts that are apparently supposed to make us feel better about Laureate but actually leave me disgusted with the priorities of most universities.

Now I learn that Bill Clinton was the honorary chancellor of Laureate Universities. “Honorary” meaning he was not expected to do any real work, but was just endorsing the place and allowing them to slap his face on all their advertising, but he was apparently expecting to get paid. And he did.

Clinton was paid $18 million over 5 years for a few token appearances in promotional visits and brochures.

Eighteen fucking million dollars. $18,000,000. $3.6 million per year. For an honorary position. He got paid as much as 240 minimum wage workers, and didn’t do as much work for it as one malingerer. He did use his influence with the Secretary of State to get Laureate invited to a higher ed policy dinner, though, and seeing the face of the former President of the United States on the advertising probably fooled a lot of rubes into thinking that Laureate was legit, so in a sense he did earn his payola.

But it’s yet another sign of venality and corruption at the highest levels of government, and tells me that, in spite of the mild praise padding every article about them, Laureate is just another well-heeled con job.

I know. Trump University was a worse scandal. That was a cheesy, cheaply gilded “educational” scam befitting a low-rent no-class thug like Donald Trump. Laureate University a tasteful, solid-gold, up-scale scam, which makes it…better?

So once again, another election year, and there’s absolutely no question who I have to vote for in November — there is no question that Donald Trump is a ghastly fascist/racist demagogue and goon, and that we can’t allow the Republican party to hold any power at all. But jebus, why do both candidates have to be so sleazy and unappealing?

Phyllis Schlafly is dead

They say if you can’t say something nice about the dead, you should say nothing at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Continued below the fold)

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Antivax, chemtrails, and creationism

hovindjail

Kent Hovind is getting divorced from Jo Hovind. I guess this isn’t surprising — maybe his former wife is smarter than he is (a hurdle easily cleared), and saw through all the BS and manipulation and realized it was time to get out.

He’s also remarrying, to an anti-vax crank named Mary Tocco. He’s made a video announcement of his engagement, and it’s another bit of obnoxious lunacy. He spends half of it blaming his ex-wife completely for the divorce — I guess he had absolutely nothing to do with it, despite getting the two of them arrested and imprisoned with demented legal advice — and the other half reassuring everyone that he checked with a whole bunch of fellow ministers, ranging in age from 60 to 85, and 15 out of 16 assured him that it was perfectly OK, and then he mumbles on about how this opens up whole new options for his ministry, allowing him to understand all those divorced people out there at last.

I predicted that there would be interesting times ahead for Hovind’s Creation Science Evangelism once he got out of jail — he’d left management of the creationist organization in the hands of his son, Eric, and I kind of figured it would not be an easy transition once he got out and tried to take back the ministry he’d run into the ground with his tax fraud. And it was so. Hovind is claiming that Jo and Eric conspired to steal all the assets of CSE out from under him. It’s gotten very ugly and confusing.

When Kent originally announced that his divorce, he claimed that Eric had stolen from him and would not let him have the web domain “drdino.com”. He claimed Eric sold himself over two-million dollars worth of equipment and supplies. He mentioned a couple of four-wheelers, a copy machine and a fork-lift. Deana Holmes, a non-practicing attorney, who has been following the Hovind story speculated that he was way off on his valuation and that a lot of the supplies were old T-Shirts, VHS tapes, DVD’s and CD’s of Kent’s old non-copyrighted videos which are all on YouTube. I don’t normally take Kent’s public word as fact, but assuming that we have a couple of old four-wheelers, a fork-lift, some office furniture, plus, the material that Deana mentioned, the price that Eric paid for this is probably about right. Deana pointed out that these accusations were pretty stupid in the light of his tax-liabilities and legal problems they could cause for his son. Kent said in court and in public that he took a vow of poverty and owned nothing. Then turned around and claimed publically that Eric and his mother conspired to take everything away from him. Which one is the truth Kent? Did you own nothing? Or did you own two-million dollars worth of items that Eric stole from you? Just like all of Kent’s statements that seem to change to fit the circumstance.

Eric has stuffed his ministry into a shiny new dumpster, called “God’s Quest”, while Kent seems to be trying to set up a place of his own in a gravel pit in Lenox, Alabama, where he’ll build a brand new Dinosaur Adventure Land. I’m sure this marriage with Mary Tocco will bring order out of chaos. After all, look at her credentials.

Mary is co-founder of the American Chiropractic Autism Board (ACAB) 2006, helped manage Hope For Autism, (HFA) a training program for physicians who want to help children with autism recover and is the Vice President of the Foundation for Pediatric Health. She is also the Director of Vaccine Research and Education for Michigan for Vaccine Choice, a non-profit (501c) watchdog group, insuring vaccine choice in Michigan. Mary Tocco is on the Board of Directors for WAVE, World Association for Vaccine Education (www.novaccine.com)

Wait. The American…Chiropractic…Autism…Board? Those words do not belong together.

Once again, the Hovinds — every one of them — set the standard for creationist inanity.

Creationists skittering about in the background

Would you believe an angry creationist tried to get Jeffrey Shallit fired for critically reviewing some creationist books? Of course you would. It’s what they do. I’ve had a couple of loons do the same thing, rifling through my university’s faculty list to get all the email addresses they could, and then send off bulk email to everyone documenting my crimes. It’s annoying, but it’s also incredibly stupid; every time it has happened, there’s a bit of a laugh among the people targeted, and it’s an uncomfortable laugh at these sad people with their weird delusions.

It doesn’t help their case that their arguments are always so awful. Here’s another example: David Klinghoffer, the Discovery Institute hack, is claiming that Proxima B calls evolution into question. How? I don’t know. But as Matthew points out, the logic is ridiculous.

If life is common, that’s evidence for intelligent design. But if life is rare, that’s evidence for intelligent design. Everything is evidence of your theory when you haven’t internalized the concept of falsifiability.

It doesn’t help that the Proxima B story is an example of ridiculously over-hyped nonsense: the observation that there’s a big rock orbiting a star almost 5 light years away does not imply that it is habitable or that anyone will be colonizing it soon. It doesn’t help that Klinghoffer quotes Mr Indiscriminate Hype himself, Michio Kaku.

It’s a “game changer,” the “holy grail,” only a “hop, skip, and a jump” away, physicist Michio Kaku tells CBS, which characterizes the planet as a possible “Earth 2.0.”

Jebus, but that guy is a pandering twit — it’s gotten to the point where, if I see his face appearing on the television, I turn it off, confidently secure that I’ve spared myself another trickle of bullshit. And really, life is contingent on a set of circumstances that we haven’t mapped out yet, so discovering that another planet either has no life on it or has independently evolved it (and neither of these things are known for Proxima B) says absolutely nothing about the validity of evolutionary theory.

Maybe they differ in flavor?

malefemalebrains

Finally, someone cuts through all the neurological differences between men and women and summarizes all the differences between male and female brains. Dean Burnett gets one thing wrong, though: sometimes, “male” brains are not connected to a penis, and “female” brains are not attached to a vagina. It’s almost as if the dominant consideration ought to be the nature of the human brain, rather than contriving distinctions without evidence!

He is right on one thing, though.

… it could be that the human brain develops in accordance to what it experiences, and things it experiences and is made to do more often are reflected in the sorts of connections that develop. This would suggest that there aren’t actually any marked differences between male and female brains. However, this would mean that there is no scientific basis for all of our stereotypes and prejudices about what certain sexes should/shouldn’t do and they all stem from irrational or unpleasant cultural influences that haven’t gone away yet, forcing us to admit to ourselves that our preconceived notions about certain sexes or genders are just self-fulfilling clichés with no logical basis, potentially threatening our beliefs, our positions and even our identity.

And we can’t have that, can we.

That’s quite the dog whistle

Donald Trump is getting more subtle in his racism. He said this recently:

We’ve admitted 59 million immigrants to the United States between 1965 and 2015. Many of these arrivals have greatly enriched our country. So true. But we now have an obligation to them and to their children to control future immigration as we are following, if you think, previous immigration waves…
To keep immigration levels measured by population share within historical norms. To select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society and their ability to be financially self-sufficient.

As Eric Schmeltzer points out, “1965” is a dogwhistle to the racists. That’s the year, to their horror, that a law established during the height of the eugenics fervor, prior to WWII, was gutted by congress.

In 1965, we passed the Immigration and Nationality Act. That law essentially repealed the crux of a 1920s law called the Emergency Quota Act.

The Emergency Quota Act (and a 1924 bill that slightly amended it) set quotas on immigration that were based on the number of people of a nationality currently in a country. The effect and intent of the law was abundantly clear. America was mostly white and European, and the law was going to keep it that way, by putting low and hard caps on “others,” while opening the doors to more white Europeans.

I cannot emphasize enough how vile the 1924 act was — it was patently, unashamedly, blatantly racist. Rather than admitting new immigrants on the basis of need or ability, it made the primary criterion for limiting immigration the color of their skin and ethnicity of origin. It enshrined the bigotry of a small group of influential, educated white men, in particular a few Harvard-educated Anglo-Saxon elites, into the law of the land. As Gould summarized it in The Mismeasure of Man:

Congressional debates leading to passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 frequently invoked the army data [misleading data from IQ tests]. Eugenicists lobbied not only for limits to immigration, but for changing its character by imposing harsh quotas against nations of inferior stock—a feature of the 1924 act that might never have been implemented, or even considered, without the army data and eugenicist propaganda. In short, southern and eastern Europeans, the Alpine and Mediterranean nations with minimal scores on the army tests, should be kept out. The eugenicists battled and won one of the greatest victories of scientific racism in American history. The first restriction act of 1921 had set yearly quotas at 3 percent of immigrants from any nation then resident in America. The 1924 act, following a barrage of eugenicist propaganda, reset the quotas at 2 percent of people from each nation recorded in the 1890 census. The 1890 figures were used until 1930. Why 1890 and not 1920 since the act was passed in 1924? 1890 marked a watershed in the history of immigration. Southern and eastern Europeans arrived in relatively small numbers before then, but began to predominate thereafter. Cynical, but effective. “America must be kept American,” proclaimed Calvin Coolidge as he signed the bill.

They were cunning. Rather than openly and explicitly shutting down the immigration of swarthy Italians and Greeks and Lebanese, or worst of all, the dusky inhabitants of the Dark Continent by name, which would have been a little too on-the-nose, they used a call to “historical norms” and declared the noble cause of American purity, which everyone knew meant keeping America white. Those brown people, obviously, are not truly American.

That’s what Donald Trump is signing on to now. He is tapping directly into nativist bigotry in a way that’s not obvious to people outside racist circles. These ideas have consequences — dreadful, fatal, corrupting consequences — and we’ve got a media that’s oblivious to what is going on, and a significant sub-population that does understand what he’s saying, and is cheering it on. Take it away again, Steve Gould:

The quotas stood, and slowed immigration from southern and eastern Europe to a trickle. Throughout the 1930s, Jewish refugees, anticipating the holocaust, sought to emigrate, but were not admitted. The legal quotas, and continuing eugenical propaganda, barred them even in years when inflated quotas for western and northern European nations were not filled. Chase (1977) has estimated that the quotas barred up to 6 million southern, central, and eastern Europeans between 1924 and the outbreak of World War II (assuming that immigration had continued at its pre-1924 rate). We know what happened to many who wished to leave but had nowhere to go. The paths to destruction are often indirect, but ideas can be agents as sure as guns and bombs.

The Golden Door is being slammed shut, and the lamp is going dark.

Did they ever correct their opinion?

Just curious — I ran across this article from back in March that rips into Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking for their ignorant comments about philosophy. I’d like to think better of all three of them. Does anyone know if any of them made any responses to their numerous philosophical critics? Is there any sign that they’ve learned from the criticism?