Looking forward to the big meeting

Skepticon is coming on 26 July, and they’ve announced the first few speakers. One is Kavin Senapathy

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Kavin Senapathy is a writer, journalist, and author covering a slew of life science-related stories for outlets like SciShow, Scientific American, Slate, Forbes, Undark, The Daily Beast, and SELF. They are the author of the forthcoming book The Progressive Parent: Harnessing the Power of Science and Social Justice to Raise Awesome Kids (August 2024, Hanover Square/HarperCollins).

Another is Greg Gbur.

Greg Gbur is a Professor of Physics and Optical Science, the author of two popular science books on invisibility and falling cats, and the author of a long-running blog, Skulls in the Stars, about physics, science history, horror fiction and whatever else catches his fancy.

They are both excellent human beings and interesting people. This is going to be a great meeting!

Three cartoons

This first one is blunt and all-too accurate.

The second one is cynical and will reinforce my disappointment in humanity.

The third one is horrible and supports the disappointment I have…and also needs some explanation.

That’s by Michael Ramirez, far-right flaming nutjob and actually talented cartoonist, who is cheering the Supreme Court in the Chevron v. NRDC case, in a decision called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. He thinks it was a good thing, because he’s insane. Loper Bright chopped off the whole idea of an informed government that listened to the evidence and paid attention to experts.

The Supreme Court fundamentally altered the way that our federal government functions on Friday, transferring an almost unimaginable amount of power from the executive branch to the federal judiciary. By a 6–3 vote, the conservative supermajority overruled Chevron v. NRDC, wiping out four decades of precedent that required unelected judges to defer to the expert judgment of federal agencies. The ruling is extraordinary in every way—a massive aggrandizement of judicial power based solely on the majority’s own irritation with existing limits on its authority. After Friday, virtually every decision an agency makes will be subject to a free-floating veto by federal judges with zero expertise or accountability to the people. All at once, SCOTUS has undermined Congress’ ability to enact effective legislation capable of addressing evolving problems and sabotaged the executive branch’s ability to apply those laws to the facts on the ground. It is one of the most far-reaching and disruptive rulings in the history of the court.

This corrupt court is just that bad. I always thought that the Roger Taney court was the gold standard for a bad court that led the USA into self-destruction, thanks to the Dred Scott decision, but the Roberts court is giving ol’ Roger a run for the money…although at least John Roberts hasn’t denied the humanity of a large chunk of the citizenry, yet. You know he’d love to.

As if to illustrate the point that government should pay heed to scientific input, the Court also ruled against the EPA last week, and their opinion made multiple errors of scientific fact.

Justice Gorsuch’s opinion refers five times to “nitrous oxide” (aka laughing gas) rather than the entirely different chemical compound — smog-causing “nitrogen oxides” — actually at issue in the case.

But OK, the Supreme Court will never again be troubled by basic chemistry. Some people think this is a good thing, and they’re the same people who think it’s great that Donald Trump is above the law (who is already trying to use the Supreme Court decision to overturn his 34-count conviction in New York).

Are you ready for the 4th of July?

To celebrate our independence from kings, the Supreme Court has declared the president to be a king. At least, that is, when he’s a Republican.

Sotomayor dissents. She’s one of the 3 patriots left on the court.

We’re going to have to tear this court down someday soon. It is absurd that the supreme arbiter of the law in this land is run by people who are appointed for life, with no ethics regulation at all.

Rural American values

Believe me, they suck. A corporation, Tractor Supply Co., has announced some revisions to their policy.

Going forward, we will ensure our activities and giving tie directly to our business. For instance, this means we will:

  1. No longer submit data to the Human Rights Campaign
  2. Refocus our Team Member Engagement Groups on mentoring, networking and supporting the business
  3. Further focus on rural America priorities including ag education, animal welfare, veteran causes and being a good neighbor and stop sponsoring nonbusiness activities like pride festivals and voting campaigns
  4. Eliminate DEI roles and retire our current DEI goals while still ensuring a respectful environment
  5. Withdraw our carbon emission goals and focus on our land and water conservation efforts

Human rights? Unamerican. Fuck pride, we gotta support our veterans (who are all heterosexual, of course). Why support diversity, there are plenty of straight white men we can hire. Global climate change, we’re not worried that that will affect local land and water.

Short-sighted and stupid and selfish, those are core rural values.

Come back, Dave Futrelle!

He had been talking about this for years at We Hunted the Mammoth, how strange little nazi babies had been complaing about how video game women weren’t sufficiently feminine or pulchritudinous or pornified for their taste, and they’d go on and on about how they’d cracked open their calipers and determined that character facial structures were actually male. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never masturbated to Lara Croft, so those people were telling on themselves, I think.

Today, Stephanie Sterling is covering that beat. The nerdzis (her coining, I like it) are claiming that video game characters have “woke chins,” and think there is a conspiracy to inject obviously trans protagonists into their shoot-em-ups. Because they can tell. By looking at their chins.

I have the reverse problem on Instagram. I’m mainly interested in a few friends and macrophotography, but “The Algorithm” insists on sprinkling my doom scrolling with reels of random short videos of women with pathologically bloated breasts and butts who just stand there in skimpy clothing and jiggle, with comments about how they really like older men. I’m an older man with creaky old bones, and I glance at them and all I can think about is how much their backs must hurt. They aren’t enticing at all. But maybe those women ought to get together with the guys who think their cartoon characters aren’t sexy enough and find true happiness together.

Although…next time one of those bouncy women pop up on my phone, I’ll have to look up at their chins. Maybe they won’t be good enough for the gamer boys.

Weep for Oklahoma

The state of Oklahoma ranks 49th in education, according to one review (there are many such reviews that come up with different values, but none of them place the state higher than near the bottom of the barrel.) The superintendent of the Oklahoma school system, Ryan Walters, is surely aware of their abysmal reputation, and surely wants to make the schools in his state better, right? That’s his job! Walters has taken bold, radical action to fix Oklahoma schools.

Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters issued a directive to all public schools ordering them to incorporate the Bible as an instructional support in the classroom.

Doing so is a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country, Walters said.
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In remarks to the board, Walters went further than his own memo, saying that every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.

If I were teacher in Oklahoma, this is the point where I’d be sending my CV to schools in other states, and be preparing a lesson plan that, if I had to stay in the state for a while, would reveal what a pile of archaic shit the Bible was. That counts as teaching from the Bible, right?

The sad thing is that there are a lot of conservative Republicans who heard Ryan Walters’ plan and clutched their precious Bible and shouted “Hallelujah!” because they’re religious dumbasses, and they would run any teacher who criticized their holy book out of town.

Even sadder: thanks to the Republicans, the rest of the country wants to become Oklahoma.