They’re trying to wear me down

I get email from creationists all the time, and it is so discouraging: there are a few people who manage to pump out so much noise and garbage, and there are a few people willing to engage their nonsense, and I guess I’m one of them. But I can’t possibly keep up! For instance, one obnoxious creationist has sent me a couple of links to his horrible website, Darhiwum, which just goes on and on with bogus misinterpretations at endless length. This particular article first quotes Conservapædia, and then explores the author’s misbegotten thesis, which is…let’s see if you can figure it out.

The cause of evolution does not exist in evolution. Evolution as a cause does not contain a response to the cause that makes it consequent. It does not give an account of itself, why is evolution possible in the first place? It is merely a programmed biological process on an assembly line.

“Evolutionary units must know the “trick” of reproducing, they must have heredity, hereditary variation… The basic problem is that the first evolutionary units could not have evolved in an evolutionary way, because they did not have the necessary properties at that time.” /Evolutionary biologist Eőrs Szathmáry/.

Where did they get this “knack” – they have no idea!

A pre-existing ability cannot be developed afterwards, and if the ability to evolve /reproduction, mutation, variation, natural selection, heredity/ is not there in the first place, the evolutionary process cannot even start. Evolution can only work if all its components are present and working simultaneously. Where do we get these capabilities by which the alleged evolution takes place?

First, I have to get something out of the way, this contemptible habit creationists have of quote-mining scientists. Eőrs Szathmáry is a theoretical biologist who published with John Maynard Smith, wrote articles presenting the mechanisms for evolution, and was never arguing for creationism. This creationist, though, throws out a mishmash of Conservapædia and established scientists to somehow lard his ideas with some trace of authority.

Their article goes on for thousands of words, but their central stupid idea is that evolution needed to evolve a specific mechanism for mutation, but evolution cannot proceed without mutation. Error is apparently intentional and designed; error is the “capability” that needs to be put in place by design.

I tried to read this bozo’s work with an open mind, but as it sank in what he was trying to argue, I realized that he was just stupid and not worth the effort.

Better send in the riot squad

Tom Cotton has a plan to deal with those rioting students at Columbia.

The nascent pogroms at Columbia have to stop TODAY, before our Jewish brethren sit for Passover Seder tonight. If Eric Adams won’t sen the NYPD and Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to take charge and break up these mobs.

The “mob” of “Jewish brethren” holding Seder.

Jewish students celebrating Passover with the protesters.

Has anyone else noticed what a colossal ass Tom Cotton is?

TV killed journalism in America

I’m glad Jon Stewart is around to point out the absurdity of our news media.

Yes. Following Donald Trump’s car on his commute to the court is not news. Reporting breathlessly on the courtroom artist’s rendering of the scene is not news. Endlessly describing what Trump, a man who hasn’t changed his wardrobe in decades, looks like is not news. Reporting on the ongoing minutiae of court procedure is not news. It’s all boring stuff that could be summarized in 5 minutes at the end of the day…and on days when nothing dramatic happens (that is, most of them), it’s overkill.

I did not care for the short segment near the end when Jessica Williams complains that Stewart is being a killjoy. Just let the press have “fun,” she says, it’s entertainment. The consequences of this trial may be important. It’s a serious matter. And our bored journalists are stretching out the thin daily story into a tedious, superficial gloss on the substance of the trial. Who needs to consider corruption when can instead talk about whether Trump is “glowering” or “pouting” while he’s sitting there?

Behold, our new king

These little guys, wolf spiders of the genus Pardosa, are everywhere right now. Mary brought this one home from work because apparently she thinks we don’t have enough of them here.

No worries, it scurried away shortly after I took this photo, and now owns our living room.

Just another spring day on campus

Here is a typical gathering of UMM students, honoring the god of electricity.

UMN Morris is a clean energy leader and destination. We are carbon neutral in electricity. UMN Morris produces more clean electricity per student of any campus in the United States.
-100% carbon neutral electric status achieved in 2020
-1,000,000 lbs + of organic waste diverted from landfills by campus and community
composting program
-10 Million kWh electricity produced each year by two wind turbines
-Gold STAR rating (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher
Education)

I am stumped by the logistics

I honestly tried to give this Netflix movie, Rebel Moon: the Scargiver, a chance. I made it about halfway before giving up in boredom.

It’s a sci-fi fantasy story about a rag-tag group of deadly warriors defeating an empire…prosaic enough so far. But what totally killed it for me, besides the deadly dull characters and ridiculous stakes, was the logistics. There is the gigantic, ultra-powerful galactic empire, you see, and the local governor sends this gigantic starship crewed entirely by psycho Nazis, to collect…grain. That’s the macguffin here, bags of grain. This grain is the output of a small village of maybe 30 vaguely North European farmers who harvest it over the course of less than a week, so we’re not even talking about megatonnes of vital foodstuff to feed a planet or two. Nope, just a bunch of sacks of grain that the farmers can pile into a single building in their village.

An immense starship appears, so large that it looms over the village while hanging in low orbit, and then the stupid slow-mo fighting with swords and clubs and farm implements and a few rifles against a robotic army of multi-barreled tanks and armies of space nazis and I see from the synopses that the peasants win.

None of this makes any sense, but there are two movies in this series and a third threatened. There are also going to be “director’s cut” versions of this thing released, as if it deserves further attention. This is garbage of Hugo Gernsback quality, illiterate hackery. How does Zack Snyder get away with it?

You know, the first thing a good science fiction movie should have is a competent, compelling writer generating the ideas behind its premise and execution. I guess since Star Wars got away with neglecting that component, though, nobody thinks it’s necessary any more.

Mondays are for disillusionment

Me, right now

I am all caught up on my grading — until Friday, when it starts all over again — so I could have used some happy, wholesome news. Instead, I got this:

Mr Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who previously spent time in prison, ran several chat groups for monkey torture enthusiasts from around the world on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

The groups were used to share ideas for custom-made torture videos, such as setting live monkeys on fire, injuring them with tools and even putting one in a blender.

The ideas were then sent, along with payments, to video-makers in Indonesia who carried them out, sometimes killing the baby long-tailed macaque monkeys in the process.

I mentioned this horrible monkey torture ring before. Does it count as good news that several people are going to prison over this activity, or is it bad news that such horrors exist at all? This is a better question than whether the stupid cup is half empty or half full — should we regard the existence of monkey torturers as an indictment of humanity, or the existence of anti-torture laws as an example of humanity’s virtues? I can go either way.

Unfortunately, then I read about 764, the torture ring that’s all about kids torturing kids. We should probably all just get off the internet.

That’s my boy

My son, Major Conlann A. Myers, has been published in Army Communicator, with a short history and current status of the 51st Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced (ESB-E) (his unit) on page 35, if you’re interested. I know I am. This is the best we get, though – vague statements about the broad general area of deployment, next to nothing about timing.

The 51st ESB-E is postured to deploy to the United States Central Command area of operations (AoR) in 2024 as the first full ESB-E, taking over a mission that has previously been filled from ESBs and providing new capabilities to the area of responsibility. The mission will provide the Army the opportunity to improve the tactical network supporting U.S. forces in the AoR with the newest equipment and prove out the ability of the ESB-E concept to fully replace existing ESBs.

We know it’s soon and it’s the Middle East, and we’ll be worrying the whole time.

The Columbia administration is totally out of touch with academic principles

If I lived a good bit further east, I’d be here this afternoon:

There have been several days of peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and Barnard College, which is not surprising. That’s what students should do; if other students want to rally for Israel, that’s fine, too. Unfortunately, the administration does not understand free speech at all, adopting the right-wing definition that says you are only allowed to freely agree with them.

They turned the police loose on the students. Protest leaders were summarily dismissed from the university, and evicted from housing, given minutes to clear out and get out.

They attempted to shut down the campus radio station. They prohibited students from putting posters on their dorm room doors. They colluded with conservatives to silence any protests.

The students sat on the ground and sang as police in riot gear approached them. Eventually, more than 100 of them would be arrested; their tents, protest signs and Palestinian flags were gathered into trash bags by the police and thrown away. One video showed officers and university maintenance workers destroying food that had been donated to the encampment, making sure it would be inedible. According to student journalists reporting from WKCR, Columbia University’s student radio station, one arrested student protester asked the police to be allowed to go to their dorm to collect medication and was denied; as a result, they went into shock. The arrested students were charged with “trespassing” on the campus that they are charged more than $60,000 a year to attend.

The day before her administration asked the New York police department to storm their campus and arrest their students, Minouche Shafik, the Columbia University president, testified before Congress, saying that she wanted her university to be a safe and welcoming environment for everyone. But Shafik, who was called to testify after missing a hearing last year where the presidents of Penn and Harvard were each grilled on their insufficient hostility to pro-Palestinian students, appeared eager to please the Republican-controlled committee. The Penn and Harvard presidents who had testified each lost their jobs soon thereafter; Shafik clearly entered the hearing room determined to keep her own.

A “safe and welcoming environment,” hah. Shafik and others made a knee-jerk over-reaction to the existence of opinions that their moneyed conservative interests disliked, and suddenly they’re the Gestapo. Students have since occupied one of the lawns at the university with tents and banners flying, and you can guess how the administration is reacting.

In yet another sign of the ongoing division between students and faculty on one side, and administrators on the other, the Barnard and Columbia faculty members of the American Association of University Professors have loudly deplored the actions of the administration.

Joint Statement by the American Association of University Professors,

Barnard and Columbia Chapters

April 19, 2024

The American Association of University Professors has defined two central pillars of higher education in America: academic freedom and shared governance: the freedom to teach and do research without interference from entities external to the profession; and the “inescapable interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, students.” In the last three days, Columbia University President Shafik and her administration have seriously violated both. We are shocked at her failure to mount any defense of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs. She has demonstrated flagrant disregard of shared governance in her acceptance of partisan charges that anti-war demonstrators are violent and antisemitic and in her unilateral and wildly disproportionate punishment of peacefully protesting students.

President Shafik’s testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee on April 17 has profoundly disturbed us. In the face of slanderous assaults on Columbia faculty and students and of gross interference in academic practices by Congressional inquisitors, President Shafik not only did not object—she capitulated to their demands. Academic freedom was formulated from its very beginning to safeguard faculty from political or other non-academic sources of intrusion. President Shafik, the co-chairs of the Board of Trustees, and the former Dean of the Law School allowed this freedom for Columbia faculty to be publicly shredded. They effectively pledged, on the Congressional record, to end academic freedom at Columbia.

President Shafik’s decision on April 18 to call upon the New York Police Department to arrest over one hundred students for engaging in a peaceful protest is a grotesque violation of norms of shared governance. Section 444 of University Statutes, put in place after the police attacks of 1968, requires “consultation” with the University Senate executive committee before anything so drastic as yesterday’s attack would be permitted. President Shafik’s administration did not consult; they informed the committee of its decision. “The Executive Committee did not approve the presence of NYPD on campus,” said the Executive Committee Chair, adding that the Committee came to their decision “unequivocally.” President Shafik’s decision to invite the NYPD to campus was thus undertaken unilaterally, disregarding the very idea of shared governance.

In Wednesday’s hearing, President Shafik repeatedly claimed that she was inaugurating a new era at Columbia. Her actions thus far suggest that this era will be one of repressed speech, political restrictions on academic inquiry, and punitive discipline against the University’s own students and faculty. As the protesters’ chant rightly states, “Protest is democracy; this is a travesty!” AAUP Barnard and Columbia pledge continued support for our students’ right to protest and to speak freely, and for our colleagues’ right to teach and to write freely within their domains of expertise. We have lost confidence in our president and administration, and we pledge to fight to reclaim our university.

The administration is selling out the university and betraying faculty and students.

“It’s the most appalling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor who was on the school’s lawn when the police entered. “The students were extraordinary. Chanting. Crying. It felt like a total violation of everything an academic institution is supposed to be.” She said the arrests were political theater aimed at appeasing Congress without concern that students were collateral damage.

“Palestine was always going to be the issue that broke this university,” said Ry Spada, 24, a history major who is Jewish and was part of the pro-Palestinian protest Thursday night, identifying as non-Zionist. “This year and this topic.”

James Applegate, an astronomy professor who is part of the executive committee of the Columbia University Senate, said he is more concerned about what happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the ongoing loss of academic freedom and the culture on campus than he is about police making peaceful arrests of student protesters.

I don’t even understand that last comment. Students are being arrested, dismissed, and evicted — it’s important to stand on principle, but these are young people who are being actively harmed. I stand with the students and a liberated Palestine. This isn’t stopping, and shame on any college professor who supports the tyranny of Columbia University and Barnard College.