Void, abyss, both have their virtues

I know it’s MLK day, and that this is a day off for my university, and it’s also the day of the meaningless Republican caucuses in Iowa (bugger Iowa, I don’t care what that state does,) but it’s also the day before classes resume. That means I must now stop slacking. I have to focus, get my act together, and go in to work and get prepared for another long semester. How do I feel about that?

Can I do both, screaming and staring?

This semester is also going to be a huge change. I’m not teaching any labs at all, which feels a bit strange, and I also have only one hour of classroom time every day, at precisely 1:00. That’s it! You might be thinking that sounds pretty slack, too, except that two of my classes are writing classes, which entail a massive amount of grading, and the third, my eco-devo class, is going to involve a heck of a lot of reading. I promise, I won’t be sleeping in until noon and closing up shop and going home mid-afternoon. I’ve got the first 3 weeks queued up and ready to fire into the brains of the students, while I try to get ready for the next few weeks.

I’m thinking I should get both models. I can spend the first half of the term staring into the void, but I’m sure I’ll be screaming in the last half.

Why is a high government official fantasizing about shooting people?

Yeah, you. He wants to shoot you.

Because he’s a Republican.

Republicans are religious zealots who want to expand the power of government to control your personal private life…and create a white nationalist fascist state. Greg Abbot, the Texas governor, dreams of killing people of the wrong color and wrong ideology.

Appearing on The Dana Show last week, Abbott declared: “We are using every tool that can be used from building a border wall to building these border barriers, to passing this law that I signed that led to another lawsuit by the Biden administration where I signed a law making it illegal for somebody to enter Texas from another country…. The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

Oh, dear. He spoke the quiet part out loud.

The plague resumes in 4 days

I’ve been at home, rarely stepping out, other than to visit an empty university and a lab populated entirely and exclusively by spiders. And I like it that way! Alas, it all changes on Tuesday, when the students return and I have to mingle with them 5 days a week. I have my masks, and I’ve been thoroughly vaccinated, but I’m also aware that there are plague demons among us. People like Joseph Ladapo, surgeon general of Florida, and accomplice to the fast-fading fascist, Ron DeSantis.

It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.

That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.

This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”

He’s basing this sweeping dismissal on ONE (1) swiftly debunked paper by an anti-vax crank.

It’s not just COVID, though. I’m concerned about that as I prepare to share an atmosphere with students again, but also because we’ve got idiots like Ladapo everywhere who are disrupting basic public health with their absurd ideas.

Then there’s the public health context: As COVID infections have been surging coast to coast, advisories from public health authorities to resume masking and take other protective measures, such as making sure you’re up to date on vaccinations, are almost invisible.

Even more worrisome, the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases may be rising. As many as nine cases of measles have been reported in Philadelphia, some associated with an infection started at a daycare center with a family that violated quarantine rules.

Among the victims, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, are “an infant who was too young to get vaccinated, an unvaccinated older child and the older child’s unvaccinated parent.”

Nine cases may not sound like a lot — 41 were reported nationwide in 2023 — but they could be a harbinger of worse to come, in clusters in which anti-vaccine propaganda has taken hold.

The “invisible” aspect of public health advisories is notable — my university used to have a big bold link on the main web page that pointed to the status of the pandemic on campus, with recommendations for protecting oneself. It’s gone. You have to dig to find any updates on COVID. I guess someone thinks COVID-19 is over.

And then, undermining public confidence in such basic principles of good preventive medicine, such as vaccines and hygiene, as Ladapo is doing, is going to do long-lasting harm. I don’t want to die of COVID, but I also don’t want to die of polio, or measles, or the bubonic plague, or some exotic new disease that springs up in the rotting flesh of some Republican ignoramus. Ladapo and all of these conservative know-nothings are making that more probable.

How do these morons get any power at all in government, I’d like to know.

Code 415

“Ma’am, is that your husband in the sack of kitchen scraps and half-digested body parts?”

Not a happy morning — that Steatoda borealis I paired up earlier is no longer a pair. I guess she got a hungry.

Well, this is a bother. That was my last adult male — I’ve got about two dozen juvenies growing up in the incubator — and this has been a chronic problem. Every winter, all the spiders start eating less, lose all interest in sex, and stop laying eggs, despite my efforts at fooling them with temperature and a July-like light schedule. Last summer I’d come in an find fresh egg sacs every day; this winter, they dry up and even start dying.
I guess this just means I really have to do the bulk of my research in the summer…or maybe I’ll have to spend the winter trying to figure out how wild spiders survive the cold.

I wasn’t warned today

Apparently, all the students, faculty, and staff were warned to stay away from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus this morning. I didn’t hear about it until all the danger had passed. Some fool named Joseph Rongstad threatened to go on a rampage and start killing students.

The notice did not offer any specifics about the threat or how it was communicated, but Olson told the Star Tribune that the suspect went on an hours long threat-filled rant on his landscape company’s Facebook page. Some of the postings included a specific family as an intended target.

“Here we go AMERICA,” the last of his many postings read. “I am heading out … to the U of M Minneapolis mn to start killing kids. … if I can’t get the USA military to [come] talk to me face to face then I’m going for it to try defend your freedom America. … I may have been played … on this brain reading technology but today I find out for sure.”

The posting then warned, “IM COMING FOR YA KIDS AND ITS GOING TO GET BLOODY.”

A previous posting from the man also made a threat against Iranian students, saying, “If this government don’t have the total lock down of ALL university’s of Minnesota by this morning sun up watch out PARENTS … Kids will die for real amongst them u of m students.”

Other postings from the man made explicit threats to Sheriff Olson, and Chippewa County judges Thomas Van Hon and Keith Helgeson. In 2016, Van Hon ordered the man civilly committed for six months as mentally ill and chemically dependent.

What I find a bit irritating about this is that the was in Watson, MN which is about an hour away from Morris, while the Twin Cities campus is almost 3 hours away, and we didn’t get an email notification until after Rongstad was confined and we were all out of danger. He did specifically mention the Minneapolis branch, but also threatened “ALL university’s of Minnesota” and we were the closest potential target. We got notified well after the SWAT teams had shut down the town of Watson for this ranting kook.

I’m just saying it would be nice if we all got the warning, not just the big city campus.

MBAs ruin everything

I have no confidence in an industry that allows this to happen

I grew up sucking at the teat of the Boeing company — like most people living in the Seattle area. So I pay attention when Boeing makes the news in a bad and terrible way, since there was a time when that would have been catastrophic for my family, would probably mean we’d have to move to a smaller, more run-down house, and I wouldn’t be getting any dentistry done for a while. That was the reality of living in a company town. It’s weird to think we’d be happy when Boeing sold a couple of more planes, which would be front page news in the paper.

I felt a faint frisson when I heard about the door panel blowing out on a 737 in flight, and it was peculiar because my first thought wasn’t about the terrified passengers, which would have been more appropriate, but…uh-oh, is my family back in Seattle going to feel the consequences? Boeing has made a lot of bad decisions in the decades since I moved away, and the worst has been the shift from putting the engineers first and at the top of the decision tree and instead promoting all the suits, the MBAs who don’t give a fuck about these machines except as a way to squeeze more money out of the customers. It’s profit uber alles.

A faulty course change pretty well describes Boeing, which went through a restructuring during the 1990s from an “association of engineers” to a firm run by Wall Street shareholders. This catastrophic path has led to another systemic crisis for one of the world’s two major commercial aviation companies, underscoring the deterioration of Boeing’s product quality by financialization, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.

Yep, that’s about it. I’ve known a few engineers in my time, and they’re a bunch of persnickety, demanding people who would have cut a suit dead if they dared to suggest cutting corners on a basic safety issue to save a few bucks. They can be pretty obnoxious that way, daring to rebut such plans with math and analyses and outrage at the temerity of some damn business guy daring to tell them how to make a hunk of metal fly better.

Let’s also blame the airlines. They’re not about safety or even reliable transportation — I’ve had so many bad experiences with airlines that I’m not going to fly unless the situation is pretty dire. Last summer I had scheduled a flight to a science conference, and instead of getting to Syracuse, I spent two days sitting in an airport until they finally just canceled the whole trip beneath me…and offered me a $300 travel voucher to repeat the same bad experience with the same goddamn airline.

After subjecting their passengers to a horrific terror-ride on their improperly maintained airplane, Alaska Airlines offer their traumatized customers a refund and $1500. $1500! Would you take a $1500 offer to fly on a plane that was going to blow out midflight?

I guess in the future I’ll (1) simply not fly anywhere, or (2) if I’m faced with essential travel, book on Airbus, or (3) take a train, if possible, which it often isn’t in America. I’m suddenly sympathizing with Richard Lewinton, who was infamous for refusing to fly. I think it wasn’t because he was a scaredy-cat, but because the state of air travel in this country is deplorable.

I’m blaming capitalism.

Oh no! Our atheist origin myth has been obliterated!

Paleoconservatives are such an odd and scary group. They tend to be delusional, they’re often (but not necessarily Catholic), and they use lots of old, tired, dead arguments, so they aren’t even very entertaining. They also aren’t very stable. I was laughing at arguments from a group calling itself “Intellectual Takeout” years ago, but they’re gone now; they got absorbed by a right-wing think-tank called the Rockford Institute, which also splintered to form the Howard Center for Family, Religion (you can guess what they’re about), which has renamed itself the Charlemagne Institute. They were big supporters of Pat Buchanan, which should help focus their goals in your mind, because they sure are hard to track, they’re so busy covering their trails with new names and new organizations.

Anyway, they publish online something called Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. They’re probably not worth following unless you’re the SPLC and are tracking neo-Confederates or are just a connoisseur of stupid.

I’m the latter. How could I resist an article titled A Stand-Up Comic Stands Up for God: Evan Sayet Obliterates the Atheist Origin Myth, which is purportedly a review of the book illustrated on the right? The review starts thusly:

To be on the left is to be humorless. This makes sense when you consider how the left views the world as a perpetual occasion for an oppression fest, where the clock is ticking on their quest to free all the world’s intersectional victims before the climate apocalypse kills everyone. Sure, in line with their Manichean, comic-book ideology, they take an adolescent delight in hypocritically bullying everyone who dissents from their disordered views, and they equally detest and fear those opponents who give back in return to them more than they get. This is especially so if the opponent uses humor to buttress the case for dissent with ridicule.

I do appreciate the irony of a criticism that uses “Manichean” as an insult while simultaneously splitting the world into Left and Right and characterizing the entirety of the Left as a humorless monoculture. I was going to point out that a lot of great comedians, like George Carlin and Janeane Garofolo and Sarah Silverman and David Cross, etc. etc. etc., are godless liberals, while the conservatives limp along with the likes of Greg Gutfeld and Steven Crowder and Dennis Miller, etc. etc. etc., but then I realized that no one from the Charlemagne Institute would find George Carlin funny at all, so that argument would be pointless. Humor is a matter of personal taste.

But sure, open your review by levying baseless accusations at people you don’t like. It’ll rally the troops on your side.

Then we get to the meat of the review.

It is why the left loathes and fears people like Evan Sayet.

Who? Never heard of him.

It is with good reason. Consider his remarks about his latest book, Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, and Horny Aliens from Outer Space: The Patently Absurd Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth: “Trying to litigate against atheism is like trying to litigate against the Emperor’s clothes; atheism needs to not just be disproved but ridiculed for the patent absurdity that it is.”

Uh-oh. The book title gives the game away: Evan Sayet is an anti-evolutionist. Like the reviewer, he is going to mischaracterize the thing he doesn’t like, in this case science, and presumably he’s going to do it with jokes, because right-wing creationists are far funnier than left wing bullies who are competing in the oppression olympics, obviously. I hope the book is funny, although the title isn’t, and Sayet’s bona fides aren’t exactly promising.

A stand-up comic who has written for television shows such as Politically Incorrect w/Bill Maher,

A very bad sign, that.

Evan Sayet has tested and proven his mettle as a political observer and activist. Behind the scenes, Sayet has counseled and penned speeches for presidential candidates and, eventually, a president. Further, risking his livelihood in the leftist-controlled entertainment industry, Sayet has courageously and continually expressed his trenchant insights on television and with the written word. He has not shied away from rich targets for his pointed wit, no matter how powerful.

Wait wait wait — I thought it was lefties who were involved in an oppression fest, but now we’re told that Evan Sayet has been oppressed by a leftist-controlled entertainment industry? And simultaneously he has been counseling a president (I can guess which one)? It must be Schrodinger’s Oppressor. He’s everywhere on all sides all at once.

So what’s his argument?

Sayet refuses to let the atheists off the intellectual hook, even skewering them with science to salt the wound. Starting with teleological arguments of Intelligent Design and “Fine-Tuning,” and, ultimately, in his own inimitable fashion moving on to St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Five Ways” (Quinque Viae from the Summa Theologiae): (1) argument from motion, (2) argument from efficient cause, (3) argument from necessary being, (4) argument from gradations of goodness, and (5) argument from design. Sayet employs all of these methods and more to demonstrate the existence of God.

Great. As is typical, a conservative site considers the philosophical arguments of a 13th century theologian to be definitive. We’ve been soaking in that nonsense for eight centuries, and it’s been unpersuasive to everyone other than shallow poseurs.

(1) The unmoved mover could be a physical agent, a singularity or Big Bang, not your peculiar and specific god-thing. We don’t need to propose the Unmoved Mover was any kind of god at all.

(2) Likewise, the first cause could have been a hiccup in the firmament, a twitch in the fabric of space-time, and invoking a sentient, humanoid entity is superfluous.

(3) Again, the problem is that you think you know who the ‘necessary being’ was, and how its mind worked (if it even had one), and its intent. It could have been a cosmic fart, for all any of us know.

(4) “Goodness” is a matter of human perception. It is not a universal force. The universe, in general, seems to be a pretty nasty place, so why you would think there must be a Supreme Good Guy is a mystery.

(5) The argument from design boils down to pointing at complicated things you don’t understand and announcing that someone smarter than you must have made it. This is trivially refuted by revealing that dumb processes can make some pretty complex things.

None of those arguments demonstrate the existence of God, a concept, I note, they don’t bother to define, probably because they just assume that God is the body of superstitious theological assumptions they already believe. Like I said, these are just old, tired, dead arguments that we’ve heard time and again; Sayet is incredibly unoriginal and uninteresting.

Thus, does Sayet proceed to plumb the shallow depths of militant atheists’ theological Sitz bath, and he drowns them with the proofs for God’s existence.

Whoa, I started reading this article warned that I was going to be obliterated, and we instead end up relaxing in a Sitz bath? How nice. It’s kind of hard to drown in a Sitz bath, you know. I suppose it could be done if you contort yourself and use it improperly, but I’ll leave the twisty delusional distortions to the Christians.

I get email

From Jerry Coyne fans!

I am appalled at the ad hominem attacks which you – as a scientist – seem willing to deliver against people like Prof Jerry Coyne et al.

No, no, no. An ad hominem attack would be something like “Coyne’s cowboy boot fetish is stupid, therefore his ideas about trans people are wrong.” Just pointing out that his ideas about transgender biology are stupid is not an ad hominem.

This is just an annoyance. A lot of my hatemail flings around the “ad hominem” accusation without understanding it.

Having read pretty much all of Coyne’s comments on this issue it is quite apparent that he is not a transphobe as you falsely claim.

As the definition of a phobia is ‘an irrational fear’ this means that I too am not transphobic.

OK, this is another common trope: literal dictionary translation of a term to weasel out from under it. That’s not how it works. A transphobe is someone who opposes allowing trans people rights and opportunities, who has an irrational contempt to justify their biases.

If you’re not afraid, then why oppose them at all? I mean, I would concede that I am “Republicanphobic,” because I am afraid of what they’re doing to our country, but not transphobic, because even if I thought they were wrong (I don’t), I’m not at all concerned about letting them participate in sports or write books or talk to people about their experiences. Leave them alone!

So perfect I had to use it:

Why on earth would you then presuppose that JK Rowling, Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock, Richard Dawkins et al are ‘transphobic’ – particularly as all of them have expressed supportive views towards the trans community.

Oh, wow. Rattle off the names of some of the most notorious transphobes in the public sphere, and then think it excuses you and Coyne because you’re just like them. OK, you win, you’re no more transphobic than Rowling & Joyce & Stock & Dawkins. Great defense.

Utter nonsense on your part.

However, what Coyne and I share in common is in the defence of biological women, and in their right to retain women-only spaces and sports etc, and which should not be invaded by individuals who possess male genitalia and male musculature, but who wish to be regarded as women.

Perhaps you need to take a step back and consider the rights of (biological) women who have fought against male oppression for centuries?

Great. Now we get the “biological women” canard. We’re all biological, you know, we’re all people. All these traits people use to put people into two categories exhibit a wide range of overlapping variation. The one reason Coyne fans have retreated to basing their arguments on gametes is because there, at least, they can find one criterion that is binary…never mind that all the other features are not, and can contradict the evidence from gametes. Get used to it — humans are complicated and don’t fit into just two bins.

I do wonder if your personal attacks represent the weakness of your position on this issue?
They certainly represent a failure on your part to adhere to Science.

Back in the day men who wished to dress as women regarded themselves as being cross-dressers, or transvestites. What they never claimed to be was a ‘woman.’

I consider extreme reductionism — such as claiming that human identity can be reduced to two simple categories — to be a failure of science. Simplistic explanations make me skeptical.

Has it occurred to you that unsubstantiated, unscientific views like yours are actually doing harm to the cause of trans people, a group of our fellow humans who no doubt you would want to claim you support?

You haven’t demonstrated that my views are unsubstantiated or unscientific. The basis for your disagreement is that you don’t like my position because it contradicts your superficial biases.

Also, I kind of suspect that denying their existence does more harm to the cause of trans people.

As a result, the extreme right and extreme left will no doubt welcome you into their nasty little cliques with open arms…..

Both sides! The correct answer is in the middle!

This is just like slapping down creationists.

An old antique

This is a watch I inherited from my late grandfather. I believe it was from the 1940s or thereabouts — he served in the Army Corps of Engineers in WWII, and then worked as a highway engineer in Washington state.

The watchglass is missing, and a couple of hands have broken off. The mechanism is still kind of functional, in that when I wind it up it ticks away.

I post this on the off chance that anyone might know anything about it. It has sentimental meaning (I wore it when I got married!), and I’d also be interested in knowing where to take it for repair.

Also, it’s pretty and shiny.

All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets

How does magnet fishing work?

You can always trust the Republican candidate to be wrong on all matters of science. Now Trump is opining on magnets. It’s all part of his long history of complaining about magnetic elevators and electronic catapults on aircraft carriers, and it’s just plain stupid.

This guy is the leading Republican candidate. He’s an idiot.