She was asking for it

A professor in Indiana has been removed from her class after a student complained.

A lecturer in the Indiana University School of Social Work has been removed from teaching one of her classes — “Diversity, Human Rights, and Social Justice” — while the university investigates a complaint by a student against material she presented.

Whoa. The class was titled “Diversity, Human Rights, and Social Justice”? That’s just asking for it. MAGA hates all three of those things. They want uniformity, not diversity. Human rights are a thing to be trampled. Social injustice is what they favor.

Jessica Adams joined the school as a lecturer last year. She spoke at a press conference with campus activist groups Friday against what she sees as an unfair process and accusation.

“I as an instructor should have the ability to bring those ideas into my class,” Adams said.

She said a student submitted the complaint to the office of U.S. Senator Jim Banks over a graphic she used in her class. Adams said Banks’ office then contacted her dean.

I’m trying to see this event from the perspective of the student. They signed up for a course titled “Diversity, Human Rights, and Social Justice” — they had to know what they were in for. Did they think it was going to be a course bashing all those things? No. They were looking for something to complain about.

And they complained to their senator? Jesus. And then the senator tried to dictate what should be taught? Absolutely nuts.

Here’s the graphic that annoyed the student and senator.

What’s the objection? What would offend a MAGA? Be specific. Explain why you would disagree that one of those phrases is fundamentally racist, or supporting white supremacy. That’s the kind of question I would ask of the class, if I were teaching a sociology course (I’m not, fortunately, since I don’t have the expertise).

I am preparing a unit on the misuse of genetics by racists for my spring genetics course. I hope my students don’t report me to Amy Klobuchar or Tina Smith.

What’s up with 3I/ATLAS now?

There’s nothing new. It’s a big space rock passing through empty space, not even coming close to us or interacting in any significant way with anything in the solar system.

That’s all the 3I/ATLAS news. Bye!

Oh, but wait, we can rely on Avi Loeb to invent news. Apparently, some “experts” are alarmed!

3I/ATLAS Alarms Experts—NASA, Avi Loeb, Nostradamus and Baba Vanga Clash Over Earth’s Fate

I am amused that the A-team for studying an astronomical body is Avi Loeb, Nostradamus, and Baba Vanga (a Bulgarian psychic). Do not downplay the importance of AI in interpreting images of the body. Here’s a rather speculative reconstruction of 3I/ATLAS.

Yeah, right.

Loeb restrained himself and did not post that image. Instead, he posted an picture of an antimatter-propelled spaceship.

For a little sanity, let’s see what real scientists think of that idea.

Mainstream scientists [Loeb is not one] have met the claim with skepticism. Dr. Samantha Lawler, an astrophysicist at the University of Regina, told EarthSky: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence presented is absolutely not extraordinary.” NASA officials, cited by The Guardian, said 3I/ATLAS “behaves like a natural comet in all observable ways.” Astronomers emphasize that non-gravitational acceleration is typical in icy bodies when sublimating gases create jets that push them slightly off course.

Cosmologists have also dismissed the antimatter theory as inconsistent with known cosmic distributions. Studies published on arXiv indicate that if antimatter concentrations of that scale existed, they would produce gamma-ray backgrounds already detectable by instruments such as Fermi. Loeb himself acknowledged the contradiction, writing that large antimatter bodies “should have been destroyed soon after the Big Bang.”

Loeb is a crackpot, and a high-ranking member of the Harvard faculty. What does that say about Harvard?

I love a good NYT takedown

Zohran Mamdani graduated from a small (but wealthy) liberal arts school, Bowdoin College, with a degree in Africana Studies. It’s a good and reputable degree from a reputable college, so that’s nothing to complain about, but the NY Times sent a reporter to talk to professors at Bowdoin, transparently with the intent to find dirt on Mamdani’s education.

The article has been published, and as expected, it’s an exercise in slimy innuendo that tries to indict the whole educational system as leftist political propaganda. You can expect nothing else from the NY Times. Here’s the summary of what the article said.

Mr. Mamdani graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies. And his experience there—readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus—is emblematic of the highly charged debate over what is taught in American universities.

Critics say the growth of these programs, which aim to teach about historical events from the perspective of marginalized and oppressed groups, has turned colleges into feckless workshops for leftist political orthodoxy.

Bleh. I’m not linking to the NYT, because, as I’ve been saying for over 20 years on this blog, they’re a disgrace, a he-said-she-said crapshow that advances the conservative cause with weasely evasiveness. Somehow this is the most prestigious news source in the country, probably because billionaires back it.

Far more interesting is this delightful essay in which one of Mamdani’s former professors comments on the NYT hatchet job.

“Critics say” is the tell, and does it ever go on telling. First, note that this criticism (“Majors like Africana studies, or any of its siblings such as women’s studies, these critics charge, promote a worldview that sees little to admire in American history. Some disparagingly call the entire field ‘grievance studies’”) gives to the article the whole of its contrapuntal structure of argument: these scholars and teachers say Mr. Mamdani’s education is substantial, yet critics say something else. But then note as well that this counter-position is substantiated, in its length and breadth, by: J. D. Vance and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the former a man whose fervid anti-intellectualism needs no introduction, the latter a conservative 501(c)3 flush with money from the Olin, Bradly, and Castle Rock Foundations, and more lately affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and its delirious “Project 2025” document. The author refers to the group as “conservative-leaning,” which, ok. I guess you could say Latvia was a little antisemitic-leaning during the war.

Oh man, that “critics say” phrase is infuriating. What critics? Name them. Explain why these anonymous critics are making these accusations. It ought to be standard journalistic practice that you back up claims with details, rather than vaguely waving in the direction of the opposition while leaving them unscrutinized.

When writing to a journalist friend, I just said that it’s a bit unravelling, right now, to be on the receiving end of this kind of belated real-time education in elite metabolization. Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter. Some people say this; however, others say this. It’s so offhand you can think you’re gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised.

That’s a perfect description of the NYT’s MO.

And nothing was accomplished

We’ve been dealing with this ridiculous government shutdown, which was initiated because the Republican budget was promoting major cuts in health care support, among other billionaire favorites. If done properly, the purpose of such a shutdown would be to get concessions from the opposing party. Now the Democrats are talking about caving to the opposition.

The Senate on Sunday made significant progress towards ending the longest US government shutdown in history, narrowly advancing a compromise bill to reauthorize funding and undo the layoffs of some employees.

But the measure, which resulted from days of talks between a handful of Democratic and Republican senators, leaves out the healthcare subsidies that Democrats had demanded for weeks. Most Democratic senators rejected it, as did many of the party’s lawmakers in the House of Representatives, which will have to vote to approve it before the government can reopen.

“This healthcare crisis is so severe, so urgent, so devastating for families back home, that I cannot in good faith support this [resolution] that fails to address the healthcare crisis,” said Democratic Senator majority leader Chuck Schumer.

I hate having to agree with Chuck Schumer, but he’s right: this is just a surrender.

It wasn’t the whole Democratic party that gave up, but eight chickenshit Democrats who joined forces with the Republicans to try to endorse a “compromise” bill. These are the people who must be voted against in the future.

From top left: Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Jacky Rosen, John Fetterman and Catherine Cortez Masto. From bottom left: Democratic Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan and Tim Kaine, with independent Sen. Angus King.

I am not surprised to see Fetterman in there — he disappointed me long ago. But hey, Tim Kaine was a Democratic vice-presidential candidate once upon a time, with Hillary Clinton. Maybe I should have mistrusted him even more.

If this compromise bill goes through, brace yourself for a big jump in the cost of health care.

The compromise does not resolved the issue of the Affordable Care Act premiums, which one study forecast would jump by an average of 26% if the tax credits were allowed to expire.

Keep in mind that that 26% goes straight from your pocket into the coffers of insurance companies, because of the fucked up way health care is managed in this country, with unnecessary middlemen inserted into the process.

Please improve the biology of “Predator” movies

My favorite alien organism in Predator Badlands was the brachiating carnivore with trilateral symmetry. That was neat.

I also like the novel communal (?) branch like thing that would strike like an army of snakes. Cool.

There was a grazer with a weird set of mouthparts that I didn’t get a good look at, unfortunately, but it had to be good because they were adapted to feed on razor-sharp fields of leaves. Show more next time.

I was mildly disappointed with the main big bad monster, which was just kind of ape-like, and had unrealistic powers of regeneration. I want to see the energetic breakdown of the metabolic costs of rebuilding whole body parts in seconds — that’s pure fantasy. Not going to happen.

Also, and this was a problem with the Avatar movies, too, if you’re going to get creative with strange background animals, do think in evolutionary terms. There should be some shared continuity of structure in various clades, not just random odd beasties with no visible relationships between them.

I was deeply disappointed with the main “alien,” the Yautja, who was just a man — a perfectly ordinary, familiar human being — wearing a mask with funny flexible fangs on it. Pathetic. Unbelievable. Cheap and cheesy. Drop that transparently fake alien from future episodes (you know they’re going to keep making these “predator” movies, and the weakest prop in the whole franchise is the predator.)

I’m also a bit tired of the “warrior alien” trope. Advanced alien cultures are going to be more diverse and complex than the “everyone fights for honor” nonsense that’s affected the genre since at least the Klingons, and it’s boring and makes those aliens into one dimensional characters. Stop it.

I guess there was a plot that I didn’t pay much attention to — it was something about big fights with an evil corporation trying to exploit alien monsters, don’t care, been there, done that. Elle Fanning stood out as a good actor who was playing two synthetic humanoids, but I never understood why, if you have mastery of building artificial organisms with intelligence that you’d put them in a limited human form. Get funky with it next time, and let the synth engineers imagination run wild. If I could do that, you know I’d have giant spider-squid hybrids with vaguely human minds running rampant over the cosmos.

Go ahead, make me feel old

The spam is rising. I’m going to have to go through and block a lot of unwanted email sources.

This one isn’t too bad, but it set me back for a moment: Phone numbers used to start with letters. Oh yeah? That’s news? The first phone number I learned was UL2-6652, my home phone. And yeah, we also memorized phone numbers, something we also don’t do anymore.

My girlfriend’s phone number was 852-1177 (learned after the letter convention was abandoned). Another curse I have is that stuff I memorized as a kid still floats around in my head — I’d try calling her up again, but she lives in the house with me now, and I haven’t memorized her current number.

I also get lots of email from Donald Trump, which I don’t mind — please do waste a few pennies on me, I’ll never ever vote for you. The annoying one is PragerU, which sends me spam every fucking day, and now they’re sending me postal mail.

It’s a fundraising letter, of course, but also, annoyingly, it doesn’t actually give the reason why Charlie Kirk dedicated his upcoming book to Dennis Prager. The book is some pious claptrap about keeping the Sabbath, which smarmy ol’ Prager agrees with, but that’s about it…so send him $35, $50, or $70 for some reason or other.

Mainly, though, it’s clear that PragerU has an absurd amount of money that they’re spending on outreach, and they’re busy capitalizing on Kirk’s bloody death. Ghouls, all of them.

James Watson is dead at 97

That’s a good long life, so there’s that at least. But otherwise, let this be an object lesson to everyone: you can make marvelous discoveries and launch science in bold new directions, but if you treat people badly, that’s what you’re going to be remembered for. The Washington Post even brought it up.

Dr. Watson also was known for his unsparing, even mean-spirited candor when commenting on the personalities and rivalries at the cutting edge of science. A longtime colleague at Harvard, eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson, called him “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met” and compared him to Roman emperor Caligula, the mad degenerate who fancied himself a god.

I have to paraphrase an old and familiar joke:

So a man walks into a bar, and sits down. He starts a conversation with an old guy next to him. The old guy has obviously had a few. He says to the man:

“You see that lab out there? Built it myself, recruited the staff, and it’s the best lab in town! But do they call me “Watson, the lab builder”? No!”
“And you see that book over there, I wrote that, number one bestseller in the country! But do they call me “Watson the author”? No!”
“And you see that double helix over there? I figured that out, took me years, against the resistance of the establishment, but do they call me “Watson the co-discoverer of DNA? No!”

The old guy looks around, and makes sure that nobody is listening, and leans to the man, and he says:

“but you peddle a lot of racist and sexist ideas…”

I do have to say, though, that I met his wife, Elizabeth, who seemed very nice and struggled to get Jim to shut up, and I feel sorry for her. She seemed to care very much for him, and I hope she’s coping well.

Inspector Clouseau is still employed, I see

Computer security is not an issue Clouseau has thought about much, I guess.

At the time of the brazen heist of $102 million in jewels from the Louvre last month, the password to the world-famous museum’s video surveillance system was simply “Louvre,” according to a museum employee with knowledge of the system.

Awesome. I wonder if the password to the vault at Fort Knox is “FORTKNOX”. Someone should try it.

They are trying so hard to come up with excuses for how this could have happened.

The Louvre director told French lawmakers, “The security system, as installed in the Apollo Gallery, worked perfectly. The question that arises is how to adapt this system to a new type of attack and modus operandi that we could not have foreseen.”

They could not have foreseen that a taxi driver, a delivery man, and garbage collector could have been so sophisticated to back a cherry picker up to an upstairs window and hack through with some power tools. It’s so crude and simple that no one could have imagined pulling it off!

A neglected (or hidden) history

Juan Cole makes an interesting point in light of Mamdani campaigning partly in Arabic.

Because so many Arabic speakers have immigrated to the United States since the end of the old Nazi-like immigration quotas in 1965, many Americans may think of Arabic as recent language in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Because he thought he was going to land in Muslim-ruled Asia, Columbus brought along interpreters on his voyage, including Luis de Torres, who knew some Arabic. De Torres was of Jewish heritage, but by then all Jews and Muslims in Spain during the reconquista had been forced to at least pretend to convert to Catholicism. It is likely that the first words a European said to a Native American chieftain in Cuba were “as-Salamu `alaykum,” Arabic for “peace be upon you.”

Wait a moment…but farther north, the first Old World greeting a Native American would have heard might have been in Old Norse. But they were white, so American audiences would be unsurprised.

Alternatively, the first greeting might have been an axe to the face, because Vikings might have exercised raiding extincts, rather than trying to be neighborly. (Columbus turned out to be rather nasty himself — first contact, no matter who it was, could be ugly.)

Of course, those Norwegian settlements proved to be temporary, and Scandinavians did a poor job of colonization until the 19th century, when my great-great-grandparents finally made it over the Atlantic. Muslim settlers had a better record.

Hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Muslims fled Spain rather than convert. While most went to North Africa, it is clear from the genetic record that many covertly went to the New World:

“Oteo-Garcia and his colleagues conclude . . . that the Arab and Berber heritage is much higher in Latin American than in contemporary Valencia, which shows that a lot of Moriscos must have exited to the New World (even though that was supposedly against the law at the time). They write, “One final point, highlighted by the survival of North African-related ancestry in substantial proportions until the seventeenth century, is the widespread presence of such ancestry in present-day South Americans ”
Karoline Cook points to the way Moriscos were perceived by Spaniards in the New World as having useful artisanal skills, such that they sought to bring them over. Some were brought as slaves and never sent back.”

The territories of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California thus had Arabic-speakers, many of them crypto-Muslims, for generations — throughout the 1500s and 1600s. One Arab woman from a crypto-Muslim community in Spain who married a Spanish gentleman and was taken to Mexico City, Maria Ruiz, ended up being tried by the Inquisition in the late 1500s for having retained her Muslim beliefs.

Isn’t it curious how Americans avidly gobbled up the idea that Leif Erickson and his merry band were early European visitors to the Americas, but this is the first I’ve heard of Arabic-speaking brown people adapting and thriving in these continents in the sixteenth century?