Sympathy for Linda Yaccarino?

But not much sympathy. She eagerly jumped at her job at Xitter, and is being paid handsomely…it’s just that she’s trying to do something impossible.

Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X/Twitter, appeared to be trying some damage control this afternoon, as she posted, “X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board — I think that’s something we can and should all agree on. When it comes to this platform — X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.”

Yaccarino has been trying to convince advertisers that X/Twitter is a safe place for them to place their spots. She wrote on Tuesday, “We’re always working to protect the public conversation.”

And then Elon Musk started typing and said all the things Yaccarino claims to be opposing. It must be hard to work in a company run by a modern-day Nazi, while trying to pretend not to be a bunch of rich fascists.

At the rate things are going right now, though, she may not have the job for long. Either she’ll wise up and quit, or the company will melt into toxic sludge right there under her desk. It was already unprofitable, and now a lot of big companies are yanking their ads away.

Major blue-chip companies are announcing they will suspend all advertising on X (formerly known as Twitter) after owner Elon Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory and Media Matters reported that X was placing ads alongside white nationalist and pro-Nazi content.

So far, they’ve lost IBM, Disney, Lions Gate Entertainment, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Comcast, and Apple. Apple was their biggest advertiser (no wonder cables cost so much), shelling out $100 million per year on Twitter ads — that revenue has just evaporated.

In addition, the White House has condemned him, although that doesn’t immediately scorch his pocketbook.

Joe Biden has excoriated Elon Musk’s “abhorrent” tweets two days after the X owner posted his full-throated agreement with an antisemitic post.

A statement from the White House issued on Friday said: “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”

Musk’s response? He’s suing Media Matters for posting news about the loss of advertisers.

Worst. Businessman. Ever. Get out while you can, Linda! Unless you’re also a closet Nazi.

It’s not a good day for the social media Nazi. Another rocket blew up, and you should read his whining lawsuit in which he complains that the media are attacking free speech.

Someone want to break the news to him?

In a long and horrific article that recounts all the terrible safety violations and tragic deaths and injuries at SpaceX, we get Musk’s perspective on workplace safety.

“Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company,” said Tom Moline, a former SpaceX senior avionics engineer who was among a group of employees fired after raising workplace complaints. “The company justifies casting aside anything that could stand in the way of accomplishing that goal, including worker safety.”

Someone needs to explain that rushing as fast as possible to get to a place does not translate into safely and reliably arriving at that place. “As fast as possible” exposes his real goal, which is to win a race and feed his ego. He wants bragging rights. Getting a shambling wreck of a space base installed on Mars while its crew dies slowly (or instantly!) is not what people mean by “going to Mars”. It is going to kill any interest in “going to Mars” for any more responsible space nerds in the future, though.

Also, the “saving humanity” schtick is old and overblown. Putting a few people on Mars in a ramshackle station that decays away for lack of utility is not going to save humanity. Did that temporary outpost in Vinland save the Vikings?

Do I need to add that this is not a serious leader? This is a man-child.

Four SpaceX employees told Reuters they were disturbed by Musk’s habit of playing with a flamethrower when he visited the SpaceX site in Hawthorne. The device was marketed to the public in 2018 as a $500 novelty item by Musk’s tunnel-building firm, the Boring Company. Videos posted online show it can shoot a thick flame more than five feet long. Boring later renamed the device the “Not-A-Flamethrower” amid reports of confiscations by authorities.

For years, Musk and his deputies found it “hilarious” to wave the flamethrower around, firing it near other people and giggling “like they were in middle school,” one engineer said. Musk tweeted in 2018 that the flamethrower was “guaranteed to liven up any party!” At SpaceX, Musk played with the device in close-quarters office settings, said the engineer, who at one point feared Musk would set someone’s hair on fire.

I work in a place that takes people’s safety seriously. If our chancellor showed up and giggled while firing off a flamethrower in the atrium, we’d be calling the police and demanding their immediate resignation. But then, we don’t claim our role is to “save humanity” and lack the overwhelming sense of importance that excuses idiot behavior.

Little victories

A few things made me feel good at work this week.

#1: We’re wrapping up the Evolution section of my Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development course. After a month of lectures and tree drawing exercises and discussions about good examples of evolution, I gave the students an overview of human evolution and a primary research paper, the Lee Berger stuff about Homo naledi. They were asked to critically evaluate the claims: did they really have fire? Did they bury their dead? Did they create crude art? As you probably know, Berger is emphatic about answering “YES!!”, but I urged them to think carefully…and they did. They stated some concerns and doubts, and talked about what they’d like to see to confirm the claims, like good little scientists. Then I gave them a paper by Martinon-Torres and others, “No scientific evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead and produced rock art,” and they saw what an active debate in science looks like. Warmed my heart, it did. This is what a good science class is about, tricking students into thinking for themselves.

#2: I’ve had nightmares about this one thing. Our university enrollment has been way down — I’m teaching a second year required course in cell biology, and I have TEN (10!) students enrolled. Most years I’ve had 50. Sure, a small class is nice in many ways, but not so great if you want to get active participation and discussion going. It took about 12 weeks to get the class warmed up and regularly asking questions! What was causing me some anxiety, though, is that I’m offering a 4000 level elective in ecological developmental biology next semester, the kind of course that lives or dies with student engagement, and really needs a critical mass of students if it was going to fly. I’d been dreading getting 3 or fewer students signed up (the administration would cancel it), or perhaps worse, 5 or 6 students, and I’d have to struggle all semester to get them active while not throwing too much of a burden on individuals. My ideal class size for this kind of course is 10-12 students, and I was dreading getting too few students for all the work involved.

Spring term registration started this week. I’ve already got 10 students enrolled! Maybe next semester will be fun, after all.

Sometimes there are little defeats, too. Our football team qualified for the NCAA DIII playoffs, and will be playing at the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse tomorrow. This is a very big deal! So I get to my cell bio class this afternoon…I’ve got two students. One has to leave early for an interview. So I get to lecture to a nearly empty room.

This sort of thing happened early in the semester and I just cancelled class, but I warned them that next time I’d go right ahead and lecture to empty seats, so that’s what I did. At least now I have a set of questions that will definitely go on the next exam.

Good riddance, Xitter

Would you believe I have 150,000 followers on Twitter? A lot of them are just hate-following me, but still, it’s a large crowd.

I’m abandoning them now. I’ve made my last post on that hellsite.

Elon Musk has promoted so much garbage that I can no longer in good conscience use the social media site. It’s just vile, and the final straw that broke my interest was the raging anti-semitism that’s flourishing there.

Elon Musk is an impressive business guy. In the space of a year, he turned Xwitter from a sometimes-annoying but vital source of information and community-building into an antisemitic dumpster fire in the middle of a racist tire fire atop a shit-encrusted mountain of misinformation and conspiracy theories — all while losing money at it, too.

Wednesday night, the techno wunderscheißhaufen poured gasoline on one of those fires, boosting a vile antisemitic tweet that echoed the deadly rhetoric behind multiple mass shootings by white supremacists. But he later said he didn’t mean to do antisemitism to all Jews, just the ADL and a lot of others, so no harm, no foul stench, and advertisers will surely not be further put off spending money at Xwitter, right?

Here’s another take.

“You have said the actual truth” was Musk’s Wednesday night response to a paid X Premium user who, in explaining why “Hitler was right,” accused Jewish communities in the U.S. of “dialectical hatred against whites” and blamed them for “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities.” Musk went on to clarify that he was not talking about all Jews, just the Anti-Defamation League (which has criticized Musk for white nationalist content on his platform) and unnamed others he claimed were “unjustly” focusing on “the majority of the West” rather than “the minority groups who are their primary threat.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, all of it bad. Musk is promoting the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, as many have noted. That blood-soaked fantasy was touted by tiki torchbearers chanting “Jews will not replace us” and echoed by several murderous white supremacists, including the terrorist who massacred Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue, even as it spread through Fox News and the right-wing media and became a fixture of GOP politics. And unlike others who have adopted a less explicit version of the theory, Musk is, in the parlance of the white nationalists who applauded his remark, explicitly “naming the Jew” as the source of the problem.

Enough, enough, enough. Fuck that guy, and fuck his company.

Anyone who wants to follow me on social media can find me here:

https://octodon.social/@pzmyers (@pzmyers@octodon.social)
https://bsky.app/profile/pzmyers.bsky.social (@pzmyers.bsky.social)

And if you don’t care about social media, that’s fine, I’ll also be right here.

Interesting news from outer space

You know we sent a probe, OSIRIS-REx (ugh, it’s a contrive acronym — I hate the name), to an asteroid name Bennu (better), and it has returned to Earth with a load of debris. It’s a big deal to crack this probe open, because they really want to avoid contamination, and we won’t see the results of a thorough analysis for a while yet, but NASA has examined the stuff outside the main container, and it’s promising.

So what’s the big deal about recovering pristine samples from the surface of an asteroid? The big deal is that Bennu, an asteroid in a near-Earth orbit that is about one-half kilometer across, is believed to be a time capsule for the types of rocks and chemicals that existed when the planets formed in our Solar System more than 4 billion years ago. By studying Bennu, scientists are looking back to that primordial era when Earth began transitioning from an extremely hot world with a hellish surface environment into something more like a mud ball.

Poking these pebbles and rocks with sophisticated equipment here on Earth may allow Lauretta and the other scientists to answer questions about how terrestrial planets like Earth and Mars formed and possibly whether asteroids seeded Earth with the building blocks for life.

In a preliminary analysis of some of the dust, Lauretta said scientists hit the jackpot with a sample that is nearly 5 percent carbon by mass and has abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals. It is highly plausible that asteroids like this delivered the vast majority of the water now found in Earth’s oceans, lakes, and rivers billions of years ago.

By piecing together clues from the asteroid dust—both its water and organic molecules—the scientists believe they may better understand how Earth went from an uninhabited mudball to the world teeming with life today.

“This is incredible material,” said Daniel Glavin, a co-investigator on the mission. “It’s loaded with organics. If we’re looking for biologically essential organic molecules, we picked the right asteroid, and we brought back the right sample. This is an astrobiologist’s dream.”

Cool, but not at all surprising. This is what we’d expected — we already knew space was full of organic molecules, this isn’t the 19th century when vitalism and the belief that organic chemistry could only be perpetrated by living organisms.

I look forward to the results, but I predict that they will find…amino acids, nucleotides, simple sugars, etc. All the basics you need to make an apple pie. The universe provides.

Local pseudo-archaeology

Here’s a fascinating old photo.

Farmer Olof Öhman (center), who reported the artifact’s discovery in 1898, at a carnival held to raise funds to buy a park for the Kensington Runestone, 1927.

I’ve seen the Kensington Runestone, it’s in a local museum just north of here. I’ve been to that park several times — it’s nicely maintained, it has a large, mostly empty building used for presentations (it’s always been locked when I visited), and it’s a bit out of the way, several miles away from a town of any size. It’s notable only because a fair amount of money and time has been invested to enshrine this fraud in local culture. It was probably an even bigger deal in 1927, when that photo was taken, and when the old farmer who ‘found’ it was the center of attention.

What I just learned is that there were other runestones all over the country. There’s the Yarmouth Stone and the Narragansett Runestone in Nova Scotia and Rhode Island. The Heavener Runestone in Oklahoma. The Poteau stone, and Shawnee stone, also in Oklahoma. The Braxton Runestone and Grave Creek Stone, in West Virginia. They even found a second runestone in 2001 near Öhmon’s original ‘discovery’ to ‘corroborate’ it. You’d think there were armies of Vikings tromping all over the eastern half of the US in the 14th century, all busily chiseling rocks and scattering them about to entertain tourists in the 20th and 21st.

The article gives a couple of explanations for this curious phenomenon. One is that the Viking sagas were popular at the time. I don’t find that convincing — you’d expect every literary fad to generate a pile of phony artifacts if that were the case. The second is that the wave of Scandinavian immigrants were trying to build validation. I can sympathize with that a little more. If Italian immigrants could take pride in Christopher Columbus, well, Swedes and Norwegians would hold up Leif Ericson as their hero.

I’m inclined to favor their third explanation.

The third factor was the urge to assert European prior claim to land, which predated the Columbus expedition of 1492, and furthermore, gave it a northern European character. At times, this involved the expropriation of Native American monuments as part of a process which sought to belittle Native American cultural and monumental achievements by claiming Viking ancestry for them—and at times, claimed that those responsible were just about anybody, so long as they were not Native Americans.

The Mormons did it. The Mississippi valley settlers who denied that indigenous peoples could have been the Mound Builders did it. All those batty von Dänikenites who claim aliens built every bit of non-European architecture do it. Why couldn’t my Scandinavian ancestors have done it?

The Runestone park is a pleasant little spot, but fundamentally it’s an embarrassment.

For us pescatarians

I would murder that table

I’m a lazy vegetarian — I’ll sometimes eat chicken or red meat in small quantities if I’m traveling or a guest in someone’s home (my scruples weigh less than putting a burden on someone else), but that doesn’t happen often…once every few months, maybe? But on one thing I do not compromise: I love seafood. I’d eat it every day if I could. I guess that makes me a pescatarian rather than a vegetarian.

So this is handy. The LA Times has an article on ethical seafood consumption, and it links to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, which lists all the varieties of seafood and whether they were ethically caught and managed.

A lot of it is about the source. Don’t buy fish from Chinese factories — they basically employ slave labor, overfish, and leave a trail of dead bodies behind them. Don’t eat fish caught by trawling, which damages the environment…and Americans and Canadians are guilty of that. Most of the recommended fish and shellfish are farmed. Unfortunately, most of the seafood we buy isn’t labeled with the method of capture — cod is OK if caught on a pole&line, not so ethical if dredged up by a trawler. That’s not on the label, though!

Also, it doesn’t help that a lot of the responsible farmed seafood are molluscs & shrimp & squid, which I’m very fond of, but gives my wife the heebie-jeebies. I can only eat weird marine invertebrates when she’s not around, and she’s almost always around. I guess I’m insufficiently dedicated to my food, because I’d rather have her in the house than a bucket of clams…

Mmmmmm. Big bucket of steamer clams, with some crab on the side, and calamari, and a salmon fillet…

Yay! The Supreme Court has a code of conduct! Sorta.

Finally! The Supreme Court has been acting like a troop of freebooters, running loose and without any ethics to limit their greed, but now in a surprise announcement, they have released a set of rules they’re supposed to follow.

The absence of an ethics code has given the impression “that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules,” said the statement, signed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his eight colleagues. “To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.”

Except…there’s nothing there. They wrote down a set of things that general public expects would limit the behavior of justices, but they’re so vague that they don’t do much to regulate any constraints — they’re so wide open that they ultimately let individuals do whatever they feel like.

An unsigned “commentary” accompanying the code indicates that justices will continue to make their own decisions about recusals and speaking engagements. It says justices should “consider whether doing so would create an appearance of impropriety in the minds of reasonable members of the public.”

The code does not squarely confront questions about lavish trips and gifts that some justices have received from billionaire friends, or questions about recusals.

I get it. “The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules,” to quote the movie pirate Hector Barbossa. It’s got no teeth.

Supreme Court justices stung by controversies over the court’s ethics pledged Monday to follow a broad code of conduct promoting “integrity and impartiality,” but without a way to enforce its standards against those who fall short.

I think we need to stop thinking of Supreme Court justices as in any way trustworthy. To quote another movie pirate, Jack Sparrow, they’re all thinking “I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly, it’s the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they’re going to do something incredibly stupid.”

Fair enough. I trust the Supreme Court justices to be dishonest thieves. It’s unfortunate, though, that none of them have any swashbuckling charisma to compensate.

Failing upwards

Bill Ackman is a hedge-fund billionaire who was very concerned that an MIT professor allowed a student to promote a pro-Palestine rally. He’s more worried about denying Palestinian civil rights than he is about known sexual harassers in the classroom, though.

Ackman is a major supporter of David Sabatini to the tune of millions of dollars per year. Sabatini, you may recall, was fired twice from major institutions and his attempt to be hired by NYU was aborted by huge demonstrations by the faculty and students there. He is not a good guy. He ran a party lab for dudebros.

In 2021, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute fired Sabatini, and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research forced him out after an investigation by an outside law firm found he violated the institute’s sexual harassment and relationship policies. That investigation found that Sabatini conducted a clandestine sexual relationship with a woman scientist and asked her to meet him for sex on institute grounds. At the time, he was mentoring her in a program he directed while she launched a lab at the Whitehead. The investigation also found, among other behavior, that he created a lab culture that rewarded sexualized banter; implicitly threatened a faculty member who refused to make a place in his lab for a visiting woman scientist whom Sabatini later married; and created a “pervasive” fear of retaliation, for example implying there would be career consequences for lab members who reported unfavorably on him to the outside investigators or who discussed rumors that he was sexually pursuing a woman undergraduate from another institution.

I figured that with three strikes he was finally out, no matter how much money a rich boob threw his way. I even made a prediction: “He’ll go get a job in construction or pharmaceutical sales and we won’t have to worry about his unpleasant influence on academia anymore.”

I was wrong, so wrong. He’s starting up a new lab in Prague.

David Sabatini, the high-flying biologist who lost positions at three prominent U.S. institutions after breaching sexual misconduct policies, last month began a new job as a senior scientist at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry Prague (IOCB), a powerful arm of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS). The hire has divided Czech scientists and is likely to ignite debate about whether and when institutions should give second chances to those who commit sexual misconduct.

He’s like an antibiotic-resistant venereal disease. He keeps flaring up when you least expect it, and when you think you’ve finally beaten it back.

IOCB Director Jan Konvalinka said in a statement: “We believe that [Sabatini] has been punished enough for his previous actions and that the research community will be served best if this brilliant scientist returns to research.” He added that IOCB “will require that Dr. Sabatini follows the same high standards of conduct and respectful behavior that is expected from every other principal investigator.”

Yeah, that’s what the Whitehead, MIT, and NYU all said, too. When will people learn that “high standards of conduct and respectful behavior” aren’t in his repertoire?

Probably about the time that rich Republican jerks stop bankrolling him, I bet.

I guess you could argue that corporate capitalism is a kind of religion

Ken Ham is pissed off at this song from an upcoming Disney movie.

I know nothing about the movie, nor am I interested in seeing it (maybe my grandkids will enjoy it, I don’t know). I don’t think it will turn anyone into worshippers of Sol Invictus. All it is saying is that the world around us is pretty nifty.

Not in Ken Ham’s feeble mind, though.

Imagine if public school students in their science classes were encouraged to worship the sun. And yet this is happening! But how do they get away with it? Well, they just call worshipping the sun “science,” and then claim they can teach this “science” in the public schools! Really the Disney song mentioned above is all about worshipping the sun and stars.

That’s quite a leap, from a cheerful bit of fluff to a sinister plot to inculcate sun worship in public school classrooms. No one is teaching kids to pray to and worship natural objects in the universe.

By the way, he also doesn’t like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“Our ancestors worshipped the sun. They were far from foolish. It makes good sense to revere the sun and stars because we are their children. The silicon in the rocks, the oxygen in the air, the carbon in our DNA, the iron in our skyscrapers, the silver in our jewelry—were all made in stars, billions of years ago. Our planet, our society, and we ourselves are stardust.”

That statement was made by Neil deGrasse Tyson in the Cosmos series he narrated. Evolutionists encouraged teachers to use this series in public school classrooms.

Oh, how awful: he was suggesting that pre-Christian people were not stupid, and were trying to understand the world as best as they could. Tyson is not an animist. He’s not saying it would be a good idea to worship rocks, but that we should try to understand why some people might have. Damn those public schools! They’re teaching tolerance and empathy! You won’t get any of that in a Ken Ham-approved homeschool.

He really is a fully coked-up conspiracy theorist.

I think it’s about time Christians woke up and understood that even though there are Christian missionaries in the public (Government) school system (and they need our prayers), by and large these schools are actually churches of atheism. Millions of students are being taught that all life and the universe arose by natural processes—by naturalism. But we need to call naturalism what it is—atheism.

Well, so, True Christians™ reject understanding of the natural world? There’s no difference between studying physics, chemistry, and biology and worshipping pagan gods and being an atheist? Good to know.

Please to stay out of education and politics, Ken.