This is often a terrible mistake.
OK, I’ll play along. Ten year old people don’t have the experience to make an informed decision, parents have an obligation to protect their children from the depradations of rich old creeps, it doesn’t matter whether I’m male or female, and Richard Hanania is a gross scumbag who ought to be watched carefully.
Isn’t it nice that he bought a blue checkmark from that other creepy fuck, Elon Musk?
I often start my day by getting the latest news from the Washington Post, but I still always have this on my mind.
The New York Times is the same, but worse.
You know you’re reading the blog of PZ Myers, right?
Trust no one.
Lectern for a tombstone, I guess
I just learned that my planned sabbatical for next year has to be postponed, for a really stupid reason. We — meaning everyone in my department — had it in our heads that we were eligible for a sabbatical every seven years. We were wrong, because the sabbatical year doesn’t count, meaning it’s effectively every 8 years. So I just got handed the information that I can’t take a sabbatical until 2025, rather than 2024, which blows all my plans for next year to smithereens. In addition, I’d planned to begin phased retirement the year after my sabbatical, so I have to postpone that an additional year.
I’m beginning to feel like I’ll never escape. I’d like to have a little taste of a retirement before my inevitable heart failure leaves me slumped and lifeless in my office chair, or worse, I croak in the middle of a lecture and traumatize a whole lot of students.
Oh well. I probably can’t afford to retire anyway. I was looking forward to an escape from the pressure and the grind next year, though.
Of course he was guilty. Billions of dollars vanished under his watch, while he somehow lived an extravagant life of luxury in the Bahamas, while piously preaching the gospel of “effective altruism” as a cover. The jury deliberated for only five hours, but now we have to wait until March until we learn how many decades he gets to spend in prison.
Now…when do his partners-in-crime, his girlfriend, his parents, face justice? They’re all awful people.
You’re forgiven if you don’t know this, but there’s a Democratic Minnesota congressman running for president. Dean Phillips is pretty much a Biden fan-boy, but at 54 he’s significantly younger. That’s really the only appeal of the guy — he’s Joe Biden from almost 30 years ago, which isn’t really the advantage he thinks it is. It’s all about Phillips’ ego.
If he handles his 15 minutes of fame well, he gains name recognition and positions himself to run for the Senate or for governor (because there’s essentially no chance he’d beat Biden). Perhaps, as a consolation prize, his candidacy draws other Democrats into the field and he can take credit for a sitting president having to sweat out winning his own party’s primary.
In other words, he says it’s all about Biden, but it’s really all about him.
I’m not at all interested in voting for him, and this weird grab for attention only diminishes my interest. He’s trying, though, and is campaigning in New Hampshire (I know, I’m dismayed that the electioneering has already begun in 2023). Unfortunately for him, he’s bombing spectacularly. He’s not very good at politics.
Speaking in a theater here less than a week after announcing his campaign, Phillips faced screaming and profanity from voters disappointed in his response to a question on a cease-fire in the Middle East. He was accused of gaslighting the lone Black woman in attendance, who was escorted out of the event — but not before a handful of other attendees walked out of the room.
The tense moment reflects the impassioned debate and nuanced positions within the Democratic Party over the Israel-Gaza war and underscored the question of whom exactly Phillips hopes to appeal to with his campaign. Though many Democrats express a desire for an alternative to Biden, it is unclear if Phillips is the candidate they are looking for.
Around an hour into the meandering town hall here Wednesday, 23-year-old Democrat Atong Chan rose to ask Phillips to support a cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza war.
Phillips blinked rapidly as Chan asked her question, and then began his response by turning around the question to ask her about how she feels about the Israelis killed by Hamas in the conflict.
“I’m going to answer each of your questions, but I have to tell you, I took note that you didn’t mention — how do you feel about the Israeli babies? And moms and dads and grandmas and hostages in Gaza who were brutally murdered? I just want to hear, before I answer your question, if that empathy is across humanity or only for Palestinians right now?” Phillips responded to Chan, a Manchester resident.
He interrupted before she replied, “I am completely empathetic to them.”
Phillips repeatedly invoked his multiple visits to Israel in the past year and his role as the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs subcommittee focused on the Middle East, and told Chan, “You and I are the same.” Though he said he was “horrified and disgusted when I see Palestinians slaughtered,” and denounced Hamas as an enemy of both Israel and Palestinians, he did not answer her follow-up questions about why he is not calling for a cease-fire.
All the politicians, Democrats included, seem to be rushing to find a centrist position that doesn’t require them to condemn violence and murder. It’s not going to work, unless you’re trying to court the fascist vote.
Oh well. I think most people had written off Phillips long ago. When the response to his early attempt to appeal to prospective voters is “screaming and profanity,” I think it’s safe to say he’s done. Go home, Dean Phillips.
Look, when you’ve got super-jaws and super-teeth and super-digestive juices, you don’t need to remove the M&Ms from the package, just eat the whole thing.
I don’t recognize the superhero, some of you young’uns will have to explain who Knut is dressed as.
The American Ornithological Society has had a good idea: rename all those birds named after people.
Get ready to say goodbye to a lot of familiar bird names, like Anna’s Hummingbird, Gambel’s Quail, Lewis’s Woodpecker, Bewick’s Wren, Bullock’s Oriole, and more.
That’s because the American Ornithological Society has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.
I like this idea. They’re first prioritizing renaming those poor birds saddled with the names of slaveholders and other such repugnant histories, but don’t stop there. Strip all those personal names from all of them. That hummingbird is not Anna’s, and neither is that woodpecker Lewis’s.
Not just birds, either: clean up those spiders and plants and mammals — why is it Thomson’s Gazelle? He seems to have been an all right guy for a European colonizer, but his name shouldn’t be on an animal that had been living in Africa long before some British explorer came along.
The latin binomials are a different story — they’re pretty much locked down and unchangeable. But maybe there should be a policy that latin names tied to specific individuals should be discouraged.
On the one hand, you’ve got powerful chemicals that can be used to make deadly addictive drugs like methamphetamine, stuff made in bulk to be used as precursors to other, legitimate organic chemistry products, so valuable that they get stolen in industrial quantities by criminals (remember the Dead Freight episode of Breaking Bad, in which they rob a train to make drugs?). On the other hand, you’ve got big pharma peddling pills that do absolutely nothing, stuff like Oscillococcinum
, a homeopathic remedy that is sold over the counter at my local grocery store. Add another useless drug, phenylephrine, which is in just about every cold remedy available, partly because the effective medicine, pseudoephedrine, has been displaced by the garbage, since pseudoephedrine was actually desired by meth heads who wanted to cook up meth at home.
Pharmaceutical companies are all about making money, not helping people’s health problems. Take a look at this exposé by Skepchick and Ars Technica — Big Pharma is not your friend. It’s not just the Sacklers and OxyContin, they’re all rotten to the core.
OK, it’s not just Big Pharma. Blame Big Capitalism. The lack of regulation and the ability of the rich to just buy the legislation they want is what’s killing us.
Fortunately, better hygiene and the use of masks has meant I’ve avoided the usual fall/winter colds for a while now.
In Maine, there’s an effort to put into practice traditional indigenous methods of land management. This sounds like a smart idea to me — ask the people who have lived there for centuries what works, and try that.
Meanwhile, traditional tribal practices have often proved the most sustainable way to manage natural resources. Prescribed burns in forests carried out by generations of Native Americans in the Klamath Mountains in California, for instance, have prevented destructive wildfires better than European settlers’ methods, which suppressed fire and let forests grow too dense. More wildland managers and scientists in North America now recognize the need for prescribed burns, but they still are not being carried out enough to prevent catastrophic fires.
For decades, tribal members in Maine advocated bringing down Penobscot River dams that once powered saw and paper mills to restore an Atlantic salmon fishery. The Penobscot method of timber harvesting, which leaves 75- to 100-foot buffers of trees around rivers and streams, creates ideal conditions for salmon. Salmon like to spawn upriver in shady pools, created by allowing the forest at a river’s edge to thicken and birch trees to fall into it. One afternoon in late October, I watched Penobscot tribal members and scientists from Maine’s department of marine resources release into the Penobscot watershed 80 adult salmon that the state agency had raised in a hatchery, in the hope that they would spawn in such pools and help restore the historic salmon population.
Ah, the salmon. I grew up near a river that used to be thick with salmon, and my childhood was spent watching the fish slowly fade away, and seeing my father growing increasingly frustrated and depressed about it. The rivers were overfished and abused, and steadily declined in productivity. Gosh, maybe we were doing something wrong.
My father, with salmon, in the 1950s
When we lived in Eugene, Oregon, we were just a few blocks from the Willamette River (hint for non-natives: it’s pronounced will-LAM-it, emphasis on the second syllable), and it was a very pretty river, but we never bothered fishing it. I’d occasionally see fly fishermen working it, but nobody was hauling 20 pound silver salmon out of its waters that I know of. Part of the reason was that it was extensively dammed upstream, and as everybody knows, the salmon life cycle requires swimming upstream to spawn, and then the young fish have to navigate downstream to the ocean to mature. Dams kind of get in the way.
But don’t you worry! The Army Corps of Engineers has come up with a solution for the Oregon salmon fishery!
To free salmon stuck behind dams in Oregon’s Willamette River Valley, here’s what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has in mind:
Build a floating vacuum the size of a football field with enough pumps to suck up a small river. Capture tiny young salmon in the vacuum’s mouth and flush them into massive storage tanks. Then load the fish onto trucks, drive them downstream and dump them back into the water. An enormous fish collector like this costs up to $450 million, and nothing of its scale has ever been tested.
The fish collectors are the biggest element of the Army Corps’ $1.9 billion plan to keep the salmon from going extinct.
Yikes. You know, salmon can swim. They’ve been doing it for millions of years, quite competently, until humans started planting great big obstacles in the way. You could just shut down the dams periodically, and let them do what comes naturally, but no…we need a plan that involves fish vacuums and big trucks. They think they’ve got a good reason for that.
The Corps says its devices will work. A cheaper alternative — halting dam operations so fish can pass — would create widespread harm to hydroelectric customers, boaters and farmers, the agency contends.
Moreover, many of the interests the Corps says it’s protecting maintain they don’t need the help — not power companies, not farmers and not businesses reliant on recreational boating.
The Corps’ effort to keep its dams running full-bore is a story of how the taxpayer-funded federal agency, despite decades of criticism, continues to double down on costly feats of engineering to reverse environmental catastrophes its own engineers created.
The only peer-reviewed cost-benefit analysis of the Willamette dams, published in 2021, found that the collective environmental harms, upkeep costs and risks of collapse at the dams outweigh the economic benefits.
This looks like an expensive solution looking for a problem, after years of amplifying the problems that they created. There is already a simpler solution at hand, but it wouldn’t justify the Army Corps of Engineers spending nearly $2 billion.
There is a simpler way to protect fish: opening dam gates and letting salmon ride the current as they would a wild river. It costs next to nothing, would keep the Willamette Valley dams available for their original purpose of flood control and has succeeded on the river system before. This approach is supported by Native American tribes and other critics.
The Corps ruled it out as a long-term solution for most of its 13 Willamette River dams, saying further reservoir drawdowns would conflict with other interests.
The debate and the consequences of the decision are real for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, who have fished the Willamette for thousands of years. Grand Ronde leaders said they’ve met with the Corps seven times to spell out potential alternatives to building giant fish collectors and maintaining hydropower.
“They always feel like they can just build themselves out of problems. And this is really something that we don’t need to build,” said Michael Langley, a former tribal council member for the Grand Ronde.
The fish would flourish, but the recreational boaters would “suffer.” I say fuck the boaters, I support the fish.
The native American tribes know what’s up, and delivered a pithy, if understated, summary.
The tribes filed a letter with the Corps in February that included a pointed summation: “Killing salmon to lose money deserves a deeper analysis.”
For now, though, we’re stuck with a bureaucracy that can’t see clearly, because they’re so wrapped up in technological solutions that make the problems worse…but increase the power of the bureaucrats.
Former employees and scientists who’ve worked closely with the Corps say its officials are afraid to change because drawing down reservoirs and eliminating hydropower would call into question the agency’s usefulness in the Willamette Valley.
“They don’t like to be seen as an agency that can’t execute,” said Judith Marshall, who spent six years as an environmental compliance manager for the Corps.
Marshall, whose work included projects in the Willamette Valley, filed a complaint with the federal Office of Special Counsel in 2017 alleging the Corps ignored obligations under federal environmental laws.
“They’re some of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered,” Marshall said, but “they’re so wound up in their models and what they’re doing, like they can’t see the forest through the trees.”
They’re not thinking old enough. Go back further than solutions dreamed up in the 1930s and examine solutions that were tested in the thousands of years before that.
It would have made my father happy.
