Good news from Minnesota

Donald Trump has another reason to invade us: this state stands for trans rights.

Today, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Cooper v. USA Powerlifting, affirming that transgender athletes have the right to compete in sports without discrimination under the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA). The decision also clarified the harmful precedent set in Goins v. West Group only applies in the employment context, and the court did not consider whether to overturn Goins because Cooper’s case is not an employment case.

“This ruling sends a clear and powerful message: transgender people have a right to enjoy public spaces in Minnesota like sporting events, restaurants, and movie theaters, free from targeted discrimination,” said Jess Braverman, Legal Director at Gender Justice. “This decision is a historic victory for fairness, equity, and the fundamental rights of all Minnesotans.”

This ruling clarifies that all public accommodations in Minnesota, including sports organizations, must ensure their policies comply with Minnesota’s anti-discrimination laws. The implications of this decision extend well beyond sports to other facets of public life. This ruling reinforces the principle that every person deserves equal access to opportunities and spaces where they can thrive and belong.

Cool. Can we just replace the federal supreme court with the Minnesota supreme court?

That’s some persecution complex you’ve got, Anna Krylov

I wish people would stop running to Richard Dawkins for quotes defending regressive policies in science. He has nothing worthy to add, and it just damages his reputation more. Leave him in peace, to fade away gracefully.

His latest contretemps is to accuse the journal Nature of abandoning science for social justice. He provided no evidence that Nature was compromising science.

A leading scientific journal has defended its efforts to boost the diversity of researchers cited in its pages after an academic accused it of abandoning science to pursue a “social justice agenda”.

The criticism of Springer Nature group, which publishes the journal, was made by Anna Krylov, an American professor who has been a supporter of President Trump’s drive to stop American universities from promoting diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) in their admissions policies.

Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, backed Krylov and said that too many journals were “favouring authors because of their identity group rather than the excellence and importance of their science”.

Krylov has a prestigious position at USC and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s also a crank. She wrote an atrocious article equating soap companies using inclusive language in their advertising to Soviet-style purging of history, which was much loved by the right-wing opponents of DEI. Her latest criticism is even more absurd and contrived.

Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California (USC), said she had been invited to act as a peer-reviewer — a scientist asked to provide independent scrutiny — of a study being published in the journal Nature Communications.

In an open letter to bosses at Springer Nature, she said the topic was “within my field of expertise” and that she would “normally welcome the opportunity”, but asked if she had been contacted “because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs”.

Wait, what? She’s highly qualified, she has expertise in the field, and her response to a routine request to review a paper is to ask if it’s because she has ovaries? The request says nothing about her sex, but is all about her skills, and she is reaching ridiculously hard to take offense. I would suggest that maybe her imposter syndrome has grown massive and malignant, but I think it more likely that she has found an angle that gets her a lot of attention. Either way, it’s a ridiculous complaint.

And look — she gets support from Richard Dawkins!

Reposting Krylov’s letter on X, Dawkins said: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journals”, but claimed it was now among many who placed emphasis on the background of authors rather than only on “the excellence … of their science”.

Nature is still among the world’s most prestigious science journals, and he has not shown in this complaint that the excellence of their science has diminished.

Unless…

Maybe he thinks Anna Krylov is such a poor scientist that he’s dismayed that she was asked to review a paper? That asking Anna Krylov to review a paper is evidence that Nature is scraping the bottom of the barrel nowadays? This could be a devious insult, you know.

Nah, near as I can tell, Krylov is an extremely well qualified chemist who is just afflicted with a petty and unjustified need to find offense in everything.

Once upon a time, Anna Krylov would have been unable to get a job in academia, and would have been discouraged from getting a college degree, let alone a Ph.D., and things have changed to the point where universities are doing their best to not discriminate against women or minorities (but not always succeeding). Now she wants to block progress in dismantling barriers, for some unfathomable reason, to the point she’s inventing slights against her career. It’s pretty bad when recognition that you’re a good scientist is used as evidence that scientific skills are being deprecated.

They’re harmless, let’s kill them

This article leads with a photo of a spectacularly beautiful joro spider.

Beautiful. I’d love to see more, but I am content with our native Argiope, we don’t need to import invasive species.

The title of the article, though, is this troubling claim.

Studies show Joro spiders are easy to kill and virtually harmless

That’s a disturbing juxtaposition: Harmless! and Easy to Kill!

Well, great. If they’re harmless, leave them alone, you don’t need to kill them. They tested how to kill them, anyway.

Coyle and a team of co-authors from Clemson, Southern Adventist University and Union College tested various products, some of which are labeled as spider killing products, while others came from scouring the internet to see what people were telling others to use, such as water, isopropyl alcohol, foaming dishwashing detergent, window cleaners, bleach, hair spray, vinegar and WD-40.

Those labeled as insecticides were effective in killing the spiders. Coyle said that while some household products did kill the Joro spiders, he would not recommend using them.

“They are not labeled as insecticides, therefore it is illegal to use them as such,” Coyle said. “Beyond that, it is not safe, both from a personal standpoint, or ecologically. It’s not good to be spraying machine lubricant or some household cleaner all over where your dog or child might be playing. We strongly encourage people if they must use an insecticide, use a labeled, legitimate one.”

Aaaargh. I would not be able to carry out a study like that — collect healthy animals, and ask students to kill them with random products from the garage and kitchen? It’s not ethical, and also, we already know the answer: our homes are full of industrial glop that can kill animals. I also don’t need to test whether dropping a big rock on a bug would kill it. I also wouldn’t do the study and then recommend that you use a commercially available insect neurotoxin to hose down a place where your dog and child might play.

I also wouldn’t be able to do the other part of the study.

For the second part of the study, the researchers forced the spiders to bite volunteers, who then ranked the pain based on the Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scales, a pain assessment used in pediatrician offices where six faces ranging from a neutral expression (no pain) to a crying face (worst pain) are used to identify the pain level.

“We asked participants their pain level at several time points,” Coyle said. “It was never more than a 4 for anyone. Most were in the 1 range, which would be similar to a mosquito bite to most people. We also measured redness around the bite. Our conclusion was that Joro spider bites don’t do much and it doesn’t hurt most people.

I already have enough trouble recruiting research students.

But OK, the studies have been done, time to stop torturing spiders. Leave them alone.

Using identity to sell beer?

A beer ad caught my attention this morning, and I watched the whole thing. That’s good advertising! Except for the fact that it didn’t motivate me to buy any beer at all. It’s titled “The Most Washington Man in the World,” and some of it was true.

I remember refusing to own or use an umbrella, but it was more because I was going to get wet no matter what…but later I learned it was probably more because Washington rain was a continuous gentle drizzle. Midwestern rain is about getting pelted with fierce wind-blown drops, and you need shelter. Worse, I experienced southern rainstorms along the gulf coast, and no way can you ignore that and amble along.

The stuff about beer in the ad is nonsense. When I was growing up, the only debate was between two mass produced cheap beers, Rainier and Oly, and I didn’t care much about either. I was drinking coffee from an early age, though, and yeah, we grew up with Sasquatch lore and would look for him in the woods. Never found him. Also, I-5 is a hellish choke point.

Otherwise, though, the scenes of misty fog and big trees on steep hillsides and seastacks off the coast did make me a little bit homesick.

It’s an odd phenomenon. I lived near Seattle from birth to age 22. I’m 68 now, which means I spent 46 years living in Oregon, the Midwest, Utah, and Pennsylvania, and none of those places made the impression on my identity and self that the Pacific Northwest did. I suspect that if we asked my kids, my oldest might have a strong connection to Philadelphia, but the other two are Minnesota kids. There is such a thing as a sense of place that get fixed in our brains at an early age.

A grim ending

We have a home Pholcus phalangioides living under our kitchen cupboard, who occasionally emerges when they’ve caught something in their cobweb. In this case, a ladybug, who has been trapped under there for the past day.

The spider is clearly fang deep in a gap under the beetle’s armor, but what adds a frisson of horror to the scene is that the beetle was still alive, it’s mouthparts and forelimbs slowly writhing as Mlle. Pholcus sups on her fluids.

He is a very stupid man

I don’t even need to name him, you all know who I am talking about. He’s challenging Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Jasmine Crockett to an IQ test, because he’s decided that the are ‘low IQ individuals’, on some basis. He’s also very racist.

You give her an IQ test. Have her pass the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. I took– those are really hard. They’re really aptitude tests, I guess in a certain way. But, they’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. I don’t think Jasmine– the first couple of questions are easy, a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six, and then when you get up to ten and twenty and twenty five, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions.

He did not take an IQ test. He took a basic cognitive exam, which is very, very easy to pass, unless you have serious cognitive deficits. I don’t know that he passed it as he claims, because he has obvious age-related cognitive problems, and I doubt that he’s in better mental shape than either of two young healthy women.

He’s making these claims while on a diplomatic trip to Japan, embarrassing us all.

Good god, how much longer do we have to suffer with this fool in charge?

History repeats itself, again

It is my habit to read quietly before bed every night, and I vary between cheesy sci-fi and classic literature. Lately I’ve been re-reading (after a long interval) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, because I figured I’d better catch up on my anti-white American history before it gets banned by the Republicans.

It is not an uplifting story.

It is a story of continuous betrayal and horrific murder, and white Americans do not emerge as heroic or noble. The Indians are also not particularly heroic — they just want to live their lives, and sporadically explode in violent reprisals, and are also capable of horrific, monstrous acts. White America, though, has the numbers and the guns and the willingness to use them that leads to the carving up and seizure of Indian lands, and the confinement of tribal peoples to reservations. It turns out that Americans are not good or honorable people.

For example, here’s an excerpt, an account of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.

Robert Bent, who was riding unwillingly with Colonel Chivington, said that when they came in sight of the camp “I saw the American flag waving and heard Black Kettle tell the Indians to stand around the flag, and there they were huddled—men, women, and children. This was when we were within fifty yards of the Indians. I also saw a white flag raised. These flags were in so conspicuous a position that they must have been seen. When the troops fired, the Indians ran, some of the men into their lodges, probably to get their arms. … I think there were six hundred Indians in all. I think there were thirty-five braves and some old men, about sixty in all … the rest of the men were away from camp, hunting. … After the firing the warriors put the squaws and children together, and surrounded them to protect them. I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter. When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all. I saw one squaw lying on the bank whose leg had been broken by a shell; a soldier came up to her with a drawn saber; she raised her arm to protect herself, when he struck, breaking her arm; she rolled over and raised her other arm, when he struck, breaking it, and then left her without killing her. There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children. There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side. Captain Soule afterwards told me that such was the fact. I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them. I saw one squaw whose privates had been cut out. … I saw a little girl about five years of age who had been hid in the sand; two soldiers discovered her, drew their pistols and shot her, and then pulled her out of the sand by the arm. I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.”

This Chivington SOB is a truly monstrous villain.

In a public speech made in Denver not long before this massacre [the Sand Creek massacre] Colonel Chivington advocated the killing and scalping of all Indians, even infants. Nits make lice!” he declared.

The book was written in the context of the Vietnam War and it’s clear that we learned nothing in the intervening century. But I kept thinking, not of Vietnam, but of Israel. They learned well from us.

You are trying to occupy a land inhabited by indigenous people, who you outgun and confine? Ethics be damned, you can murder them at will, because your manifest destiny gives you that right, and any resistance is an excuse to slaughter. There are just too many parallels.

I would hope that we could learn from our past and have sense of humility and shame. I fear though, that we are going to outsource our history to PragerU and we’ll learn nothing.

Not all astronauts know much about geology

The latest xkcd makes the point that science changes over time, and that the early days of space flight preceded the widespread acceptance of plate tectonics. Ha ha, there were astronauts in the 1960s who hadn’t yet caught up on the latest ideas in geology, and thought the continents were static.

The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.
—xkcd

How far we’ve come. Now, in the 2020s, we have astronauts who think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that the continents zipped into their current position at hyperspeed, four thousand years ago.

Somebody should tell Ken Ham that most astronauts weren’t selected for their scientific knowledge, and that he is intentionally selecting from the bottom of the spaceman barrel.