We’re having a little unpleasant weather — high temperatures and sky-high humidity, to the point where this morning we were socked in with a gray mist. The good thing about that, though, is that it highlights all the grass spider webs in our lawn. These are perfect and beautiful.
Yes, we have a few weeds in our lawn. It’s a yard for diverse invertebrates, so that’s OK.
Leaves? The leaves have started to fall? It’s that time, I guess.
Oh, Wisconsin. The Republicans want to strangle their university system.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers had proposed a $305 million increase for the UW System over the next two school years.
Republican lawmakers instead cut state funding for campuses by $32 million in an effort to defund diversity offices, which they see as a waste of money.
UW-Madison will bear the brunt, losing $7 million, or 44%, of this year’s $16 million cut. The university enrolls about one-third of UW System students. UW-Madison declined to comment on the cut.
Diversity offices are a waste of money? Only if you think only wealthy and middle class white people deserve a university education…which, I will admit, is true to the Republican ethos. Don’t worry, though, they’re dangling a carrot with the promise of restoring the money. All the university has to do is focus on vocational programs and cut all the diversity and equity programs. This is
UW System has a chance to recoup the $32 million budget cut. Officials must present a plan to the Republican-controlled budget-writing committee on how campuses would spend the money on workforce development.
The Regents will receive a preview of the plan in October, said UW System chief finance officer Sean Nelson. Spending will focus on engineering, data, science and nursing programs.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said the UW System won’t get its money back unless it eliminates diversity and equity programs — an idea UW officials have previously shot down.
“Let’s hope these campuses start by eliminating their unnecessary (diversity, equity and inclusion) positions,” he said in a statement responding to the latest furlough news. “It would be a first step in showing they’re serious about cutting wasteful spending, shoring up their deficits, and working with the Legislature to develop sustainable long-term funding solutions.”
Well, great. My daughter is currently on the job market, and the kinds of jobs she’s looking for are in biomedical computing — so those positions aren’t in immediate danger. But a healthy workplace in academia or industry requires a good balance, and also requires diversity, so this is a long-term threat.
Another long-term problem is that we’ve been starving the universities in Minnesota as well as Wisconsin.
Ten of the 13 universities are projecting deficits this year, too, and many are taking significant action to rein in spending. UW-Oshkosh is laying off 200 employees and mandating furloughs for all other staff. UW-Parkside and UW-Platteville are considering similar measures.
Most campuses are using money from a tuition increase to offset their deficits. The Regents voted earlier this year to increase in-state undergraduate tuition across all 13 universities by about 5%. It was the first time since 2012.
Many campuses are also tapping tuition balances, which is what campuses carry over as their main source of reserves. They’ve been spending down their reserves for more than a decade. UW-Oshkosh, for example, said it expects to deplete its balances by the end of this school year.
“This is not sustainable,” Rothman put it plainly.
Again, this is the Republican agenda. Diversity programs are just the latest crack in the system that they’re hammering on, but make no mistake: the ultimate goal is the destruction of all of higher ed.
I will try to calmly cope.
JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, gave the commencement speech at Northwestern. It’s pretty good.
The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. When we see someone who doesn’t look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us—the first thought that crosses almost everyone’s brain is rooted in either fear or judgment or both. That’s evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren’t familiar with.
In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges. I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.
Then the summary:
Be more substance than show. Set aside cruelty for kindness. Put one foot in front of the other even when you don’t know your way. And always try and appreciate the good old days when you are actually in them. And remember what Dwight Schrute said, ‘You only live once? False! You live every day! You only die once.’
Hey, remember the Fyre Festival?
The original festival promised luxury villas, a lineup with Blink-182 and Migos and advertised with models like Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber. But when people got there, they found no Jenner, no Biebers, no Blink-182; just “FEMA tents” and stacks of construction materials.
It was legendarily bad, so awful that two documentaries were made about it, and the organizer, Billy McFarland, went to prison over it.
Billy McFarland is out of prison already, and guess what? He’s planning a Fyre Festival II.
After teasing the follow-up festival earlier this year, 100 presale tickets went up for grabs on Aug. 21 for $499 apiece (technically $549.89 after taxes and fees). Tickets will continue to increase incrementally, with the last round selling for $7,999 each. For $1,500 less, you could get four VIP tickets to Coachella with accommodations in a “ready-to-go Lake Eldorado Tent.”
Those 100 tickets have sold out, according to an email from organizers and McFarland’s social media, despite the event having no lineup of artists, exact date or location.
I don’t think prison reformed Billy at all, and why should it? The marks are still out there, happy to be fleeced some more. They haven’t learned anything either.
That didn’t stop Victoria Medvedenko, 20, a nursing student in Arizona, from buying a ticket. In screenshots of a receipt shared with The Washington Post, it shows Medvedenko purchased one of the “The First 100” tickets for $549.89.
“I really don’t think Billy would want to go back to jail and he’s had a lot of time to think about it and prepare this time,” she said of her decision. “And I think the first time around it had a lot of potential. He just didn’t have enough time or the right mind-set.”
We can’t get people to support climate action that threatens their lives, but sure, we’ve got people who’ll spend hundreds of dollars on a ticket and thousands of dollars for travel, all for the promise of a bad cheese sandwich.
I’m not all clear on the logic here, but trans women have been banned from chess competitions.
The world’s leading chess federation voted this week to bar transgender women from its women’s competitions.
Federation Internationale des Echecs, or FIDE, acts as the governing body of all international chess competition. In a ruling approved Monday, the organization said that a competitor who changes their gender may gain competitive advantages.
No one has come out to say what those competitive advantages might be. More cc of brain tissue? Should we break out the calipers and ban people with cranial capacities larger than 1500cc? Let’s teach those big headed freaks a lesson.
Fox News is brave enough to say it, though. They consulted super brain scientist Riley Gaines about the matter, because real scientists would just snort and tell them to fuck off. Gaines, whose sole claim to fame is that she tied with a trans woman for 5th place at a swim meet, and made a huge stink about it, was asked whether she agrees with this discrimination. Of course she did. Maybe she can explain the biological reasoning behind it?
No, she can’t. What is that argument about brain size and ability anyway? I need one that wasn’t debunked a hundred years ago.
I still have to do something about the lack of garish chemicals. They’re mostly clear or gray or cloudy.
Every fall I teach 3 lectures a week in cell biology, and it used to be 3 lab sections. We pared it back to two labs this year, and then…one of them was drastically under-enrolled, so we’re shifting everyone in it to our Wednesday afternoon lab. I’m only teaching one lab this year??!? Feels like cheating.
I’ve still got at least one class every weekday, but suddenly a big block of time opened up for the spiders, which is good. My first year classes are filling up, which probably means I’ll be back to the usual number of lab sections next year. If you want lots of one-on-one attention in biology, though, this is the year to be here.
Light up another one, Elon
Whoa. Cautious, fair, thorough…Ronan Farrow reviews Elon Musk’s life. Imagine an angel of utmost probity assessing his soul at the doorway to heaven, nodding kindly as he summarizes each decade, and then, sadly, pulling the lever that drops him into a blood-drenched flaming tunnel to Hell. It’s so satisfying.
Here’s a short sample.
“Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he tweeted last year. By the time he bought Twitter, he was urging his followers to vote along similar lines, and appearing to back Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy he helped launch in a technically disastrous Twitter live event. Although Musk’s teen-age daughter, Vivian, has come out as trans, he has embraced anti-trans sentiment, saying that he would lobby to criminalize “irreversible” gender-affirming care for children. (Vivian recently changed her last name, saying in a legal filing, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”) Musk started spreading misinformation on the platform: he shared theories that the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former Speaker of the House, had followed a meeting with a male prostitute, and retweeted suggestions that reports accurately identifying a mass shooter as a white supremacist were a “psyop.” Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift. “There was nothing political about him ever,” a close associate told me. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.”
See what I mean? Farrow doesn’t pass judgement, he just calmly describes Musk’s appalling history of imposing his awful ignorance on everyone around him.
Read the rest. You won’t enjoy it, but much respect to the writer’s skill.
The semester has genuinely positively started. It’s happening. Can’t turn back time now.
By the way, I seem to be the only person on campus masking up anymore. I will continue to do so. I missed Skepticon this year, so I escaped some consequences there: Three attendees have come down with COVID so far. The pandemic is still around, be careful out there!
That Washington Post series on arch-racist Ales Hrdlicka has really stung the Smithsonian. The Secretary of the Smithsonian has written an op-ed apologizing for its history.
Anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka served as the head of the Smithsonian’s physical anthropology division from 1903 to 1941, when the majority of the human remains in our collections were obtained. During Hrdlicka’s four decades at the institution, he oversaw the acquisition of hundreds of human brains and thousands of other remains. The overwhelming majority of these remains were taken without the consent of the deceased or their family members, and Hrdlicka took particular interest in the remains of Indigenous people and people of color to undergird his search for scientific evidence of white superiority.
It was abhorrent and dehumanizing work, and it was carried out under the Smithsonian’s name. As secretary of the Smithsonian, I condemn these past actions and apologize for the pain caused by Hrdlicka and others at the institution who acted unethically in the name of science, regardless of the era in which their actions occurred.
I recognize, too, that the Smithsonian is responsible both for the original work of Hrdlicka and others who subscribed to his beliefs, and for the failure to return the remains he collected to descendant communities in the decades since.
OK, that’s a good start, but so far it’s just words. Tell me what you are doing, because that’s where the excuses get weak. The material changes so far are that they have repatriated a few thousand remains, they have formed a task force, and they promise future policy changes.
Our forthcoming policy will finally recognize these remains not as objects to be studied but as human beings to be honored. It is a long-overdue shift, and I regret that human bodies were ever treated with such disrespect at our institution.
If I may suggest an alternative response: reverse the obligations. Assume every single piece of flesh or bone must be traced to their origins as quickly as possible and returned to their peoples; the priority is to get rid of all of it. If anything is to be retained, someone must be named as responsible for the objects, and must have a specific scientific plan for extracting information from them in the near future, and then returned. Right now, everything is backwards, where we just assume if someone has a bunch of bones in a barrel, well, it belongs to them, even if all they can say is a vague assurance that it’s in a “teaching collection.” I always wonder what they plan to teach with them.
If you want to claim something is scientifically valuable, the onus is on you to justify that claim.
