Good luck with accreditation, New College of Florida!

This is how Ron Desantis wants to handle higher education: fire everyone! Kick the faculty and administration out!

He somehow seems to think that a university is just a collection of buildings, rather than people and traditions and a well-established curriculum. So he hires a couple of clueless goons, Chris Rufo and Eddie Speir, and tries to put them in charge of everything.

Somebody should explain to them that their accreditation is not a piece of paper glued to a building. It’s part of a process that involves active engagement with the faculty and administration — you know, all the people that they want to dismiss — and when they go, the institution evaporates. It’s gone. All the currently enrolled students are screwed. The university will have to start over completely from scratch, rebuilding a reputation and a curriculum that was just annihilated.

New College is a public liberal arts college that was founded in 1960. I’m at the University of Minnesota Morris, a public liberal arts college that was founded in 1960. I’m going to have to take this a bit personally.

Not clear on the “free speech” concept, I guess

North Dakotans are making themselves look like idiots again. They’re trying to pass a bill that literally criminalizes free speech.

A Republican lawmaker in North Dakota introduced a bill that would fine people $1,500 if they refer to trans people using their correct pronouns, rather than the pronouns they were assigned at birth.

The rule would apply to organizations that receive state funding—which includes public schools. That means schools and teachers could be fined for using their trans colleagues’ or students’ pronouns.

‘Words used to reference an individual’s sex, gender, gender identity, or gender expression, mean the individual’s determined sex at birth, male or female,” states Senate Bill 2199. “Any person that violates this section must be assessed a fee of one thousand five hundred dollars.”

Remarkable. So, if a teacher uses a student’s preferred form of address, they can be slapped with a $1500 fine? Just for saying “he” or “she”? I’m glad I don’t live in North Dakota, or I’d be bankrupt right now, all for respecting students’ identities.

Thank goodness it’s still legal to reference David Clemens as a horse’s ass with a bad haircut, who looks like he’s trying out for a remake of Dumb and Dumber. At least that’s an upgrade from being known as a member of the North Dakota state senate.

Where do Nazis come from, Mommy?

If I had to guess, I would have figured they were hatched out of the slimy runoff from a sewage treatment plant, but no! There are people who take little kids and teach to be Nazis! It’s an online school, of course, titled “Dissident Homeschool.”

“It is up to us to ensure our children know him for the deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro he actually was,” the administrator of the network’s Telegram channel wrote, alongside a downloadable lesson plan for elementary school children. ”He is the face of a movement which ethnically cleansed whites out of urban areas and precipitated the anti-white regime that we are now fighting to free ourselves from.”

Since the group began in October 2021 it has openly embraced Nazi ideology and promoted white supremacy, while proudly discouraging parents from letting their white children play with or have any contact with people of any other race. Admins and members use racist, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs without shame, and quote Hitler and other Nazi leaders daily in a channel open to the public.

One problem here is that we’ve been steadily degrading the meaning of the word “school”. When I was a kid I had a relative who bought a house and set up a “school” to teach the principles of the John Birch Society — at that point, you had to have some kind of facility and had to fill out some paperwork in order to shovel your garbage into children’s heads. He was only able to poison the brains of a small number of families, but nowadays, anyone can assemble a pile of bullshit, call it an online school, and spew it out through a channel on Telegram, and amplify the signal. “Dissident Homeschool” has 2400 members! We can at least hope many of them are critics tracking the nonsense, and that some of those families are treating it as supplemental and also sending their kids to a real school.

The “Dissident Homeschool” network is run by a husband and wife team who use the aliases “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon.” This week the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective published a detailed report that unmasked the Saxons as Logan and Katja Lawrence, who live in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, with their four young children.

Oops. I doxxed the Nazis! No regrets.

Lawrence expanded on her view on why she wanted to educate her children at home. “We have our children’s best interest at heart and nobody can do a better job than we can because it’s our child. We are so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” she said.

There are no good Nazis.

The Right Stuff and the National Justice League were described by the Anti-Defamation League as “virulently antisemitic”, while 31 members of Patriot Front were arrested last year inside a U-haul truck on their way to an LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, carrying shields and smoke grenades.

Yet Katja attempts to describe these group’s activities as entirely wholesome.

If your agenda involves treating a significant proportion of the population as degenerate and evil on the basis of irreverent criteria like the color of their skin, you aren’t “wholesome”.

We really need better enforcement of rules defining what constitutes a school, preferably one that establishes a required curriculum, but the combination of Republicans trying to carve up educational funding for their own selfish benefit, and religious groups demanding special privileges to indoctrinate their dogma means all these gaps and loopholes form that allow Nazis to burrow in and thrive.

Uses of language

Once again, the cops are exposed. They beat a man to death at a traffic stop. Along the way, they also tortured the English language — but don’t get our priorities confused, they murdered a man and that’s what matters most. Part of the process of building an ‘elite’ police unit that can carry out street executions is to dehumanize potential victims and distance themselves from their actions.

The first time Memphis police described what happened between their officers and Tyre Nichols — the 29-year-old who died of his injuries after being beaten by police — they wrote that “a confrontation occurred” following a traffic stop. Nichols fled on foot, and then “another confrontation occurred.”

“Afterward, the suspect complained of having a shortness of breath,” reads the statement posted on the Memphis Police Department’s Twitter account the morning after Nichols was beaten on Jan. 7. “The suspect was transported to St. Francis Hospital in critical condition.”

Brutal video footage released Friday, an hour’s worth of clips from body-worn and mounted cameras showing police pepper-spraying, punching and kicking Nichols, underscores the disparity between what police first reported and what actually happened.

Across the country, police sometimes use passive language that can paint a very different picture from what cameras later show. Initial news releases are often based on police officers’ self-reporting, and were it not for the ubiquity of cameras in modern times, the discrepancies between those filings and the reality of a police interaction may never come to light.

See? The police apparently did nothing. A confrontation just happened. The victim complained. The victim was transported, presumably on the wings of angels. Batons apparently moved of their own accord to batter the man. The active voice is anathema when what you are actively doing is inhuman and criminal. Even in the body cam videos, the cops are trying to portray what they’re doing as wildly different from the truth.

While videos can show what police do not write in incident reports, experts also say officers could be starting to use body cameras to influence narratives. Some believed they saw that in the Nichols videos.

In the first altercation shown in the videos, multiple officers shout at Nichols to lie down, though he is already pinned to the ground from shoulders to feet. “I am,” he shouts back, desperate. During the second video, officers tell Nichols to give them his hands when an officer is already holding him by the wrist; then the body camera points away. Officers also say on film that Nichols reached for their guns and is high, neither of which the videos show, though their first traffic stop was not included in the videos because it wasn’t filmed.

All cops are bad. All cops are liars.

Here’s another infuriating example. The unit responsible for this crime is being “deactivated,” cop-speak for “we’re going to rename this group and disperse the guilty parties throughout the department,” and an officer, Major Karen Rudolph, Commander of Public Information, sat down to write a press release. She’s a professional liar, and really ought to reconsider her place in the universe.

Today, Memphis Police Officers assigned to the SCORPION Unit (Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods…

Fuck me. They gave this unit an aggressively macho name, and then invented a contrived acronym to justify it? Jesus. I bet someone was proud to have come up with that one, and they deserve to be fired for it.

…in the aftermath of the tragic death of Tyre Nichols.

“Gosh, someone died? Tragic,” says the group of thugs who murdered him. Own it, you cowards. You are disbanding a unit because they intentionally and viciously killed a civilian. You don’t get to pretend to be sad at a death you caused.

…listening intently to the family…

When has a cop ever listened to the people they abuse? Did they try listening, attentively and politely, to Tyre Nichols?

…it is in the best interest of all to permanently deactivate the SCORPION unit.

Oops. We have to sweep this one under the rug, quick. I wonder if they had listened to the community when they decided to form a unit called SCORPION that would drive around the neighborhood in unmarked cars and pull over people they didn’t like?

The officers currently assigned to the unit agree unreservedly with this next step.

I’m sure they did. Hide the name, please, just don’t send us to prison for the violence we do.

While the heinous actions of a few casts a cloud of dishonor on the title SCORPION…

Christ. SCORPION was never a title with any honor in it. You can tell what strategy they’ve decided on, though: it was just a few bad apples who somehow ended up on the police force, serving dishonorably in an honorable unit that just happened to be named SCORPION (But look, the “P” is for “Peace”!).

For the next phrase, I’m afraid Major Karen Rudolph, Commander of Public Information, deserves to be fired, pilloried, and prohibited from ever being employed in any job involving public communication.

…it is imperative that we, the Memphis Police department take PrOacTiVE StePs iN tHe HEalIng PrOCEsS FoR AlL IMpAcTeD.

AAAAAaaargh. Where’s my red pen? Where’s my goddamn flamethrower?

You’re not going to believe this, but Major Karen tops that in the next sentence.

…to rebuild the trust that has been negatively affected by the death of Mr. Tyre Nichols.

That’s an appalling twist of the knife. The poor police department…the trust that the citizenry had in them has been damaged by the death of Tyre Nichols. It’s his fault. He shouldn’t have died and hurt our reputation.

Hey, Karen: I think that what negatively affected the trust was the savage brutality and violent tactics of the cops, not the fact that the victim died.

The passivity and displacement of blame can be traced all the way to the administration of the police. The bad apples are rotting everywhere.

Creepypastor

Who are these people?

  • David Lloyd Walther
  • Timothy Jason Jeltema
  • Chad Michael Rider
  • David Pettigrew
  • William C. Robinson
  • Brian Pounds
  • Lawrence Hopkins
  • Conner Jesse Penny
  • Jonathan Ryan Ensey
  • Aaron Duane Shipman
  • Conrad Estrada Valdez
  • Rob Shiflet

Hint: they’re all Texans.

Not enough? Another hint: they’re all church leaders.

Now you can probably guess what significant fact unites them: they’re all people who have been charged with child porn, sexual assault on a minor, or child sex trafficking in just the past year. I have to wonder how many atheists have been similarly arrested.

That’s just scratching the surface!

In May, a document released by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) revealed the case of more than 700 Baptist leaders—including pastors, teachers, ministers and volunteers—accused or found guilty of sexual abuse of children.

The 205-page document, which looks at cases dating back to a period between 2000 and 2009, details the arrests and—sometimes—sentencing of Baptist leaders found guilty of sexual assaults, soliciting children, child pornography and more.

I wonder what it is that draws pedophiles and groomers to religion.

Royalty is ridiculous

Creepy ol’ Prince Andrew, Epstein’s pal, is reportedly being evicted from Buckingham Palace. He’s been an embarrassment to the family — and embarrassing that family is an amazing accomplishment — especially since he settled out of court with Virginia Giuffre, who’d accused him of sexually assaulting her multiple times. It’s an unsavory, ugly story that so far has resulted in the death of Epstein in prison, the sentencing of Ghislaine Maxwell to 20 years for sex trafficking, and Andrew reduced to a shameful laughingstock.

But the ugly absurdity isn’t ending yet. Andrew wants to overturn that settlement, and is apparently doing some maneuvering to get it tossed out. Some of Maxwell’s friends have provided “evidence”, they claim, that proves the unsavory stories of Andrew assaulting Giuffre in a bathtub can’t possibly be true.

If the tub doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

Yeesh. That’s a rather roomy bathtub, so I don’t see what it demonstrates, other than that these people are idiots. So on top of his “I don’t sweat” defense, he’s adding “I don’t fit in a large bathtub”?

Oh well, it was printed in Britain’s Best Quality Newspaper, so it must be true.

Lovely eggs!

It’s been one of those days. We’ve got another chemistry job candidate today with a busy schedule, and we’re making him suffer for this position. Flight delays, bad weather, drifting snow…I’m impressed that he made it all. Shortly I have to do my own bit of suffering, attending his job talk. I’m sure it will be good, but I’m not a chemist, and I know what to expect. It’ll start off gently enough, with alcohols & alkenes & alkynes, names I’ll recognize, and then within minutes I’ll be lost in exotic reactions with wild catalysts and I’ll have no idea what’s going on.

But before that, happy news from the lab: after a long dry spell, we have a new egg sac!

Are they not luscious and beautiful? I think two things might have uncorked an oviduct: I’m teaching fly genetics, which means we get an excess of flies, and everything that doesn’t get used in our crosses gets showered upon the happy spiders; and we spent a day adjusting humidity in the cages, which seems to have been one of the triggers.

Now…off to organic chemistry.

North Dakota Republicans…enough said

They’re up to their usual tricks, pushing more hate bills.

Six Republican members of the North Dakota Legislature introduced a bill Wednesday that would send a clear message to nonhuman-identified students: You’re not wanted in the Roughrider State.

The two-page bill, which is primarily a measure seeking to prohibit schools in the state from accommodating transgender youths,

Wait. Stop there. The bill is mainly about discriminating against trans kids, but that isn’t newsworthy enough anymore, so the news article is focusing on…furries. It turns out the sponsors of the bill have been listening to propaganda about litter boxes. To resume…

includes a subsection aimed at a different — and theoretical — category of students.

“A board of a school district, a public or private school, or a teacher in a public or private school may not … Adopt a policy establishing or providing a place, facility, school program, or accommodation that caters to a student’s perception of being any animal species other than human,” the bill, labeled an “emergency measure” by its authors, states.

This section of the bill appears to be connected to an urban myth about litter boxes in U.S. schools that spread among conservative Republicans ahead of the November election. An NBC News report published in October found this myth — about schools providing accommodations, like litter boxes, for children who identify as cats — to be untrue.

Do you think this is stupid? Wait until you hear directly from the ditz behind it all. She’s posing in front of some sort of Christian slogan, which is totally unsurprising.

The interviewer asks exactly the right questions: “Do we have any confirmed sightings of furries in North Dakota schools?” I don’t specifically have a confirmed number on that. She doesn’t know any. And she repeats the litter box myth. This is all a purely hypothetical exercise. Then she says it is happening in Minnesota! No, it’s not. You don’t get to use my state as a shield for your stupidity, lady.

But let’s not forget that she’s using this nonsense about furries as a stalking horse for her real agenda: she’s a transphobe elected to state congress who wants to implement her hate and religious dogma in North Dakota law.

Troll farming is a growth industry

Behold the social media harvest! Pay me!

This will not end well, as we’re already seeing. Elon Musk recently pardoned a whole army of right-wing scumbags, allowing them to tweet freely, and then got reminded why they were banned in the first place. Nick Fuentes, the Nazi-loving anti-semite, took advantage of his new bullhorn to declare, We love Hitler…bitch!, and got banned again within 24 hours. You know, this was entirely predictable. That’s what Fuentes always does, ramping up the hatred to get his followers excited. He can do nothing else — if he toned down the rhetoric, his rabid base would evaporate.

Now Facebook/Meta/whatever mask Zuckerberg is wearing now, announced that they’re unbanning Donald Trump. They didn’t offer a good reason.

In an interview with Axios, which first reported the news, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said the company had decided to allow Trump to regain access to his account shortly ahead of the 2024 election cycle.

Clegg added that he hoped Trump wouldn’t want to “delegitimize” the 2024 election as he did the 2020 election, should he decide to return to the platform.

“We just do not want — if he is to return to our services — for him to do what he did on January 6, which is to use our services to delegitimize the 2024 election, much as he sought to discredit the 2020 election,” Clegg said. “We’ve always believed that Americans should be able to hear from the people who want to lead the country.”

Oh. They let him back because they “hope” he won’t continue to do what he’s been constantly doing for the last several years. That’s not very rational. These bozos really need to read the fable of the scorpion and the frog.

I think Amanda Marcotte has figured out the real reason they want him back online. Meta has been an embarrassing debacle and is bleeding money. Trump is a trick to provoke more traffic.

This isn’t about fairness, free speech, or democracy — all values Trump has spent the past 8 years trying to destroy. It’s likely not even that much about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s well-documented willingness to be bullied by right-wingers. This is almost certainly about one thing and one thing only: money.

It’s not just the money that Trump’s campaign will spend on Meta. Trump himself, by being the most famous and repugnant troll in the world, is just big business for social media. His fascism, his bigotry, his cruelty and even his poor spelling and grammar all draw attention from fans and haters alike, creating a whirlwind of clicks and engagement that more responsible content simply can’t match. As tech journalist Kara Swisher notes, “Enragement equals engagement.” Trump makes liberals angry, makes his fans angry at liberals, causes fights and incentivizes dunks. Every post generates huge numbers of reposts both praising and condemning him. Democracy can’t stand a chance against the sheer profitability engine that is his unique combination of stupidity, ego, and hatefulness. He’s the worst person imaginable, but that is all the more reason we can’t look away.

Exactly. The social media companies have figured out that troll farms are the cheap way to harvest clicks. They will then go to the capitalist companies and trade their bounty of clicks for real money, and the companies have not yet figured out how to tell cheap rage clicks from valuable quality clicks, so they pay up. The social media giants have been working very hard to devalue their product, and I hope someday everyone catches on.

Marcotte accurately describes what Facebook is currently selling.

At this point, Facebook has little choice but to lean into the userbase it still has: aging Boomers who believed they were joining to share pictures of grandkids but end up spending hours of the day on the site further alienating themselves from their kids through their addiction to COVID-19 denialism memes and conspiracy theories about “antifa.” Not injecting Trump into that situation is, from a profitability standpoint, like marketing a cruise line to retirees that doesn’t feature an all-you-can-eat buffet. In this case, all they’re eating is fascist propaganda.
…
Even more than Fox News, Facebook is why your grandpa thinks the city you live in is a burned-out husk where BLM protesters and “antifa” won’t let you out of your house unless you change your gender. From a purely business standpoint, leaving Trump out of that is like not stocking Coca-Cola in a grocery’s soda aisle.

Tossing Donald Trump into that barrel of garbage isn’t going to put Facebook on the comeback trail, for sure.

A complete story with a satisfying conclusion

Act I: The story begins with a Christian apologist named David Falk making some scathing comments about a Biblical scholar named Francesca Stavrakopoulou.


From what I’ve seen of Stavrakopoulou, she seems professional and competent. Falk, on the other hand, has something wrong with his brain.

Act II: a fellow named Dan McClellan replies and calmly minces him to a fine pulp. Wow, this is thorough.

Act III: Falk makes a pathetic not-pology.

Act IV: The Vancouver School of Theology, where Falk used to be employed, follows through with a finishing move.

Post-credits teaser: “I’ll have my revenge!” cackles a vanquished Falk.

Stay tuned for the sequel! Oh, wait, Netflix already cancelled it.