An homage

I opened up You’re All Just Jealous of my Jetpack this morning, and this cartoon leapt out at me.

I felt so smart, like a classically trained art historian, because I knew instantly that this was a reference to a famous cartoon from Gary Larson’s The Far Side. I even remember seeing it in the newspaper back in the 1980s, and puzzling over its profundities.

It’s become the painting of a pipe for our age.

Crime is legal now

Those Purge movies got it wrong. This is capitalism. We’re not going to legalize murder, but felonies, like theft and grift, are the crimes that will be indulged in, and it won’t help you to hide in a bunker. Your salaries, your retirement funds, your bank accounts are going to be pilfered and emptied into the pockets of the rich.

Trump has already started. It’s the day before his inauguration, and do you think he’s working on a high-minded speech and getting ready to take action to Make America Great Again? Ha. He’s launching a memecoin.

Man, there’s a lot of jargon in that video. I’m not and never have been into crypto, so a lot of it went over my head, but I can recognize the general thrust of what’s going on: Trump is going to use the authority of his position as head of the federal government to sell worthless trash to his followers. I won’t be buying it. Unfortunately, I’m still going to be sad for all the people he’s robbing, and I know this is going to do harm to the communities I’m part of.

Why are fewer men going to college?

Every year in my genetics class we play a little game. The first lab is dedicated to learning some basic rules of probability and running through some simple statistical tests, and one of the exercises is to look around the room and count male-presenting vs. female-presenting students, and test whether the distribution is close enough to 50:50. It never is. then we test against a 40:60 male:female ratio, which used to be the ratio for my university as a whole, and it’s always significantly different than that. This year I have closer to a 30:70 ratio.

Another anecdotal observation: all the men in the class spontaneously segregated themselves to one lab bench. I told them it looked like a high school dance with all the boys nervous and shy about asking someone to dance. The women also looked comfortable with the separation. I’ve long wondered what’s going on, why men are avoiding college, and today I found an article that ponders the same question.

In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.

By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.

Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.

The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?

Yeah, why is that? Let’s hear some hypotheses.

Ruth Simmons, president of A&M University thinks “the problem is the way we treat our boys in k-12. They turn away from school because of the negative messages they get at school… Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.

I call bullshit on that one. Do you think women don’t get negative, discouraging messages in k-12? The whole damn culture is rife with a bias that girls are supposed to be homemakers and squirt out babies.

Another college president, Donald Ruff believes it boils down to money. “Honestly I think it’s the sticker shock. To see $100,000 that’s daunting.

True, tuition is ridiculously high, but being a woman does not qualify you for a discount, so that’s a bad explanation.

Author Richard Reeves thinks, “The main reason is that girls are outperforming boys in school.

I can confirm that! I’ve looked at final grade distributions in my classes, and typically the top 10% in the class are all women. However, that doesn’t explain why we have this difference in performance. I don’t think women are intrinsically smarter than men (I confess to being biased by my experience), and I struggled to understand where this performance difference might come from. Once I thought it might be that the men are all distracted by sports, but no…our male students are often engaged with our sports teams, but I’m more often seeing that women are putting in long hours with the swim team, the volleyball team, the soccer team. When there’s an away game it produces bigger holes in the women student audience than the men’s group (partly, of course, because there are fewer men in the first place.)

There are other suggestions bounced around.

• Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.

• Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.

• Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.

• Men join the military more than women.

• A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.

OK, but those disparities were just as great, or greater, in the 1950s as they are now. They don’t explain the 𝚫♂ at all. But the author proposes an interesting, if rather circular, explanation.

What has changed is an increase in girls.

When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.

We’re just not talking about it.

Here’s a phenomenon I have witnessed in almost 40 years of teaching: vocational choices have been shifting.

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

That’s also true for med school. Every year I’m writing recommendations for vet school, med school, and grad school, mostly for women. It’s not for the usual annoying excuse I hear from some people, that those professional schools and those occupations have gotten easier, with reduced standards, to accommodate “the girls”* because, if anything, admissions have become even more competitive over the years. Probably the toughest school to get into is vet school, and that’s where the disparity between male and female applicants is highest, in my experience.

So one simple explanation is…cooties. Girls’ germs.

“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what’s really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” – Dr. Anne Lincoln

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

Great. I’ll inform the administration that one way out of our enrollment and budget declines is to admit fewer women.

But seriously, there is something going on here: witness the spontaneous segregation of men and women in my genetics lab. I don’t understand why men are averse to working with women, but it’s a real phenomenon I’ve witnessed. There is no shortage of stupid explanations, at least!

Because the concept of school is feminine.
In Spanish, school is ‘escuela’, ending in -a, which is a feminine.
Think about what you do in school.
You sit down, you accept that you don’t know sh:t and you accept that your teacher is right and you have to shut up and listen.
Obedience is what school requires, which is a feminine trait.
What is masculine is standing up in the classroom and saying “Fvck this sh:t, I’m going to do it my way, you’re wrong, I’m right, I’m not gonna listen to you”, that is a very masculine thing to do, and that’s why men, who are on average, more masculine, essentially do that.

The concept of school is feminine…but never mind that women were often forbidden from attending college, until relatively recent decades.

In Spanish, ‘escuela’ has a feminine gender…damn, this is an argument from a man who has never studied languages, because the article attached to a word has no necessary association with sex.

Since when is good teaching and good learning a matter of rote memorization? My best students ask questions. I encourage them to ask me to clarify or explain why something I say is true. To assume that obedience is a feminine trait is straight up wrong and bigoted, and to think that the manly way to learn is to announce aggressively that you’re not going to listen, is antithetical to learning anything. That guy gets everything wrong.

It’s a useful example of the problem, though. It tells me that the problem is a deep cultural bias, where loud-mouthed, ignorant men are shouting out their sexist biases and indoctrinating other men into a dumb attitude that reinforces their bigotry even further. Somehow, men can acquire authority by being loud and aggressive, no matter how stupid their views are, and that just generates more loud, aggressive, stupid men, enshittifying whole generations of young people.

That’s my perspective from the world of education. I can’t think of any examples from the world of politics, for example, can you?


* One thing that bugged me about the article is that it uses men/women, boys/girls, male/female interchangeably. I’m working with college-aged students, and I can’t think of them as boys/girls — they’re adults, or nearly so — and as a biologist male/female has connotations of sex, which I avoid with students. They’re men and women in my classes, that’s it.

Surprise! We have a 28th amendment?

As Joe Biden was getting his coat and leaving the White House, he has announced that he has ratified the equal rights amendment! Just like that! He can do that? What took him so long?

But legal experts contend it isn’t that simple: Ratification deadlines lapsed and five states have rescinded their approval, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school, prompting questions about the president’s authority to ratify the amendment more than 50 years after it first passed.

Biden is leaning on the American Bar Association’s opinion, the senior official said, which “stresses that no time limit was included in the text of the Equal Rights Amendment” and “stresses that the Constitution’s framers wisely avoided the chaos that would have resulted if states were able to take back the ratifying votes at any time.”

This is an interesting bomb to throw back over his shoulder. Will Trump fight it? Is this another issue that will tear the Republican party apart? Will Zombie Phyllis Schlafly rise from her grave to haunt the halls of Congress?

I approve of the core principles of the amendment, but I also approve of any effort to sow chaos in the Trump administration.

Typical Scandinavian-American family, circa 1900

My niece is busily archiving a vast pile of family documents to ancestry.com, and I periodically get these announcements that something new about long-gone relatives has appeared. This is a family portrait of the Westads in Fertile, MN ’round about 1900.

The stern bearded fellow seated in front is my great-great-grandfather Jens Pederson Westad, and next to him is my great-great-grandmother Marit Oldsdatter Solem Westad. The tall young man standing at the back is my great-grandfather Peter. He looks to have been about the age of the students I teach nowadays, which is a bit strange to me, since I remember him as a tall old guy with a great grey mustache. We all get old, I guess.

It just reminded me that I’ve got Peter’s pocketwatch (he’s not wearing it yet in the photo, he won’t buy it until 1908) out for repair and it should be ready any day now, and I do have his Talebakke Totenkniv (not worn in the photo, again it’ll be a few years before he buys it) on the desk in front of me. I always feel this odd thrill at seeing connections like this.

Elon Musk is a fake everything

I’ve been saying this for a long time: Musk is a poseur. He’s not a great engineer; when he directly meddled in the process at Tesla, the result was the Cybertruck, or his fake robot. He’s definitely not a good scientist, as witnessed by Neuralink. His efforts at social engineering are disastrous — look at what he’s done to Twitter. Musk is just a guy with a lot of money who buys people to do work he can attach his name to. The only thing exceptional about him is his ego.

So when he started bragging about being a great gamer, you could predict that that was all a lie.

During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Musk boasted that he was one of the top-ranked Diablo IV players in the world.

Shockingly, this turned out to be true (at least, at the time), but really, it shouldn’t have been possible—presumably, Musk doesn’t have enough spare hours in the day.

Recently, Musk attracted the suspicions of gamers again after revealing himself to be a top player of Path of Exile 2, with his high-level characters equipped with extremely powerful gear, indicating that a significant amount of hours had been pumped into his account.

Rather foolishly, Musk livestreamed himself playing the game, and gamers instantly clocked him as an inept player.

A detailed Reddit thread laying out the evidence against Musk makes it clear that he wasn’t familiar with basic gameplay mechanics of Path of Exile 2, and couldn’t possibly have leveled up his own characters by himself.

Gamers noted that Musk’s equipment was even better than Twitch streamers who play the game full-time for a living—the world’s richest man appears to have hired players to strengthen his characters.

I’m not a great gamer, not even a good one, but years ago I played World of Warcraft, and it was easy to tell when you had a fake player in your midst. Playing that game well required a thorough understanding of the mechanics — you had to be familiar with optimal sequence of attacks, you had to know the cooldowns on your magic items, you had to know the choreography of a boss fight. You could just use lots of money to buy top-tier gear, and you could pay someone to level up your character for you, but then the person who did that wouldn’t have the reflexes or the expertise to be effective. Those were the guys you’d invite to a raid because they had the glittering armor and the magnificent sword who would then, in the fight, stand in the fire and spam one button.

It’s easy for real players to spot the phonies.

It is pathetic that the richest man in the world who is running (badly) multiple companies and has the ear of the soon-to-be president and has what, 13 kids feels the need to pretend to be a super-cool elite gamer, too. No one is fooled.

Kent Hovind’s latest ‘wife’ says bye-bye

Kent Hovind must be a real asshole — he keeps driving women away. Here’s a brief history of his brief ‘marriages’:

He was married to his first wife Jo Hovind from 1973 and they stayed together until their divorce in March of 2016.

He then ‘married’ Mary Tocco in September 2016, though no sexual adultery had taken place in his former marriage, making him an adulterer. They did not get a marriage license and instead entered into a public, legally recognizable common-law marriage.

However, in Alabama at the time, the state did not recognize “common-law-divorces” that can be entered and exited willy-nilly, but rather in order to legally end the marriage, they would have to undergo a formal divorce process, the same as if entered into a traditional marriage. To quote Robert Baty “Legal common-law marriages cannot be dissolved except by legal process, not by hand-waiving.”

But that’s exactly what he did. While still legally married to Mary Tocco, Kent Hovind waived his hands and declared the marriage dissolved in 2017.

Feeling restless and on the prowl, he got ‘married’ again in 2018, this time to Cindy Lincoln. This was done in the same sort of private ceremony.

However, after his first common-law marriage, Alabama changed its laws, so that the state no longer recognized any new common-law marriages as legally binding.

Following this pattern, his new ‘marriage’ to Lincoln did not last long, and he cut ties with her in 2020 by ‘divorcing her’ ie another wave of his hand. Though they publically presented themselves as married up to this point and consummating the relationship, the law treated this basically as a boyfriend and girlfriend breaking up, given the ‘marriage’ was invalid in the first place.

It is this third ‘wife’ that took an order of protection against the disgraced creationist, claiming that he physically abused her by ‘body-slamming her’ and has engaged in a pattern of psychological torture, resulting in him being sentenced to 30 days in jail for domestic violence.

Then in September of 2021, he ‘married’ a 4th ‘wife’, Sandra Sawyer, in another private covenant/ common-law ceremony. Like the ‘marriage’ before, the state does not recognize this marriage, and so legally he is still married to his second wife.

The saga will have to be updated, because it seems that #4, Sandra Sawyer, has now left him.

I hope the women around him are waking up to this and that there is no #5.

An unfortunate retraction

I had previously announced that I was going to retire after 2025-2026. That statement is no longer operational. We looked at our finances, and we looked at the orange clown who is going to be running the country, and decided that we could not afford to retire yet. Or in the foreseeable future. Or ever.

It’s not all bad news. My lab is right across the hall from the anatomy lab, so when I drop dead at the bench, they can just wheel me across the way to the cadaver storage room, and we’ll also save the university one yearly expense.