Once, I would have predicted that Ukraine was going to be crushed

Even now, I don’t know — at a guess, I’d assume the eastern Ukraine is going to get bloodily chewed up by the blundering Russian war machine. But then I see this map of recent fires and explosions at important Russian military facilities.

Look at those sites north of Moscow. Are Ukrainians that fierce and bold that they’re carrying out a counter-invasion? Not likely. Here’s a better explanation or two.

The fact that so many fires have broken out at key locations in such a short period is “quite suspicious,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank in Washington. However, he added, it is “really impossible to tell at this stage.”

There are explanations other than sabotage, Alperovitch said. Accidental fires are not unusual in Russia, which has a reputation for poor maintenance, and Western sanctions are making it harder to secure spare parts for vital machinery.

Arestovych doubts Ukraine was involved in the fires at the defense-related facilities and suggested that Russian officials are setting fires to cover up evidence of corruption.

Oh. Russia might manage to eke out some pyrrhic victory in the east, but wow, one thing they’ve just lost forever is any reputation as a formidable fighting force. More like a gang that couldn’t shoot straight. It’s too bad Don Knotts has died, he would have been perfect playing Putin in the bio-pic to come.

Why would anyone hire Sabatini?

David Sabatini, the molecular biologist who sexually harassed students and faked data, was first fired from HHMI and the Whitehead Institute, and then resigned from MT as his behavior was exposed. We’re done with him, right? He’ll go get a job in construction or pharmaceutical sales and we won’t have to worry about his unpleasant influence on academia anymore.

Wrong.

NYU wants to hire him.

The New York University (NYU) Grossman School of Medicine is in discussions with biologist David Sabatini about hiring him as a faculty member, according to multiple sources at the school. Since August 2021, Sabatini has been forced out of or fired from three leading institutions for sexual harassment or for violating workplace or consensual sexual relationship policies. The hiring discussions have been taking shape over several weeks, according to NYU sources.

Note: “forced out of or fired from three leading institutions for sexual harassment”. I would have thought that would be a colossal black mark on your record that would have made you permanently unemployable, but no, I guess not. Why does everything I learn about academia leave me feeling more and more disappointed?

In part, this is because there are assholes at the top.

In an email to faculty and staff last week, the medical school’s dean decried what he called “cancel culture.” And last month, a prominent research philanthropist defended Sabatini to a crowd of elite medical researchers in New York City.

Hey, Mr Grossman, what you ought to decry is that your medical school is apparently the refuse bin for biomedical waste, and you are under the thumb of billionaires? Shouldn’t the faculty there be up in arms at being the dumping ground for MIT’s discards?

They are.

More than 200 students and employees staged a walkout to protest the NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s potential hiring of biologist David Sabatini outside the school’s Kimmel Pavilion on Wednesday, April 27. Sabatini, a former tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resigned on April 1 following a student’s allegations of sexual harassment.

Grossman students, staff, faculty and postdoctoral students demanded that Grossman protect its students by ending the employment consideration at the rally, which took place across from the NYU Langone Medical Center at 30th Street and First Avenue. Kritika Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Grossman, said she attended the walkout because she believes that hiring Sabatini would contradict the ideals that the school claims to uphold.

Reject the idea of offering a known harasser and fraud a position. While you’re at it, fire Dean Grossman for being an out-of-touch stooge who doesn’t mind damaging the reputation of NYU.

Why does hateful bigot Kent Hovind still have a YouTube channel?

Emma Thorne made a compilation video of Kent Hovind and Matt Powell being “horrible, horrible people”. It’s pretty good, and illustrates why those two actually are horrible. She notes that they are “slipping in more and more dramatic, violent, out-there viewpoints into their religious ministry”, so there is cause for alarm, although I’d suggest they’ve always been this way, they’re just becoming more vocal about it.

Well, ol’ Kent is not having any of that, so he made a response video (I’m not linking to it, if you must, look it up). You can tell he’s having a slow burn over it, and he’s annoyed that his hateful views are being shown to the public in a disapproving manner. He’s pissed off — his jaw is clamped tightly shut as he watches — and when he can take it no more, he erupts into babble near the end. Emma highlights some of his more awful ideas, like his statement that All the Chinese look alike (he usually keeps mum about his bigotry on YouTube, but in his unrecorded lectures I’ve heard him throw out all kinds of “jokes” about Jews and black people), and the fact that he brags about how brutally he beat his children.

His response to that last comment is to call upon someone in his audience at Dinosaur Adventure Land, at about the 24 minute mark:

Brother, how many children do you have? Four? Do you once in a while have to discipline them to get them to understand? Is that Biblical? Is it effective? Do the kids love you and want to do right, or do they love you for it? They love you for it!

Um, no. Children love their parents in spite of any abuse, and sometimes they stop loving them. You don’t get to call on the natural charity children exhibit for the people they depend on and have grown up with to justify any harm you do to them!

At about 26 minutes, Emma has hit him with his callous comments about the boy who drowned at his camp. Does Kent talk about his responsibilities as a manager, about the need to improve safety at his lake, his sympathy for the grieving parents? No. He responds with excuses, and justifies it all because the father of the dead child made a donation to his camp.

The dad of that boy loves our ministry, donated money to build a dock that gazebo out there, he paid for that to be in memory of his son. He had twin boys, seven years old, one was kind of hyperactive, and apparently came up under the dock, hit his head and knocked himself out, and nobody saw him. The water was 3 feet deep. The parents were there. Nobody saw him under the dock. And he drowned. I’m sorry. People drown in lakes all the time. It’s tragic and bad, but it happens. People get in car wrecks all the time too. They still want to say something about me, I wasn’t there.

It was tragic, but the dad loves our ministry. I should have him on the program sometime and say, look, guys, quit picking on Kent Hovind, my boy drowned in the lake, that’s bad enough, knock it off, OK, it’s fine.

No, it’s not fine. Hovind wants this man to appear with him on camera and say that it was fine that his child died (it’s OK, it was the hyperactive one, after all.) That is disgusting and psychopathic. He’s entirely focused on the harm done to him, that he’s getting “picked on”, not that a child died in his irresponsibly maintained bible school.

This is what he does throughout his response video. He takes a criticism from Emma, and tries to argue that it was fine, and makes it all ten times worse. We need a phrase stronger than “doubling down”, because this guy is just throwing everything into the pot all at once. He’s justifying everything she said while trying to defend himself.

For example — and these really demonstrate what a horrible person he is — Emma quotes him saying, Have you ever heard of the Palestinians? They should have totally destroyed them back then, three thousand five hundred years ago. How do you think he should respond to a direct quote in which he advocated genocide? His response is to declare that God said it was OK, and besides, the Palestinians were filthy, dirty people who had sex with animals.

When God told the children of Israel to go into that land, he said to totally destroy certain nations. They were loaded with diseases. And god said utterly destroy them and they did not obey. And there are some diseases haunting humanity today that could have been wiped out in their infancy. The Palestinians, some of those people, had unbelievable sex practice with animals and other things like that, and God said to kill them all. The children of Israel did not obey, and that’s a long interesting story, but it’s what God said to do.

Well, now, the Bible says nothing about Palestinians, a modern people who did not exist as a distinct nation 3500 years ago. But this does not in any way lessen or excuse Hovind’s bigotry! It makes it all worse!

Oh, but wait until you hear how he defends himself when Emma quotes Matt Powell and Kent Hovind ranting about how homosexuals ought to be executed. He says of AIDS, suppose when the disease was first discovered, those who had it were isolated or euthanized. Just a hypothetical, right? No, he really does believe they should have been rounded up and killed. He brings up a slide that says there are 30 verses in the Bible about homosexuality, and points out that it repeatedly says it is an abomination…and he looks up “abomination” in a dictionary, where it says “abomination: a thing that causes disgust or hatred.”

I guess it’s OK to hate gays, then, since the Bible says so.

Then it gets weird.

He goes on and on about disgusting things, trying to make inappropriate comparisons. Is it disgusting for a parent to let their baby eat poop? This has nothing to do with private behavior among consenting adults; parents have responsibilities to their children. Most ironically, he also rants for many long minutes about how the government has the right to regulate many behaviors — Child Protective Services can take children away for good cause, they can set speed limits on roads, they can execute people for murder, they can get involved to stop sex trafficking, etc., all these things that are not at all relevant to being gay, unless he’s trying to argue that being gay is tantamount to murder, therefore execution is warranted.

What’s ironic is that he repeatedly defends the right of the government to decide on any punishment for any arbitrary law, while forgetting that earlier in the video (and many times in the past) he has tried to argue that he was innocent of ever violating any law. He also seems to assume that Emma Thorne is a proponent of capital punishment for certain crimes; I don’t know what her stance on that is, but at a guess, as a liberal lefty like me, she’s probably against it.

You can tell he’s warming up to say that we should have murdered all the gay people.

First case of what would later become known as AIDS was in 1981. What are the main risks of anal sex? Penetrative anal sex has a higher risk of spreading STIs than many other types of sexual activity. This is what the homosexuals do. They’re going to spread disease. “Nobody tells me what to do”, yes they do. They tell you how fast to go, they tell you what side of the road to drive on, that’s a moron, lots of people tell us what to do. Duh. 42,000 people were unknowingly HIV positive at the time. So in 1981, 42,000 people is the estimate, would it have been better at the time to quarantine or execute? Would that have been better for humanity? That’s what I said, and Emma, and her other homosexual friend AJ, are so upset about this. I’m just point out what God’s law says and the logic behind it. 42,000 people had it. How was it transmitted? How did they get this disease? Let’s see. Having anal sex is riskier than vaginal sex. This is where you get the disease, contact with the feces. Duh.

HIV related deaths. 1.4 million people died in the year 2000. Now hold it. When it was first discovered only 42000 people had it. If it had been stopped then, 1.4 million people would not have died in 2000.

All I said was would it have been wise to stop it then?

Yes, it would have been wise to stop it then. We could have saved a lot of lives. But take it up with Ronald Reagan, who ignored the disease, and didn’t do anything to protect people. Protect people, not round them up and execute them. Public education, health measures, active research into treating the disease, condom use, needle exchange programs would have all saved lives. But the plan that leaps to the sick minds of Matt Powell and Kent Hovind is that now they have an excuse to murder lots of people they don’t like.

Also, here’s a hint: the disease is primarily spread by the exchange of blood, not contact with feces. Hovind is just full of misinformation that way. He’s a very stupid man, as well as a bigot.

So let’s end our engagement with these disgusting men with one last amusing quote from Kent Hovind, as he mansplains British history to an English woman.

Study the history of England, and why your sailors were called Limeys. They brought sheep on board, and got all kinds of diseases from sex with the sheep, the sailors did, Emma, study your history.

Yeah, that’s how ignorant Kent Hovind is.

Too much truth

I have to agree with this video. It lines up too well with my experience.

About the point that stupidity is a sociological phenomenon: look at the mess we’re in, and then look at Fox News. There’s the breeding ground, that and all the other awful social media, like Facebook.

Numbers go up, numbers go down, what does it all mean?

Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter, I’m hearing reports of more popular liberal people on the platform losing hundreds of thousands of followers as people read the handwriting on the wall and abandon Twitter. OK, I can sympathize with that, but most of the people I follow are still there — I think it’s a matter of recognizing that whether it’s Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk, it’s assholes all over the top, and you have to wait and see if they actually do anything to compromise your experience. That is, compromise it more than it already is.

I thought I’d check my follower count, to see if I’d been losing people in droves, but the problem there is that I haven’t paid any attention to it for years. I recall that I looked at it several years ago, and was surprised that it was something around 70,000. I looked this morning, and it was 158,000! Why, I don’t know. I can’t determine whether I’ve had a recent decline, though, with my sloppy sampling. I’ll just peg that number to April 2022, and if I remember, I’ll check back in a few weeks or a month. Maybe I’m losing already. Or maybe I’ll get a surge of Nazis hate-following me!

I do know one thing for sure: starting yesterday, my usual quiet Mastodon account got hundreds of new followers (I have 1,700 followers there). I guess some are checking out the alternatives to Twitter already.

Hot tip: if you’re interested in Mastodon, don’t sign up for mastodon.social, which is the biggest instance and is seeing a huge traffic surge. There are lots of instances, almost all connected to the federation, so pick one that seems to have a high up-time and has been around for a while, so that you have a stable entry point. I’m using octodon.social, but there’s a long list of alternative sites as well.

In case you’re wondering what the difference between Mastodon and Twitter is, on the surface, there isn’t much. The big difference is that Mastodon doesn’t have a centralized server, but a lot of smaller, distributed servers that are independently managed and just share data with one another. Musk was free to buy his own Mastodon server, set it up, and manage it, and it wouldn’t have cost him $44 billion…but it also wouldn’t have allowed him to dictate how every other server is managed.

Oh. I guess that is a big difference.

Vulcanized fossil spiders

And they fluoresce, too!

Part and counterpart of two fossil spiders shown in plain light and under UV illumination.

These are part of a well-known invertebrate fossil bed, 22.5 million years old, in France. It contains lots of well preserved insects and spiders, and one question is…why? What makes this particular place so good at preserving these delicate specimens?

The fluorescence was a clue. They dug into the chemistry of the fossils, and figured out that the glow was produced by the sulfurization of chitin, that as the dead spiders sank in the diatom-rich waters of an ancient pond, the sulfur in the diatoms reacted with the chitin carbohydrate to produce a tough carbon polymer, inedible to the microbes, that could last for millions of years.

Cartoon shows the entire proposed pathway: spider becomes entrained in planktonic diatom mat. Pieces of the diatom mat, both with and without spiders entrained within fall to the sediment floor against a background sedimentation of other diatoms and algae (gray dots). With time, these sediments become compressed and preserved into the rock record. a Chemical composition of chitin. Two chains of chitin are illustrated, organized in anti-parallel. Gray boxes indicate the carbonyl functionalities on the chitin. b Sulfonate-containing molecule, which are common in diatom EPS, can undergo microbial sulfate reduction (MSR), leading to the production of sulfide. c Chitin molecule after sulfurization. C–S bonds could potentially replace the carbonyl functionalities, and S–S bridges could form across the chitin chains. d Idealized molecule representing a chitin polymer after further diagenetic alteration, which could result in the formation of aromatized carbon.

I thought that was kind of neat. It’s also a reminder to biology students that you never know where that organic chemistry we make you take might be useful.

If you’re sane, you should be afraid

Warning: the video below may induce seizures if you triggered by strobing lights.

That’s a promo for a QAnon conference. It’s utterly insane. It has everything: junk DNA, vaccines, Hitler, Illuminati, Trump, transhumanism, the Jews, prophecy, etc., etc., etc. It’s also got evil in it, but I think that was entirely self-referential.

After watching that hateful bullshit, the one question in my mind is…do I need to buy a gun to protect myself?

These are not good arguments against “wokeism”

What do you get when a gang of far-right loons gather together to complain about modern medicine? An amazingly revealing expose of what actually bothers them. This essay, In Medical Schools, Woke Ideology Trumps True Healthcare, is a summary of a discussion sponsored by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a far right conservative/libertarian organization that tries to tell universities what they ought to do, and they hosted a little group of conservative nuisances to whine about medical schools.

The webinar, entitled “Hypocritical Oath: The Origins and Consequences of Woke Medical Education,” featured Dr. Sally Satel, a practicing psychiatrist, lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute [enough said]; Aaron Sibarium, associate editor at the Washington Free Beacon [a conservative website founded by a billionaire hedge fund investor]; and John Sailer, a research associate at the National Association of Scholars [I’ve written about these clowns before] and author of numerous articles on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in medical education.

Oh, no! Not the “Wokes” again! Perhaps they’ll start out by defining what they mean by “woke”.

Satel began the talk by speaking about how woke ideology has taken over psychiatric care. She stated, “any kind of psychotherapy that takes place under such conditions, where patients are reflexively branded as oppressed and encouraged to see themselves as feeble victims, is doomed to fail.” She made the point that therapy is meant to help individuals identify the inadvertent ways in which they undermine their best interests and how they can adapt if they are unable to change. To be sure, one’s health can be affected by social factors—but not exclusively. There are other factors that impact health, despite the new social doctrine of the day.

No, that’s not what it means. I agree that any psychotherapy that reflexively branded as oppressed and encouraged to see themselves as feeble victims their patients is going to fail, but that’s not what goes on. Can you imagine trying to motivate a mass movement under the banner of “YOU’RE ALL FEEBLE VICTIMS!” Sorry, nope, being conscious of oppressive social systems is not the same as accepting victimhood.

She also parrots the conservative/libertarian line about personal responsibility.

The choices one makes on a daily basis, for example, have long-term effects on health. Satel highlighted an often ignored fact: individuals, no matter their circumstances, still have some agency when it comes to their own health. Unfortunately, the concept of individual agency has slowly withered away, replaced by the far more popular victimhood ideology. In today’s victimhood society, it is almost unthinkable to take responsibility for one’s actions and the possible negative effects they may have.

Sure, personal responsibility is important. So why can’t rich entitled folks acknowledge their personal responsibility for denying others civil rights, or a living wage, or some measure of security in housing and food? Everyone has some agency, but we also have an unequal distribution of privilege and ability. We have “some” agency, but we also have “some” unfair societal biases. Sally Satel does not work harder than someone in an Amazon warehouse, and “personal responsibility” isn’t going to pay your medical bills.

Sailer spoke next about how institutional policy has resulted in woke medical schools. He noted that UNC-Chapel Hill has twenty-four paid DEI officers, and half of these officers are in fields related to healthcare (12), and a majority of those are in the medical school (8). The university, as a result, has convened a task force to integrate social justice into the curriculum. Sailer says these kinds of policies and task forces are present on almost all medical campuses in the country.

DEI and social justice, for example, are now a part of the tenure and promotion process at many medical schools. This means that if one objects to the politically correct idea of the day, one’s job as a professor may be in jeopardy. Objective truths such as, “a man is a man, and a woman is a woman,” may now cause faculty to lose their jobs.

Whoa there, John. You forgot to tell us why diversity and equality and social justice are bad things for doctors to learn about. Why shouldn’t we expect a doctor to care about the health and welfare of their patients? Shouldn’t doctors oppose unhealthy working and living conditions?

Also, you’re being sneaky and dishonest, John. a man is a man, and a woman is a woman is only an objective truth if you’ve clearly defined what you mean by the complex terms “woman” and “man”, and I suspect you’re trying to smuggle in some bigotry.

Sailer also spoke about the White Coats for Black Lives group and its beliefs. Its members believe in a variety of radical notions including, but not limited to: dismantling fatphobia, abolishing prisons, dismantling capitalism, and queer/trans liberation. What is remarkable is the effectiveness with which this radical group has enacted concrete policy changes, including at the University of Michigan, the University of California-Davis, the University of Minnesota, and many others.

Yes? Again, what is your objection to dismantling fatphobia? Do you think we should build more prisons? Do you fail to see the glaring flaws in capitalism? What do you want, queer/trans imprisonment? Sailer is simply taking for granted that his audience opposes these things that humane people with the goal of making the world better are trying to implement. Just like his “a man is a man” statement is just a call for bigots to fill in the blanks.

I look at the list of things these anti-“wokists” oppose, and they all look like fine ideas to me, and they always fail to explain why they’re agin’ ’em. What’s wrong with queer/trans liberation? What are they afraid will happen if queer people have equal rights and autonomy and are protected from discrimination and hate? It’s the unspoken stuff behind their words that is most revealing.

Please, medical schools, continue to make it a priority to train doctors to be ethical human beings who respect the existence of others. That’s what “woke” really means, you know.

IT’S ALIVE!!?!

A giant squid washed ashore in Japan. Surprisingly, it was still alive!

That looks like a sick squid to me — alive, but barely. I’m seeing conflicting reports that it’s already died, or that it’s living in an aquarium, or that it was airlifted to a secret kaiju laboratory on a remote volcanic island in the Pacific.