Oh boy, I’m a demon!

When will my supernatural demonic powers kick in? None of my curses ever seem to work.

I think a perfectly legitimate way to deal with ranting pastors like Greg Locke is to immediately revoke their tax exempt status. Any time a preacher gets blatantly partisan, or uses their pulpit to promote sedition, swiftly inform them that they are preaching politics rather than religion, and send them a bill for property tax and income tax.

It’s absurd that we just shrug and look away at that kind of behavior.

The Northman — just a bit too down home for me

I count two films by Robert Eggers as just about the best movies of the last decade — The VVitch and The Lighthouse — they’re thick with an otherworldly atmosphere and a fearfully weird kind of horror. So of course tonight I had to go see The Northman.

It was OK. Not as compelling as the other two movies, but I enjoyed it as a grim, fatalistic saga of bloody revenge. I think it was less exciting to me because the primary elements of the story — howling with the wolves, vengeance, berserker rages, betrayal, and vicious fights against the backdrop of an erupting volcano — were so familiar. That’s the mundane experience of growing up in a Scandinavian-American family, don’t you know.

Also, finally, we get some affirmation of our religious beliefs. Yes, when I die in battle, a Valkyrie will descend to carry my soul into the sky to Valhalla, where I will spend eternity feasting and fighting. I saw it in a movie now, so you know it has to be true.

I am unsurprised by the allegations against Elon Musk

If you haven’t seen the news in the last few days, I’ll fill you in: Elon Musk has been accused of sexual harassment.

The flight attendant told her friend that the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla founder asked her to come to his room during a flight in late 2016 “for a full body massage,” the declaration says. When she arrived, the attendant found that Musk “was completely naked except for a sheet covering the lower half of his body.” During the massage, the declaration says, Musk “exposed his genitals” and then “touched her and offered to buy her a horse if she would ‘do more,’ referring to the performance of sex acts.”

The offer to buy her a horse is an unusual detail, but apparently the flight attendant rode horses when she wasn’t working. It’s not as if Musk buys horses for every woman he propositions.

Of course, denies everything.

“I have a challenge to this liar who claims their friend saw me ‘exposed’ — describe just one thing, anything at all (scars, tattoos, …) that isn’t known by the public. She won’t be able to do so, because it never happened,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted early Friday morning.

Now that raises another question: does he even have any distinguishing scars or tattoos that someone would notice? It’s a mark of vanity that he would think his nethers are so distinctive that anyone would recognize him.

But OK, it really is a she said, he said sort of situation. So far, it’s just an accusation, and I’m not seeing the evidence. Except there is one thing that I’d like to see him explain away: the payout.

In 2018, after becoming convinced that her refusal to accept Musk’s proposal had diminished her opportunities at SpaceX, the attendant hired a California employment lawyer and sent a complaint to the company’s human resources department detailing the episode. Around that time, the attorney’s firm contacted the friend and asked her to prepare the declaration corroborating the claims.

The attendant’s complaint was resolved quickly after a session with a mediator that Musk personally attended. The matter never reached a court of law or an arbitration proceeding. In November 2018, Musk, SpaceX and the flight attendant entered into a severance agreement granting the attendant a $250,000 payment in exchange for a promise not to sue over the claims.

The agreement also included restrictive non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses that bar the attendant from ever discussing the severance payment or disclosing any information of any kind about Musk and his businesses, including SpaceX and Tesla.

Wait wait wait. She was concerned that her refusal to accommodate Musk’s sexual demands was going to affect her prospects in the company, and her complaint was very quickly addressed in a meeting with lawyers and the billionaire president of the company by cutting a quarter million dollar check? This is bizarre and damning. He folded fast and handed out an awful lot of money for ‘just an accusation’. Is this routine policy at SpaceX?

It also means there has to be a record somewhere of a payout by SpaceX and a bank deposit by the accuser. Let’s see the evidence.

Although there is also the troubling fact that Free Speech Warrior Musk made the flight attendant sign an NDA. How about waiving that, Mr Musk, and letting freedom ring?

Another argument Musk makes in his defense is that this is the only accusation made, and that his record is clean, which is a point in his favor. However, I wonder what effect his ability to drop $250,000 (or a horse!) on an accuser to silence them with legal shackles plays on that absence. Will success in breaking that NDA lead to a new collection of accusers to step forward? That’s what happened with #MeToo, you know.

When in doubt, lie

It’s amazing what conservatives think they can get away with by just lying loudly, and what’s worse, they do get away with it. Here’s a college-educated woman, the president of Americans United for Life, testifying before congress that cities power their street lights by burning aborted fetuses as fuel.

But wait…fetuses are small, wet, and squishy. It’s going to constitute a net loss of energy to incinerate them — they’re not like little candles that you can touch a match to them and they then burn. This is a patently ridiculous claim that makes no sense at all.

Amanda Marcotte writes about the cavalcade of lies that came pouring out of that session.

It was only one half-hour into Wednesday’s congressional hearing on abortion access when it became clear that the Republican contributions to the day would be loonier than a QAnon message board.

“In places like Washington D.C.,” fetuses are “burned to power the light’s of the city’s homes and streets,” claimed Catherine Glenn Foster, who had, just minutes before, sworn not to lie under oath. The GOP-summoned witness let loose the wild and utterly false accusation that municipal electrical companies are powered by incinerated fetuses.

“The next time you turn on the light, think of the incinerators,” she said, apparently repeating a misleading talking point from the same anti-choice activists caught stashing fetuses at home. Everything on the right is psychological projection.

But then, abortion is a topic on which they’ve been building lies for decades. Conservatives can pound their fists on tables while spitting out lies for hours.

Republicans pretended progressives don’t know what a “woman” is. They insisted that the mere existence of abortion shows that birth control efforts are useless. (On the contrary, the abortion rate has gone down as birth control access has improved.) They pretended, over and over, that the issue at hand was only late-term abortions. In reality, the abortion bans being passed start at two weeks after a missed period, if not sooner. And then there was the repulsive contributions of Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who pretended that women wait until they go into labor and then abort the pregnancy right before the baby is born. Having made this lie up, he then berated Alabama-based OB-GYN Dr. Yashica Robinson for the existence of a procedure that, quite literally, only happens in his bizarre fantasies.

It’s not just abortion! They can lie about everything.

As their actual political views become harder to defend on the merits, Republicans increasingly embrace conspiracy theories and urban legends to justify the unjustifiable. Want to ban schoolchildren from reading about Martin Luther King Jr.? Just falsely claim that something called “critical race theory” is being taught to school kids and use that as cover. Want to deny trans kids the right to be treated with dignity in public schools? Roll out some wild story about how kids are now “identifying” as cats and using litter boxes in school. Want to rile up the GOP going into the midterms? Screw making any substantive arguments! Just claim that Democrats are conspiring to “replace” white Christians with people of different races and ethnicities, a conspiracy theory lifted directly from neo-Nazis, with the details barely tweaked before being repeated hundreds of times on Fox News.

CRT was a big fat lie from the very beginning: it’s not taught in the public schools, but if you don’t understand what it is, you can pretend any mention of our country’s racist history is CRT. So here’s a woman, a single mother raising a son fathered by a black man, suing a school because, she says, they made her son aware of his race. He never talked about his race or racial issues until the school forced it on him.

(Apologies for exposing you to the smarmiest man on television, Jesse Watters.)

I think Melissa Riley is the one projecting racial biases here. She says that once the school told him that he was biracial, that he he has seen himself just as a black man and when he gets a bad grade at school or a girl rejects him, or when his mother asks him to clean the house, that’s racism. Her lawyer claims that the school is brainwashing him and teaching that his behavior is determinined by his race. That’s probably a lie (there are people who argue that), but if the claim is true, that’s not Critical Race Theory at all — CRT is about social structures that affect everyone. She has her own weird ideas about race, as she has said:

“He looks Hawaiian,” she said of her son. “He’s beautiful.”

Eh, African-American, Hawaiian, they’re all the same thing, right?

It’s all projection with these bozos.

Shhh…don’t tell Peter Thiel

I wish I weren’t so pessimistic, but it’s my nature to doubt this paper in Nature that purports to have found a substance that improves learning in in old mice. Maybe it’s true, but I’d want to see it replicated multiple times and with other parameters examined. There have been way too many examples of magical infusions to improve this or that — I immediately think of John Brinkley, who transplanted goat testicles into human patients, but don’t carry the comparison too far. I don’t think the people doing this experiment are unethical quacks like Brinkley at all. It’s a reasonable preliminary experiment.

They’re infusing cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from young mice to old mice, and seeing improvements in a memory test.

The first step for Iram and her team was to give ageing mice an experience they would remember. The team gave 20-month-old mice three small electric shocks on their foot in tandem with several flashes of light and sound, to create an association between the lights and the shock. The researchers then infused the brains of one group of 8 mice with CSF from 10-week-old mice, while a control group of 10 mice were given artificial CSF.

After three weeks the mice faced the same sounds and lights, but this time without a shock — recreating the context of the fear without the actual fear-inducing action. Mice that receive young CSF remembered the shock and froze in fear almost 40% of the time, but that happened only around 18% of the time in mice given artificial CSF. The findings suggest that young CSF can restore some declines in ageing-brain abilities. “The broader implication is that the brain is still malleable and there are ways to improve its function,” says co-author Tony Wyss-Coray, a neuroscientist at Stanford. “It’s not all lost.”

Cool. I know I’m not as good at remembering stuff as I was when young, a common experience in us older folk. A little special fluid that would brighten up my brain would be nice — for me, that fluid is coffee, but if someone has a better brain juice, I’d try it.

Except…it might just be me, but I’m a little leery of behavioral tests done in mice, because mice are complicated and there’s this so-called replication crisis in just these kinds of experiments. Also, CSF? You’re going to have to squeeze a lot of mice to get a human-sized dose. It would be better if they isolated something specific in CSF…oh, they did. That’s promising.

The researchers also isolated a protein from the CSF cocktail that another analysis had suggested was a compelling candidate for improving memory: fibroblast growth factor 17 (Fgf17). Infusion of Fgf17 had a similar memory-restoring effect to infusing CSF. Furthermore, giving the mice an antibody that blocked Fgf17’s function impaired the rodents’ memory ability. Wyss-Coray and Iram have applied for a patent on their findings around Fgf17.

Why did they have to ruin it by taking out a patent on it? Suddenly I’m seeing a whole lot of potential bias introduced into their studies. I know it’s a capitalist planet, but on the one hand a scientist should be working to disprove their hypothesis, and on the other hand a patent-holder is going to see the promise of a lot of money fading if they disprove it.

They’ve also seen an effect of blood plasma on memory.

The work on CSF is inspired by Wyss-Coray’s past work showing that plasma from young mice could restore memory function in older rodents. A start-up co-founded by Wyss-Coray, Alkahest in San Carlos, California, has conducted small trials suggesting some cognitive benefits in mice and people with dementia given the company’s plasma-derived products. Other groups are exploring different methods for using young plasma, but the field is still in its infancy.

Who is funding this? Somehow it seems like something that would appeal to a ghoulish venture capitalist in California.

Also, I’m sorry, but you’d have to get a reverse spinal tap to reap the benefits of Fgf17 which kills a lot of the appeal.

It took more than a year for Iram to perfect the process of collecting CSF and infusing it into another brain. Collection is extremely challenging, she says, and has to be done with precision. Any blood contamination will ruin the fluid. Pressure in the brain is a delicate balance, so infusion must be slow and in a specific location within the brain: the cerebral ventricle. The delicate procedure might pose challenges for use in people, says Julie Andersen, who studies Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California.

“might pose challenges”? My memory isn’t that bad yet that I’d risk blowing out my ventricles to get a slight enhancement. I’m also curious to know how antibodies against Fgf17 are having an effect, since antibodies have an extremely limited ability to cross the blood-brain barrier.

What crimes were committed in your neighborhood?

There’s a dark blot covering my house in this map.

That map is from a report from the Department of the Interior discussing the long, ugly history of Indian boarding schools. It’s 100 pages long, but you can get a summary here.

The findings show from 1819 to 1969, the federal Indian boarding school system consisted of 408 federal schools across 37 states, some territories at that time, including 21 schools in Alaska and seven schools in Hawai’i. Some of these schools operated across multiple sites. The list includes religious mission schools that received federal support, however, government funding streams were complex therefore, all religious schools receiving federal, Indian trust and treaty funds are likely not included. The final list of Indian boarding schools will surely grow as the investigation continues. For instance, the number of Catholic Indian boarding schools receiving direct funding alone is at least 113 according to records at the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions.

It’s appalling. This country engaged in cultural genocide, and we’re only beginning to document what these places were like, often prompted by the discovery of unmarked graves on the sites. (I’ve seen memos from my university that they are going to search the site of the Indian boarding school on campus, but I haven’t seen much action yet). Basically, though, these weren’t schools so much as prisons for children.

The first volume of the report highlights some of the harsh conditions children endured at the schools. Children’s Indigenous names were changed to English names; children’s hair were cut; the use of their Native languages, religions and cultural practices were discouraged or prevented; and the children were organized into units to perform military drills.

The report cites findings from the 1928 Meriam report in which the Interior acknowledged “frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate.

How inadequate?

Examples included descriptions of accommodations at select boarding schools such as the White Earth Boarding school in Minnesota where two children slept in one bed, the Kickapoo Boarding School in Kansas where three children shared a bed and the Rainy Mountain Boarding School in Oklahoma where, “single beds pushed together so closely to preclude passage between them and each bed has two or more occupants.”

The 1969 Kennedy Report, cited in the Department investigation, noted that rampant physical, sexual and emotional abuse: disease; malnourishment; overcrowding,; and lack of health care at Indian boarding schools are well-documented.

It also found schools focused on “manual labor and vocational skills that left American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian graduates with employment options often irrelevant to the industrial U.S. economy, further disrupting Tribal economies.”

I can understand why the Republicans want to shush every mention of race from our history books, because racism seems to have been the primary operating principle of of the United States government since the moment of its inception. All that talk of “liberty” and “freedom” and “equality”, but the unspoken modifier was “for white people only.”

There are a lot of maps in the full report. You should take a look to see if your house is covered with a dark blot.

It really isn’t funny

Ha ha. He made a slip while speaking and admitted that his invasion of Iraq was just as much a criminal act as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Ha ha.

Ha ha. It’s funny because he’s old. Ha.

You know what? That George W. Bush can still laugh over his murderous, pointless, unjustifiable killing of hundreds of thousands of people is just another reason that man, and his cronies, ought to be in prison. Maybe he and Putin could share a cell.

I hope his dreams are populated by the ghosts of all those dead Iraqi children, and that he dies quietly in his bed knowing that his life was a net loss to humanity.

I get email (Phillip edition)

If you experience difficulties typing exclamation points in a comment here, it’s because Phillip Jones has been hogging them all. I just discovered a vast stagnant pool of missives from him deep in the bowels of my university email account, which has a lot of filters on it to prioritize messages from students and colleagues, so email from outside those groups tend to languish in neglect there. He seems to go on a rage jag every few weeks and dump a lot of repetitive invective, with numerous exclamation points, typically including links to his own posts on Twitter or Facebook, as if they are authoritative sources.

But lately he’s raging on Gettr, the right-wing pro-Trump Twitter look-alike, because his Twitter account has been suspended. Poor man. At least his emails are getting shorter.

https://gettr.com/post/p1a8bdj013f https://gettr.com/post/p1a8cis02f9 I’m going to contact the police and ask them to arrest you! And I’m going to contact UNMM and ask the to fire you!

Now I want to ask my local police if they’ve been contacted by a very emphatic kook — that was sent last night, so if the cops knock on my door and drag me away in handcuffs today, you’ll know why.

He’s going to have a tough time contacting my employer at UNMM, though. I don’t even know what that is!