The cork is about to pop

Just in case you think my last post was too pessimistic, here’s the latest news from Antarctica.

This week, ice scientists meeting in New Orleans warned that something even more alarming was brewing on the West Antarctic ice sheet – a vast basin of ice on the Antarctic peninsula. Years of research by teams of British and American researchers showed that great cracks and fissures had opened up both on top of and underneath the Thwaites glacier, one of the biggest in the world, and it was feared that parts of it, too, may fracture and collapse possibly within five years or less.

Thwaites makes Larsen B look like an icicle. It is roughly 100 times larger, about the size of Britain, and contains enough water on its own to raise sea levels worldwide by more than half a metre. It contributes about 4% of annual global sea level rise and has been called the most important glacier in the world, even the “doomsday” glacier. Satellite studies show it is melting far faster than it did in the 1990s.

Thwaites is worrisome, but there are many other great glaciers in Antarctica also retreating, thinning and melting as the Southern Ocean warms. Many are being held back because Thwaites acts like a cork, blocking their exit to the sea. Should Thwaites fall apart, scientists believe the others would speed up, leading to the collapse of the whole ice sheet and catastrophic global sea level rises of several metres.

The Thwaites glacier looks so small in the satellite view. All the white icy stuff piled up behind it looks even more ominous now.

Satellite view of Antarctica with the Thwaites glacier marked in red.

Don’t panic! Governments around the world are leaping into action…or not.

Yet just one month after Cop26 ended in Glasgow, the warning that the 300-metre thick, 50-mile wide Thwaites glacier has started to crack up has been met with silence from governments preoccupied by Covid-19 and the return of normal politics. The danger is that the many actions pledged in November to address global heating will be shelved for another year, to become just one more risk in an increasingly dangerous world.

Thwaites underlines that global heating and glaciers do not wait for politicians, and every year action to reduce climate emissions is delayed only accelerates global disaster.

Isn’t it reassuring that no matter how dismal I sound, reality is so much worse?

The most important civics lesson they never taught us

I was this many years old before I learned this extremely important civics rule (forgive me, I’m a little slow):

The laws don’t apply to the people on top.

Or, rather, the laws were written by the people on top to provide them with loopholes, but also the minions who enforce the law do so at the bidding of the people on top.

I know, it’s obvious, and has been obvious all of my life, but as a white man I have been given enough benefits that I could overlook that aspect of reality. Events of recent years have made it so conspicuously overt that it is an unavoidable conclusion. Why do you think so many white men are rushing to join white supremacy movements, or voting Republican, or writing desperate op-eds defending the latest horrific act? It’s because they’re panicking about losing their privileged status in the inevitable upheaval. They’re shoring up the dikes, but the waters are rising fast, and they’re afraid they’ll drown in the flood.

There are only two possible outcomes here: either we get a total fascist crackdown to armor up the inequities of the ex-Republic, or we are going to see the Ancien Régime demolished for its excesses. I’d rather be on the side of the latter process.

What finally hammered the lesson home to me? There have been so many things. The Supreme Court has become transparently political, and I can no longer regarded it as an impartial arbiter of the law. It’s stacked. It’s rigged. It’s laws can no longer be regarded as fair and just.

The police…I remember when they were portrayed as Officer Friendly in PR campaigns. Nope. They are militarized enforcers for the status quo, committing murder at will. Have you noticed that the blue of the boys in blue has become progressively darker over the decades, until now it’s just black? If this were a fantasy novel, we’d call it blatant, over-the-top foreshadowing. Any day now they’re going to redesign the badges to be just silver skulls. Oh, too late — the police themselves think that would be awesomely cool.

We’re only just now becoming widely aware that the US Senate is an undemocratic institution that privileges wealthy landowners. I know, that’s what it was explicitly set up to be, but all we were taught is that the power was distributed among three branches so no one could dominate. Well, the judicial branch is dead, and the Senate is a place where minority views by octogenerians get total power to block legislation.

We still have the house, right? Nice populist institution? Forget it. The House Speaker thinks it is a branch of the “free market economy”. The real reason Jimmy Stewart as Mr Smith goes to Washington is to sell out and get rich. He’s going to filibuster to make sure coal and oil companies can continue to destroy the environment.

We can still respect the distinguished office of the presidency, though. Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Presidents make clowns look dignified.

Now we know that…

The Trump administration engaged in “deliberate efforts” to undermine the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic for political purposes, a congressional report released Friday concludes.

The report, prepared by the House select subcommittee investigating the nation’s Covid response, says the White House repeatedly overruled public health and testing guidance by the nation’s top infectious disease experts and silenced officials in order to promote then-President Donald Trump’s political agenda.

He is responsible for the deaths of thousands, and further, he helped sow the seeds of conspiracy theories and bogus quack medicine that will kill thousands more. He pressured the head of the NIH to endorse hydroxychloroquine and other quackery — fortunately, Collins refused (shockingly, there are some tiny specks of integrity in the political landscape, although Trump followers will probably be chanting about killing him now).

Trump still walks free, and is planning his next run for office. The media is eagerly awaiting the exciting, spectacular news and the frenzied PR circus that will follow along in the trail of wreckage it leaves behind. Everyone is dithering, because…because…because, well gosh, he’s the ex-president! We can’t arrest him for conspiring to overthrow the government and being so incompetent that he let citizens die for political gain! Why, if he fell, then congress would have to after their colleagues, like the rapist-enabler and the coke-snorting party boy and the incompetent conservative loony (I know, that one describes a lot of Republicans), and they won’t do that. That could disrupt the party money machine. And then, who knows, the UK might wake up to how wretchedly stupid Boris Johnson is, and the whole edifice that props up idiot privileged assholes all around the world might crumble.

That could lead to principled politicians taking office, and next thing you know, reform. The well-established money making game might get shaken up, the tables flipped, and suddenly everyone in office would have to work for a living.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that isn’t going to happen.

Hey, remember the good old days of George W. Bush, when idealists would fantasize about how his crimes and corruption and wholesale murders would culminate in him being put in handcuffs and perp-walked out of the White House? It never happened. The war criminal is in a prosperous retirement in which the media occasionally publishes a puff piece about his cheesy amateur paintings. Henry Kissinger is still alive, has a net worth of tens of millions of dollars, and still has journalists begging for interviews. Donald Trump might just be the next president of the United States.

Burn it all down. The American republic is a failed experiment.

The world will sigh with relief when we’re simultaneously hollowed out by the pandemic (facilitated by our own idiot policies) and torched by climate change, which we will do nothing about.

Distractions

Can’t you see I’m working here? The birds have taken over. My wife has set up multiple bird feeders, and she also sows seeds on the snow, so all day long it’s flocks of birds flitting past my office window. I’m trying to get these exams graded, but I get these constant visual distractions.

Also, bird butts.

You might ask, “why not close your window shades?”. I answer that it doesn’t help, because these birds are flighty and numerous. They swoop in, peck as a mob at the seeds, and then after 10 or 15 seconds, they abruptly rise with a whooshing whirr that is quite loud and audible in my office, indoors.

Also, there’s a hawk that occasionally darts in for a snack and sends everyone in frantic flight, and I’d like to catch it in the act.

Gay cartoon ducks killed David Menton

Ken Ham is very concerned about sin, and cartoon ducks, and the curse of homosexuality — more than he is concerned about the pandemic, apparently. Pink News wrote about his fury over gay ducks appearing in the cartoon Duck Tales, prompting him to condemn gay reporters for not being more concerned about sin than COVID-19.

In a new Facebook post, Ham said: “A gay news source wrote an article about me with this headline: ‘Thousands of people are dying from coronavirus every day, but this Christian fundamentalist is raging over two gay cartoon ducks.’”

He suggested that he would have preferred the headline to be “150,000 people die each day in the world, and Ken Ham is concerned for their spiritual state and their eternity because of the raging pandemic of sin”, but added, while knowing nothing about the journalist’s religious beliefs, that they would not understand because “God of this world has blinded the eyes of those who don’t believe”.

He then, bizarrely, went on to speculate about the journalist’s death and whether they even cared about people dying from COVID-19.

Ken Ham wrote: Yes, the worst pandemic of all – sin – is raging about us and the death toll is 100 per cent. I predict the writer of the article about me will one day die.

From a perspective of a non-Christian, why do they care if people die?… If you die and that’s it and you won’t know you ever existed, why do they care about people dying?

It’s true: Ken Ham doesn’t care much about the pandemic. From Dan Phelps: “From early in the pandemic the Ark Encounter amusement park only “suggested” the use of masks and complained bitterly about closures and Kentucky mask mandates. YouTube videos by Ark visitors indicate mask wearing is practiced by a small fraction of visitors.” So yes, he is not at all inconsistent here — he really does believe that sin is a greater worry than dying of COVID-19. He has even claimed that viruses are a good thing for humanity.

Evolution, on the other hand, says that death has always been a part of nature. This view, found nowhere in the Bible, was actually embraced in a recent article by the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. His belief in evolution led him to declare that it is a biological reality that “bacteria and viruses are not bitter fruits of the fall, but among the first fruits of good creation itself.” But this idea makes God the author of bad things.

Even in a fallen world, God remains omnipotent and perfectly capable of sustaining and protecting His fallen creation. But when Adam sinned, the world was cursed. Suffering and death entered into His creation. The whole universe now suffers from the effects of sin.

In the biblical worldview, viruses had an originally good purpose in creation. In fact, many viruses today are being investigated for their positive benefits, including possible symbiotic relationships and the regulating of populations of bacteria in our gut. Viruses are also used for gene therapy. Such modern-day research offers us a glimpse into the original created purpose for viruses.

Cool cool cool. So what sin was David Menton guilty of, and what virtue has he acquired?

If you don’t recall, David Menton was one of Ken Ham’s pseudoscientific minions — I’ve mentioned him a few times. He’s a guy who got a Ph.D. in biology, and used it to lie for Jesus. Ken Ham has now announced that David Menton died “after a brief illness”. He doesn’t say what that illness was, but the newspaper obituary does.

Dr. David Norman Menton, 83, of Petersburg, KY passed away from Covid Saturday, December 11, 2021 in Edgewood, KY.

Hmmm. Maybe if Ham had been a bit more diligent and rational in policing all those people strolling around his “museum” and Ark Park, his great friend would still be alive today.

Behold my mountain of digital papers!

All the final exams have been turned in, so now it’s time to sit my butt down and read them all. I’ve got two classes with about 25 students each, so here’s what I am to complete this weekend. These were all due on Friday, yesterday.

Comprehensive Final Exam for Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development. This is the monster, 7 pages of questions in different formats that cover the topics in the title of the course and also a bit of the history and philosophy of science. FunGenEvoDevo is a first year overview course that doesn’t dig too deeply, but prepares them with the general background (there is also another intro course, Evolution of Biodiversity, that hits them with evolution again and also basics of ecology and systematics). I started on this one yesterday, and am a bit more than halfway through; I plan to finish it by this afternoon.

Lab Final for Cell Biology. Another longish exam, this one emphasizes basic quantitative skills they should have learned in the lab. So lots of questions about unit conversions, calculating concentrations, interpreting data, etc. For instance, they get some measurements of reaction rates, and they then have to calculate enzymatic Km and Vmax. There are a lot of parts to this one, too, but most of the answers are short, specific, and numeric, which are relatively easy to grade.

Required Final Essay for Cell Biology. Oh boy, this will be challenging. I gave them a paper to read (“How energy flow shapes cell evolution” by Nick Lane) and asked them to summarize it and relate it all to the content of the course. On this one, I demand high writing standards and coherence in addressing the subject, so we’ll see how that goes.

Optional Final Exam for Cell Biology. Another big ol’ comprehensive exam, but this one is optional for the students: whatever score they get on the final will replace their lowest midterm score. Everyone has a bad day, so this is their opportunity to vindicate themselves. It’s a long exam, but grading it might not be too bad — only about a third of the class has opted to do it.

So that’s my weekend! This is all I’m doing for a few days. I hope to get it all done by Sunday evening and get all those grades submitted to the registrar early.

Then on Monday I have one more class to grade, Biological Communications II, in which students spend the semester writing a 10+ page review paper under my tutelage, so I already have a good idea of what they’ve done — I just have to go over what is supposed to be the final polished draft of the paper. And then I’m ALL DONE!

I guess I better buckle down and get to work now.

10:45 Saturday: FunGenEvoDevo done! Grades submitted! Students mostly did OK, but a few of them may have learned that skipping an exam or two is a good way to fail a course.

3:45 Saturday: Lab final done! Starting on the required final essay.

1pm Sunday: Required lab final done! Now to polish off the optional final.

Tell me he’s doing a bit. It’s a bit, right?

John Cleese wishes to register a complaint (see? It must be an old Monty Python routine). He is complaining to the BBC that, in a recent interview, he came off sounding “old-fashioned, uncaring and basically harmful”.

In other words, the BBC was dead-on accurate. Given the BBC’s recent record on these matters, that is surprising.

Cleese’s comedic routine is rather rusty, though, since he stomped out in a huff at being asked questions on subjects he’s been shouting about lately, like cancel culture and trans rights. He only wants to talk about those things when he’s the only voice, and the interviewer is only a stenographer.

Cleese then removed his headphones, as it was “not the interview I had agreed to,” he noted.

“Karishma had no interest in a discussion with me. She wanted only the role of prosecutor. The BBC needs to train her again.”

He had only “agreed to” a fluff piece, I guess. Oh, for the days when media interviews were challenging and interesting and put people on the spot…

WTF, UM?

I just got an email from the president of the University of Minnesota. They’re going to ‘compensate’ us for the efforts we’ve made.

Throughout the most fluid, uncertain, and challenging days of the global pandemic, you have consistently responded with an unequaled focus to serve our students and support your colleagues. Your personal and professional excellence is undeniable and your sacrifices have been significant, including for many, a reduction in pay.

As a gesture of our appreciation for your service and commitment, we have proposed, and the Board of Regents has since approved, a one-time plan that would award each of you two additional personal holidays that may be used at any time through June 30, 2022. As a result, all eligible full-time employees will receive two days added to their paid time off inventory, and all eligible part-time employees will receive time away proportional to the hours they work. Faculty and P&A staff on 9- and 10- month appointments who currently receive personal holidays will receive this additional time away.

This time is effective for any employee on active payroll as of December 6, and it also follows a similar approach to that used by a number of our peer institutions. You will be able to find this noted in MyU, within your “My Time” tab effective late Monday, Dec. 20, 2021.

I extend my sincerest appreciation for everything you’ve done for our University these past 20 months and all you will do in the weeks and months ahead. I hope you are able to use these days to relax, recharge, and reflect on the difference you have made in the lives of our students, your colleagues, and our great state and beyond.

I’m happy for the staff who will benefit, but I had to screw up my eyes to try and interpret what this means for me. I have a salaried appointment. I do not currently receive any personal holidays. I won’t get any extra days to relax. I will not get any extra pay. The university is giving me…diddley squat, and similarly, nothing to all the other regular faculty.

I think I’m insulted. I sure don’t feel grateful.

Don’t die for me!

This is an actual exchange between an Amazon delivery driver and dispatch during the recent catastrophic weather.

7:08 p.m.

Driver: Radio’s been going off.

Dispatch: OK. Just keep driving. We can’t just call people back for a warning unless Amazon tells us to do so.

Driver: Just relaying in case y’all didn’t hear it over there.

7:40 p.m.

Driver: Tornado alarms are going off over here.

Dispatch: Just keep delivering for now. We have to wait for word from Amazon. If we need to bring people back, the decision will ultimately be up to them. I will let you know if the situation changes at all. I’m talking with them now about it.

Driver: How about for my own personal safety, I’m going to head back. Having alarms going off next to me and nothing but locked building around me isn’t sheltering in place. That’s wanting to turn this van into a casket. Hour left of delivery time. And if you look at the radar, the worst of the storm is going to be right on top of me in 30 minutes.

Driver: It was actual sirens.

Dispatch: “If you decided to come back, that choice is yours. But I can tell you it won’t be viewed as for your own safety. The safest practice is to stay exactly where you are. If you decide to return with your packages, it will be viewed as you refusing your route, which will ultimately end with you not having a job come tomorrow morning. The sirens are just a warning.

Driver: I’m literally stuck in this damn van without a safe place to go with a tornado on the ground.

Dispatch: Amazon is saying shelter in place.

Dispatch: I will know when they say anything else to me.

Dispatch: [Driver name] you need to shelter in place. The wind just came through the warehouse and ripped the rts door and broke it so even if you got back here, you can’t get in the building. You need to stop and shelter in place.

Driver: Okay.

Isn’t it curious that the US Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, is a corrupt Republican who has been slowing down mail delivery, while corporations like Amazon are cracking the whip and compelling their workers to risk their lives to get packages shipped faster and faster?

Here’s the deal: nothing I ever order from Amazon is so time-critical that I’ll get upset if it’s a day or two or three late. Next-day delivery is not a big issue to me — I’m not ordering live organs and human tissue, ever. At least not yet. I don’t want any drivers to die so I can get a rush of gratification.

There’s a reason Minnesotans don’t wear sandals in Winter

I’m still required to wear backless shoes as I recover from Achilles tendinitis, and the only such shoes I have are a pair of sandals. I also still have to take a very short walk to the lab to take care of spiders and flies. Today, while wearing my heaviest, warmest socks and making only a short shuffle from parking lot to science building, I discovered that this combo, despite being awesomely stylish, provides no protection for one’s toes on even a mild Minnesota winter day.

Said toes are now snorgled down in a hot heating pack. You could get frostbite really quickly out there if you aren’t properly prepared!