I may be in Fargo for Flag Day

Mark your calendars. Donald Trump is planning a gigantic military parade — $90 million dollars sunk into rolling tanks and missiles down Pasadena Avenue — but the rest of us should be planning to rise up in protest on Saturday, 14 June, instead. There will be No Kings rallies all across the country on that day. Right now, the nearest event near me is in Fargo, so I’m planning on trooping north on that day to wave a sign and chant angry slogans. Look up the rally nearest you and try to hit the streets on that day!

The fundamental fork in the road to destiny!

The DOGE scam is fading, at least in the sense of helping Musk skim off money from the government, so now he’s pivoting to maximizing fear in the uninformed. Forgive me for including this clip from Fox News of that walking smarmy smirk, Jesse Watters, encouraging Musk to expound on his nonsensical imaginary apocalyptic claims of the coming doom of Earth.

He can’t even get the numbers right. He says that the sun is going to expand and swallow up the Earth in a few hundred million years — the end is imminent! It’s more like 5 billion years, but even a hundred million years is an immensity of time for a species that has only existed for maybe 300,000 years, and it’s ridiculous to be trying to terrify stupid people, like Jesse Watters, with the news of an apocalypse sometime. It’s a good way to shake down the rubes, though, just like the opening claim that the Biden administration stole billions of dollars from the gullible geezers watching Fox News.

I’m not being pessimistic to say that Musk will never build a colony on Mars; I doubt he’ll even get a single mission to land there and return. He is not saving humanity. He’s the biggest grifter to ever exist, and Fox News has cultivated an army of goobers who will direct the federal government to shovel their tax money into the gaping maw of this horrible person.

Tammy Faye is calling you home, Jim

Jim Bakker is 85 years old, and he’s still running his scam.

Televangelist Jim Bakker needs 1,000 people to donate $1,000 each to save his ministry: If they foreclose on this ministry, they will take my house too, so I’ll be on the street.

Yes, please. Shut down this scoundrel’s ministry and toss him out on the street.

I notice that he relies heavily on the old “seed money” con. If you give him money, he claims, Jesus will reward you with even more money, even if the truth is that handing your seed corn over to the old fraud really means he’ll be snacking on popcorn watching you fail and die.

People still fall for it.

Just in time for summer

It is now legal to go topless in public in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Supreme Court issued an opinion last week that holds that women can go topfree without violating the Minnesota indecent exposure statute as long as they don’t engage in sexual conduct.

In short, the Court unanimously held that a woman who is topfree is not acting lewdly merely by appearing in public with her torso unclothed. Since the indecent exposure statute only criminalizes lewd behavior, a woman with an unclothed torso is not commiting a criminal act unless she is also engaging in sexual behavior. In other words, a woman merely going topless is neither lewd nor sexual and it’s perfectly legal.

It’s only useful about 3 months out of the year, and in those 3 months you’ve got to worry about mosquitos.

The best thing about this decision is that it removes a pretext cops used to search and arrest people.

The facts in this case are short and undisputed: On July 28, 2021, the Rochester
Police Department received a report that a woman was walking around a gas station
parking lot with her breasts exposed. An officer responded to the call and saw Plancarte
in the parking lot with her breasts exposed. The officer recognized Plancarte from two
encounters earlier that week. During those encounters, the officer saw Plancarte exposing
her underwear on one occasion, and her breasts and her underwear on another occasion.
The officer stopped Plancarte and asked her why she kept exposing herself.
Plancarte replied, “I think Catholic girls do it all the time.” Plancarte then worried about
how she would get home and stated, “I dance at the biker club. I’m a stripper.” The officer
said, “Well, you can’t strip in the middle of public.” Plancarte responded, “Yeah, but they
should account for me at the club, shouldn’t they?” The officer arrested Plancarte and later
searched her purse, where the officer found a vial containing cocaine.

Yeah, this is an anti-cop decision. I approve.

Missionary Lizards!

How many ignorant claims can a creationist pack into a short clip?

If there’s one thing the world uses to steal the hearts and minds of our kids it’s dinosaurs.

One thing? Absurd. We have all of reality to entice kids away from the lies of Answers in Genesis.

“Hey look kids. Look at these fearsome creatures. They’re amazing. They’re fascinating. They died out 65 million years ago. They’re products of evolution. They’re just the results of chemicals bumping together over millions of years.

Come on. If you’re going to convince people that evolution is not true, you should start by accurately describing it. No one claims that dinosaurs arose spontaneously from simple chemical processes.

Just like you, evolution’s true.” They use dinosaurs to convince our kids they’re nothing but rearranged pond scum.

We also don’t claim that.

Stop and think. Why would scientists be arguing that, when it’s not true, and wouldn’t accomplish much of anything? It’s clear that this guy is proselytizing and trying to recruit followers, so if we just assume that scientists have a similar, competing motive (we don’t), how does telling someone they are rearranged pond scum serve our purpose? Or Satan’s purpose?

We use dinosaurs to call our children back to the authority of the word of God. We call dinosaurs missionary lizards because we want to give children sound biblical scientific answers about these incredible creatures.

I do appreciate that contradictory phrase, biblical scientific answers, especially given that the Bible says nothing about dinosaurs. But AiG will tell us all about it! The next AiG video linked to by the above short is titled You’ve Been LIED to About How Dinosaurs Looked, which explains how a creationist artist uses the Bible to help him figure out how dinosaurs actually looked.

The unfathomable question is why AiG chose to use this AI-generated image of “dinosaurs” on their video?

Abomination, I say! Who is lying to kids about dinosaurs now?

Humanity is not fading away

The world population stands at 8.2 billion, and it’s continuing to grow. It is not shrinking. We are adding 70 million people each year. Some simple facts:

During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.
In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.
Because of declining growth rates, it will now take over 200 years to double again.

Does it bother you that it’s going to take 200 years to fill up the planet with 16 billion people? The 1970s were not that overcrowded nor was it empty. I don’t think we gained that much by adding 4 billion people since then, especially since so many of the additions are being exploited and are suffering to benefit relatively rich people like me.

I wonder if some people are confused by graphs. Here’s a plot of the growth rate, not total population, and yes, the rate has gone down (which is good news), but that does not mean we’re losing population.

But this graph keeps Elon Musk awake at night, because he’s a very stupid person.

Billionaire Elon Musk told Fox News recently that falling birth rates keep him up at night. It’s a drum he’s been beating for years.

Musk is one of the world’s most visible individuals to elevate this point of view. Vice President JD Vance also talks about wanting to increase birthrates in the U.S.

I am untroubled by it. I am more concerned about whether my grandchildren have a good quality of life and opportunity to personally live and grow, and whether all the other children living in the here and now also have equal opportunities. Increasing the world’s population does not increase our happiness — we should care more about the quality of life than creating bulk quantities of consumers.

I also have to ask…why are so many of the people advocating for increased growth rates such horrible fascists? There was a meeting of these “pro-natalists” back in March, and these weren’t people who just love children and want to build hospitals and daycares and open up more educational opportunities and expand vaccination, all things I would consider virtuous evidence of a true desire to help a burgeoning population…quite the opposite. The philosophy seems to be strongly tied to Nazis.

A natalist conference featuring speakers including self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science, apparently including the man behind a previously pseudonymous race-science influencer account, and the founder of a startup offering IQ screening for IVF embryos, will be held at a hotel and conference venue operated by the public University of Texas, Austin.

Details of the conference have emerged as a prominent supporter of pro-natalist positions, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, lays waste US government agencies under the banner of his “Doge” initiative, with the blessing of Donald Trump.

Natalism in its current often rightwing iteration encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers.

composite image of people wearing maga caps with red stars on their mouths
‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word
Read more
The Natal conference website embeds a Musk post on X, reading: “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.” Musk, who reportedly has at least 13 children by four mothers, was in recent days confronted on X by musician Grimes and the rightwing influencer Ashley St Clair over his alleged neglect of the children he has fathered with them.

The conference, scheduled for 28-29 March, is being organized by Kevin Dolan, who the Guardian identified in 2021 as the person behind a Twitter account that was prominent in the far-right “DezNat” movement, and last year as the organizer of the first conference. It is the second time the conference has been held, and once again, the speakers roster runs from provocateurs who emerged from the “fascist fitness scene” to practitioners of “liberal eugenics”.

Uh, Elon…civilization will not end if we maintain a low, stable, sustainable growth rate. If you’re so concerned about too few people, open the doors of America to more immigration. More is better, right?

Also, eugenics is eugenics. Attaching the adjective “liberal” to it doesn’t make it beneficial, you’re still making value judgments on the worth of individuals. Whether you’re euthanizing them or hiding them away in institutions or giving special advantages to people who meet your subjective criteria, it’s all the same thing — it’s an attempt to short-sightedly dictate what kind of people will be allowed to thrive.

Here’s the organizer of that natalist conference.

KEVIN DOLAN: But the topic of demographic decline clearly matters to Elon Musk, JD Vance and many others in the Trump administration, which means that the great ideas developed here can get a hearing that would not have been possible last year.

HAGEN: Dolan left his data science job in 2021 after his anonymous Twitter account was exposed. Among other things, he’d used it to promote the racist notion that white men are superior to other races and women. After getting doxxed, Dolan continued sharing his thoughts about how society should be ordered on his podcast.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DOLAN: We’re expected to lie about the existence of these hierarchies all of the time. And if our goal is to rehabilitate hierarchies of nature, then the best place to start is the most fundamental natural hierarchies, which are found in the family. And that brings us back to where we started, with selective breeding.

What natural hierarchies? Nature is more of an anarchist collective, without a big boss deciding who benefits from selective breeding. Nature does not follow any human ideology, so it’s fallacious to try and attach one to it, or worse claim that humans should follow your biased interpretation of how it ought to work.

LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Simone Collins, in her thick-rimmed, round glasses, is one of the more visible faces of pronatalism – on purpose.
SIMONE COLLINS: My whole entire, like, Etsy getup right now, it’s intentionally cringe.
HAGEN: She’s here at Natal Con in her signature look, which she describes as techno-puritan.
COLLINS: There should obviously be more cybernetics in my outfit, but we are combining, like, chunky hipster glasses and a lot of modern equipment with a bonnet and linen clothing.

Some of the more prominent faces in this movement are Malcolm and Simone Collins, a pair of dorks who complain about “demographic collapse” (whatever that undefined disaster is) while saying that oh, no, they have nothing to do with those horrible people running the conferences they attend. They gave the keynote speech at the Austin natalist conference!

Image is everything to them. The Collinses are quick to verbally denounce fascists and the far right, but then you have to look at what they do: they ally themselves with people like Charles Haywood.

CHARLES HAYWOOD: And generally, women should not have careers. They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.

HAGEN: That’s Charles Haywood at the first Natal Con a couple years ago. This year, he’s behind the scenes as a sponsor. He made his money as a shampoo magnate. Haywood blames birth rate declines on feminism and the overturning of what he sees as natural hierarchies of gender and race.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

HAYWOOD: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever for the history of this nation.

They can tell me they’re progressive and good people when they get around to denouncing that guy and all the racist/misogynist/neo-nazi scum that form their audience.

I should also mention the incident that put them in the news a while back when Malcolm Collins slapped his son Torsten in the face.

Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face.

It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.

Oops, the mask slipped for a moment. It’s OK, it was never a very convincing facade that they’ve put up, anyway.

Spider season begins

I told you I was running away from home this afternoon! I was walking for 2 or 3 hours, and now my quads are killing me–I’ve been sedentary for too long. I didn’t have much luck finding any interesting spiders, but the bushes are alive with spider food, swarms of gnats and midges, and if you feed them they will come.

As soon as I got home, of course, I find a spider on my garage door. It’s a very small Attulus fasciger, and it has been hunting successfully. That’s a midge of some sort, totally wrecked in the spiders jaws.

Asiatic Wall Jumping Spider

More will be coming. It is that time of year. Hooray!

Have mercy!

I think I’ve got my final exam written — it’s an online exam, automatically graded, due on Friday, but I’ve posted it already. The students will have no excuses, they’ve got oodles of time, but I’m being absolutely rock-solid rigid on the due date. If they post it at 12:01 on Friday they get nothing, not one point.

I’m drawing a line here, finally, because the classes I thought were done (Yay! Relax!) suddenly received an influx of late submissions. “Here’s my lab report I forgot to turn in last March, can you grade it now and give me credit?” I’m such a pushover that yeah, OK, I’ll let it slide in, and so I’ve been grading old papers and catching up all over again. Now I’m behind where I thought I was.

There’s only one thing to do: run away. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, I’ve been sitting on my butt reading teeny-tiny print on my computer all morning, so I think I’ll flee the house and walk to a park and optimistically look around for spiders. Anything but thinking about these classes that I want done.

Bye!

Mix Harvard and the NY Times to get perfect mush

Harvard privilege + NY Times centrism gets this kind of crap published: I Teach Computer Science, and That Is All. It’s an op-ed by a clueless Harvard professor explaining that while it’s deplorable that Trump is dismantling the educational system in the US, the fault lies with those professors who bring their politics to work.

Nothing justifies the unwarranted attacks by the Trump administration on universities as a whole and on my institution in particular. I am proud of Harvard’s leadership for resisting the impossible demands made of it. I also believe these attacks are enabled by the lack of popular support for universities. We academics should look at how we contributed to this erosion of trust by allowing the blurring of the lines between scholarship and activism.

In recent years the mantra of bringing your whole self to work has replaced the old notion that you should leave it all at the door. This movement has had some positive outcomes. Ensuring everyone feels included and has access to mentors and role models can be crucial to attracting and retaining talent.

Some have taken it too far, letting the personal and political overtake the professional, which has led to pressure on businesses to take positions in matters outside their domain. Makers of business software weighed in on elections. Google employees staged a sit-in over Gaza. Right-wing activists began a boycott of Bud Light after it was featured in a transgender influencer’s promotional social media post. The result is that people who disagree with one another find it hard to work at the same company or buy the same products, increasing the problem of polarization.

Oh, yeah, the real problem here isn’t Republican politics, it’s that Google employees thought genocide was bad and Budweiser briefly featured a trans person in an ad. That’s polarizing! We can’t can’t confront and conflict with terrible ideas and actions, that’s not the university’s job. (Except…it is.)

It wouldn’t be a NY Times op-ed without a healthy dose of both-siderism.

On the extreme right, the same idea has taken hold in government, where the very notion of a nonpartisan public servant is threatened, and those deemed insufficiently loyal have been fired. Both versions, on the left and the right, are toxic.

On the one hand, having a trans woman in an ad; on the other, boycotts, death threats, and Kid Rock shooting up beer cans with an assault rifle. Both equally evil! On one hand, Google employees peacefully protesting their employers’ policies; on the other, Israel bombing and killing civilians. We’re supposed to be confused about these two entirely equivalent actions. I have to conclude that any idiot can become a Harvard professor, and the NY Times will happily publish any waffle they shit out.

And this is how he teaches.

You might think I can avoid politics in the classroom only because I am a computer scientist. This is not the case. Faculty members who are determined enough can inject politics into any topic, and after all, computer science has brought huge and significant changes to society. The interaction of computer science and policy sometimes arises in my classes, and I make sure to present multiple perspectives. When I teach cryptography, a topic at the heart of the tension between privacy and security, I share with my students writings by former National Security Agency officials as well as “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”

In fact, I believe that the lessons students learn from computer science (and science in general) can make them better citizens. Trying and failing to solve hard problems teaches students that there is such a thing as an objective truth and our first attempts to find it are often wrong.

Oh. So he’s the guy who has been teaching that imaginary pseudophilosophical claptrap about there being no such thing as truth. Now everyone can stop picking on post-modernism and go after the Harvard computer scientists instead. He teaches cryptography, a subject that he considers himself an expert in, but he can’t say anything about the dangers of crypto, because that would be political, and professors shouldn’t have political opinions.

OK, I don’t know much about crypto, but then he gives examples I’m more familiar with.

All academics are experts on narrow topics. Even when they intersect with the real world, our expertise in the facts does not give us authority over politics. Scientific research shows that vaccines work and climate change is real, but it cannot dictate whether vaccines should be mandated or fossil fuels restricted. Those are decisions for the public, with the scientific evidence being one factor. When academics claim authority over policy, the result is not an increased effect on policy but decreased trust in academia.

That is insane. College professors do not have direct power, so the idea that they “dictate” anything is nonsensical — all we can do is inform and encourage people to use their knowledge wisely. Vaccines WORK, hell yes they do, and we can confront our students with the data and evidence and experiments that show that they are effective and save citizens’ lives, and further we can show that bad policy, like that perpetrated by that grand fraud, Robert F. Kennedy jr., will not work and will kill people, so for a biology professor to sit on their hands and refrain from stating the truth is a criminal neglect of their responsibilities. Hush now with that science and facts and history — it’ll make people distrust academia, because we keep saying that your misconceptions and errors are wrong.

But that is our job.

The author, Boaz Barak, is an Israeli, and serves on Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias (he seems to avoid saying where he stands on anti-Palestinian bias) so he’s a hypocrite. He’s happy to denounce all those academic activists who are eroding the public’s trust in the universities by taking a stance on the politics he disagrees with, but he himself thinks that his politics are great and good, and that no one should be offended by them.

I might disagree with his politics, but I don’t think he should be fired for holding them. I think he should be fired for being a colossal hypocritical dumbass who can’t think his way out of a soggy paper bag.