What’s with McMaster University?

They seem to be appallingly slow to respond to accusations of scientific fraud. Last February I wrote about the scandal involving Jonathan Pruitt, a prolific scientist studying spider social behavior, whose collaborators (and there were many) who discovered that the data he contributed to their papers was in some substantial part fabricated. This is a big deal. I’ve been seeing papers cited in the popular press that are tainted by his work. There was a wave of retractions, and the guy hired lawyers to block them, which is just weird, since going to court would have provided more exposure to the evidence — I guess he was just hoping publishers would be too lazy or disinterested in validating the integrity of the research they publish.

Well, now another major strike has been made against Jonathan Pruitt: his Ph.D. has been retracted.

Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist and Canada 150 Research Chair who has had a dozen papers retracted following allegations of data fraud, now appears to have had his doctoral dissertation withdrawn.

The news, which was first noted by Nick DiRienzo, who co-authored papers with Pruitt but has been one of the scientists trying to cleanse the scientific record of Pruitt’s problematic work, suggests that Priutt now lacks a PhD, generally considered a requirement for professorships.

Ouch. that implies that his untrustworthy behavior goes all the way back to the earliest days of his career. It also implies that he is unqualified to hold his professorship at McMaster University.

Which he still does! He’s still listed as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavior, and he still has a lab web page which lists 9 post-docs and graduate students. Oh, man, I feel for those students — I hope they’ve since landed in better labs. This is the kind of association that can ruin careers.

But now I’m wondering why McMaster isn’t cleaning up this mess. Has Pruitt sicced lawyers on them? This is the kind of thing most universities would be quick to condemn, or at the very least, sweep under the rug. Yet there he still is, virtually at least (physically, he seems to be in Florida), even with a page advertising for new grad students to join his lab. Something is going on. I hope we find out someday. Until then, I’m just going to skip over any papers authored by Pruitt, J.

Uh-oh, it’s snowing

We also have a chance of a blizzard tonight. This is going to limit my mobility even more, I’m afraid, and it’s going to kill more spiders. Scurry deep into the leaf litter, little ones, hide under the rocks, you’re also welcome to move into my house.

Right now it’s pretty and expected. I wonder how long it’ll be until I’m shaking my fist out the window and cussing out the snow?

How to fight climate change in a 3-minute spot on TV

I am deeply impressed with what Michael Mann does here. He gets a good grip on this Australian politician, Barnaby Joyce, doesn’t let go, and makes him squirm while constantly hammering on the importance of addressing climate change. There’s a lot of skill at communication and media messaging on display here for such a short video.

The difficulty in these kinds of exchanges is that the professional politician is adroit at shifting the conversation to what his audience wants to hear — that the government is doing something about the Australian wildfires, and that they prioritize saving money and jobs — but Michael Mann turns that back against him, explaining that the Australian government has a terrible record on environmental issues, and that what they’re not doing is going to cost more than the jobs they vainly try to protect. And he doesn’t let Joyce get away with any lies!

And Mann comes off as a decent fellow while he’s doing it. It’s a hard trick to pull off. It’s why science communicators are important and not as common as we’d like.

This is what happens when you abandon a consensus

Suddenly, we have “universities” claiming to be the only ones in pursuit of the truth.

Then…THE DEEP RIFTS. Oh, this is delicious. The phrenologists and the anti-vaxxers are battling it out on Twitter.

There’s more.

Screw all those guys, every one of them.

I’m too old for this stuff

All right, I’ve kicked prednisone to the curb, since it was magically making me wake up at 2am every morning. Now that I’ve been off it for a few days, though…I wake up at 1 am every morning, and can’t get back to sleep. Never again will I touch this poison!

To be fair, though, I think part of the problem is that the stupid ankle has slowed me down so much I’m not maintaining my usual level of physical activity, trapping me in my office most of the day. I’ve got this boat anchor strapped to my left ankle which simultaneously means I can’t get out much, but at the same time, I’m worn out from hauling it around.

On happier news, I seem to have successfully blocked our little troll. He’s now battering himself senseless posting one word abusive comments that get immediately whisked off into the spam trap. Seeing his frustrated futility cheers me right up. Also, my lectures are all prepared and ready to go for the next few days — I might be presenting them in an exhausted fog, but at least I won’t need to think too hard for a while.

The real cancel culture

It’s moms.

Monday evening’s discussion was spurred by parents of a Riverbend student, who brought their concerns to the meeting.

The mother said during public comments that she was initially alarmed by “LGBTQIA” fiction that she said was immediately made available upon accessing the library app. After doing more research, she discovered a book in the collection that she found more upsetting.

The book, “33 Snowfish” by Adam Rapp, concerns three homeless teenagers attempting to escape from pasts that include sexual abuse, prostitution and drug addiction.

Oh no! The LGBTQIA stuff was just the tip of the iceberg! Down below we find stories of homeless kids who are sexually abused, which never ever happens in Spotsylvania, Virginia.

Don’t you worry, though. The school board has a cure.

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.

“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

There’s a solution that has never ever gone wrong in the entire history of humanity.

Another example of our neutered “justice” system

Jennifer Gosar, sister to the demented fascist Paul Gosar, condemns his behavior and asks how we can sit back and watch him promote racism and genocide.

Good questions. And yet he was elected. The rot goes deep.

Cops are useless

Dynamic shot of police leaping into action to defend the citizenry from terrorists!

Have you ever read the news and wondered how the loons and right-wing terrorists can get away with it all? We had an insurrection on 6 January, 10 months ago, and the wheels of justice, we are told, grind exceedingly slow, so all we see is slaps on the wrists delivered to the low-level dupes. The ring-leaders are sheltered by doubt and fear, the propaganda sources continue to spew poison in the name of “free speech”, and Donald Trump gets to run free and plan his 2024 campaign for president. It’s doubly unjust, because while the so-called “patriots” get all the benefit of the doubt, their victims get swift and decisive condemnation from the opinion pages of the New York Times, the offices of Fox News, and too often get executed by the police. IOKYAR — It’s OK If You Are Republican — has somehow become the unwritten law of the land.

Reuters has published an article on the ongoing campaign of fear.

In Arizona, a stay-at-home dad and part-time Lyft driver told the state’s chief election officer she would hang for treason. In Utah, a youth treatment center staffer warned Colorado’s election chief that he knew where she lived and watched her as she slept.

In Vermont, a man who says he works in construction told workers at the state election office and at Dominion Voting Systems that they were about to die.

“This might be a good time to put a f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pistol in your f‑‑‑‑‑‑ mouth and pull the trigger,” the man shouted at Vermont officials in a thick New England accent last December. “Your days are f‑‑‑‑‑‑ numbered.”

The three had much in common. All described themselves as patriots fighting a conspiracy that robbed Donald Trump of the 2020 election. They are regular consumers of far-right websites that embrace Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods. And none have been charged with a crime by the law enforcement agencies alerted to their threats.

They were among nine people who told Reuters in interviews that they made threats or left other hostile messages to election workers. In all, they are responsible for nearly two dozen harassing communications to six election officials in four states. Seven made threats explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the U.S. federal standard for criminal prosecution, according to four legal experts who reviewed their messages at Reuters’ request.

You can shout all the terroristic threats you want because FREEEEZEPEEEECH, you can try to intimidate others at will because FREEEEEEEEEEDOMMMMM. The intimidator/terrorist gets the freedom, though, at the cost of the terrorized. And part of it is that the cops and justice system are useless at best, enablers most often, fellow terrorists at worst.

The examination of the threats also highlights the paralysis of law enforcement in responding to this extraordinary assault on the nation’s electoral machinery. After Reuters reported the widespread intimidation in June, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a task force to investigate threats against election staff and said it would aggressively pursue such cases. But law enforcement agencies have made almost no arrests and won no convictions.

In many cases, they didn’t investigate. Some messages were too hard to trace, officials said. Other instances were complicated by America’s patchwork of state laws governing criminal threats, which provide varying levels of protection for free speech and make local officials in some states reluctant to prosecute such cases. Adding to the confusion, legal scholars say, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t formulated a clear definition of a criminal threat.

I’ve had a small taste of that. Remember Dennis Markuze, the nutjob who sent death threats to me practically every single day for years? He wasn’t alone, either; I still get email, at a lower frequency, fortunately, from people who make explicit threats. I’ve had people announce that they were going to show up at my university office and shoot me in the head. I’ve gotten detailed descriptions from Catholics and atheists (it turns out, atheists were the worst) telling me how they were going to cut me up at public events, and horrific threats against my family. There was a time when I would document them all, gather IP addresses and even names and home addresses of these lunatics and take them to my local police department and ask them to forward them to the parties that could take action. I’d get dumb cow-like looks, nothing more, and the information would get filed away and ignored.

I eventually just learned to accept the fact that someone could promise to murder me, and all I could do was note it down so that maybe the investigation into why I was turned into a bloody corpse would have a lead. I don’t even have that confidence anymore. What I see in the justice system is that justice doesn’t matter anymore. I could be murdered in public in broad daylight and I think the cops would spend their time trying to rationalize why the culprit did it, and the media would be speculating about what I did to deserve it.

And I’m a privileged white guy! I can’t even imagine the despair and futility minorities must feel in this country. I’m a member of the older white demographic that is trampling all over decency in America, and that won’t protect me at all.

Most galling is that the 9 people who made these over-the-top threats in the story are not ashamed at all and aren’t even shy about confessing their identities and admitting that yes, they did tell an election official that they were going to “pop” them and talk about firing squads and torturous deaths; they leave abusive phone messages with horrific promises of murder with clear intent to threaten them, they get passed on to the bumbling, incompetent cops, and what do they do? They hide behind excuses to do nothing.

The officials referred the voicemail to state police, who again declined to investigate. Agency spokesperson Adam Silverman said in a statement that the message didn’t constitute an “unambiguous reference to gun violence,” adding that the word “popped” – common American slang for “shot” – “is unclear and nonspecific, and could be a reference to someone being arrested.”

Legal experts didn’t see it that way. Fred Schauer, a University of Virginia law professor, said the message likely constituted a criminal threat under federal law by threatening gun violence at specific individuals. “There’s certainly an intent to put people in fear,” Schauer said.

The article includes the recorded audio from a number of these messages. You can’t possibly listen to them and think that golly, the wording is ambiguous…they are crystal clear and no doubt is left in the listener’s mind that this person wants to do them serious harm to prevent them from doing their job. The journalists consulted multiple legal scholars about whether these were actionable threats, and got responses that were rather different from what the cops would say.

Three legal experts said the message met the threshold of a threat that could be prosecuted under federal law. “The whole purpose of the threats doctrine is to protect people from not only a prospect of physical violence, but the damage of living with a threat hanging over you,” said Timothy Zick, a William & Mary Law School professor.

Yeah, that’s the whole story, over and over again, at length. Angry crank screams death threats at an official. Cops shrug and do nothing. And then we all wonder why the madness is escalating.

Those uppity women…no longer controlled by fear of dinosaurs

What a charmer. This guy, Sean Parnell, is running for the Pennsylvania senate with Donald Trump’s blessing, and is facing charges of spousal abuse. His ex-wife has had two protections from abuse orders on him. He’s a thoroughly unpleasant person, as you can tell from this outburst.

The idea that a woman doesn’t need a man to be successful… the idea that a woman can live a happy and fulfilling life without a man, I think it’s all nonsense.

I am gonna say something very un-pc, I reject this study wholesale. I feel like the whole happy wife, happy life nonsense has done nothing but raise one generation of women tyrants after the next.

Maybe it is just now there is an entire generation of men that don’t want to put up with the bs of a high-maintenance, narcissistic woman.

It used to be, you know, women were attracted to your strength because you could defend them from dinosaurs.

The whole rant is just hateful and nuts, but I do confess I laughed out loud at the stupidity of that last comment.