Jon Stewart channels my personal feelings about the Democrats in general and Chuck Schumer in particular. We are so thoroughly screwed by these blithering cowards.
Look, now my blood pressure is elevated just before I go in for my physical. I’m going to tell the doctor it’s not my fault, it’s the Democrats.
Today is the day for my annual physical exam, and I’m about to get my veins tapped and my body poked and get informed about my bad habits and told about my imminent doom. It’s going to take a while. Then I have to rush back for multiple appointments with students and to teach a couple of classes.
So today is filmstrip day! Is anyone else old enough to remember when the teacher was hung over and just wheeled in the machine that would show a series of still images with voiceover so they could retreat into a back corner and close their eyes for a while?
That might be the same people who remember who Al Gore was.
We were hit by a snowstorm this past weekend, but it’s now melting away fast. We can’t get too excited yet, because apparently another storm is supposed to brush by us this week.
We’ve had a few flowering plants that brave the whole winter, and this what they look like right now.
Here’s what they looked like last summer.
Maybe when they stop looking so skeletal and dead, the spiders will come back.
I’ve spent my entire career training students in STEM, and sending them off to graduate and professional schools to become scientists and doctors and dentists and veterinarians and nurses and research technicians. That may be ending sooner than I expected. Entire fields are drying up right now.
Admissions in some graduate programs have have been cut in half or paused altogether, said Emilya Ventriglia, president of UAW 2750, the union representing around 5,000 early career researchers at NIH facilities in Bethesda, Maryland, and elsewhere.
“At this rate, with the hiring freeze, there may be no Ph.D. students next year if it’s not lifted soon, because usually people make their decisions by April,” Ventriglia said.
Spring is when we’re accustomed to hearing joyful news from our students who have applied to and gotten in to the programs they wanted. It’s kind of quiet around the campus this year. A lot of students who have been working hard for four years are being told that their progression is over, and are having to rethink their life suddenly.
I’m worried, too. Universities around the country have suffered declining enrollments, and it’s going to make it worse if the perception spreads that universities are a dead end. Government policy is about to kill science and engineering in this country. It’s also a bit ironic that these people who have been railing about DEI and liberal arts and majors that don’t have concrete utility are now using that angle to destroy STEM education.
We might wonder who is going to benefit from this intellectual suicide.
At the University of Nebraska, an institute that works to improve water management for agriculture offered to host a doctoral candidate in hydrology from Ghana and was talking to three other international students. But it had to rescind the offer after it lost USAID funding, said Nicole Lefore, associate director of the school’s Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.
She now worries about the diplomatic fallout, noting she has met with agriculture ministers in other countries who were educated at land grant universities in the U.S. through USAID programs.
“The university you go to, people have a loyalty to it. And so bringing in generations of students for education and agriculture in the U.S. helped to create those personal connections and then later scientific and diplomatic connections. That’s really important to the soft diplomacy side of what the innovation labs were doing.”
She said she is barraged with emails asking what this will mean.
“The only winner out of this is China, she said. ”Because the countries that are being cut off there, I think they will turn to someone.”
I thought MAGA hated China, but here they go helping that country, and the EU. I’ve got one bright student who is thinking about applying to a university in Mexico. Everyone benefits except the US.
You know, categories are arbitrary, subjective, and human constructed, right? This is an excellent illustration of the idea.
I appreciate that each example includes a tidy, neat rationalization, so we can see that the rationalizations are arbitrary, too. I just wish he’d do the same thing for categories of DNA sequences so I’d have an excuse to use it in my classes.
As seen on Discord: Lockheed Martin Develops Giant Tactical Rubber Spider.
Although…I notice they don’t include a price tag. Lockheed Martin wouldn’t gouge their customers with grossly inflated prices, would they?
Yesterday, I left my coat at home and went for a brisk walk downtown, which left me sweating. It felt like a nice warm spring.
Tomorrow, all the students will be returning from spring break, all tanned and rested and ready to work.
So what happens today? I was awakened to the sound of sleet and wind rattling the windows, and went to look out and see what’s going on. This is what I saw.
The windows are all glazed with ice. There is a nice foundation layer of ice on the ground, with snow coming down on top of that, wind blowing it everywhere. We’ve got weather warnings about whiteout conditions.
Drive safe, students! I guess I’ll have to prepare my planned lecture so I can deliver it over zoom. It’s not as if I’m going anywhere today, I’m just going to hunker down and work from home anyway.
Bryan Johnson — you know, the Bryan Johnson who wants to achieve eternal youth by turning himself into a plasticine android — has taken the next inevitable step. It’s not a bold new medical innovation. It’s turning his lifestyle and his weird recipes and behavior into commodities that he can sell to gullible people, especially now that RFK jr has conveniently tagged all the dupes with the MAHA label. Johnson set up a conference that you can attend for the low, low price of $249 ($1799 for the premium package), and he and his associates will lecture you on how to don’t die
by buying a subscription to his $15-$20 per plate food delivery service. You could live forever on this kind of meal:
I knew this was going to happen. Bizarre schemes by Trump-lovin’ rich people are a natural consequence of the world we live in now. Maya Vinokour attended the first event in New York, and blesses us with a lengthy breakdown of all the nonsense and banality that went down. Really, it’s long — but all you need is the conclusion.
I overhear a young woman telling her friends, her voice hesitant: “I guess this was ever so slightly overpriced?”—laughable from my perspective, as a severe understatement. Even at the Premium tier, the summit’s health “insights” were either overly familiar or extravagant and outlandish. The most daring proposal I heard all day was that we can save our messy human selves from technological obsolescence by capitulating to algorithms in advance. Is that a good idea? In keeping with this authoritarian moment in American history, what Johnson’s Blueprint and its commercial ecosystem does, ultimately, is invite us to understand our own dehumanization as a form of empowerment.
If that has whet your appetite, Bryan Johnson is taking his medicine show on the road, and is going to be bringing it to Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. Get your tickets now.
I’ve done multi-city traveling lecture tours on the past, and they’re grueling, even when all I did was talk for an hour and then go to a restaurant and spend a night in another hotel room. They’re bad for your health. Somebody should tell Johnson that he’s going to reduce his lifespan by doing this.
It’s true: they literally hate science.
Warning, though: they will also lie to you. For example, look at Answers in Genesis, which claims to love science, while redefining it to include claims that the earth is 6,000 years old and that there was a world-wide flood 4,000 years ago. Expect to hear that True Science involves prayer, denial of evolution, and genes being rewritten by looking at sticks.
The more secular MAGAs are going to tell you that science requires you to believe in American exceptionalism, the inferiority of non-white humans, and that you must bow down to worship capitalism.
They don’t love science, they love their preconceptions.
Republicans may seem unstoppable, and the MAGA movement has energized a racist, nativist, nationalist mob. But you know what else seemed unstoppable? The Ku Klux Klan. A hundred years ago, the KKK was marching by the thousands in parades across the country, and had installed multiple members in governorships. It was, for a while, the MAGAs of yesteryear. It fundamentally eradicated and forced to go underground, although of course its sympathizers were still lurking in our society, usually afraid to speak out loud.
One of the reasons it faded was because some people were not afraid to speak against the Klan, even when the establishment used their power to harass good people. Good people like George Dale.
George Dale, the founding editor of The Muncie Post-Democrat, had published his first attack on the Klan in 1922. Dale charged that Delaware County Circuit Court Judge Clarence Dearth was a Klansman who stacked juries with those of his ilk and gave light sentences to Klansmen convicted in his court.
Dearth subsequently found Dale in contempt of court and the editor spent his life savings defending his First Amendment right to print factual information, a story picked up by the national press.
Republican and Democratic newspapers across the country lauded Dale for his heroism, and readers nationwide contributed to his legal defense fund.
By 1927, The Post-Democrat’s circulation had swelled to 18,000—more than seven times its 1923 readership. By 1928, Klan membership statewide had dwindled to 7,000 from an estimated 300,000 at its peak.
He stood up for what was right, and he used ridicule to do it.
Klan ideology in the ’20s also differed from its focus during the Civil Rights Movement in the ’50s and ’60s. While never friendly to African Americans, the “second wave” of the Klan was mostly interested in halting immigration, undermining perceived Catholic and Jewish influence in American politics and schools, enforcing Prohibition, and protecting the “purity of American womanhood.” A new religious movement, Protestant fundamentalism, also fueled the Klan’s rise, with ideologues hijacking religion to stir up nativism. It’s no coincidence that 1925 was the year both of Stephenson’s trial in Indiana and the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee.
George Dale and others went to work documenting the hypocrisy of the Klan’s basic principles — from “100% Americanism” to a ludicrous KKK resolution passed in Muncie proclaiming that Jesus Christ was a white Protestant native-born American and not a Jew.
This was Indiana, after all, the state that had unsuccessfully tried to decree that pi had a value of precisely 3.2, back in 1897. They failed again when they tried to decree that Jesus Christ was a white Protestant American. (note: this excerpt is heavily larded with sarcasm.)
Muncie Klan N o. 4 Friday night by a unanimous vote, passed a resolution endorsing Jesus Christ, the resolution appearing in full the next day in a local newspaper. The question of the divinity of the Redeemer had been previously submitted to a committee consisting of Rev. Walter Gibson, Deacon Court Asher and Elder Willie Moy, the Chinese goblin, who reported unanimously in favor of the fundamentalists. When the resolution was presented one kluxer introduced an amendment to the effect that Jesus was not a Jew, but a native born, white Protestant American. The resolution went through unanimously but the contaminated, hireling, Papist press refused to print that part of it. Copies of the resolution were sent to the theological gentlemen in New York who have lately been staging a wordy conflict between faith and science. Its perusal will no doubt be a great aid in settling the argument.
And yes, let us not forget that 1925 was also the year of the Scopes monkey trial, which besmirched the reputation of another state, Tennessee, that is now also a stronghold of MAGA foolishness.
These know-nothing racist fools have infested this country long enough. Be like George Dale, and beat them back.
