I am becoming sympathetic to squirrel murder

I’m coming around to Iris‘s point of view. I have a bird feeder just outside my office window. It’s supposed to be squirrel-proof (nothing is squirrel-proof).

Birds are constantly coming by. Our cat sits there twitching, watching them.

Unfortunately, these big meaty monster squirrels keep climbing up on it, terrifying the birds. There’s a bar for the birds to perch on, to the right, but it’s hinged so that when a heavy rodent climbs on it, it folds down, closing access to the seeds inside. So far, so good.

Only now what the squirrels have figured out is that they can climb onto that silver roof and twist that red handle until it unlatches, and then get on the bar and pop the roof off, allowing them to climb right in and wallow in bird seed. It’s very annoying to find the roof removed and a brushy-tailed rat inside, indulging in gluttony.

I’m trying something different now. I’ve put a line of sriracha sauce all around the roof, and also dabbed it on the latch. We’ll see how well that dissuades the thieves. Otherwise, I wonder if a line of squirrel skulls would work.

Anyone else have other suggestions?

That reminds me…

I’m home alone, and in addition to taking care of the evil cat, I have a mealworm colony in the dining room. Mary set it up and usually feeds them — it’s not a big deal, just throw a slice of apple in there every once in a while — and I just scoop up a handful every few weeks to feed the spiders.

We do not have 10,000 mealworms. I’d have to be raising a thousand spiders for that to make sense. But I can dream!

(We do not have guests over for dining now…pandemic, you know. If we did, we might move the colony to another room, even though they are quite quiet and well-behaved.)

Why does CNN pay Rick Santorum to appear in the news?

The “liberal” news media <snort>. Watch this and try not to throw anything heavy across the room.

There it is. There’s the great American myth. We are a nation that coalesced out of nothingness around two ideas: FREEDOM (for white landowners) and CHRISTIANITY (oh, judeo-Christianity) and the Ten Commandments and Jesus, despite none of those appearing in our constitution. Meanwhile, the people who were already living here were just sitting around slack-jawed and drooling, not a single thought in their heads, no art, no culture, no religion, no technology, no music, no traditions, so it was OK to slaughter them. It’s one grand smug lie, repeated over and over, and the rich white people sit there and lap it up.

The fact that that slimy fraud hasn’t been canceled and has in fact been prospering is all the evidence you need that cancel culture does not exist.

It gives me some slight satisfaction that I lived at a time in Pennsylvania when I could vainly vote against that horrible human being.

The first responsibility of a university should be to provide a safe space for learning

Should I be envious? Look at these scores that Bruce Conforth of the University of Michigan got on RateMyProfessor. This may be the first time in years that I’ve so much as glanced at that hellsite (no, don’t tell me what my score is, I don’t want to know), but I heard all the news about what an inspiring, award-winning instructor he was, so I had to check.

Yeah, “all the news”. You know something awful has happened, because you don’t get national attention for being really good at your job. So let’s get the whole story.

Several sexual assault allegations surfaced Friday against former University of Michigan American Culture lecturer Bruce Conforth, who won the 2012 Golden Apple Award for most outstanding U-M instructor, according to the New York Times.

Conforth, a musician and founding curator of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, retired in early 2017. His retirement came after three women reported to the University in 2008 and 2016 that Conforth had attempted to engage in sexual relationships with them as students, according to the Times.

Now, six former students have filed legal papers with the intent of suing both Conforth for sexual misconduct and the University of Michigan for failing to provide Conforth with consequences or protect the victims with further investigation and action.

Conforth’s allegations of sexual harassment include unsolicited messages and rape.

Warning: the article gives more detailed accounts of his behavior. It was hard to read through to the end, where you discover that six other professors and administrators at the University of Michigan have been committing unrelated sex crimes in recent years, and the university has only reluctantly acted on them. I guess it’s easier to hand out awards.

We get an idea of the university’s policies from the timeline.

The University claimed to have taken action against Conforth by setting restrictions on him after the first report of sexual assault in 2008, and planned to conduct an investigation after the second two reports in 2016, if Conforth did not agree to retire in 2017.

So…you rape one student, and the U wags a finger at you and gives you a major teaching award a few years later; you have to rape three students before you’re asked to quietly retire and collect your pension. No wonder they’ve accumulated an impressive collection of sex offenders on their faculty.

But he was so popular and enthusiastic in his lectures, you know…

I have a cunning plan

I’ll be OK! I’ve managed to plow through that massive pile of student essays by the simple expedient of getting up at 3:30am on Sunday and working through midnight, and I got them all read and sprinkled them with comments. I’m not quite done: now that I’ve got a good idea of their relative merit, I’m grinding through them all again and assigning grades, and uploading electronic copies that I can send to the remote black rectangles I affectionately regard as my students. I should be able to complete this final stage by mid-afternoon and put this one behind me.

Good thing, too, because I’m handing out another take-home exam on Wednesday, which they’ll return to me on Saturday. The hamster wheel is spinning fast, folks! I think the axle is glowing cherry red, but I’m hoping it’ll last a little longer. The next exam, I have decided, will be a series of genetics problems where the answers are just pure, simple, clean numbers — they’ll turn in a page with 10 numbers on it, and they’re either right or wrong, and I just go down the list and check them off. I should be able to survive next weekend, right? And have time to compose the comprehensive final exam they’ll get the week after?

Then tonight I burn the midnight oil again to finish up this stack of lab reports.

Oh yeah, I also have a second class I have to finish up by tomorrow, and they get another exam on Thursday.

I have a long to-do list in front of me, but don’t worry, I’ve penciled “sleep” in for a few hours on Friday, right after “spiders”.

Imagine, this whole university is full of highly-trained Ph.D.s who are going to be bleeding from the eyeballs for the next couple of weeks, and we’re all going to crash spectacularly on approximately the 16th of May, when we can finally close the books on this semester.

It’s snowing and raining, how am I supposed to find spiders?

Once again, it’s cold and nasty out there, unfit weather for any arachnid, so I’m going to be frustrated a while longer. Fortunately, a reader sent me a link to a page documenting the spiders of Portugal, and lovely spiders they are. Spiders are the international language!

I think this means I have to book a flight to Lisbon right away. It’s a mensagem de Deus!

Pity party!

Hey, everyone! It’s Saturday night, during a pandemic, and I home alone with a cat that hates me, so it’s a perfect time for a pity party. I walked out to the liquor store and got some cheap whisky, and I’ve already downed a couple of shots, so you better get to work to catch up. I have many things to be miserable about, and I wanted to get a head start.

  • I’ve already mentioned my monster load of grading. I don’t need advice, I know it’s my fault — but I also feel an obligation to cram in a lot of stuff the hard way because this zoom teaching is not my bag at all. I’m clearly overcompensating and suffering for it.
  • Speaking of which, this has just been an agonizing year. All the compromises I’ve had to make are driving me crazy, and all the good stuff about teaching have been lost. I hardly know my students — they’re names on a roster. Getting any kind of interaction with them is a struggle. I did not sign up for this career to be a voice on a computer talking to an array of black rectangles.
  • I’ve been regretting more than a few choices. Forty years ago my dad suggested I go into refrigerator repair, and even lined up an apprenticeship for me. Sometimes now (especially now) I fantasize about a 9-to-5 union job with good pay and paid vacations…I wonder what that would be like?
  • I used to enjoy getting out to events and talking with other people about science, or the folly of religious dogma, or the importance of social justice. I was traveling roughly every two weeks to meetings, and then, abruptly, that all dried up about 8 years ago. Sheesh, you expose just one high muckity-muck skeptic rapist, and your phone stops ringing. It was impressive how quickly and thoroughly the blacklist was implemented.
  • The fun was only beginning. I learned gradually that the movement I’d spent years promoting was infested with patriarchal asshats and harassers. I get so much hate mail now! It turns out many of the rank-and-file of atheism sound like refugees from 4chan. Or whatever that hellhole is called now.
  • Some of you regular readers got a taste of what my in-box looks like — we had a troll come by and leave a series of obscene comments talking about how I enjoyed fellating transsexual individuals, among other such crudities. Don’t bother looking for them, I delete them as fast as I find them, but here’s a taste of one of his milder comments:

    Myers is a bitch. And she was bitchslapped long time ago by almost everyone in the atheist community and made a pariah [he’s right, you know–pzm]. Thoroughly deserved given the damage that C*unt did.

    Once upon a time I thought atheists would be more rational than theists. Boy was I wrong!

  • But, you say, that’s just some bottom-of-the-barrel nobody — a loud-mouthed twit who has never contributed anything positive — so who cares? But then tonight I also got email from a more senior member of the atheist community, with a high position in a regional organizer. She’s been pestering me for years, and now she was writing to me to get my support (why, I have no idea — I have zero influence) in a crusade against American Atheists. This is what some high-ranking atheists sound like.

    Have you see this?
    Access the article by clicking on the address way below.
    Notice that the tranny within AA, Alison Gill,
    is coming down hard on Dawkins.
    Dawkins is not perfect but I’ll take him any day over Alison Gill.
    Dawkins’ main problem is that he doesn’t speak “American.”
    I think he means well but he doesn’t come across very well
    to Americans. But he is basically correct.

    Rumor is that the Humanist organization
    has also been taken over by LGBTQ people.

    I wrote back to tell her to stop sending me her poisonous crap. Like my usual trolls, she didn’t stop.

    PZ, This is not hateful and this is not poisonous.
    You know me better than that.
    These people (LGBTQ) have taken over AA and
    the Humanist organizations.
    “Tranny” is a well-known nickname for transgender people,
    which is a mouthful to type. It is not meant negatively.

    Dawkins is correct. The right wing fundamentalists
    are using the “transgender issue”as a Trojan horse to get at us.
    We need to separate the transgender issue from atheism.
    We are science oriented.
    You do not become a woman by amputating your male genitals.
    But if they want to do that, they are free to do so in America
    but don’t connect it with atheism.
    THAT IS ALL WE ASK.

    Depressing, isn’t it? I don’t want to be associated with these people any more. And she doesn’t know me at all.

  • I’ve got lots of legal debt that’s going to drain all of my disposable income for the next few years. Yeah, that’s the happy ending to my atheist career.
  • I’m running out of whisky.

Fuck it, party is over.

James Croft addresses the critics of humanism

It’s very good. Read the whole thing.

But what about the argument that contemporary Humanism is becoming a cult, with its own unquestionable dogmas? Is the board of the AHA donning robes and preparing the thumbscrews? Of course not. In fact, steps like this show that organized Humanism is becoming more Humanistic. Humanism means more than a commitment to skepticism and freethought, and more than not believing in God (and the more I do Humanism the less I think that even matters). It means working to promote the dignity and worth of all people; fighting for the oppressed and the marginalized; working together for a more just world; and striving to bring out the best in ourselves and in others. Humanist organizations should seek to uphold these positive values at all times, and in disassociating themselves with the increasingly cringeworthy behavior of Richard Dawkins, the American Humanist Association showed a commitment to them.

Of course freethought, skepticism, and intellectual debate are central to the Humanist project. We should be vigilant against any tendency toward groupthink or cultishness. But for too many years, organized Humanism has focused on freethought and skepticism to the detriment of the broader panoply of values the tradition should uphold. It has promoted – even lionized – figures who are rightly well-known for their contributions to science and skepticism, but who are not good representatives of the fullness of our tradition. People like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins became darlings of our movement at a time when it was focused far too much on defeating religion, and far too little on defeating injustice. That is now changing, and some in the movement don’t like the change. They want to hold onto their heroes, and resist the criticism they receive. New battle-lines are forming, and with this decision the AHA has chosen a side.

Good for them that it’s the right one.

I know what side I’m on. I’m relieved at one decision we made years ago. When the late Ed Brayton and I were discussing what to call this network, we both shared the goal of making it inclusive and committed to broader concerns than just “there is no god”, and we went back and forth on appropriate names; we quickly ruled out anything with “atheism” or “atheist” in it, because even then we could see the divisions becoming deeper and there were a few too many people calling themselves atheists that we did not want to be associated with. When Ed came up with “freethoughtblogs”, we said “PERFECT!” and I immediately bought the domain. And here you are. And here we are, able to easily distinguish ourselves from those people.

I recently renewed the domain registration, by the way.

Thanks, Ed, for your foresight.

Wake up, America

I’ve been disturbed by American selfishness — we seriously have swarms of people who are anti-vaccinations, and conspiracy theorists who believe the pandemic is a “plandemic” — and maybe we should look beyond our shores for the global perspective.

So, India…brace yourself for the horrific news.

On Friday, India reported more than 332,000 coronavirus cases in one day – the highest ever recorded by a single country.

Since the start of the pandemic, the country has recorded more than 16 million cases and 186,000 deaths, according to a tracker by Johns Hopkins University.

This means it has now overtaken Brazil, with the second-highest number of confirmed cases worldwide. The first remains the US.

The hospitals are full. People are dying in stretchers outside the hospital, waiting for care. And then, once they’ve died, they’re overwhelming the crematoria.

The unprecedented death rates are overwhelming the nation’s crematoriums.

“No one in Delhi would have ever witnessed such a scene. Children who were 5 years old, 15 years old, 25 years old are being cremated. Newlyweds are being cremated. It’s difficult to watch,” Jitender Singh Shunty, who runs a makeshift crematorium, told Reuters.

As the crematoriums are overrun, people are turning t mass burials in makeshift facilities like parking lots.

We have a moral obligation to make sure everyone in the world gets the best treatment. If you need a selfish reason, one of the reasons for the recent surge in India is the rise of new COVID variants.

How about some good news, though? We might have a successful malaria vaccine!

A vaccine against malaria has been shown to be highly effective in trials in Africa, holding out the real possibility of slashing the death toll of a disease that kills 400,000 mostly small children every year.

The vaccine, developed by scientists at the Jenner Institute of Oxford University, showed up to 77% efficacy in a trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso over 12 months.

Yes! This has the potential to be the biggest medical breakthrough of the 21st century. Defeating malaria would be huge.

Now we just have to get regulatory agencies to attach as high a priority to controlling tropical diseases as we do those that afflict temperate countries.

Hill said the institute might apply for emergency approval for the malaria vaccine just as it did for the Covid jab. “I’m making the argument as forcefully as I can, that because malaria kills a lot more people than Covid in Africa, you should think about emergency-use authorisation for a malaria vaccine for use in Africa. And that’s never been done before.”

The institute would probably ask the regulatory bodies in Europe or the UK for a scientific opinion on the vaccine and then apply to the World Health Organization for approval for use in Africa. “They did Covid in months – why shouldn’t they do malaria in a similar length of time as the health problem is an even greater scale in Africa?” Hill said.

They’ve arranged to have the vaccine mass produced by the Serum Institute of India…uh-oh. You might have guessed this: those facilities are overwhelmed right now by the need to churn out COVID-19 vaccines to deal with the pandemic surge.

Everything is interconnected! Wake up!