Tacky slime all over the place

The list of awardees of the Presidential Medal of Freedom is kind of a mixed bag already — for every Anthony Fauci there’s an Antonin Scalia, for every Toni Morrison an Irving Kristol, for every Jesse Jackson a James Watson. It’s political, it’s by whim and by credible honor, it’s a mess. It’s nice to see someone you favor get the recognition, but it’s never been anything but a too-freely given token that a president liked you.

Now it’s that much more meaningless. Donald Trump is handing one out to Jim Jordan, the cowardly hack who looked the other way as student athletes were sexually molested, the political leech who is one of the far right hard cases who still insists that Trump won the last election, who even now refuses to admit that there was no “steal”, and whose ambition far exceeds his ability. He’s the perfect Trump apparatchik, in other words.

Boy, Trump is determined to leave a thick layer of slime over everything as he exits, isn’t he?

Yay me

I got all my syllabi written, and organized my first week’s lectures. I also created and published the Canvas pages for my students. I still have to revamp the first lab — thanks to COVID-19, I’ve had to do major surgery on how the lab operates, to accommodate social distancing. I’ll probably get that done tomorrow.

Also, I sort of understand why the administration did this, but it’s still kind of annoying. They killed Spring Break — don’t you students scurry off to visit family and bring back the plague! But then they sprinkled one day long breaks throughout the term, rather than just shortening the whole semester. That tends to mess up lab schedules more than the usual big block of lost time.

But they didn’t consult me on the matter, so I guess I can’t complain. I just deal with what they hand me at this point, and hope I don’t die a horrible slow lingering death of the current epidemic.

If Chauncey Gardiner were a malicious, hate-filled bigot…

Maybe nobody else remembers the movie Being There, but I thought of it when I read this account of the president’s day last week. While the Republic was falling into chaos after he had incited a mob to march on the capitol, while his aides and cabinet and senators were desperately trying to get him to respond, what do you think he was doing? He was watching TV.

But as senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who — safely ensconced in the West Wing — was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their cries for help.

“He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV,” said one close Trump adviser. “If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.”

Even as he did so, Trump did not move to act. And the message from those around him — that he needed to call off the angry mob he had egged on just hours earlier, or lives could be lost — was one to which he was not initially receptive.

This is what he does and has been doing for the last 4 years: TV, golf, rallies to feed his ego, and appointing incompetent sycophants to high office. Oh, and tweet. That’s it. That’s all he has done. If only we’d known we could distract him into total paralysis just by running video of him talking 24 hours a day.

They couldn’t get him to mobilize the national guard. They couldn’t get him to do anything, other than send out a reluctant tweet. He didn’t even want to do that!

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., the group finally persuaded Trump to send a tweet: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement,” he wrote. “They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

But the Twitter missive was insufficient, and the president had not wanted to include the final instruction to “stay peaceful,” according to one person familiar with the discussions.

He was persuaded to make a short video, which he poisoned with his own views.

“This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said in the video, released shortly after 4 p.m. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.”

You can tell his sympathies were entirely with the insurrectionists. He wanted a democratic election overthrown, he is openly pandering to a violent mob.

He mustered the energy for another tweet (how pathetic), and this one was even worse, declaring once again that he was the rightful winner of the presidential election, in a landslide no less, and declaring that he was the victim of an injustice. This was not going to quell the violence.

At 6:01 p.m., Trump blasted out yet another tweet, which Twitter quickly deleted and which many in his orbit were particularly furious about, fearing he was further inflaming the still-tense situation.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so ­unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Trump wrote. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

This is all so revealing, and it tells you what he is going to do after the 20th: he’s going to go on tour, making more false claims and inciting more violence and rage. He fired up the QAnons and Trumpkins and right-wing militias and religious fanatics, and he’s going to keep on doing the same thing, and because he doesn’t have the authority of the office of the president to prop him up, he’s going to have to make increasingly extreme and inflammatory comments…to get back on TV. Because that’s what he really wants.

All this recent talk of healing and reconciliation is going to accomplish nothing as long as they let this walking talking bomb stroll about in public, and as long as enablers like Cruz and Hawley and Graham are allowed in congress.

That title worried me for a minute

I read Turkey Sex Cult Chief Sentenced to More Than 1,000 Years in Jail and thought at first it was going to be about some ghastly poultry fetishist, but no, it’s something completely different.

A Turkish Islamic televangelist was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail on Monday for running a decades-old cult whose members were accused of crimes ranging from sexual assault to blackmail, money laundering and even espionage.

Adnan Oktar, who wrote books on Islamic creationism under the pseudonym Harun Yahya, was put on trial in Istanbul alongside 236 other alleged members or enablers of his network, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

He became well-known in Turkey over the years, especially for provocative TV shows broadcast on his own channel. On screen, the cult leader surrounded himself with young women he called his “kittens,” who were often dressed in revealing clothing while he uttered opinions on religious and political matters.

Goodbye, Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar! I still have a couple of copies of his Atlas of Creation, a truly silly book.

All work and no play makes….

Another addition to my YouTube schedule: Friday night is play time. I’m going to try streaming No Man’s Sky, assuming I can get my streaming software to cooperate.

There are so many people playing this game now that it’ll be hard to add anything new by being yet another streamer, but I’ll try to give some informed biological commentary on the algorithmically generated planets. I can tell you in advance that they have limited success…but it’ll be fun anyway, right?

Oh, also — I’ll plan on doing some creationist bashing on Sunday mornings at 6am my time, look for that announcement later. I’m trying to accommodate all those people in distant time zones, too!

The Evo Devo conversation resumes!

I had a productive discussion with Phrenotopian, Jackson Wheat, and Nesslig 20 yesterday, in which I got lots of suggestions for how to make the science content of my YouTube channel more interesting. Now I just have to implement them! Starting on Wednesday!

I’m going to talk about evo-devo again, but with a revised format that allows for more actual discussion. So, on Wednesday at noon Central time, I’m going to fire up Zoom and Keynote and YouTube, all at the same time, and talk about Evolution of Coloration Patterns, a 2008 paper by Meredith Protas and Nipam Patel. You can give me feedback as we go in the chat, but also, if anyone wants to participate directly and put their face/avatar on screen, we can do that, too. Just send me an email, and I might send you a link back if 1) you promise to have read the paper, and 2) you think you have something to say.

I have other changes in mind for the future; maybe I’ll allow voice chat from the FtB Discord at some time. Not yet, though, but I’ll be experimenting.

Corporate talk radio has noticed someone is looking at them

Wait! There’s more good news! Talk radio is feeling the heat!

After months of stoking anger about alleged election fraud, one of America’s largest talk-radio companies has decided on an abrupt change of direction.

Cumulus Media, which employs some of the most popular right-leaning talk-radio hosts in the United States, has told its on-air personalities to stop suggesting that the election was stolen from President Trump — or else face termination.

This is big. Talk radio has been a pernicious poison in the country for even longer than the internet. Living in the big open spaces of rural America, I’ve done a fair bit of driving, and one thing I learned 40 years ago was to not turn on the car radio, ever. It was all ranting televangelists and Rush Limbaugh raving about ‘Murica and how them liberals are destroying the country, when the real truth is that it was the conservatives doing the damage all along.

Since I don’t listen to it (EVER!), I had to read about who the current stars are. Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino? Jesus.

Also unsurprisingly, it is revealed that these loudmouths have been corporate puppets all along.

“It’s naive not to recognize that a corporate imperative goes into all media,” said Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers magazine, which covers talk radio. “Corporations have always called the tune ultimately. Everyone pays attention to the guys at the top and always has.”

Talk-radio hosts, Harrison said, “never expected” their critiques of the election “to get out of hand” in the manner seen Wednesday. Cumulus and other broadcast companies “recognize they’re in the hot seat right now because the national eye is on them,” he said.

Yeah, right. They were only getting out of hand on Wednesday. From my perspective, they’ve been out of hand since the Reagan years.

A little glimmer of satisfaction every morning

After years of watching the news feature right-wing idjits every day, whining about being oppressed while advocating the shooting of black people, screaming “lock her up!” at politicians only slightly less conservative than they are, and posturing stupidly in racist groups and gun-toting militias, it’s nice to wake up to new schadenfreude every morning, as they receive their just deserts.

So, the guy capering about in the “Camp Auschwitz” shirt during the Capitol riots? Identified. His name is Robert Keith Packer, and I hope he’s about to suffer some severe economic stress and is anxiously twitching every time someone knocks on his door. The media are already digging through his arrest record! I thought that only happened with black people who were murdered by the police.

You know who else is twitching behind closed doors right now? The guy who inspired Mr Packer.

In other fantastic news, after months of far right jerks announcing that they were stomping off to join Parler, the new social media site for just fascists, all the rich tech companies like Amazon and Apple and Google abruptly pulled the rug out from under them and withdrew all support, and Parler has gone dark. Oh dear. Now they’re all going to come crawling back to Twitter and Facebook, those media sites they found intolerable, even though they had willingly given free reign to their Big Cheeto to spread propaganda, medical misinformation, and lies right up until next week.

Even better, they’d signed up for Parler even though it required them to hand out sensitive info, like their social security information, and now it’s revealed that all the GPS information for their criminal activities in Washington DC was uploaded with their photos and videos! It turns out that Parler was the world’s ugliest Honey Trap!

I’m going to find something in the news to enjoy every day for the next few weeks, I think. Then I think it will go back to normal as all these awful people get slaps on the wrist and go back home to start fundraising for Trump monuments and fomenting insurrection again.