If only he’d shot himself a day earlier

I can’t imagine working at home, and having one of my kids getting murdered for answering the door by some angry asshole who was gunning for me. That’s what happened to federal judge Esther Salas, whose 20 year old son Daniel Anderl was shot through the heart by a men’s rights coward, Roy Den Hollander, who had a long history of anti-feminist bullshit. I suppose I should say “alleged” murderer, but he had recently written hate-filled screeds against Salas, and his dead body (by suicide) was found with a package addressed to Salas. He has been featured on We Hunted the Mammoth several times for his irrational MRA obsession.

Anyone who rages against women generically is a danger to the world. The pain they cause with their self-righteous bigotry is intolerable.

Matt Taibbi and the disappointing lack of cultural awareness

Matt Taibbi used to be one of my favorite writers, but then I learned about his ugly misogyny (which he unconvincingly claimed was made up), and I was never able to look at his work in the same way. So I cancelled him. By which I mean I stopped reading him. Apparently he has sensed the declining number of eyeballs gazing at his writing, and the fading number of tongues wagging his praises, because he is mad about it, and I had to read something new of his. I am disappointed even more.

It’s the usual spittle-flecked screed we usually see from disgruntled right-wingers, with but one message: the Left is just as bad as the Right! They’re all prudish, finger-wagging authoritarians at heart, but the Lefties are just the worst! We can’t even discuss how stupid the Left is, he says as he writes about how stupid the Left is, because they’ll descend on us with great force and crush us!

Doing so would have meant opening the floodgates on a story most everyone in media sees but no one is allowed to comment upon: that the political right and left in America have traded villainous cultural pathologies. Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip.

That he can claim this in the era of Trump, when badgeless cops in unmarked cars are grabbing civilians off the street, when cops are maiming citizens with rubber bullets and truncheons and pepper guns, when our president openly considers not respecting the outcome of the next election, is weird and dumb. The old Taibbi had sharp perceptions; this one seems blinded with resentment that his good ol’ boy rape fictions have damaged his reputation.

The centerpiece of his gripe with the Left is a tweet by Byron York (yeah, NRO York, far right apologist for every one of Trump’s excesses), which mocked the National Museum of African American History and Culture for producing this graphic:

Personally, I think it aimed at a bad target. It’s not about “whiteness” itself, it’s about the assumptions of the dominant culture of modern America, and as an exercise at looking at ourselves, it’s useful and insightful. Of course, it doesn’t matter anymore, because the right-wingers were so outraged and expressed the same attitude as Taibbi and the graphic was “cancelled”. Oops. They keep self-owning themselves.

Take the Smithsonian story. The museum became the latest institution to attempt to combat racism by pledging itself to “antiracism,” a quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.

Oh? And how will you propose combating racism, by pretending it doesn’t exist?

It’s a shame, because look at what it highlights. This is not examining the obvious or necessary components of a successful culture, it’s pointing out unconsidered values we hold and asking us to think about them. Consider alternatives.

For instance, “rugged individualism”. You can’t doubt that this is an implicit value in American culture, and in fact many of the comments responding to York are aghast that we could even question this. But what if an alternative were “cooperative communities and mutual aid”? That would be a better solution to America’s problems, but no, we’re supposed to love the cowboy myth.

Or “family structure”, the heterosexual pairing of a dominant male breadwinner with a subservient female marital aid and housecleaner. Why is that assumed by the American culture at large to be an ideal? It has oppressed more than half our population for centuries and has done us nothing but harm.

Or take “emphasis on the scientific method”. I love the scientific method, I’m a scientist, I apply it all the time. But linear thinking often fails in complex issues with multiple contributing causes, and people are emotional animals who rarely make purely objective decisions. When you limit yourself to only one path to a solution, you’re circumscribing the range of possibilities to such a terrible degree you’re going to miss equally good or better alternatives.

“History”: oh sweet jesus, spare me the monstrous chimera of the “judeo-christian tradition”. All they have in common is the Old Testament, which is a compendium of barbarities and superstitious evils. There are more than 7 billion people on the planet, and they are making a legitimate complaint that our version of “history” is a biased collection of rationalizations for the oppression of the majority by a minority.

Or the “Protestant work ethic”, which is simply an awful way to indoctrinate labor to serve the needs of their bosses. How about work/life balance? How about about recognizing that “hard work” is usually unrewarded with anything but the bare minimum of necessities (sometimes not even that), and that the true path to riches is theft and inheritance, under our current system?

None of these are actually “white” values, although they do serve to maintain the status quo and benefit the majority, who are mostly white, and it’s unsurprising that a museum of African American history and culture would find it worthwhile to point out our biases…and for an angry mob of far-right conservative assholes to squash it. Yet somehow Taibbi finds the African American side to be the one that must be deplored and chastised, while the lunatic right-winger is his ally, and thinks this is a great example of the Left being more evil than the Right? Does he even realize that the graphic is intended to demonstrate the unthinking, implicit assumptions of the American public? This is Anthropology 101 stuff, nothing radical, it doesn’t even make any judgments on whether these are good or bad values, it simply describes the traditions of American culture. People commenting on it are all saying “great values!” and “this is the way to succeed!”, etc., etc., not even aware that they are all confirming the accuracy of the graphic.

But no, to Taibbi this just confirms that the Left (it’s not even written from a leftist perspective!) has gone insane and is worse than the Right. Apparently, questioning your values is not something anyone is supposed to do in Matt Taibbi’s America.

OK, Taibbi, this is going to hurt you a lot worse than it will me — I shall resume the cruel torture of not reading your work any more.

Setting records in Minnesota

Dismal news from the Minnesota wing of the American pandemic ward: our youngest death so far.

Minnesota has reported its first COVID-19 death in a child amid a rise in cases of the infectious disease among children and young adults.

The death of a 9-month-old baby from Clay County is one of the youngest reported in the U.S. in the pandemic.

The child had no underlying health conditions and was not hospitalized. State Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm described it as an “isolated incident related to this infant’s very specific situation.”

Details and lab samples are being sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for further investigation of why this infant died with an infectious disease that has taken a much harsher toll on the elderly. Of the 1,545 COVID-19 deaths so far in the pandemic in Minnesota, two have involved people in the 20 to 29 age range. But none until now had involved anyone 19 or younger.

We also added 922 new reported cases on Monday, the highest single-day total since the start of the pandemic. Stevens County, where I’m located, is holding steady at a total of 13 cases, but we’re less than a month away from a big influx of students. Maybe we’ll set some more records! How exciting!

I need to add one other detail to our situation. Relatively few young people are dying of COVID-19 around here, but one of the features of the rural landscape is that every town has an aging population and features at least one retirement home. Morris has four: Skyview Plaza, Skyview Court, West Wind Village, and Prairie Community Services. That’s where the pandemic will hit hardest, and that got me wondering. I’ve been selfish and worrying about what will happen to staff and students when classes resume, but will the university close down if the old folks start dying?

Yuck, grocery stores

I made it home from our grueling grocery shopping trip, which was made worse by all the road construction this year. It’s so much fun to get to the intersection you need to take to find it’s completely closed and you can’t get there that way, and then having to back-track and take a gravel road through farm country to get on track.

I also discovered a new class of person to detest: the woman who gets a grocery cart and a handful of disinfectant wipes, proceeds to carefully wipe it down, and then marches into the store without a mask. She takes the virus seriously enough to take care of herself, but not seriously enough to care about anyone else. I felt like sneezing on her.

Now I’m back, just in time to go in to the lab and get cracking on cleanup, spider maintenance, and more class prep. Oh boy, less than a month to go!

Let the wildflowers bloom

We’re about to waste our morning on a long trek north to get groceries, thanks to our local grocery store being a filthy pestilential breeding ground for disease, so I’m going to be gone for a few hours. I’ll leave you with a few views of the strip of native plants growing outside our sun room window, which Mary calls the Father’s Day Garden, because she planted it for me last year. It’s doing well!

It looks so good that I think we should dig up the whole lawn and let it flourish like this. Lawn mowers are the tools of the devil, you know.

Way to undermine my sense of relief, guy

These are not happy times for universities — after decades of declining support, the pandemic is hitting us hard, and the colleges that ought to know better are opening up for business because they can’t afford not to, which is a bad idea. Of course, it’s also an opportunity for some MBA in a business school somewhere to analyze universities from a capitalist perspective and make predictions about which are going to survive the current crisis, and which are going to break. It’s a bit ghoulish, and I’d rather efforts be spent on figuring out how to make universities viable again, but OK, let’s look into your crystal ball.

Business Week looks at over 400 universities and categorizes their ability to weather the storm. Schools will can a) thrive, which is the case for the big prestigious private colleges with massive endowments. Think Harvard. They’re going to whine and moan about having to peel off some of their riches, but they don’t have any real worries. Then there’s b) survive, where the school has enough status and income that they can make it through lean times and rebound. c) Struggle, is for schools that already have some lurking problems that will be amplified by the pandemic. And finally d) perish is the fate of those colleges that had severe issues already, like high tuition and dependency on foreign students.

There is a spreadsheet with the parameters and results. You can check you alma mater to see how it is predicted to do.

I’ve attended or worked at a long list of state schools: University of Washington, University of Oregon, University of Utah, Temple University. All are predicted to survive. I attended one small liberal arts college in Indiana, DePauw University, and it’s slated to perish, sad to say. Fortunately, my current employer, the University of Minnesota Morris, also a small liberal arts college, is expected to survive the coronavirus! Hurrah! The tea leaves have fallen in our favor!

Of course, any model is only as good as its assumptions and data, and this paragraph dispelled all of my optimism. It’s nonsense.

College is an expensive operation with a relatively inflexible cost structure. Tenure and union contracts render the largest cost (faculty and administrator salaries) near immovable objects. The average salary of a professor with a PhD (before benefits and admin support costs) is $141,476, though some make much more, and roughly 50% of full-time faculty have tenure. While some universities enjoy revenue streams from technology transfer, hospitals, returns on multibillion-dollar endowments, and public funding, the bulk of colleges have become tuition dependent. If students don’t return in the fall, many colleges will have to take drastic action that could have serious long-term impacts on their ability to fulfill their missions.

Average salary of a professor with a PhD is $141,476!!! On what planet? Here in Minnesota we have access to salary numbers as a matter of public record, and nope, no way is that accurate. The numbers for Morris are less than half that, but we are slightly underpaid compared to other institutions in the UM system. Many universities have found ways around those “near immovable objects”, hiring armies of underpaid adjuncts and using grad student labor for a pittance. Telling readers grossly inflated numbers for salary and pretending that is representative is just a way to focus blame on the faculty who are the soul of the university, and justify further actions to undercut their support. I hate it.

We just paid our taxes, so I’m painfully aware of our financial situation. Thanks to my decision to take a sabbatical, a voluntary and massive reduction in pay, my salary for the last two years has been about $40K. I’m grateful for it, and it’s enough to live a modest academic life, but to imply that it’s excessive for a senior position with decades of seniority that required about ten years of training to land is rather offensive and stupid. Yes, the majority of the expenses for a university is people, big surprise. You’re paying people to teach and do research, would you rather that real estate and buildings form the bulk of the expenses?

Anyway, great job undermining your own analysis, Scott Galloway. As always, pretending a university is a widget factory is a bad interpretation that makes your whole thesis suspect.

Doomsday arrives in November

Expect chaos and revolution after the election, because this president is not going to make a peaceful, lawful transition.

Got your pantry stocked up? Bottled water? Plywood for boarding up your windows? Prepared to hunker down for a good long while? You might want to start getting ready now.

This is part of his re-election campaign, I suspect. “Vote for me, or I will fuck you up!”

Planning another evening of Minecraft

You can watch, Tuesday, 21 July, at 7pm Central!

I have a plan: I’ve tweaked up my house, but I’m missing something: I haven’t seen a single spider in the entire game. I need to correct that, so we’re going spider hunting. Warning: I might use this as an excuse to talk about spiders. Also, I’ve spotted a desert temple, and you know what I think of temples — let’s loot it!

I was also thinking that in the future this might be more fun with more players. If you’re interested, we could try to get a few people on http://mc.sitosis.com/, and try to organize a group session. They’re taking applications, and it’s free.

Deborah Birx’s reputation will never recover

Which is only fair, since her enabling of Trump is a catastrophe from which the nation will never recover. The NY Times has a piece on how Trump failed the pandemic test, and Birx plays a prominent role in it.

For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.

On April 11, she told the coronavirus task force in the Situation Room that the nation was in good shape. Boston and Chicago are two weeks away from the peak, she cautioned, but the numbers in Detroit and other hard-hit cities are heading down.

A sharp pivot soon followed, with consequences that continue to plague the country today as the virus surges anew.

In April. I remember April. Did anyone think we were on the right path in April? We’d shut down my university, but already I was seeing people refuse to accept it, clamoring to get back to bars and beaches.

Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.

Yeah, models built on assumptions, like that Americans wouldn’t be stupid, and that Trump wouldn’t encourage that stupidity. Just the fact that Donald Trump is president should tell you how wrong that is.

Inside the White House, Dr. Birx was the chief evangelist for the idea that the threat from the virus was fading.

Unlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak. Dr. Fauci has cautioned that “models are only models” and that real-world outcomes depend on how people respond to calls for changes in behavior — to stay home, for example, or wear masks in public — sacrifices that required a sense of shared national responsibility.

Again, a responsible nation would not have elected Donald Trump.

Dr. Birx’s belief that the United States would mirror Italy turned out to be disastrously wrong. The Italians had been almost entirely compliant with stay-at-home orders and social distancing, squelching new infections to negligible levels before the country slowly reopened. Americans, by contrast, began backing away by late April from what social distancing efforts they had been making, egged on by Mr. Trump.

The difference was critical. As communities across the United States raced to reopen, the daily number of daily cases barely dropped below 20,000 in early May. The virus was still circulating across the country.

Italy’s recovery curve, it turned out, looked nothing like the American one.

Nope. Because Italians were smarter than Americans…or rather, I should say, Italians didn’t have failed leaders who were modeling the worst possible behavior for containing the infection, and didn’t have scientists feeding their delusions.

Other nations had moved aggressively to employ an array of techniques that Mr. Trump never mobilized on a federal level, including national testing strategies and contact tracing to track down and isolate people who had interacted with newly diagnosed patients.

“These things were done in Germany, in Italy, in Greece, Vietnam, in Singapore, in New Zealand and in China,” said Andy Slavitt, a former federal health care official who had been advising the White House.

“They were not secret,” he said. “Not mysterious. And these were not all wealthy countries. They just took accountability for getting it done. But we did not do that here. There was zero chance here that we would ever have been in a situation where we would be dealing with ‘embers.’ ”

We could still take those actions that other nations did — in fact, we really ought to, despite the fact that it’s late and those measures will cost more and we’re still going to suffer the tragic consequences of our failures — but we won’t. Classes start in a month, and my university still plans on opening, and I’m going to have to teach in-person labs, and students will still be moving into the dorms, and will still be gathering in the cafeterias for meals as a group, and will probably still be heading out to the bar for quarter taps on Thursday nights. It’s madness. If the University of Minnesota had asked me, I would have told them to slam on the brakes right now, refuse to enable the massing of students in one place, and teach online classes only for a year. The summer of 2021 would be the time to discuss cautiously reopening fully, but only if the pandemic was under control.

Nobody asked me. I was only told to prepare a plan for a limited reopening, not asked whether we should open at all.

At least I’m not a Birx making happy-clappy PowerPoints to show how everything is going to be just fine. When I’m feeling optimistic, I put the chances of me being dead within a year at about 10%.

Exactly what I’d expect in Portland

In what seems to have been an effective tactic this time, a naked protester faced down the cops.

Everyone who has been to the Oregon Country Fair or the naked bike rides in Portland knows that there is a culture of casual nudity among a subset of the state. It seems to have been used to good effect in this case. I’ve seen the photos of what rubber bullets and those pepper guns can do to clothed flesh, so this was incredibly brave.

What if they made a protest, and nobody wore any clothes? What if the powerless embraced their vulnerability and threw themselves into actions that would inevitably lead to carnage? The thugs in power might be initially taken aback, but I don’t think they’d hesitate for long.