OK, Mother Iowa, maybe you could tone it down a bit?

This is a Union monument, erected in Iowa after the Civil War.

“IOWA, HER AFFECTIONS, LIKE THE RIVERS OF HER BORDERS, FLOW TO AN INSEPARABLE UNION”

Don’t you dare call it pornographic. It’s a very serious Civil War monument, although it does seem to be lacking in the required plumbing to allow passers-by to be sprayed by her bounty.

Catholic rabbit holes are the creepiest

Did you know that leftists are teaming up with witches to attack America?

Thus, the left has used the occasion to bring together ecologists, socialists, feminists, LGBT activists, pro-abortion advocates, and others to push their false class struggle narratives upon the American public. Less known, however, is the involvement of darker forces. Satanists and witches were invoking evil powers to aid those participating in the violence.

The witches do not hide their involvement in the violent protests. Mashable reports that witches’ covens are actively engaged in hexing police, whom they accuse of brutality. They especially target those who are risking their lives to stop the riots. The witches also cast spells asking for protection for protesters that confront the police. Witch activists used their dark arts as cutting-edge weapons for those who want to engage in a more spiritual class warfare.

The article is right about one thing: secular leftists don’t seem to care. That is correct. Having a contingent on your side that also thinks sending “thoughts and prayers” (and curses and magic spells) is a waste of time and effort, but sure, if it makes you happy, wave your hands in the air, burn a little incense, do some chanting. What’s ironic is who is complaining: Catholics. How can a good conservative Catholic complain about magical thinking?

The author of that article is John Horvat II, who runs a site called The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property. Just the name of the organization has me making the sign of the cross and looking for my holy water (I actually have some somewhere in my office!). But then I discovered their neat list of things they hate, which is a real blast.

The American TFP has opposed:
contraception; abortion; euthanasia; human cloning; the social acceptance of homosexual practice; anti-discrimination laws that give homosexuals a privileged status; the lifting of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in our military; homosexual adoption; domestic partnerships, civil unions, and same-sex “marriage”; transgenderism; homosexual films, theater plays, events, and pro-homosexual clubs on Catholic college campuses; public blasphemy; nudism; socialist childcare; socialist healthcare; socialist allocation of federal waters; death taxes; self-managing socialism; international communism; President Carter’s human rights policy; the policy of détente with communist regimes pursued by the American and Western governments; progressivism; liberation theology; the Vatican’s policy of Ostpolitik with communist governments; the retroactive lifting of statutes of limitations for civil cases involving sexual abuse; the enactment of State laws forcing clergy to violate the seal of Confession in cases of child abuse; the removal of beauty from and the democratization of the Catholic Church; “frenetic intemperance” in the economy; the ecological movement; pacifism; imprudent nuclear disarmament; and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

No wonder they’re unhappy — they’re all a bunch of tightly puckered sphincters. I approve of all of those things! Well, except for removal of beauty. There’s nothing wrong with beauty. But they seem to have an idiosyncratic notion of what beauty means.

In these times of great trials for the Church, it does good to souls to contemplate the sublime beauty of the Church in all its splendor and hierarchy.

Catholic churches have always seemed over-the-top kitschy to me, but this person seems to think rigid order is a synonym for beauty. Then I found the death cult dogma: The Prophet Daniel and the Beauty of Death. Catholicism seems to revel in a kind of gothic creepiness at times.

It is beautiful, because it proclaims that everything in the sensible world is delicate. It exists only with God’s intervention and through no merit of its own. Placed before the specter of death, man senses everything in him that is small and fragile. Death whispers in his ear: “Don’t you realize that everything in life is dust and ashes?” This is good for man, since he is accustomed to seeing his greatness compared to all other perishable things.

There are two other Old Testament phrases that express this same idea: “Vanity of vanities and all is vanity,” (Ecclus. 1:2) and “I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold all is vanity, and vexation of spirit.” (Ecclus. 1:14)

This voice ascends above these little perishable things, to teach man that even those things that are seemingly great, are nothing. However, there is Someone, Who hovers above all Creation, Who is a true Marvel. He is God, Our Lord in His Eternity, Inaccessibility, Intangibility and Immutability, Who touches all things without being touched.

In this spirit, the angel proclaims: “Go thou thy ways…and thou shalt rest.” In other words: “You, who were great in the eyes of God and man, you too shall go to your end. You too are perishable and your transitory state shall be broken tonight. The law that all material things must end, applies to you, too. Think of this and you will not be misled to measure Divine things by your puny grandeur.

“You must realize that you are small before the things of God, but also that you have an immortal soul. You have something that is not material, but imperishable. Thus, this end you enter tonight is temporary. In you exists the very principle of life, which is nobler than you and it shall remain.

“Moreover, your soul is good, so you will posses the happiness that things of earth cannot give. You will sleep, but afterwards will come the reconciliation between God and man and eventually your resurrection.”

God is so good that in spite of the perishability of flesh, He will resurrect the body so that it can share in the joys or torments of the soul, according to whether the man was good or bad in this life.

At the end of his announcement, the angel states: “stand in thy lot unto the end of the days.” This is a reference to this General Resurrection. One begins to hear angels sounding the trumpets and coronets that will call all men to judgment. The angel tells Daniel to sleep peacefully and wait for that day, for the death of the just is a dream that awaits the resurrection.

That is why one should always keep death before his eyes and order his life accordingly. Then, when death approaches, he can expect a joyful resurrection on Judgment Day. Living in this perspective will prepare him for the moment when Our Lord will appear with Our Lady at His side, to fulfill, perhaps His greatest promise: “I will be your reward exceedingly great.”

So, man will first be judged immediately at death, when his body is still warm. Aided by Our Lady’s mercy, he will be sentenced according to his love for and union with God, not by his position in the eyes of men. Then he shall see God face-to-face.

All right, that is simply a repulsive set of freakish beliefs. I guess I’m just going to have to summon a demon and cast some unholy imprecations on the Catholic Church. It isn’t beautiful at all.

Hsu resigns his vice presidential appointment

Good news!

Note that, as everyone has been trying to explain to the reactionaries, he was not fired, he still has his professorial appointment, but he no longer has his administrative position. That’s a step forward.

I look forward to Quillette’s tears.

Wait, wait, wait…there are people who protest against Juneteenth?

What do they want to do, repeal the emancipation of slaves?

I guess this is Trump’s America now.

As if we’ll now forget Galton and Pearson

Every year in my classes I’ll spend a little time talking about Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. It’s unavoidable. They were early pioneers in genetics and were extremely influential in their time, so I have been and will continue to bring up their contributions and their flaws. Galton was a wealthy guy who endowed a Chair in Eugenics at University College London, and Pearson was the first person appointed to it; just the strong association with eugenics ought to be enough to taint the history of the two men. I like to let my students know about how Galton, for a time, kept a device he called his ‘pricker’ in his pocket so he could surreptitiously score the attractiveness of women he met, which he later published as a list of the quality of women across the UK — the women of London were the most beautiful, while those in Scotland…weren’t. And you thought MRAs were a recent phenomenon!

We don’t need to bestow special honors on these harbingers of a century of racism and oppression, so UCL has decided to dename any buildings with their names on them.

In the meantime, the names have been changed to Lecture Theatre 115 (formerly the Galton Lecture Theatre), Lecture Theatre G22 (formerly the Pearson Lecture Theatre) and the North-West Wing (formerly the Pearson Building).

Not exactly poetic names, but better than trumpeting the names of racists.

Next up: all those corporations and rich alumni who buy the names of university buildings might want to consider the transitory nature of the honor, because when we start an accounting of the crimes of capitalism all those signs might come tumbling down. It’s always annoyed me that some rich dweeb with no real association with what goes on inside them gets to come along and have their name enshrined on the doors to a building.

Ooops, speaking of which, the Natural History Museum has decided that their new director will be the rich parasite who runs Amazon UK.

The new director has extensive experience of running online food businesses, and has also previously served on boards and acted as a trustee for high-profile museums. Gurr was the chair of the Science Museum’s board from 2010 to 2014, and was a trustee of the National Gallery.

He also acted as a non-executive director at the Department for Work and Pensions, which attracted criticism from the Labour MP and tax campaigner Margaret Hodge, who described his appointment as “disgusting” because Amazon was involved in a row over its taxes.

Oooh, “extensive experience of running online food businesses”. That doesn’t even make him qualified to run the museum cafeteria, but now he’s in charge of the whole show? This is a disaster in the making — rich executives are only good at figuring out how to loot and pillage, which, come to think of it, may be his best qualification to run a British museum.

We were not eaten by grues!

We spent a few hours at UMM’s EcoStation this morning. It’s out by the Grue Church, at the end of Grue Church Lane, just off of Grue Church Road. We made sure to visit in daylight — you wouldn’t want to be there after dark. You might get eaten.

Spoiler: We weren’t eaten. It was swarming with insects and spiders, though, which was the whole point — despite the ugly gray weather, we had a grand time lying in the muck and watching the spiders come out to play. And there weren’t too many ticks, and mosquitos didn’t bother us!

I put the rest of the story, including photos of some pretty spiders, in a public post on Patreon.

Our adventure today: the Ecostation

Mary and I are getting off our butts and committing to some regional day trips with the intent of doing some spider hunting, but also to get some exercise, take some pictures, explore glorious locations, and have some fun. Today, our goal is the UMM Ecostation.

Because we’re bad at planning, we don’t expect sun-dappled lakes, prairie grasses standing tall, and glorious webs of diverse spiders everywhere — we’re leaving on a day with predicted thunderstorms all day long. Also, the Ecostation is a plot of land donated to the university about an hour NNE of us, with grand plans to construct classrooms and research labs there in the future, but none of that has happened yet. So we’re visiting an undeveloped tract of 140 acres of Wild Minnesota to wander around in the rain on a thundery day, looking for spiders who will be sensibly hiding out of the wet. It’s going to be more of a scouting trip than a great day of arachnology, but that’s OK. The way the weather has been lately, we might have to wait for August to see sunshine again, and even then it’s uncertain.

Both of us are products of the Pacific Northwest, so a little rain leaves us undaunted. The spiders might know better. We might also be surprised, which is usually good.

Look for the helpers: Hsu has some peculiar friends

Yesterday, I told you that Stephen Hsu had gotten a bunch of signatures supporting his work, the effect of which was rather blunted by the fact that a lot of them were from racists. You’d think such a smart guy would have figured out that if you’re trying to argue that you aren’t an asshole, getting testimonials from other assholes doesn’t help. Well, now he’s got another major endorsement: Quillette and Claire Lehmann are backing him 100%. Oy. I guess he’s having his friends help dig his grave.

Lehmann’s defense is a real piece of work. She compares Hsu to Vavilov, and damns one person who criticizes him as…a democratic socialist.

Wow. So much wrong.

  • Vavilov was the victim of a Stalinist purge. No one is planning to send Hsu to a gulag.
  • Vavilov was a respected early Mendelian who was doing research within a theoretical framework that was well-respected in the world outside the USSR. Hsu is not a geneticist, he’s a loon promoting discredited ideas outside his expertise.
  • Lysenko was a political creature who exploited the wishful thinking of an ideology to claim facts that were not in evidence, or that had been disproven. That’s Hsu, too. He knows nothing of genetics, but he’s making absurd claims to prop up support for eugenics.
  • Lehmann caricatures ideas about genetics and the environment. Lysenko was a horrible fraud, therefore acknowledging any contribution of environment to the expression of genes makes you a modern Lysenko. Being a pure Mendelian who believes genes are fixed and invariant in their effects makes you a noble martyr to truth. It’s all bullshit.
  • Hsu is not being targeted “for his research and writing”. I haven’t seen anyone even mention his research in theoretical physics as a problem. It’s his dilettantish dabbling in fields outside his experience and playing on his authority in physics to justify his claims about biology that are a problem.
  • Hsu is not being misrepresented as a racist and sexist. He advocates for racism and sexism, he has a following of racist, sexist friends, and he publicly endorses racist, sexist ideas. His version of condemnation is to say, ‘I am not a racist, but hey, how about them differences in IQ scores?’
  • Hsu is not at risk of losing his livelihood. He may be asked to resign his title as Vice President for Research and Innovation (he may lose a bit of salary for that, but also gets out of some administrative duties). He’ll still get paid as a high-ranking professor, not to mention that he has made millions founding and selling a couple of Silicon Valley companies. He’s not at the slightest risk of starving to death in a prison camp.
  • I’m with Kevin Bird. Seeing the oppressive capitalist foundations of American wealth inequality getting shaken up is a good start. It’s not quite the change we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, though — we’re going to need to see Wall Street dethroned from its power and influence on government to be comparable.
  • Having the craniometry cabal at Quillette backing him is not evidence that he’s not a racist. Quite the contrary.

I’m hoping that the activists in Michigan can just point to the dishonest support of Quillette as confirmation that Hsu is a goddamned racist who has no right to be leading anything at MSU.