Good Morning Spider!

It’s Thursday, which means it’s my spider clean up day — feeding and removing withered dead corpses from their vials, and also bottle-washing and general tidying up.

I’ve also been working on compiling some resources for students, since in a few months I have to sit down with a few of them and teach them how to identify spiders (challenging, since I’m a novice myself). For everyone’s general edification, here’s a short list of websites with taxonomic information:

Of course I also have a couple of printed field guides. I’m eager for the spring thaw and an opportunity to go chase spiders.

What happens when philosophers & biologists talk about a movie? Turns out they don’t talk about the movie much

If you were following the podcast Philosophers in Space with Aaron and Thomas and, last week, me, we continue our discussion this week, with 0G47: Annihilation and Deep Ecology, Part 2. Strangely, we don’t talk much about the movie Annihilation this week, and instead focus on philosophy and evolution and ecology. Dive in and listen, it’s loads of fun.

Hey! I’m a professor at one of those universities no one has heard of, too!

Dinesh D’Souza thought he’d teach an uppity college professor a lesson.

I kinda suspect that Dartmouth is rather embarrassed that D’Souza is a product of their education. Ivy League schools turn out asshats, just like every college — it’s a problem with being egalitarian and trying to educate even tendentious dullards like D’Souza. Don’t feel bad, Dartmouth grads, it’s not your fault. You tried. I don’t think that even the University of Minnesota Morris could have salvaged him.

Kevin Gannon, the target of D’Souza’s attempted snipe, had a great reply.

What all that means, Gannon continued, is that Grand View “serves students, many of whom come from populations or places that have not historically been well served by higher education.” The university is a liberal arts college with many pre-professional programs, and a liberal education should be accessible to all students, in all majors, he said, noting his institution is relatively affordable.

“And here’s the thing: there are a lot of folks at schools a lot like mine doing this same kind of work. The universities ‘Nobody’s heard of’ literally make this country go. We’re out here doing work, y’all. We support entire communities. We make our part of the world better.”

Yup. He could have been describing my university, too. As an undergraduate, I attended both the Giant State University and the Little Liberal Arts College, and I can say with an informed background that both have advantages…but if I were to do it over again, I’d have stuck with the liberal arts school. They provide more personal instruction and a broader background to students. And that’s why I switched from teaching at a large state institution to a smaller university myself in my career as an instructor.

I’m not worried about Ilhan Omar. I worry about the other guys.

There’s something rotten at the heart of US foreign policy, and this is just one small example.

questioning support for the US-Israel relationship is unacceptable…christ. That’s what is unacceptable. Israel is a corrupt genocidal theocracy, and US policy ought to be directed at supporting Israel while reducing their criminal behavior, rather than treating them as an aspirational model.

And what horrible thing did Omar say? All the critics seem to weasel around it. Here it is, though:

Last week, Ilhan Omar said something insensitive about the Israel lobby. While explaining her frustration with the way allegations of anti-Semitism can be used to suppress “the broader debate of what is happening with Palestine,” the Democratic congresswoman said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

When I just said, “Israel is a corrupt genocidal theocracy”, I said something far stronger than Omar simply questioning the idea of slavish devotion to Israel, as exhibited by American politicians. The article I’m quoting from, while mostly favoring her views, also buys into this weird notion that she said something “insensitive”. If you wanted to call me “insensitive”, I wouldn’t argue with you; what Omar said was the cautious advance of a view contrary to dogma, and was pretty darned politically careful. If anything, the author of that article is saying that Omar was too cautious in her criticisms.

The problem isn’t Congress’s “allegiance to a foreign country,” but its complicity in Jewish supremacy in the West Bank, an inhuman blockade in Gaza, and discrimination against Arab-Israelis in Israel proper.

Imagine if Omar had said that! But as he points out, Congress, including Democratic leaders, have fully accepted the righteousness of genocidal theocratic reasoning.

Speaking at AIPAC’s conference last year, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer suggested that Israel did not need to end any of these practices — because the Arabs wouldn’t make peace with the Jewish State, even if it did:

Now, some say there are some who argue the settlements are the reason there’s not peace … some say it’s the borders … Now, let me tell you why — my view, why we don’t have peace. Because the fact of the matter is that too many Palestinians and too many Arabs do not want any Jewish state in the Middle East. The view of Palestinians is simple, the Europeans treated the Jews badly culminating in the Holocaust and they gave them our land as compensation.

Of course, we say it’s our land, the Torah says it, but they don’t believe in the Torah. So that’s the reason there is not peace. They invent other reasons, but they do not believe in a Jewish state and that is why we, in America, must stand strong with Israel through thick and thin.

When Schumer says that America “must stand strong with Israel,” he means that it must block any and all efforts to liberate Palestinians from race-based oppression. When the Obama administration declined to veto a unanimous U.N. resolution condemning Israel’s illegal settlements in 2016, Schumer decried the move as “frustrating, disappointing and confounding.”

I think it is Schumer’s view that is simple, and using the Torah as a justification is religious blithering…and that ought to be unacceptable in any evidence-based approach to policy. Meanwhile, Omar’s views are far more humanistic, and she gets accused of racism.

There are costs to selectively policing bigoted (or insensitive) speech. The Democratic Party’s decision to spotlight Omar’s moment of rhetorical insensitivity toward Zionists — while ignoring, or actively championing the oppression of Palestinians — distorts public understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The party’s actions have the effect of casting Omar as the face of “extremism” on the Israel-Palestine issue, even though her official position — that any peace agreement must “affirm the safety and rights of both Palestinians and Israelis” — is more consistent with America’s purported values than almost any other lawmaker’s. Never mind that Chuck Schumer proudly defends Israel’s right to permanently disenfranchise Palestinians, as a means of protecting its ethnostate from the “demographic threat” posed by other people’s babies. Since Omar’s remarks attract bipartisan condemnation — while Schumer’s do not — it is Ilhan Omar who gets branded as “the Steve King of the left.”

Interesting. While Steve King of the Right gets sympathy and support from his colleagues, who refuse to condemn him other than a little mild tut-tutting, the “Left” in Congress is far more concerned with policing reasonable ideas that question the unthinking support for Israel than they are with the flagrant racism of the Republicans in power.

See also:

Seriously? Omar is going to be rebuked?

Something about education everyone should know

A misconception I wish could be corrected: most Americans don’t realize state funding for education has declined.

Most Americans believe state spending for public universities and colleges has, in fact, increased or at least held steady over the last 10 years, according to a new survey by American Public Media.

They’re wrong. States have collectively scaled back their annual higher education funding by $9 billion during that time, when adjusted for inflation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, reports.

That’s right, we’re not rolling in the cash, Scrooge-McDuck-style, out here in the ivory tower. In fact, we’ve been whittling off bits of the tower and taking them down to the pawn shop to try and make ends meet. The painful decline in state support has been a major driver behind all the bad news that people hear about higher ed: the rising tuition costs, greater student debt, and and the increasing reliance on piece-work by adjuncts. State legislatures have felt secure in hacking apart allotments for education for years because they know their know-nothing electorate (especially in Republican districts) will approve, and because they know we’ll tighten our belts and keep working as hard as we can to keep the whole enterprise afloat.

Congratulations on joining the club, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!

She has had an asteroid named after her, 23238 Ocasio-Cortez. Next time I’m in DC or NY, we’ll have to get together and compare space rocks, since I’m proud to say that 153298 Paulmyers is my namesake. I wonder how close those rocks are to each other? Probably not as close as Minnesota and the East coast.

There’s actually a legitimate scientific basis for honoring Ocasio-Cortez this way.

Evans and Stokes decided to keep things “honorable” by handing out asteroid names to the winners of top science and engineering fairs for students.

“We didn’t want to make it willy-nilly. We wanted to keep it exclusive,” Evans told Business Insider. She said first- and second-place winners of three major student competitions, plus some teachers and mentors, get naming rights.

Ocasio-Cortez took second place in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007, when she was a high school student. Yay! In biology! ONE OF US, ONE OF US!

“A surprising amount of death of small vertebrates in the Amazon is likely due to arthropods such as big spiders and centipedes.”

See? This is why we don’t invite mygalomorphs and scolopendrids to any of our parties. They tend to eviscerate and decapitate and consume innocent visitors and splatter fluids all over everything. The Araneomorphae are much tidier, wrapping up their victims in silk and then neatly puncturing them and sucking out their guts. It’s the difference between an axe murderer and the gangster who lays down plastic before executing his enemy. Who would you rather have at a social event?

I ☠️ flat-earthers

I refuse to watch this new Netflix documentary, Behind the Curve, because even if it is ripping ruthlessly into those idjits, it’s giving them more attention than they deserve. They’re also intellectually dishonest.

One of those Flat Earthers is Bob Knodel, who hosts a YouTube channel entirely dedicated to the theory and who is one of the team relying on a $20,000 laser gyroscope to prove the Earth doesn’t actually rotate.

Except… It does.

“What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift,” Knodel explains. “A 15-degree per hour drift.

“Now, obviously we were taken aback by that – ‘Wow, that’s kind of a problem.’

“We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for easy to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.”

You know what they say: If your experiment proves you wrong, just disregard the results!

“We don’t want to blow this, you know?” Knodel then says to another Flat Earther. “When you’ve got $20,000 in this freaking gyro.

“If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad? It would be bad.

“What I just told you was confidential.”

Wow. They spent $20,000 on an instrument that they then chose to ignore. As one of those small college scientists who is trying to patch together gear on little bitty $400, $600 grants, and who bought a microscope camera for $2000 out of his own pocket, I’m more than a little appalled. Next time someone decides to drop a chunk of money on some crackpot, could they just send it to me, instead? I’ll use it responsibly.

If nothing else, that kind of money would fund summer research projects for at least six students, and would help produce competent scientists for the future.

The world will be a better place when Rupert Murdoch dies

Jane Mayer’s thorough article on the entanglement of Fox News with Trump is a depressing exposé, but not a surprising one. The airheads on Fox are shaping government policy.

Other former Fox News celebrities have practically become part of the Trump family. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of “The Five,” left Fox in July; she is now working on Trump’s reëlection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr. (Guilfoyle left the network mid-contract, after a former Fox employee threatened to sue the network for harassment and accused Guilfoyle of sharing lewd images, among other misconduct; Fox and the former employee reached a multimillion-dollar settlement. A lawyer who represents Guilfoyle said that “any suggestion” that she “engaged in misconduct at Fox is patently false.”) Pete Hegseth and Lou Dobbs, hosts on Fox Business, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 p.m. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”

Axios recently reported that sixty per cent of Trump’s day is spent in unstructured “executive time,” much of it filled by television. Charlie Black, a longtime Republican lobbyist in Washington, whose former firm, Black, Manafort & Stone, advised Trump in the eighties and nineties, told me, “Trump gets up and watches ‘Fox & Friends’ and thinks these are his friends. He thinks anything on Fox is friendly. But the problem is he gets unvetted ideas.” Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.

It’s all a big joke. These people at Fox are corrupt, incompetent, rat-fucking idiots. For example, look at how they do “research”.

To the astonishment of colleagues, the Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism. She’d share the day’s planned topics with Townsend, and then he’d e-mail her suggested content. A former colleague of Guilfoyle’s says, “It was a joke among the production assistants—they were, like, ‘Wait till you hear this!’ She actually got research from him! It was the subject of hilarity.”

Townsend is a frequent contributor to the fringe social-media site Gab, which Wired has called a “haven for the far right.” (He has promoted the idea that “physically weak men” are “more likely to be socialists,” and has argued that it is not anti-Semitic to observe that “the most powerful political moneybags in American politics are Zionists.”) The server company that hosts Gab removed it from the Internet temporarily after it was revealed to have posted hate-filled rants by Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, last October.

Remember the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine that regulated the media and required them to be honest and balanced, and that was thrown out by the Reagan administration? Bring it back. Its absence is what has allowed Fox to flourish.

Jeez, but Murdoch has been a malignant influence on the world. I’ll be partying when he kicks the bucket.