Now I’m physically incapable of seeing Richard Jewell, because of all the projectile vomiting

Never forget.

Richard Jewell was a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics, who discovered pipe bombs that had been planted on the grounds. They were disarmed, he was hailed as a hero, and then people became suspicious and wondered if he had put them there, to win attention. He was later cleared of the accusation.

He is now the subject of a Clint Eastwood movie, with the tagline, “A hero’s life is shattered by one massive, misplaced rush to judgement when the man who thwarted the 1996 Atlanta bombing was wrongly accused as the main suspect.” It’s a pretty good summary. I have no interest in seeing the movie, however, given Eastwood’s political bias.

Do you have a bucket nearby? You might want to be prepared.

American Patriot has put up a review of the movie. Given AmPat’s reputation, you might expect it to be jingoistic and stupid, and you’d be right.

Don’t rush to click on the link, though. There’s one more detail that you need to brace yourself for.

The review is written by…George Zimmerman. You know, the guy who murdered Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black kid who went to the store to buy candy and was then tracked and shot by vigilante Zimmerman.

You will not be surprised to learn that Zimmerman loved Richard Jewell, because he identifies with Jewell.

This movie hit home. I absolutely identified. Richard and I were both cop wannabes — or so the media told us. We were both gullible. We both believed law enforcement had our best interests at heart. We both believed reporters wanted the truth. We both believed everyone was basically good and then we both realized what fools we had been to believe all that.

As I sat there in the dark, my stomach in knots, I found myself wishing Richard was still alive so I could reach out and hug him and tell him, “Yes, Richard, you are a hero.”

Aww, poor George. He identifies with a guy who was falsely accused, because he thinks he was falsely accused. Unfortunately, the facts are that Jewell didn’t kill anyone, and in fact saved lives, while Zimmerman literally and accurately shot a young black boy (this is not in dispute) for being in his neighborhood; he was acquitted, thanks to Florida’s unjust “stand your ground” law. He has since sued the Martin family for $100 million, been arrested multiple times for domestic violence and disorderly conduct, and has tried to raise money by auctioning off the murder weapon.

He is no Richard Jewell.

I’d say shame on American Patriot for publishing that self-serving drivel, but AmPat has no shame.

Never cross the streams

I have been sent an attempt to unify my two obsessions: an octopus is just a wet spider.

No. No. NO. I was surprised at how strongly my brain rejected this proposition — my first reaction was to want to scream at the screen, that this is not correct, don’t you know anything about arachnids and cephalopods, my god, you fool, I need to set everything on fire, this is going to simmer in my brain like acid, aaaargh, do I have to write a whole book on this ridiculous idea, how dare you, now I’m going to have counter-arguments reverberating through my skull for at least a week!

It was objectively interesting how being close to something can trigger such a strong reaction to counter-factual nonsense. Sure, you can tell me that baseball is just football with sticks, and I’ll chuckle and move on and forget about it in minutes, but an inappropriate comparison of my two totally independent, incomparable, glorious organisms feels like you just stuck a hand-grenade in my eye socket. I am totally discombobulated.

I’m better now, though. I’ve calmed down. Just don’t say that phrase to me ever again, I might cry.

I knew nothing about enneagrams until yesterday

I’d heard of them, of course, but I was in a state of blessed ignorance so the term just sailed right over my head. Now I’ve received a couple of emails from the persistent Richard Colter (never heard of him, either), so I looked ’em up.

Jesus.

It’s some kind of personality profile system, based on numerology and Christian mysticism, with this magical figure used to diagram your personality traits. It has about as much validity as Myers-Briggs personality tests, that is, none at all, but sucks believers in with its pseudo-scientific/pseudo-mathematical posing.

An enneagram is, literally, a drawing with nine lines. Figuratively, however, the enneagram is a New Age mandala, a mystical gateway to personality typing. The drawing is based upon a belief in the mystical properties of the numbers 7 and 3.* It consists of a circle with nine equidistant points on the circumference. The points are connected by two figures: one connects the number 1 to 4 to 2 to 8 to 5 to 7 and back to 1; the other connects 3, 6 and 9. The 142857 sequence is based on the fact that dividing 7 into 1 yields an infinite repetition of the sequence 142857. In fact, dividing 7 into any whole number not a multiple of 7 will yield the infinite repetition of the sequence 142857. Also, 142857 x 7 = 999999. And of course 1 divided by 3 yields an infinite sequence of threes. The triangle joining points 3, 6 and 9 links all the numbers on the circle divisible by 3. To ascribe metaphysical or mystical significance to the properties of numbers is mere superstition and a throwback to an earlier time in human history when ignorance was considered a point of view.

I’d just throw it in the bin with astrology and dianetics and The Bell Curve and every attempt to reduce humanity to a couple of numbers, but Richard Colter has a book he thinks I should read: UNDERSTANDING HUMAN EVOLUTION: AND THE NINE HUMAN ENDEAVORS – REVEALS THE PURPOSE AND MEANING OF LIFE. I am almost tempted to order it.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to read this book is that it reveals the Nine Human Endeavors (NHE), which are the highly sophisticated behaviors that separate modern humans from early human species such as Neanderthals. The constructive use of this knowledge is the key to unleashing the untapped potential of individuals, organizations, and countries. Thus, the knowledge contained in this book will prove to be indispensable to people of all walks of life.
This book will be of interest to Anthropologists because it provides a comprehensive theory of human evolution that answers the unassailable questions of how and why humans evolved. As the story of human evolution unfolds, new concepts fill the gaps existing in the anthropological sciences, along with critical details such as the key psychological and physiological differentiators between modern humans and early humans. And a basic timeline of evolutionary events provides the context necessary for those without a background in anthropology.

It’s 341 pages of this egotistical argle-bargle. I’m sure, given how the Ennealogical Brigade thinks, that it ought to be full of bizarre mystical diagrams that represent the “evidence” that this view of purposeful evolution is true, but a quick glimpse inside reveals that the author has instead substituted page after page of word salad. Maybe the diagrams are in an appendix.

Mr Colter himself is active on Quora, where he writes about two things, and only two things: how to get out of paying speeding tickets, and spreading misinformation about evolution, which always includes a plug for his book. I’d look deeper, but I think I’ve had enough nonsense for the day.

You have to spend money to make money, am I right?

This letter is purportedly from Human Resources to an employee with an older, unsightly car. I don’t know if it’s genuine or not, but the attitude is certainly authentic — it’s just that usually they avoid making it quite so blatant.

We tend to drive our cars into the ground. My wife and I get the least expensive vehicle that has a good reliability rating, and then we drive it forever, or until it breaks down. We are not the types to buy a new car every year for the status (we can’t afford a new car every year, anyway), and I can’t imagine myself ever washing and polishing a utilitarian device like that, anyway.

Fortunately, we college professors can get away with a little slovenliness, but my wife did have at least one incident where she spotted her employer circling around her dinged-up car, scowling. You know there are lots of Americans who will judge you on the presumed prestige of your car, and that spending money on the right upscale things is an important aspect of performative capitalism.

It’s only surprising that, if this letter is genuine, anyone would make the superficiality of the attitude explicit.

How does Christian math work?

I don’t know how this adds up. So this Minnesota church is struggling with declining membership — only about 25 people show up each week, and most of them are elderly — so what they’ve decided to do is tell all those old people to stay home or go to a different church so … they … can … increase the numbers of … young people?

Grove United Methodist Church in the St. Paul suburb of Cottage Grove is closing in June, with plans to relaunch in November. The present members, most of them over 60 years old, will be invited to worship elsewhere, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported. The church is asking that they stay away for two years, then consult the pastor about reapplying.

There’s some funky logic going on here. They must have additional plans to reinvigorate the church, other than telling the old folks to stay away, unless they think somehow that older people actively repel the youth. But if they’ve got some dynamic plan to draw in more, younger members, why do they need to kick out the loyal congregation? And do they seriously think the ejected members will want to come back in two years?

They’ve got some new guy coming in as pastor, and I’d really like to know what magic he plans to work to get new people to join the church that just kicked out Grandma and Grandpa. Other Methodist churches are undergoing this peculiar division of their congregations, and it’s associated with deep splits over the inclusion of LGBTQ members. I wonder if that’s the unstated and unreported rationale for showing the membership the door.

What the hell, Chad?

After Chad and Yara hit it off and mated, I started shuffling Chad off to meet other spider ladies. First up, I paired him with Melisandre.

This morning, I find one live spider and one dead spider. My immediate thought was that the little witch had murdered the male, but no — Chad was fine, it was Melisandre’s corpse that was dangling from a silken thread. This is not right. Chad, you brute. Now I hesitate to move a known domestic abuser to a new cage, the rotten killer. Mate, don’t murder.

I suppose it’s possible Melisandre lost her magic necklace and just died of old age…

Anyone remember Pepsigate on ScienceBlogs?

Since we discontinued the ads on this site, I (and other bloggers) get lots of promotional crapola from people who want to put them back on — I will not. I thought this invitation from sourceglobalmedia.com was, well, unethical.

Please let us know pricing and options to place content relevant on your website but would have 1 link to Gaming Industry website. Further details:

● We will reimburse yourselves for a one off administration fee in uploading and maintaining the content on your website as long as the site is still live.

● Within the body of the content Please do not suggest the article is paid / sponsored / advertorial in the content

● We will provide you with the article that will include citations and images, as to make the content with editorial value, we request that all these are kept in.

Please come back to me and we can provide both content and payment.

It’s that second clause in particular. They’ll provide content, but we are required to pretend it is our own original work, and not mention that it was paid advertising. We won’t do that. That’s sleazy.

If you suddenly see posts written in an entirely different style, babbling about my amazing scores in fast twitch video games, you’ll know I sold out. The legal debts must be getting to me.

What if a priest is invited to my family gatherings?

Cardinal Raymond Burke was asked about what to do if a family member brings their gay partner to an event which, I guess, we can use as a guideline to answering the question in my title.

This is a very delicate question, and it’s made even more delicate by the aggressiveness of the homosexual agenda. But one has to approach this in a very calm, serene, reasonable and faith-filled manner. If homosexual relations are intrinsically disordered, which indeed they are — reason teaches us that and also our faith — then, what would it mean to grandchildren to have present at a family gathering a family member who is living [in] a disordered relationship with another person? We wouldn’t, if it were another kind of relationship — something that was profoundly disordered and harmful — we wouldn’t expose our children to that relationship, to the direct experience of it. And neither should we do it in the context of a family member who not only suffers from same-sex attraction, but who has chosen to live out that attraction, to act upon it, committing acts which are always and everywhere wrong, evil.

And so, families have to find a way to stay close to a child in this situation — to a son or grandson, or whatever it may be — in order to try to draw the person away from a relationship which is disordered.

And we know that with time, these relationships leave the person profoundly unhappy. And so it’s important to stay [as] close as one can. But, that particular form of relationship should not be imposed upon family members, and especially upon impressionable children. And I urge parents or grandparents — whoever it may be — to be very, very prudent in this matter and not to scandalize their children or grandchildren.

Well. I certainly do regard the priesthood as a festering tradition of ignorance and evil, and I am concerned about not doing harm to my children and grandchildren, but I’m not going to accept the recommendations of an evil person. We should do the opposite. If a priest shows up at your garden party, don’t shun them, or call the police, or throw them out — treat them with sympathy and understanding. Explain to your kids that sometimes people fall into a bad crowd and make poor life decisions, but we still have to treat them with the dignity and respect owed to all human beings, no matter how flawed. Don’t try to convert them, no matter how obvious their suffering, because we don’t know what led them to this disgraceful state, and disrupting their life may cause even greater misery.

Let the kids learn from this person’s example…but by no means allow your children to be alone in a room with a Catholic priest.

Little Women was lovely!

I used the last day of my winter break to see Little Women. I hadn’t read the book, and if you’d asked me yesterday what it was about, I’d have waved my hands vaguely and mumbled “Period drama? About girls growing up?”, which wouldn’t have sounded interesting at all, but you know, I see all kinds of crap because we have one theater in town and the selection is limited, so I’d go see it anyway. Jeez, but I was clueless. It’s a fantastically thoughtful film about women who are all different and have different aspirations and have to navigate oppressive social structures and often compromise their goals…but can still sometimes find happiness. Or not. I honestly thought at the beginning that I was going to have trouble keeping track of all these women, who was who and who was trying to do what — I am infused with patriarchal bias myself — and figured it was going to be Sex and the City in rural Massachusetts in the 1860s. It is so much better than that, and the acting was phenomenal, and Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth all stood out as real and important people.

Go see it if you can.

I am now in the unusual situation of having seen three excellent movies in the last month. Little Women, obviously, and The Lighthouse (a story of a descent into madness that didn’t rely on jump scares and gore), and Parasite, about class warfare and artificial dichotomies and opportunities between the rich and the poor. There hasn’t been a single superhero in tights in the bunch, and I’ve been really, deeply enjoying my outings. Superheroes have an appropriate niche, of course, and I’ll almost certainly go see any that show up in my town, but it turns out that movies that illustrate real issues and don’t resolve everything with punching and explosions are much more satisfying. It seems I need more fiber in my cinematic diet, with only occasional bites of flamboyant desserts.

(Oh, wait, I just remembered — I also saw Jo Jo Rabbit, another terrific movie. I am overwhelmed with great films lately!)

100% ready and champing at the bit

I am organized! Now ready to face the spring semester, although I’ve also learned that I’m apparently up to be the biology discipline coordinator*, so I may not be as ready as I think. I got a lot done today, at least, and will be able to walk brightly into my new classes, not looking at all like a pole-axed cow.

Tonight I’m going to take a deep breath and relax by going to the movie. Little Women is playing, which I hear is very good, and also Dr Doolittle, which is getting panned. I think I’ll go to the one that I might have a chance of enjoying.

*There are no perks at all associated with being the discipline coordinator, not even a fancy hat. Maybe my first agenda item as I rise to power is to propose the creation of a fancy hat, to make it all worthwhile.