OMG! I’m caught up in one class!

Finally, I’ve waded through the entire backlog of grading for my genetics class, and have sent every student a personal email stating where they currently stand, what assignments are missing (I’m offering amnesty on all the homework), and what they can do to improve their grade this week — lab reports, for instance, can be revised to correct errors. There is still a gigantic take-home final looming ahead, which constitutes about a quarter of their total grade, and I’ve warned them about that. That does mean that this is only the lull before the storm, though, but at least I’ve got a couple of days to work on bailing out my lifeboat. I expect to be swamped by the end of this week and early next week, again.

It also means my class content for this last week is taken care of. I get to deal with students’ concerns about their grades, and also review the entire semester to prepare them for the final.

Now to celebrate this fleeting triumph by…uh, I dunno. What do we do to party anymore? I know, maybe get started on wrapping up my second class.

I knew all along that Lio was a good kid

Of course, the first comment on the comic is this BS:

Nobody gets to be a billionaire without creating something that millions, even billions, of people want and pay for. If you don’t like billionaires, then trying living your life without everything they’ve made possible for you.

Reassuringly, that commenter will never be a billionaire, because he fundamentally misunderstands how one becomes a billionaire. It’s not by creating something, but by figuring out how to profit off the labor of others.

IMPORTANT: do not learn anatomy from reddit or twitter

Or from men, apparently.

Men can’t possibly commit sexual assault, because there’s no way they’d be able to find their way about in a woman’s nethers. They’ll just fumble about and end up poking her in a dimple in her knee, or something.

Or they’re just grossed out by the arrangement of parts.

I think we all want that guy to continue to be repulsed by all women. It’s best for everyone.

Property values in Alex Jones’ neighborhood must be plummeting

He is a scary, sick man. He fantasizes about chopping up his neighbors and feeding them to his daughters. Where is CPS?

Speaking of values plummeting, Elon Musk murdered the price of his stock with a tweet. One tweet about the price of his stock being too high, and investors promptly wiped out $14 billion of his company’s worth (and $3 billion off his personal worth). That ought to make you wonder: if tweeting 6 words demolishes all that money in a day, doesn’t that tell you that stock prices are mostly a shared fiction? If I had any personal investments in the stock market, I’d want to bail out fast and invest in something real…like, maybe, tulips.

We should also wonder about something else. All these famous “influencers” — Jones, Musk, Jordan Peterson, probably many others — are exposed as flawed, fragile people who seem to have been broken by fortune and fame to the point where any little thing seems able to tip them over into a slide towards self-destruction. It’s a long slide, too, where they continue to be newsworthy even as they expose themselves to be merely human and far too damaged to be authorities or leaders in much of anything.

Hoo boy, the Discovery Institute is pathetic

Everyone seems to be “pivoting to video”, including the creationists, so I might as well join in the fun. The Discovery Institute put out a quasi-animated video with a young hipster narrator to promote science denialism — they want to claim that the whale transitional series is bogus, and that all those fossils are just a random jumble of unconnected species that somehow just appeared, and none of them are really intermediates. So I had to expose the flaws in their thinking. Unstylishly, of course.

If I look a little bit squinky-eyed, it’s because I only noticed after recording it that the sun was glaring in through the window to one side. Next time I do one of these, I’d better draw the blinds.

Yeesh, but anti-choicers are terrible people

The word from our regional Planned Parenthood is that quacks are using the COVID-19 epidemic as a pretext to shut down abortion services.

This is absurd. A pandemic is not a reason to shut down essential medical services. If I had a heart attack, would they give me a little voucher promising to send an ambulance in 3 weeks, if the stay-at-home orders have ended? (That’s about when Minnesota’s orders are scheduled to expire, although they may be extended further, if circumstances warrant.) Are grieving mothers with a dead fetus just supposed to “hold it” for a while? Are pregnant women with acute pyelonephritis or preeclampsia just supposed to take an aspirin and wait? Are the women who are not ready or capable of dealing with a child expected to hope that their desires change and their circumstances improve at some indefinite time in the future? During a pandemic and economic collapse?

Perhaps the fuckwits behind this lawsuit are hoping that women at the boundary of legal elective abortion are delayed long enough that they can compel them not to abort.

Of course, the clinic that is suing is providing bogus rationalizations.

In the lawsuit, AALFA Family Clinic cites concerns over the shortage of protective equipment during the COVID-19 outbreak as the primary concern. The pro-life group argues that forcing the clinics to use medication rather than surgery would conserve protective gear needed in the pandemic. They argue abortion clinics should be included under Governor Walz’s ban on elective procedures.

But these aren’t elective procedures! There’s a ticking clock at work here.

This is the relevant comment on AALFA Family Clinic.

This lawsuit is based on fantasy, not fact and has been filed by individuals who promote information and services that are medically inaccurate, deceptive and harmful.

That about sums it up. This lawsuit ought to be quickly thrown out…although my experience with lawsuits suggests it will instead drag on.