Everything was working against me. I took Lutheran confirmation classes in about 1970, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life didn’t come out until 1983. And even when it did, they cut this scene out of the movie! Tsk. I would have appreciated learning more about the life of Martin Luther.
The CEO of GoFundMe did not anticipate that a third of the money raised on that platform is used to meet life-threatening medical needs, which should tell everyone that the system is broken.
The system is terrible. It needs to be rethought and retooled. Politicians are failing us. Health care companies are failing us. Those are realities. I don’t want to mince words here. We are facing a huge potential tragedy. We provide relief for a lot of people. But there are people who are not getting relief from us or from the institutions that are supposed to be there. We shouldn’t be the solution to a complex set of systemic problems. They should be solved by the government working properly, and by health care companies working with their constituents. We firmly believe that access to comprehensive health care is a right and things have to be fixed at the local, state and federal levels of government to make this a reality.
Hah, right, “government working properly”. We haven’t seen any of that since a mob of assholes got elected who think government is the problem. Thanks, Reagan, keep on putrefying, you slimeball.
I should let you know about this article, The ultimate lovely legs competition: the world’s nine most beautiful spiders, although I’m not too thrilled with the premise. It’s not a competition, all spiders have lovely legs…and chelicerae and eyes and abdomens and cephalothoraxes.
(I didn’t include any photos in this post because I’ve learned that some of you get so overwhelmed by the beauty that you close your eyes or close the browser window and go have a nice lie-down, and I didn’t want to disturb your work flow.)
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.
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.
Dinesh D’Souza thought he’d teach an uppity college professor a lesson.
Kevin you are a professor at a university no one has heard of. You might show a little intellectual humility. At least try to address the issue at hand. Pigeon jokes are not a way to win arguments, at least not in the Ivy League where I was educated
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) February 28, 2019
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.
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:
Here is Steve Scalise, who literally spoke at a white supremacist convention, saying that @Ilhan should not be getting intelligence briefings, suggesting she is a mole or otherwise dangerous. And Congress plans to rebuke…@Ilhan
History will not look kindly on this moment. https://t.co/8OSkO3uo1E
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 6, 2019
Seriously? Omar is going to be rebuked?
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.
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!
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?
