Don’t you make me vote for Elizabeth Warren, Ann!

My wife has been edging me into the Bernie Sanders camp over the last few months, and I should be listening to her, but Ann Coulter sings a siren song for Warren.


Sen. Warren has convinced me that Bernie isn’t that worrisome. He’ll never get anything done. SHE’S the freak who will show up with 17 idiotic plans every day and keep everyone up until it gets done.

Now I’m confused again. Is she trying to use reverse psychology to steer us away from the candidate she really fears, Sanders, or is she accidentally revealing that she recognizes who the real powerhouse is, Warren?

At least she isn’t trying to trick us into voting for Bloomberg. Mike must have forgotten to send her a check.

Working data from a museum, all yours

It is good news that the Smithsonian is making its archives of millions of images freely available — this is information ought to be in the public domain. Before you start drooling at the prospect of piles of free scientific art that you can use, the implementation is a bit rough. Sure, you can search for images of “spider” in the Smithsonian collection, but you’ll get back is a hodge-podge of imagery, most of which isn’t exactly polished, and the searches are difficult to refine. I mostly got photos of spider wasps, and black and white snapshots of broken, fixed specimens from the museum archives. General terms like “skull” give you a flood of miscellaneous imagery, some of which is neat or historically interesting; try to narrow it down to, for instance, “Neanderthal skull” and you get…nothing.It’s a work in progress, I guess.

It’s an excellent start, though. Just be warned that there isn’t much in the way of curation behind it and a lot of the images look like quick photos to go into a catalog of things that are buried deep in cabinets in the bowels of the museum.

I was quoted in Charisma magazine!

Oooh, the thrill of recognition. I got a whole paragraph, too, not just a one-liner. Here’s my moment in the spotlight:

To be sure, tentacles have lots of “suckers.” The squid’s suckers are even more effective than the octopus’ in capturing prey. P.Z. Myers spells it out on ScienceBlogs.com: “They contain a piston-like structure inside an interior chamber, coupled so that when something tries to pull away from the sucker, it lifts the piston, further decreasing pressure inside and strengthening its grip—like a Chinese finger-trap, the more you struggle, the harder it is to get away.”

Except…REWIND. What’s Charisma saying to lead into that quote?

What I didn’t know was that a sneaky squid spirit would soon start stalking me.

Right about now, you might be scratching your head and asking, with all sincerity—or with all mockery—”What in the world is a squid spirit?” Essentially, it’s a spirit of mind control but its affects go way behind what you would think.

In his classic book, Demon Hit List, Eckhardt lists mind control and defines it this way: Octopus and squid spirits having tentacles; confusion, mental pressure, mental pain, migraine.” Sounds a lot like witchcraft, and I imagine that’s what it actually is. There are many expressions—and many manifestations—of witchcraft.

And what comes immediately after the quote?

Here’s a lesson: We’re not wrestling against flesh and blood. We can’t overcome a squid attack in our flesh. The more we struggle in our flesh, the greater the hold this spirit seems to get on us. The more we get in our heads trying to figure things out, the more ground the squid takes because the squid is attacking our head (our mind).

Squids also have a chameleon persona. Reference.com reveals, “Squid have the largest nervous system in the animal kingdom. They have the ability to change colors because they have translucent skin. The colors come from chromatophores, which are pigment cells that are on the outside of the skin that expand or contract to show colors.”

Spiritually speaking, this chameleon-like characteristic means it can change its behavior or appearance to stay hidden. It’s sneaky! Squids are fast swimmers and some of them can even fly. Again, that’s why you need discernment in any spiritual battle. Internet checklists and articles can be helpful if the Holy Spirit illuminates the truths within them, but we must ultimately wage prophetic warfare if we are going to win the battle.

The ignominy of it all — I am reduced to sciencey-sounding window dressing to add one little tidbit of true facts to a heaping bowl of bullshit. I shall have my revenge. When I’m dead, my incorporeal spirit will command a legion of squid demons, and they will slake their thirst for vengeance on this author’s head.

Or not. There are no floating souls or cephalopod demons, sorry.

Is this the kind of drivel that gets routinely published in Christian magazines?

Dr Mona coming to UMM

Hey, gang! Thursday evening at 7pm we have a guest speaker, Dr Mona Hanna-Attisha talking in Edson Auditorium about her work. She’s one of the first people to discover how the water in Flint, Michigan was poisoned with lead (which, by the way, it still is), and she’s going to grace our little college with knowledge that evening. You should come. Why aren’t you coming? Don’t give me that old excuse that it’s far away — you have Google Maps, you can find us.

The child in the oval office

Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor, is running for congress in Kansas (poor Kansas, haven’t they suffered enough?), so of course the NY Times has to write a puff piece for him. Jackson has the endorsement of the Trump crime family, which ought to be sufficient to round up the support of the far right, but to make sure the centrist propaganda organ of the nation has to weigh in, too.

The only thing interesting is the closing paragraphs.

During his infamous news conference, Mr. Jackson said his goal was to help Mr. Trump lose 10 to 15 pounds and that he planned to bring an exercise bike or elliptical machine into the White House residence.

Mr. Jackson said those plans never came to pass. (Mr. Trump had gained four pounds by his following physical.) “The exercise stuff never took off as much as I wanted it to,” he said. “But we were working on his diet. We were making the ice cream less accessible, we were putting cauliflower into the mashed potatoes.”

Good grief. Trump really is a creature of impulsive appetites, isn’t he? He has a doctor on call, which sounds like a wonderful idea to me, but Trump ignores his advice altogether to the point that they have to resort to subterfuge to get him to do anything, like a child.

Maybe they could strap his phone to his exercise bike, so he has to sit on the bike to use it? Power the phone with a generator so he has to pedal to use Twitter? Nah, far easier to just have Ben Garrison draw him as slim and muscular.

Who ever heard of a liberal arts college as a setting for drama?

Netflix is putting together a new show about academics and the chair of an English department which, to be honest, sounds like it could be about petty, trivial conflicts and excessive over-reactions after prolonged over-thinking, which could be exhausting. But then I learn that two of the people behind the show are those overpaid jerk-offs, Benioff and Weiss, who drove Game of Thrones into the ground, which gives me hope. Anyone who watched any of the featurettes at the end of each episodes knows that those two are dull, dry pontificating twits, and therefore they know the material that has to make up the content of any show about academia. Also, it means the show will feature gratuitous nudity and bloody violence, two things that tend to be lacking around university departments, but which would definitely elevate our appreciation of events. Who hasn’t dreamed of crushing the skull of the departmental chair, or silencing that bore who won’t shut up at the planning meeting with a crossbow bolt? (Note: I am currently the discipline coordinator for biology here, and I’m sure none of my colleagues have ever had such a thought.)

Right now, they’re at the casting stage, and they’ve got Sandra Oh and are trying to hook Scarlett Johansson, because she has to be in everything. I’m going to recommend when they’re scouting locations that they check out the University of Minnesota Morris. Imagine an academic dramedy that takes place in an isolated antarctic research station; we’re the closest thing to that you’re going to get, academic life enclosed in a tiny, remote bubble. We’ve already got a wild cast of extras to fill in the gaps, and all you need to do is add a CGI shapeshifting alien, and the story writes itself.

Except the ending. I have no idea how it would wrap up, but with Benioff and Weiss behind it, who cares? We’ll just kill a few faculty and go hang out at the Old #1 Bar and be done.

Weinstein GUILTY!

Harvey Weinstein is now a convicted rapist.

Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of sexual assault in a New York court Monday, the first conviction to emerge from the dozens of misconduct allegations against the once-powerful movie producer.

The jury determined that Weinstein forced a sex act on former production assistant Mimi Haleyi at his apartment in July 2006 and raped former aspiring actress Jessica Mann at a hotel in 2013.

Lock him up, I never want to hear about him again.

A new contender for fake university has arisen!

For years, we laughed at Kent Hovind for his Ph.D. from a degree mill, the absurd Patriot University, a cheap house in Colorado. This “university”:

It looks like they spent more money on landscaping than on their faculty.

But now, a new ridiculous “university” has emerged, and a new photo of a joke institution. Hello, Reagan National University!

Impressive. It is matched only by their elaborate web presence, which if you followed that link, is this:

It apparently has no faculty and no students, but it is accredited, for real. This story broke because pesky journalists started poking around revelations about dodgy accreditation practices.

Twice, on Jan. 29 and Feb. 12, a reporter visited the listed addresses for Reagan National University in Sioux Falls. In one location, the doors were locked, and the office suite was dark. Both had signs bearing the school’s name. At another location, the suite was mostly empty, save for some insulation scattered on the floor and a shop vacuum.

In case you didn’t know, you shouldn’t be able to put up a shingle and call yourself a university. There is a regular accreditation process in which teams of experts descend upon your university and check over the facts: how many students do you have, how many faculty, what are the available expertise and facilities, how is assessment done, how are students faring after their degree…it’s a massive amount of work. We just went through this here at UMM — I contributed tiny bits of information in my faculty role, but we also had a committee that had to put together a fat report, and the accreditors will tell us what needs to be improved, and we will take their recommendations very, very seriously and struggle to implement them before they fall upon us again. Accreditation is about standards and maintaining quality of education.

Except when it isn’t.

The accreditation agency is central to the process, and there are some of those around that aren’t quite as rigorous. Morris is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. Every good university will make it clear how they are accredited.

Patriot University is ‘accredited’ by Accrediting Commission International, a religious organization based in Florida that puts their seal of approval on Bible colleges. They do not have any affiliation with the US Department of Education or the government, and are proud of that fact. Patriot University is likewise proud of not accepting those secular standards of accreditation.

Reagan National University is accredited by ACICS, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools. They claim to have some rigor, with site visits and evaluations, but somehow they missed the fact that RNU doesn’t have any faculty or students. That’s not a good sign.

At first glance, the ACICS correspondence with Reagan appears to be a purposeful response to a struggling school, said Antoinette Flores, an accreditation expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

But the correspondence doesn’t address the apparent absence of faculty and students that USA TODAY uncovered this winter.

“You accredited this institution. How did you miss this?” Flores said.

That Reagan sought ACICS approval in 2017, when its future as an accreditor was unclear, should also raise questions, she said. The Department of Education recognizes many groups that can accredit colleges, and universities sometimes have multiple options to choose from. Some groups may have higher standards than others.

“I don’t think this bodes well for them,” she said of ACICS. “They had said that they’re turning themselves around.”

When the accrediting body faced closure in 2016, some of its colleges found new accreditors.

The ones that were left with ACICS, said Michael Itzkowitz, a senior fellow who studies higher education at Third Way, a left-leaning think tank, probably couldn’t find accreditation elsewhere.

“They’re the bottom of the barrel,” he said.

ACICS seems to be mainly in the business of collecting fees to rubber stamp college accreditation requests. They’ve been slapped down before, and have risen again thanks to…can you guess?

The agency in question, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools, has a history of approving questionable colleges, with devastating consequences. It accredited ITT Tech, Corinthian Colleges and Brightwood College, massive for-profit universities whose sudden closures last decade left thousands of students without degrees and undermined the value of the education of those who did graduate. Those closures led President Barack Obama’s Education Department to strip ACICS’ powers in 2016.

After a federal court decision, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and President Donald Trump’s administration reinstated the accrediting agency. By that point, it had lost dozens of colleges and their membership fees. It needed new members, and fast.

The decision in 2017 to approve Reagan National University as a viable college – one that today lacks the discernible hallmarks of higher learning – calls into question ACICS’ ability to hold colleges accountable for the education they’re supposed to provide.

So now in addition to diploma mills that gouge students for worthless degrees, we have accreditation mills that gouge diploma mills for fake seals of approval. Sitting atop the scammer’s food chain is Betsy DeVos’s department of education. It’s yet another thing Donald Trump has corrupted.

At least it’s fitting that the ‘university’ is named after Ronald Reagan.

Katherine Johnson has died

Aww, crap. I first learned about her in the movie Hidden Figures, which you should see if you haven’t already, where we learn that a black woman was a crucial element in doing the math that got men into space and to the moon. Now she has died after a long and distinguished career, at the age of 102.

In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, from blast off to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.

When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after thirty-three years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she says. In 2015, at age 97, Katherine Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.

Cruel, incoherent “activism”

I read the story a few times — it’s short — and I still don’t know what these “activists” were trying to accomplish. At the time of the Nevada Democratic debate, a group calling themselves P.U.T.I.N. (“Pigeons United To Interfere Now”) glued little red MAGA hats on the heads of pigeons and released them in Las Vegas. Why? I don’t know. Was it to protest Russian interference, to mock the Republicans, or to ridicule Democrats? I have no idea. It just seems to be a petty exercise in animal cruelty with no point.

It’s not even funny or clever, only ineffective and confusing. It’s a good demonstration that, while it’s good to be motivated to do something, some thought needs to be put into your plans and you must have specific goals that are served by your actions. Whoever pulled this stunt was heedless of the animals they were coercing.