Sure is purty and slick, though

I am extremely impressed with this creator’s video editing skills. Nicely done!

I am less impressed with the content, unfortunately. The message is pure optimism: our progress in biology is so great that maybe someday we can hope to cure a host of psychological concerns, like anhedonia, misery, self-doubt, etc., with…gene editing. Got low self-esteem? Frustrated by the world around you? Finding yourself unsatisfied no matter what successes you achieve? We can fix that, someday! We’ll just reach into your genome and snip out the bits of DNA that make you question your happiness, and replace them with genes that’ll give you joy, no matter how miserable the world is making you.

Well. I guess you could aspire to that, but it sounds very 1984 to me. Maybe I like being who I am, and don’t think that jacking up my sensation of happiness artificially is entirely desirable. There are drugs I can buy right now that will enhance my contentment with things as they are without meddling with my genome in a permanent way, but I don’t think elevated bliss is necessarily the purpose of my existence.

But set all that aside. Why would anyone think your satisfaction with the status quo is genetic? This is naive biological reductionism and genetic essentialism in raw form. I’d recommend learning some real genetics, molecular biology, and neuroscience, except that if your goal is happiness regardless of the circumstances, maybe artificially maintained ignorance is what you need.

May have to give up spider research, since I’m not a spider

It’s true, according to Bible scholar Joel Green, who argues that in order to be a good Bible scholar, one must be a devoted Christian.

The best biblical scholars genuinely love Scripture, and come to its pages ready to hear God’s address. They exhibit both a certain posture vis-à-vis the text and their own formation in relation to it, and a commitment to the hard work of reading Scripture that takes seriously the nature of the text.

The former involves the life of discipleship, of Christian formation, of worship, and of prayer. As I have written elsewhere: “Formed by our reading of Scripture, we become better readers of Scripture. This is not because we become better skilled at applying biblical principles. The practice of reading Scripture is not about learning how to mold the biblical message to contemporary lives and modern needs. Rather, the Scriptures yearn to reshape how we comprehend our lives and identify our greatest needs. We find in Scripture who we are and what we might become, so that we come to share its assessment of our situation, encounter its promise of restoration, and hear its challenge to serve God’s good news.”

Huh. I’d argue sort of the opposite. The challenge of being a good scholar is to maintain some objectivity and ability to assess one’s biases. Being a devout Christian doesn’t help studying the Bible as a historical document — it also doesn’t preclude it, although it does generate many subjective obstacles. It also makes you a crap scholar if you automatically dismiss the contributions of atheist, Muslim, and Jewish scholars.

So I can keep studying spiders after all! Yay!

“We on the left”: Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, and Tucker Carlson

Here’s an excellent video that includes clips from various interviews with famous people saying stupid, hateful things about trans people. That part I’m warning you about; there’s lots of ugly cluelessness included here. But the video’s creator does a great job of tearing them apart.

Sam Harris begins his clip saying “We on the left”, which stopped me cold. He’s in an interview with Joe Rogan! What do you mean, “we”? Especially when he goes on to chortle over the very idea that a person with a penis might call themselves a “woman”. Don’t you realize that the biological reality of a woman begins with her uterus? The two of them sit there bonding over their shared contempt of the idea of trans people. I think it’s safe to say that they aren’t even vaguely liberal here.

It also includes a clip of Julia Beck on Tucker Carlson’s show, explaining that the “T” doesn’t belong in LGBTQ+, and also carrying on with the usual ugly stereotypes of fake men trying to get into women’s bathrooms to commit rape. EssenceOfThought dismantles that one, but I just want to point out that if you are on a Tucker Carlson show, and if you aren’t challenging him on his far right views, and if the two of you are engaged in a mutual back-patting kaffeeklatsch, agreeing that trans people must be excluded from civil society, you have swung way over to the right yourself. That’s a situation that ought to lead you to question your self-declared political orientation.

Especially when you consider that Tucker Carlson is a man who has contempt for even cis women.

Tucker Carlson refused to apologize Sunday after audio surfaced of him degrading women and airing controversial opinions about statutory rape and underage marriage on a radio program between 2006 and 2011. Instead, the Fox News host plugged his prime-time show and urged his detractors to come on as guests.

Carlson was widely criticized on Sunday following a report from the nonprofit Media Matters for America that compiled and transcribed more than a dozen instances of the host appearing on the “Bubba the Love Sponge Show,” a popular radio program broadcast from Tampa. In the segments, Carlson suggested underage marriage is not as serious as forcible child rape, called rape shield laws “totally unfair” and once said he would “love” a scenario involving young girls sexually experimenting. He also described women as “extremely primitive,” and used words such as “pig” and the c-word.

You know, Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and Julia Beck and Tucker Carlson can hold whatever views they want. I just think they ought to strive for accuracy and honesty, and instead of claiming membership in the Left, they ought to confess to being center-Right to Right in their regressive positions, and aren’t in any sense representative of a left-wing position. Conservatives would love their ideas, but I think they at least have a rudimentary awareness that that’s a club no one with any decency would want to join.

How about if Harris were to admit to his center-Right position and struggle to draw the looney conservatives a bit leftward, rather than falsely claiming to be a Leftist in order to pull progressives to the Right? He might actually do some good for a change.

First you struggle, then you get coopted by religion, and then you die

I just learned that the Art Institute of Seattle has closed. This is bad news — I knew people who went there and others who aspired to go there. It seemed like a good place, and the closure is doing deep harm to people.

The Art Institute of Seattle will close abruptly on Friday, leaving about 650 students in the lurch — without classes, professors, or possibly diplomas.

The Washington Student Achievement Council (WSAC), a state regulation agency, announced the end of the school’s 73-year tenure on Wednesday, just over two weeks before the winter quarter was supposed to end.

These are students who’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars into their education, who are probably still carrying daunting amounts of debt, and who’ve now been told they pissed away years of their youth and all of their investment and will get nothing for their trouble. How could this happen? How can the government stand aside and let this happen? This was an accredited institution which, one would think, was an assurance of quality.

One clue is in a few key words in this summary:

The Art Institutes, a group of art colleges nationwide, has struggled with financial troubles for years; the company that owned them went bankrupt in 2017 and Dream Center Foundation, a faith-based nonprofit, bought the schools. Court filings show that since the purchase, the schools have grappled with financial issues.

Oh, here’s another clue: A College Chain Crumbles, and Millions in Student Loan Cash Disappears. Somebody skimmed off a lot of cash in this deal, not just from the Art Institute, but a whole mess of struggling colleges that were snapped up by a religious entity.

The affected schools — Argosy University, South University and the Art Institutes — have about 26,000 students in programs spanning associate degrees in dental hygiene and doctoral programs in law and psychology. Fourteen campuses, mostly Art Institute locations, have a new owner after a hastily arranged transfer involving private equity executives. More than 40 others are under the control of a court-appointed receiver who has accused school officials of trying to keep the doors open by taking millions of dollars earmarked for students.

26,000 students? This is unconscionable. The first problem is that these colleges were bought out by Pentacostal evangelical Christians with no experience in running an educational institution.

Dream Center is connected to Angelus Temple, which was founded by Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist once portrayed by Faye Dunaway in a TV movie, “The Disappearance of Aimee.” It is affiliated with the Foursquare Church, an evangelical denomination with outposts in 146 countries.

Buying a chain of schools “aligns perfectly with our mission, which views education as a primary means of life transformation,” Randall Barton, the foundation’s managing director, said when Dream Center announced its plan.

But Dream Center had never run colleges. It hired a team including Brent Richardson, who worked on the conversion of Grand Canyon University to a nonprofit as its chairman, to lead the schools’ corporate parent, Dream Center Education Holdings. He stepped down in January.

Alarms were ringing from the moment the takeover was proposed. Dream Center’s effort to buy the failing ITT Technical Institutes schools had fallen apart after resistance from the Obama administration. When it asked to buy Education Management’s schools, consumer groups, members of Congress and some regional accreditors raised concerns.

The second problem is more secular: the gang of idiots currently running the country, who are engaged in a thrilling give-away of our assets to line their own pockets.

Led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Education Department has reversed an Obama-era crackdown on troubled vocational and career schools and allowed new and less experienced entrants into the field.

“The industry was on its heels, but they’ve been given new life by the department under DeVos,” said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

Ms. DeVos, who invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges before taking office, has made it an agency priority to unfetter for-profit schools by eliminating restrictions on them. She also allowed several for-profit schools to evade even those loosened rules by converting to nonprofits.

That’s what Dream Center wanted to do when it asked to buy the remains of Education Management Corporation.

Schools are just plunder to these people. One has to wonder, though, how the church’s “mission” would have been implemented in these secular schools, if they hadn’t run them straight into the ground.

The storm is over!

And our local walkway is clear (thanks, Ted!).

Unfortunately, the university has not caught up. The snowplows have dammed it all in and the sidewalks are a foot deep with snow, as I discovered when I tried to walk in to feed the spiders. Nope, not gonna happen today. They’ve been cut off from a loving, caring world and are trapped alone in their incubators. I know they are just resting patiently and bravely, waiting for rescue, while scheming about how they’re going to capture and kill the next living thing they see.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes!

I was loafing about yesterday, and one of the things I saw was a torrent of nice comments about the fact that I’m getting even older — so many that I’m acknowledging them all now with one broad spectrum thank you. Thanks!

Here’s what I did to celebrate: carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and caramel ice cream. I’d share, but you can’t get here now through all the drifting snow from our last snowstorm.

Strumia’s disgrace continues to be public

Alessandro Strumia was in the news earlier this fall — he’s the physicist who gave a workshop at CERN to declare that the humanities suck and that women were inherently less capable of doing physics than men. It was so bad that CERN struck the recording of his talk from their archives. We still have a copy of his slides.

By the way, there is a difference between a lecture and a workshop, and he seems to have failed to comprehend that, too.

Well, now CERN has also decided to cut Strumia altogether. His appointment as a guest professor has not been extended. Cue men wailing that he has been oppressed and discriminated against.

His excuses are terrible.

“Some people hated hearing about higher male variance: this idea comes from Darwin, like other offensive ideas that got observational support,” he told BBC News.

“Science is not about being offended when facts challenge ideas held as sacred”.

Darwin isn’t sacred, either. He published sexist claims that he did not support with evidence — they were reflections of the cultural biases of Victorian England. Darwin didn’t create Holy Writ, you can’t simply pretend that Darwin said it, therefore it’s true. Does Strumia also think pangenesis was correct, and that whales evolved from swimming bears?

He added that he believed that he had not been fairly treated.

“For months, Cern kept ‘investigating’ if my 30-minute talk might have violated Cern rules [requiring an] ‘obligation to exercise reserve and tact in expressing personal opinions and communication to the public’,” Prof Strumia said.

“In such a case, they would have opened some procedure, where I would have been able [to defend] myself. This never happened.”

Last September, Professor Strumia stated that “physics was invented and built by men, it’s not by invitation” at a presentation at the Cern the workshop.

If I were attending a workshop at CERN, I’d be expecting practical, interactive discussions about matters of utility in physics. He made a tactless, opinionated rant grounded in factual falsehoods while simultaneously dismissing the relevance of academic disciplines in the subject he was discussing. Not much investigation was necessary — he was so blatantly wrong that recordings were removed in embarrassment.

I’m going to take a wild guess here that administrators took notice of the harm he was doing to CERN, and also noticed that he was on a temporary contract that was going to expire in March, and decided that it was more sensible to wait on taking any action until his renewal was evaluated. In addition, there was a thorough rebuttal of his claims by his peers. He can whine all he wants that he wasn’t given an opportunity to defend himself, but his arguments were indefensible, and he demonstrated repeatedly that his “defense” was to bluster angrily and double down on his misogyny. Good riddance.

Strumia still has his professorial appointment at the University of Pisa…although the ethical committee at that university is investigating him, too.

My wife is a harsh taskmistress

We have another big snowstorm blowing through, so she’s getting worried. She decides that this morning “we” need to drag out the roof rake and scrape off the heavier accumulations.

“But I’ve got a heart condition,” I said. Usually that’s enough.

Nope. Needs to be done.

I broke out the newest excuse: “But my vestibular instability!”

Didn’t work. She said she’d watch me through the window in case I staggered and fell into a crevasse.

So that’s how I ended up slowly circumnavigating around the house through thigh- and waist-deep snow drifts, wielding a 6- or 7-meter aluminum pole with a metal rake at the end, making snow thump down off the roof, only falling face-first twice, and eventually sinking into a mountain of snow to freeze to death and lie there entombed in ice until the spring. The blog will be on indefinite hiatus.

It’s peaceful in here. Quiet. No computers, no phones. All appetites suspended. Try it, you might like it.

Kree, Skrulls, Flerken, and Marvel — and a fine time was had by all

I had a hot date last night: dinner at the Stone’s Throw Cafe, followed by a short walk to the Morris Theater (everything is nearby in a small town), where we watched Captain Marvel. there was a good crowd there. Another virtue of small town living is that even when the new blockbuster comes to town, it’s no problem getting in — show up ten minutes before, maybe there’ll be a short line, but you’ll slide right through and get a good seat. We parked ourselves way up front, maybe the third row or so.

And then we saw the show.

No spoilers, don’t worry.

First, a criticism: the beginning was very non-linear, jumping about rather confusingly in the Vers/Carol Danvers story. For a while I was wondering if this was going to be a time-travel story, which would annoy me a lot, but then about a third of the way through it all clicked and Marvel’s origins suddenly fell into place. If you’re not familiar with Captain Marvel lore, as I wasn’t, bear with it, it will eventually all make sense.

But then, I’m used to disjointed comic book stories. In my youth, when I was really into comic books, I couldn’t often afford to buy them off the rack, and instead would go down to the local Goodwill store where they’d have a pile of old comic books they mainly wanted to get rid of, so they’d sell them at 20 for a dollar (I was so annoyed when they raised the price to 10 for a dollar). Forget continuity, I’d come to the end of a Fantastic Four cliffhanger and then the next comic in my pile would be a Baby Huey or something. Adapt or die, man.

Minor spoiler: Baby Huey does not show up in this movie.

Anyway, once I got on track it was a good, fun story. It’s not a deep cinematic masterpiece, but as long as your expectations are focused on appreciating a solid genre story, you’ll have a fine time. In particular what I liked about the movie is that it really returns to superhero movie roots: she’s a good person with super powers who cares about other people, including aliens, and exhibits empathy. It reminded me a lot of that first Superman movie with Christopher Reeve — it inspired hope in humanity rather than the usual angsty “let’s watch people fuck up a miraculous opportunity and suffer while demolishing a city”. I kinda need that now and then, because I already have a tendency to lapse into grimdark attitudes.

It’s a good sign for the next big blockbuster out of the MCU, because the Infinity War thingie fully embraced the grimdarkness with a depressing ending, and all the trailers for the Endgame movie are similarly discouraging. Captain Marvel is going to be key to wrapping up that story line, I think, and she’s bringing light and hope. Or at least, she better.

Another good sign: we sat through the end credits (it’s an MCU movie, you have to), and when it finally went black and got up to leave, the entire theater was still full, and everyone was smiling and talking happily. This was also a community event, with little kids in the audience, college students, old geezers like me, and you could just tell from everyone’s expressions that they’d had a good time. It’s a relax and feel good sort of movie.

Also, about the cat…a lot of reviews are talking up the role of Goose the cat. That’s fine, but while he has a few crucial moments, it’s not a big central part of the story. I also wouldn’t call it comic relief. Goose has some anatomical elements that made me very happy, but otherwise, despite the different coloration, he made me think of my cat: dangerously hostile and with peculiar digestive habits. I’m thinking of trying that trick of holding her up, aiming her at my enemies, and giving her a little squeeze.

Maybe we’ve adopted a flerken, rather than a cat. Holy crap, suddenly everything clicked again and it makes so much sense!

Also, a video review!