“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

Jay Bhattacharya is the new director of the National Institutes of Health. He says,

As NIH Director, I will build on the agency’s long and illustrious history of supporting breakthroughs in biology and medicine by fostering gold-standard research and innovation to address the chronic disease crisis.

Sure. Sounds great. How does he plan to accomplish that?

Effective pandemic preparedness.
Step 1: Fire all the people currently responsible for pandemic preparedness. They likely caused the pandemic, locked you down, kept your kids out of school, demolished economies, and want more power to do it again.

There is no step 2.

There may be more steps needed, but they will need to be devised by people not captured by pharma or the pandemic industrial complex.

NO STEP 2. Just fire everyone.

Monstrous

Israel has done it again. They are blatantly committing atrocities in their ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.

Some of the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, killed by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave nine days ago in Gaza, were found with their hands or legs tied and had gunshot wounds to the head and chest, according to two witnesses.

The witness accounts add to an accumulating body of evidence pointing to a potentially serious war crime on 23 March, when Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews and civil defence rescue workers were sent to the scene of an airstrike in the early hours of the morning in the al-Hashashin district of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.

Paramedics and rescue workers are not terrorists, but the Israeli soldiers who gunned them down are.

No more aid or military assistance to Israel, because that would be contributing to war crimes.

Secret group chats…in 2008

I know everyone is talking about the Signal chat where a bunch of warmongers stupidly invited the editor of The Atlantic to join in, but I have to tell you that these things are always insecure, and I have some personal experience with that.

Remember when the Expelled movie was a topic of conversation? They were doing all these press tours and radio interviews touting that stupid movie, and one of their events was a conference call in which the various people involved (Ben Stein, Mark Mathis, etc.) were calling in to promote the movie, and invited people to call in and listen to their propaganda. Well, I was involved, unfortunately, and I called in to hear what they were going to say, but accidentally found out how to join in, not just to listen, but to speak. I ‘hacked’ their system and crashed the event!

Some of you know that the producers of Expelled had a conference call this afternoon…a carefully controlled, closed environment in which they would spout their nonsense and only take questions by email. I listened to it for a while, and yeah, it was the usual run-around. However, I dialed in a few minutes early, and got to listen to a tiresome five minutes of Leslie and Paul chatting away, during which time they mentioned the secret code (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!) for the two way calls. I know. Sloppy, unprofessional, and stupid, but that’s the way they work.

So … I redialed. (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!)

Then I listened along quietly until I could take no more.

There were links about this, and even a recording of what I said in response to their nonsense, but it’s all dead links now, I’m sad to say.

Don’t trust the tech to protect your conversations! You never know when some nefarious rascal might eavesdrop.

Happy news from the state next door

I’ve been watching this race for the Wisconsin supreme court. It was a contest between a liberal (that is, sane) judge, Susan Crawford, and a conservative (that is, insane) judge backed by a Koch brother, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, and it was pretty much a demonstration of the power of rich people to buy elections. Elon Musk was actively campaigning for Brad Schimel, the right-wing wackaloon, throwing tens of millions of dollars at him and appearing at rallies, where he was awkwardly jumping to make a schlubby “X” shape, doing his usual inarticulate, stammering speechifying, and handing out million dollar checks.

It’s not just how much Musk and his groups have spent—more than any donor to a judicial election in US history—but how he has spent this money that makes Musk’s intervention in Wisconsin so alarming.

In addition to funding two dark money political groups that ran TV ads against liberal Judge Susan Crawford and sought to get out the vote for conservative candidate Brad Schimel, Musk resurrected a controversial scheme from 2024, paying voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” He then awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition.

On the Friday before the election, he dramatically escalated this sketchy tactic, saying he would travel to Wisconsin to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Unlike paying a Wisconsin resident to sign a petition, these million-dollar checks were contingent on someone actually voting. Legal experts quickly pointed out that Musk’s pledge violated the state constitution, which prohibits offering “anything of value…in order to induce any elector to…vote or refrain from voting.”

Musk backtracked, saying the money would only go to people who signed his PAC’s petition, holding a rally in Green Bay on Sunday where he hand-delivered two $1 million checks. The Wisconsin attorney general sued to stop him, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to intervene before the event.

This was criminal activity, but he’s a billionaire, so no one stopped him. He was openly and brazenly trying to buy an election, and nothing was done. This was particularly ironic, given that…

Republicans have been alleging for years that Democrats have been buying elections, usually with the help of liberal billionaires like George Soros. Indeed, election deniers, including Musk, widely promoted a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “bought by Mark Zuckerberg” because an organization he funded directed election grants to blue areas to juice Democratic turnout. (In reality, it gave grants to both red and blue areas for routine election administration activities to help offset the Covid-19 pandemic.)

If this happened in any other country, the US would be quick to declare that the elections were corrupt…that is, if a pro-USA candidate didn’t win. Schimel also ran a dirty campaign, altering images of Crawford. It was an all-around disgrace to democracy.

But, good news: Crawford won!

Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford will win Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, CNN projects, maintaining the liberal majority on the court in a key battleground state less than three months into President Donald Trump’s second term.

Crawford, a liberal circuit court judge in Dane County, will beat the conservative candidate Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge who received Trump’s backing in the final stretch of the campaign. The race was officially nonpartisan, but Crawford’s victory will be seen as a bright spot for Democrats in Wisconsin and nationwide as voters handed the president’s preferred candidate a defeat in the first major political test of the second Trump era.

I’m wondering if one contributing factor to her victory was that the few remaining principled conservatives, if such a thing exists, must have been appalled at the spectacle. Patriotic Wisconsinites must have been embarrassed at the sight of this South African carpetbagger putting on a show. He looks so small and stupid.

Although, I must admit, I was hoping that my daughter or son-in-law, both Wisconsin citizens, might have been handed a million dollar check. Unfortunately, that big money give-away was rigged (of course it was!) and only MAGAs could win.

The dirty little secret of universities everywhere

The students don’t have any significant voice in the management of the university, oh heck no. It’s definitely not the faculty, either — they are allowed to contribute to strictly defined internal academic domains, but that’s it. The people who have real control over the resources of the university are the board of regents (at the University of Minnesota) or the board of trustees, as they are called at Columbia University. These are the people who actually call the shots, and generally they don’t participate in academic life at all.

The ultimate decision-maker at colleges and universities is the board of trustees. And these boards, as the explosive events of the past year demonstrate, have serious problems, both in how they are constituted and how they lead. Those committed to the distinctive strengths of the university as a maker, teacher and custodian of knowledge, both old and new, must at long last try to grasp why these boards are failing and figure out how to fix them.

Trustees (sometimes called governors, regents, visitors or “members of the corporation”) have a lofty function: to ensure the financial health and stability of the institution, partly through their own donations. This fiduciary responsibility has extended to the recruitment, appointment and retention of the school president, and sometimes of other senior administrators, usually (as at Columbia) with little substantive faculty consultation required by the norms of shared governance. Trustees play an increasingly active role in academic decisions through the levers of cost, donor power and financial austerity. In our fraught times, these levers are in increasing use, especially by the Trump-driven Republican party, to target disciplines, departments and individual professors. Many boards have become political wolves in the guise of fiduciary sheep.

Boards of trustees are essentially private clubs, which follow their own, always confidential, norms to determine who is asked to join, who controls key committees, and who is gently persuaded to resign when they do not meet the criteria of the most influential trustees. (In some private institutions, presidents may have a say in who gets selected as trustees, but presidents themselves are appointed by trustees.) At public universities, these boards are directly tied to the powers of state legislatures and administrators and thus are at the mercy of state politics in key matters. At private universities, the club is dominated by heavy hitters in business, law and technology; the number of alumni, academics and students is vanishingly small. These business-oriented trustees (a majority being white and male) treat their board meetings as golf parties; they schmooze, network and discuss deals while going through the motions of discussing university policies and priorities.

I think I’ve met a regent at the University of Minnesota maybe twice. They generally aren’t at all interested in professors, and students even less. As the linked article explains, this is a real problem: there is a deep gulf between what universities do, and who gets to pull the strings. They’re mostly CEOs, lawyers, hospital administrators, bankers, retired politicians, that sort of thing.

Who becomes a trustee? At Columbia there are 21, all of them from business, law and technology, with the exception of a former journalist. Although they are in charge of an academic institution, none of them is an academic. None has ever led a classroom or a lab meeting or medical rounds with interns. None has gone through the process of tenure, where their teaching, publication record and service are rigorously assessed by colleagues in the field both from within the institution and outside it. None has ever had their work peer-reviewed by anonymous readers or panels of experts. None has ever published in academic or scientific journals or presses and had their ideas debated in the public sphere. None has ever framed a hypothesis and tested it on the basis of evidence they have collected. None, in short, has sought truth and had their search confirmed by objective scholars and scientists.

The University of Minnesota isn’t quite that bad, but almost; I think we’ve got one emeritus faculty on there. In general, though, they are moneyed people with deep financial interests, not scholarly experience. Here in Minnesota they are all volunteers, and are not paid for their services, which does make me wonder why they are doing this at all. It’s a mystery. I don’t like being managed by rich people with mysterious motives, but that’s where we’re at. Especially when they mostly look conservative and Republican.

This is a problem everywhere.

The Columbia board is by no means unique. The same situation prevails, with few exceptions, across the Ivy League and its peer institutions (exemplary is the University of Chicago). As far as public universities are concerned, though there are some variations among several of the flagships, such as the regents of the universities of California, Michigan and Wisconsin, they are typically composed of lawyers, politicians and businessmen, and generally appointed by governors of individual states. Their accountability is hard to locate in their charter documents, and their near-autonomous powers are wide-ranging. In these regards, they are very much like their private counterparts./p>

There is a fantasy solution proposed. Balance the CEOs on boards with professors and students, to realign the values of the university.

The most urgent need today, as the Columbia case shows, is to create a new social contract on boards of trustees, who have become too craven to be watchdogs and too self-interested to be trusted. This change will require hard community-based activism that balances lawyers, hedge fund managers and tech bros with professors, schoolteachers, researchers, scientists and students. For public institutions, this may require legal support, as well as a powerful alliance between communities and state governors. Without such changes in boards of trustees, the current capture of colleges and universities by an unholy alliance of wealthy alumni, rightwing billionaires and bureaucrats is likely to become entrenched.

Creating this new social contract will require two crucial steps. The first is to bring the full force of public scrutiny to bear on boards, their membership, their accountability and the checks on their powers. The second is to demand that all academic governing boards both reflect and defend the fundamental values of universities in a liberal democracy: freedom of academic speech, opinion and inquiry; procedural transparency; and demographic diversity.

Nice. Although I had to laugh: the regents/trustees have all the power and complete autonomy, so how do we convince them to surrender some of their power to the people they govern? Shall we ask them nicely? I guess we could demand, but all they have to do is say “no.”

Run, Mike, run!

Guess who’s considering running for governor of Minnesota?

MAGA election conspiracy theorist and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell has eyes on what could be his next gig. And it isn’t selling pillows.

Lindell on Monday teased a run for Minnesota governor, a race that could see him face off against popular incumbent Tim Walz, who is said to be sizing up a third term in the post.

“I live here in Minnesota,” Lindell said of his potential opponent. “Everywhere I go, no one wants Tim Walz. They don’t.”

Everywhere I go, we all laugh at Mike Lindell. I suspect there might be some consistent differences in the company we run with.

I hope he does run, though. He’ll siphon off money from anyone who is a competitor to the DFL candidate for the position.

Sissy hypno?

I have stumbled into a strange YouTube niche: feminization hypnosis. It’s a category of delusional videos in which voices whisper at you, telling you to put on make-up or become trans or encouraging your butt and boobs to grow larger. I listened to a few of them — they’re rather boring and ridiculous. If you want to see them for yourself, go to YouTube and search for “sissy hypno”. Be prepared for a deluge of results, none of them particularly pornographic or persuasive or even interesting. I don’t see how anyone could fall for this nonsense, unless you’re a real idiot.

Like Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire, who thinks it explains the existence of transgender people.

MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): And Genevieve can shed some light on this phenomenon that — frankly, as I’ve said on the show, I don’t even want to look into because I have been told and then I’ve read on different fora that talk about this phenomenon that there is a kind of pornography that is, apparently, a driver of the transgender identity that is so perverse that it constitutes a kind of hypnosis where men will say, I was a normal guy, I lived to be 41, 42, and I was basically normal. But then I fell into this kind of pornography and it essentially melted my brain. I had a nervous breakdown. Now I think that I’m a woman. So, rather than have to expose myself to that and then, you know, I have to go to confession, potentially my brain gets melted, I can just talk to Genevieve about it. Genevieve, thank you for coming on the show.

GENEVIEVE GLUCK (GUEST): Thank you so much for having me on the show.

KNOWLES: So, there’s a lot I want to talk about with you. We don’t have nearly enough time, so maybe we’ll just have to have you back and talk about it at greater length. But can you just give, not only the audience, but me a rundown — what is, among all of the types of pornography that lead to transgenderism, what is this hypnosis pornography?

GLUCK: Well, you touched on a good point there. There are many types of pornography that are, sort of, involved with the transgender movement. But hypnosis pornography is a little bit different in that it incorporates your lifestyle. So, typically when we think of pornography, we think of it as something that is passive that you’re, sort of, watching. But this type, it asks you to, sort of, change your behavior, change the way you dress, even to start taking hormones. And it’s sometimes called sissy hypno. So, that’s short for sissification hypnosis pornography. And, you know, I myself, I have personally been somewhat mocked for the suggestion that this is having a powerful impact on men. However, trans activists themselves will say things like it influenced them.

Oh, gosh, unlike Knowles I listened to some, and my brain didn’t melt — I just thought it was rather silly and harmless. Do I have to go to confession now? That would be even sillier than a sissy hypno video.

Although maybe he has a point. Going to church every Sunday and listening to a repetitive drone does work at turning people into Catholics.

Watch the skies!

In class today, I was telling students what to expect on the big genetics exam on Wednesday. I got an unexpected question: “What if we get 6-12 inches of snow on Tuesday and Wednesday?” I thought they were teasing me, no way I have to worry about that, look at the skies outside right now!

They weren’t joking.

Another potent Spring Storm is on tap to arrive on Tuesday lasting into Wednesday with heavy snow expected for much of central Minnesota. The system will arrive in western Minnesota by Tuesday morning with a band of heavy snow expected to begin by the afternoon continuing overnight as the system pushes eastwards. Snow quality is expected to be on the heavier, slushier side as snow ratios favor below 10 to 1. An influx of mid level warm air could also lead to a wintry mix at times, with widespread rain to the south of the main band of snowfall. Snow will diminish by Wednesday afternoon as the system continues into the Great Lakes region. A broad area of 6 or more inches of snow is expected for parts of central Minnesota, with high end amounts potentially reaching the double digits. Ice accumulations should generally remain a glaze to a few hundredths at the most.

How dare Midwestern skies disrupt my curriculum! If it’s really bad, I’ll have to postpone my exam to Monday, which makes a mess of my plans, but I do want my students to survive winter. Even if it’s winter in April.

The problem with the Democratic party

Teen Vogue is the surprising vanguard. Here’s an article by a former Democratic staffer who has some strong criticisms of the Democratic leadership.

I walked away from my job as a writer for Senator Chuck Schumer after realizing the cost wasn’t just political fatigue — it was my values and mental health. I spent a year on Capitol Hill in 2019 crafting messages for Senate Democrats. Every day, I wrote essays that trapped me between the progressive principles I held and centrist compromises that felt like betrayals. Eventually, the disconnect between my ideals and the institution I served became impossible to ignore. Leaving my job in the Democratic Party wasn’t just a career move; it was survival.

This summary hits the nail on the head.

In recent years, Democrats like Newsom and Schumer have embraced centrist, incremental approaches to issues that are fundamentally about humanity and dignity. That disconnect continues to push young voters away. But it doesn’t stop with trans rights. Whether it’s watered-down climate policies or half-measures on student debt and health care, the Democratic Party’s reluctance to take bold, unapologetic stances clashes with what young people expect from a so-called progressive movement. To be clear, we’re not asking for perfection — we’re demanding urgency, empathy, and courage. Instead, we’re met with compromises on core values, as if basic rights are up for negotiation. For a generation facing existential crises, that’s not leadership — it’s alienation.

Young voters have historically trusted Democrats to work against outdated policies and toward systemic change. But the shift in party dynamics has left many young voters increasingly disaffected by politics and disconnected from a party that once felt aligned with our values. Reflecting on my time on Capitol Hill, I notice this rupture more than ever.

Resign, Schumer.

I should read more Teen Vogue.