This is no way to run a movie theater

I was alone. Totally alone in the dark. Well, sure, there was the ticket-taker and the refreshment bar person, but they sent me off into the darkness by myself; the ticket-taker looked mildly surprised, and said, “I didn’t expect you here. Are you here for the science?” He shook his head as he pointed to the doors to my screen.

I went in. I had my choice of seats. The theater was completely empty. I got the best seat in the house, and sat and wondered where everyone was. Both screens were totally abandoned, the theater was dead silent, even the popcorn machine was turned off. I waited, and the movie started.

“The Cretaceous,” a title card announced. We see a scene of a beach, with some kind of shredded dinosaur carcass rotting, while a swarm of weird-looking reptiles with long needle-like fangs and long sinuous bodies squabble over it. Suddenly, a T. rex appears! It charges, eats a few fang-beasts, and the rest leap into the ocean and swim expertly away. I guess these are amphibious fang-beasts. The T. rex wades out into the ocean in pursuit, when…suddenly, a giant shark appears! It jumps onto the shore and chomps on the T. rex. I guess Megalodon’s ecological niche was cruising shallow seas near shore and occasionally leaping on to the land to ambush a dinosaur.

Title card: Meg2. Title card: The Trench.

Oh, yeah. I guess there’s no mystery why the theater was so empty.

Cut to action scene: Jason Statham has snuck onto a freighter dumping toxic waste into the ocean. He runs around taking photos, documenting the crimes — he’s an eco-warrior. Along the way, he beats up the entire crew, then leaps into the ocean and is scooped up, literally, by an airplane. This interlude has no bearing on the rest of the movie.

Cut to futuristic research station somewhere near the Philippines. They are studying the Trench, an abyssal canyon isolated from the rest of the ocean by a thermocline. It’s full of Megs. They also have a captured Megalodon swimming around in a blocked off lagoon. Don’t worry about it. This Meg will do nothing throughout the film. It’s going to escape to the open ocean shortly, but no one will care, and they’ll do nothing about it, and don’t even pay much attention to it. It’s purpose is solely for Statham to utter a throw away line, “maybe it’s pregnant,” near the end. It’s only there to justify Meg3: The Quest for More Chinese Investment Money.

The rest of the movie is a denial of physics, time, and space to set up a show about rampaging monsters on a resort island. Our main characters zoom down to the trench in some amazingly spacious submarines with gigantic picture windows everywhere. Don’t worry about them, they’re going to get wrecked in short order. There are bad guys down there, looting the sea bed for rare earth metals worth billions of dollars. The head bad guy immediately sets off explosive charges to kill Jason Statham, but incidentally kills all of his underlings, trapping all the good guys under boulders, and likewise trapping his own submarine. Don’t worry, they’re 25,000 feet under the sea, their ships are immobilized, but hull integrity is fine. They just get out through hatches and walk in their futuristic suits to the processing station the bad guys had set up.

The script writers apparently hadn’t paid any attention to the news about the Titan submersible that was crushed at a depth of 12,000 feet. They were too busy churning out schlock.

Their walk to the station is harrowing. They are pursued by the amphibious fang-beasts. They’ve been deep under the ocean all this time, holding their breaths for 65 million years! Some of the crew get eaten; we don’t care. It’s not as if they have personalities or something. We do get one brief nod to the idea of deep ocean pressure, though. One of the crew’s faceplates develops a crack that expands slowly, and then suddenly fractures as they are standing in the airlock, waiting for the water to be evacuated. Her head abruptly implodes as everyone watches.

Then air fills the chamber, and everyone removes their helmets. Everyone is fine.

The next part of the movie is Jason Statham running around the station, pushing buttons and pulling levers, like it was some kind of video game, occasionally stopping to punch the bad guy, who also made it back to the station. Statham eventually gets the right combination, freeing the station’s submarine, so all the good guys can escape. The bad guy survives, grabs some kind of steel balloon, and rides it all the way to the surface.

At the surface, they return to the good guys’ futuristic research station, only it’s been taken over by more bad guys. Cue more punching and kicking. Statham leads the survivors to a Zodiac, and they zoom away. Their destination: Fun Island, 30km away.

Oh, yeah, the Megs. We’d kind of forgotten them for most of the movie. They had also risen to the surface, without rupturing due to the extreme pressure differential, and they too are headed for Fun Island, along with a troop of fang-beasts and a giant ockapus. The end is approaching. The final part of this movie is miscellaneous monsters romping about on a resort island full of attractive young Asian women and their attractive young Asian children, and one homely middle-aged white man who is crass and rude and cowardly, who is inevitably snatched up and killed by the ockapus. Everyone is getting eaten by giant sharks and fang-beasts.

There are explosions and guns, the bad guys are eaten or blown up, the good guys kill all the monsters, Statham makes some improvised exploding harpoons and rides a jet ski out to kill Megs. When he runs out of harpoons, he picks up a rotor blade from a crashed helicopter and stabs the last Meg to death with it.

Oh wait, not the last Meg: the original captive Meg shows up, everyone says “hi,” and then swims nonchalantly off to the open ocean. The good guys camp out on the beach, drinking whisky, surrounded by the few surviving attractive Asian women. Everyone laughs.

The End.

I left the theater as the credits started to roll. Apparently, the workers there had been waiting for me to leave, because the instant I walked out the door, all the lights in the building blinked out. I guess the 9:00 showing was canceled. Sorry, guys. I’m pretty sure the $7 I spent on a ticket didn’t cover your wages for two hours of waiting for the old guy to get out.

This movie is not recommended at all, unless you feel like you missed the theatrical run of The Core and you really want to be able to brag that you witnessed one of the worst science movies of all time on the big screen.

You’ll have to tell me what you consider the worst science abuse in a movie. Meg2 is right at the top of my list.

Surprise lecture!

It’s always fun to volunteer for an extra lecture — this time it’s for an honors series here at UMM. The theme is built around the essays of the late Renaissance humanist Montaigne, on the subject of “Of Family.” It’s also prompted by a visiting professor.

Monday September 18, 7pm in Imholte 109

Mark your calendars for the other three lectures in the series, all held in the same place at the same time: Dr. Stephen Gross on 9/25; Dr. Paul Z. Myers on 10/2; Dr. Sarah Buchanan on 10/9

Michelle Janning is a writer, social science researcher, speaker, and sociology professor and endowed chair of social sciences at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She teaches and consults on human-centered design, roles and relationships in families and workplaces, technology and social life, education, and inclusive data-driven assessment and strategic planning in organizations and architecture projects. Janning employs qualitative and quantitative methods in her academic and applied research, and has published numerous books, articles, and essays, including The Stuff of Family Life: How our Homes Reflect our Lives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2018), and A Guide to Socially-Informed Research for Architects and Designers (Routledge, 2023). She has been interviewed about homes and family life, along with other social issues, in numerous media outlets, including Real Simple, Vox, The New York Times, BBC, The Atlantic, NBC News, and Parents.com.

There I am, on 2 October, speaking on the cryptic subject “Of Boundaries.” I’m a biologist, so they’re going to have to expect something a little different from those other speakers in the humanities/social sciences. Would you believe I’m squeezing in some material on spiders, in a lecture series on families? Yes, you would. It’s not all spiders, though. You’ll have to come on out to Western Minnesota to find out.

For now, you can try guessing what “Of Boundaries” is about.

What I’d like my yard to look like

Nice. Let’s normalize what a midwestern lawn ought to look like.

Think of all the interesting spiders that would live in that kind of chaos! Beautiful!

Somehow I don’t think the city planners would let me get away with it. We’re taking little steps, though — Mary’s birthday present this year was a rain garden, which we’ll have to wait until next summer to have put in.

How not to defend your university’s reputation

Imagine you are a big prestigious university, with a gigantic endowment — about $13 billion at last count. You have 35,000 students. You are almost 270 years old. You are private, so you’re less subject to the whims of the state congress. You are doing great! Then one of your employees, a gynecologist, does this:

Six weeks after giving birth to a daughter, on a Friday in late June 2012, Kanyok returned to Columbia’s suite of offices on East 60th Street for a checkup. She looked idly at her phone as Hadden examined her. He assured her that all looked good, and the nurse chaperoning the exam left the room. Hadden started to follow her out. Then he paused, turned, and told Kanyok that he’d forgotten to check her stitches. He instructed her to lie down again.

Beneath the paper blanket covering her knees, between her legs, the assault this time was unmistakable. Kanyok jolted back and saw Hadden’s face surface, bright red. She froze as he chattered nervously and performed what he told her was a breast exam. She texted her boyfriend. “Dr Hadden just licked my vagina,” she typed. “I’m shaking And freaked out.”

By the way, the breast exam seems to have been a frequent escape hatch for Hadden. These were two-handed, full-on naked fondling sessions, but they served to distract the patient from whatever he’d been doing below the waste.

Another incident:

She says that as she was lying on the examination table, Hadden rubbed his erect penis on her arm. Stunned and shaken, she told a receptionist that Hadden was a pervert. She recalls that the receptionist replied, “I know” and “I’m sorry.”

Now if I were a major university, I’d work fast — I need to protect the reputation of the college! I would fire that guy so fast, with cause, that he wouldn’t even have time to lick the doorknobs on the way out.

Not Columbia University! They were so concerned about their reputation that they buried the incident, all of the incidents, for 20 years. He was out there practicing pervert’s version of gynecology under Columbia’s imprimatur for decades, while the university hid all these abuses over and over. Once a patient called the cops on him, had him arrested, and a few days after he was released from jail, and the university put him back to work licking and fondling young women.

Eventually, the law caught up with this predator. He and the university were prosecuted, and Hadden got a 20 year prison sentence while Columbia was served with a $71.5 million settlement to 79 victims.

So how did that strategy to protect your reputation work out, Columbia?

Fraud, liar, Rufo

I will never understand how someone could emerge from the dismal bowels of the Discovery Institute and be taken seriously, and not laughed off as a clown. But that’s the Chris Rufo story. He just moved off to an even more ludicrous organization, the Republican party of Florida.

A journalist and activist, Rufo is largely responsible for the rise of “critical race theory” as a major concern for the GOP. He has played a crucial role in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attempt to transform Florida’s universities, spearheading the takeover and transformation of the New College of Florida, a small liberal arts school, as proof of concept for a new right-wing model for higher education.

Rufo has managed all of this before his 40th birthday. And he wants to go bigger: In recent essays, Rufo has argued for conservatives to treat authoritarian Hungary and Richard Nixon as models for a “counterrevolution” against the left.

Great. And here I thought creationism was as low as they could get. But then, this is a familiar story, or conspiracy theory.

Rufo claims that the American system as we know it has been overthrown, subtly and quietly replaced by “a new ideological regime that is inspired by … critical theories and administered through the capture of the bureaucracy.” Rufo’s “counterrevolution” is aimed at reversing this process; taking America back, starting with Florida’s universities.

That’s what John Birchers claimed in the 1960s! The American system then had been taken over by Commies…and now it’s all about the hippies and far-left radicals undermining the American way of life. It’s a great recipe for capturing the minds of paranoid idiots.

Except…Rufo has to make shit up to make that argument at all. And he admits it!

But many of his assertions, like the claim of secret regime change in America, are far less defensible. When pressed in an interview to defend some of his most extreme positions, Rufo ultimately claimed to be writing in “a kind of artful and kind of narrative manner” that does not always admit of literal interpretation. The retreat was necessary given the glaring lack of real-world policy evidence for what he had written and said.

The seemingly credible evidence Rufo presents of radical influence — the mainstreaming of once-radical concepts like “structural racism,” for example — thus ends up undermining his case. When radical language goes mainstream without accompanying radical shifts in policy, that’s not actually evidence of a radical takeover. If anything, it looks like a win for the liberal mainstream, which seemingly has coopted radical ideas and redirected them toward more moderate ends.

Radicals haven’t taken over mainstream America; they’ve been taken over by it.

Now that’s an interesting and defensible thesis: that maybe the ideals of those old-time radicals are popular and persuasive, but they’ve been effectively translated into milder, more pragmatic forms. That I can believe. I can also believe that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, while also seeing that in many ways it neuters the radical agenda.

But the notion that American arms manufacturers have been taken over by radicals is ridiculous. Lockheed Martin builds weapons to maintain the American war machine. It is not owned or controlled in any way by sincere believers in the Third Worldist anti-imperialism of the 1960s radicals; it is using the now-popular terms those radicals once embraced to burnish its own image.

Rufo is getting the direction of influence backward. Radicals are not taking over Lockheed Martin; Lockheed Martin is co-opting radicalism.

That’s how a liberal system works, not by overthrowing everything everywhere all at once, but by pushing progressively for slightly better systems, one step at a time. We need the revolutionaries shouting at the margins to push everyone in the right direction, but face it, it’s the bureaucrats who will implement it. And it’s always been that way!

Historically, liberalism has proven quite capable of assimilating leftist critiques into its own politics. In the 19th and 20th centuries, liberal governments faced significant challenges from socialists who argued that capitalism and private property led to inequality and mass suffering. In response, liberals embraced the welfare state and social democracy: progressive income taxation, redistribution, antitrust regulations, and social services.

Reformist liberals worked to address the concerns raised by socialists within the system. Their goal was to offer the immiserated proletariat alternative hope for a better life within the confines of the liberal democratic capitalist order — simultaneously improving their lives and staving off revolution. The New Deal, which was explicitly pitched as a means of defanging radical passions, is an especially clear American example of this pattern at work.

I mentioned the John Birchers — they hated the New Deal and Roosevelt. Even the slightest tinge of “socialism” would set them off. It’s the same with Rufo and his repellent ilk — they hate things with any hint of progressivism, it doesn’t matter if it empirically improves the lives of citizens, they’re agin’ it.

I do find it odd, though, that everyone writing about him ignores his personal history of anti-science, loony creationism. I also wonder if he ever really believed that nonsense. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just an opportunistic front.

Another bad memory

Oh, no. You must understand, in the late 80s and 90s, growth cone navigation was my jam. It’s what I was doing research on, and my head was full of papers from that era. Netrin, robo, slit, various molecules that attracted or repelled growing axons to establish the pattern of connections in the early developing brain…that was what I did. Now I learn that some of those papers, those written by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, were a lie.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University who resigned following scrutiny of his published papers and an institutional research misconduct investigation, has retracted a third paper, this one from Cell.

Last week, Tessier-Lavigne retracted two articles from Science that had been published in 2001.

The Cell paper, A Ligand-Gated Association between Cytoplasmic Domains of UNC5 and DCC Family Receptors Converts Netrin-Induced Growth Cone Attraction to Repulsion, was published in 1999. It has been cited 577 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In my circles, Tessier-Lavigne had a colossal reputation — he was turning out all this work from a prestigious, well-funded lab with an army of students and post-docs. I was teaching developmental biology, talking about netrins, with a textbook that already cited the Tessier-Lavigne work. Such cool stuff, and it can’t be trusted anymore.

Worse, can we trust Cell magazine? They’ve posted the retraction, and it admits that the editors didn’t care about faked data.

In 2015, we, the authors, consulted with Cell editors about issues that had been brought to our attention about this paper, specifically image splicing in Figures 3C, 5A, 5B, and 7B–7D and duplication of blank blots in Figure 7C. Cell declined to publish a Correction at that time because in 1999, when the paper was published, the journal did not have policies prohibiting unmarked image splicing and because, for the duplication, there was insufficient information to determine intent, and the impact of the duplication on the paper’s conclusions was limited. In 2022, when new concerns were raised, Cell posted an Editorial Expression of Concern (Cell 186, 230 [2023], https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.12.019) while an institutional investigation was conducted. The investigation is complete and has revealed further issues including manipulation of data-containing portions of Western blot images in Figures 3A–3C, 7A, 7B, and 7D, undermining confidence in the paper’s conclusions (https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2023/07/Scientific-Panel-Final-Report.pdf). As a result, we are retracting the paper. We regret the impact of these issues on the scientific community.

Yikes. All it should take is one fudged image to cast doubt on the entire paper. If you’re faking data, we have sufficient information to determine intent — I was brought up with strict instruction that you never never never never ever do that.

What a disgrace. Shame on Tessier-Lavigne, and shame on Cell.

Oh, right, I was reminded

This time of year, what’s at the forefront of my memory is my wife’s birthday, and my kids’ birthdays, which are mostly around this time of year. The thing that most people bring up around now is the ugly memory of 11 September 2001. I shy away from it, because while it was definitely a tragedy with significant loss of life, it was also an excuse, a justification, a starting point for excesses of evil on this country’s part. Also, a trigger for kitsch.

These days it’s perhaps more often utilized in memory of a great tragedy that happened 22 years ago this Monday, back at the dawn of the 21st century, the attacks on 9/11, when our own infrastructure was turned against us in an act of modern horror. So around this time of year, when we hear Never Forget, it’s most likely the attacks of that day being referenced. It’s on posters, and t-shirts, to help you remember. There’s a lawn decoration, I see, in the shape of the Twin Towers, which you can buy at Walmart, in case you think your neighbors might be in danger of forgetting to Never Forget. You can put it on your lawn, and maybe you’ll all remember who your enemies outside your borders are, and if you actually sometimes like to talk as if New York City is an unlivable hellscape full of your enemies inside your borders, maybe you’ll be so busy Never Forget-ing that you’ll forget to remember that you do that, at least until it is time for Halloween lawn decorations.

Oh god. $79.95. And the ugly upper-middle class house is a perfect background for it.

OK, AR Moxon mentions all the things we should never forget.

I’ll Never Forget the way the liars who had the steering wheel on that day bragged that they would create their own reality, and then proved it. I’ll Never Forget how proud they were of making us a country that tortures. I’ll Never Forget how lie led to lie led to lie, but never to consequences.

And I’ll Never Forget how the liars who came after—even less scrupulous, even more flagrant—noticed there would be no crime that an authoritarian-facing Presidential power couldn’t survive, no outrage that would not be normalized, no meat too raw for voters who craved bigotry, and pressed that advantage far past our breaking point, so that today we have an openly criminal party speaking and acting against any elections they do not win, and arguing in public and even in court that it isn’t illegal if a president does it, provided the president is an authoritarian.

I think we’d do well to Never Forget that the failure to prevent those attacks did not represent insufficiently aggressive national security, or insufficiently guarded borders, or insufficient domestic policing, or insufficient cruelty in our foreign policy, but rather insufficient attention paid to available information—an intelligence failure, in other words: a failure of awareness, of imagination, of competence. So it strikes me that those who still today insist on ignoring available information risk similarly catastrophic failures of our national intelligence.

Those are the things I already remember when the pretense of martyrdom rolls around every year.

Conservative Mormons torturing children for profit

I just waved goodbye to my daughter and granddaughter — they’re driving back to Wisconsin. We had an exhausting weekend with a 4 year old (soon to be five!) who was full of energy and was running circles around us.

No sooner had they left than I sit down and read about Ruby Franke.

Ruby Franke, the family vlogger behind the now-defunct YouTube channel 8 passengers has been formally charged with six counts of felony child abuse by a Washington County attorney in Utah, court documents show.

Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were arrested last week after Franke’s 12-year-old son climbed out a window and ran to a neighbor’s house asking for food and water.

The neighbor, noticing duct tape around the child’s ankles and wrists, called the police. The responding officer said the child appeared severely malnourished and had sustained “deep lacerations” from being tied up with a rope.

When police searched Hildebrandt’s home, they found Franke’s 10-year-old daughter in a similar condition and transported both children to the hospital for malnourishment. In total, the four Franke children still living at home were taken into the care of Utah’s Child and Family Services. Her two other children are adults.

Hildebrandt was also charged with six felony counts of aggravated child abuse.

I am at a loss. I cannot imagine doing that to a child. But I can see three factors in the story that would drive a person to child abuse, not that it excuses it.

  • Conservative bullshit. There is an old-time conservative tradition that children must be beaten — “spare the rod, spoil the child,” all that crap. Not in my immediate family, fortunately, but I knew kids who came to school with welts, and some of my relatives could be fierce with a switch. These people still exist.
  • Religious sadism. If God says it’s OK, then swat that child. It’s even in the ten commandments, when it’s read as “Honor your father and mother…OR ELSE.” It’s especially strong in Mormonism, where so many children are literally thrown out of the house to fend for themselves if they don’t follow arbitrary Mormon rules.
  • Capitalism. Family vlogging or mommy vlogging can be extremely profitable, but only if the kids are doing interesting things, and if the parents are willing to expose their private struggles to the world. If there isn’t enough drama in day-to-day life, then make some. And if they kids aren’t sufficiently profitable in their trained chimpanzee antics, well, then they must be punished.

Now Franke’s sisters have issued a statement.

“For the last 3 years we have kept quiet on the subject of our sister Ruby Franke for the sake of her children. Behind the public scene we have done everything we could to try and make sure the kids were safe,” the statement began.

“Ruby was arrested which needed to happen. Jodi was arrested which needed to happen. The kids are now safe, which is the number one priority.”

Oh, yeah? You knew about this for three years and said nothing?

Her neighbors commented.

The neighbors of recently-arrested YouTube family vlogger Ruby Franke were reportedly not surprised to see her Utah home swarmed by police. Some were just happy that the authorities weren’t pulling bodies from the house.

“Everyone is just breathing a collective sigh of relief because we thought they were going to come out of that house with body bags,” one of her neighbors told NBC News.

It was so bad that you were anticipating dead children, but you didn’t call CPS? This is just disturbing, that everyone knew and everyone kept kept quiet, and that Franke also had 2 million subscribers to her creepy YouTube channel, and all those people just watched.

That’s a little unfair. At least some of them complained enough that YouTube finally took the channel down. She just moved on to another inappropriate grift.

The channel was taken down earlier this year amid a growing chorus of criticism over Franke’s strict parenting tactics, which included threatening to take away meals.

In recent weeks, Franke had been collaborating with Hildebrandt on ConneXions, a mental health counseling service that also faced criticism for its parenting advice, including shame-based learning and shunning those who don’t share your values.

Hildebrandt is another piece of work, an ex-therapist who had her license revoked.

The founder of the company, Jodi Hildebrandt, is a therapist who had her license suspended in 2012 after she disclosed a patient’s “porn addiction” to his Mormon church leaders, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

It’s astonishing that anyone would take mental health advice from either of those two losers.

By the way, their Instagram channel, Moms of Truth, is still up and available if you are really interested in seeing a pair of hypocrites complaining about “woke.”

Can anyone be truly redeemed?

We have another podish-sortacast tomorrow, and the theme is redemption arcs.

Know anyone, famous or otherwise, who thoroughly screwed up, and then somehow got back in good graces (I think it has to start with a sincere apology, and it’s amazing how few people get that)? Any characters from literature who worked their way of a pit? Tell us in the comments or show up and shout it out in the chat.