The Democratic Party will never change

After the humiliating and ridiculous loss in November, you’d think the Democrats would decide to shake things up and change a few of the top brass. You’d think wrong.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) lost the bid to be the leading Democrat on the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, following reports that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was actively plotting behind the scenes on behalf of her challenger, Rep. Gerry Connolly.

The 74-year-old Virginia Democrat ended up winning by a margin of 131 to 84 in a secret ballot vote taken by the entirety of the Democratic caucus.

In a report published by Punchbowl News last week, the outlet wrote that Pelosi was “actively working to tank” AOC’s bid and was “making calls” on behalf of Connolly.

Not only is Connolly old, but he was recently diagnosed with cancer. Pelosi just had hip replacement surgery.

Fresh off hip replacement surgery, Nancy Pelosi, 84, secured another victory. House Democrats on Tuesday afternoon decided that 74-year-old Gerry Connolly—who announced his throat cancer diagnosis in November—will serve as ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, besting 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a closed-door caucus vote. “Gerry’s a young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” said Virginia Democrat Don Beyer, a Connolly ally. Pelosi had opposed the 35-year-old’s run for the role, “approaching colleagues urging them to back Connolly over Ocasio-Cortez,” Axios reported last week.

Connolly will join fellow septuagenarians in top committee spots next year. Richard Neal, 75, will lead Democrats on Ways and Means while Frank Pallone, 73, will be the party’s top representative on Energy and Commerce. Eighty-six-year-old Maxine Waters will be the ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, and Rose DeLauro, 81, will helm the Democrats’ presence in Appropriations.

Jesus christ, this is insane. I can say that, because at 67 years old, I can recognize that my age is a limitation, and that I should be stepping back to let younger colleagues place their stamp on my institution. When I’m in my 70s and 80s, I should definitely not be the one shaping policy in my department — I’m already too remote from modern science in my field.

But the Democrats are wed to money and power, and they’re not going to shake it off.

In other democracies, the leadership of parties that have endured humiliating defeats like the one Democrats saw in November—or even just regular defeats—resign. That kicks off a process by which members determine a new, ideally more successful direction, represented by different people. But the Democratic Party isn’t really a “party” of the sort that exists in other democracies, with memberships and official constituencies, like unions, who have some say over how it’s governed. Members mostly make decisions based on their own interests rather than to drive some shared, democratically decided agenda forward.

That’s part of what’s so depressing about the Oversight Committee ordeal for the couple dozen journalists and political junkies who pay attention to that sort of thing. Pelosi and the old guard’s continued opposition to younger talent seems breathtakingly counterproductive in the face of the Democratic Party’s numerous challenges right now. Simultaneously, the House’s “resistance” to Trump and the GOP in the House will be led by people of all ages who don’t seem particularly interested in that project, despite having spent the entire election cycle warning that Trump’s Republican Party represents a second coming of fascism. If incoming House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries really believes that, then why is he advertising his willingness to work with the GOP? Why are so many other Democrats, for that matter, trying to make nice with Trump acolyte Elon Musk?

Capitalism and a gerontocracy — we are cursed. They’re going to lose the next election, and the next after that, aren’t they?

A novel Xian argument

It’s only 4 minutes long, but it’s just packed with ‘clever’ arguments for god.

If you don’t feel like wasting 4 minutes on this guy — and I don’t blame you — here is his logical argument: if, in the future, people can invent an app that lets you instantly teleport a package to Nebraska, therefore God. If, in the future, we could 3-D print human tissue, therefore God. If, in the future, we decide not to color our tech in sleek black boxes, but use earth tones instead, therefore God. If you can imagine miraculous future technologies, then why can’t you imagine God?

OK, his first example has physical limits that make it extremely unlikely, his second is one researchers are already working on, and his third is trivial. Fundamentally, though, I don’t think you get to analogize human technological progress to a god poofing things into existence by miracles.

Man, that guy is thick.

I think I just sold a house

This house.

A notary just drove out to my house with a stack of documents from the lending company, and I signed them all, and now those documents get shipped back to Seattle for the buyers to sign, and if that all goes smoothly a bunch of money gets wired into the estate account, which I then have to divvy up to ten heirs. Wheee!

Unfortunately, mainly what I feel right now is memories of all the Christmases we had with Mom & Dad in that house. Never more.

May the new owners have many happy Christmases there in the future.

If you’ve ever wondered where all those sexist gamers came from…

Sexism in gaming isn’t a new thing at all — good ol’ Dungeons & Dragons was full of it. Here’s Gary Gygax, one of the creators of the game, opining on women in gaming sometime in the early 2000s:

There were never many female gamers in our group. My daughter Elise was one of two original play-testers for the first draft of Wi, Usa ‘what became the D&D game, and both of her younger sisters played…and lost interest in a few months as she did.
In our campaign group that cycled through in a couple of years (74-75) something in the neighborhood of 100 or so different players, there were perhaps three females.
As a biological determinist, | am positive that most females do not play RPGs because of a difference in brain function. They can play as well as males, but they do not achieve the same sense of satisfaction from playing.
In short there is no special game that will attract females–other that LARPing, which is more csocialization and theatrics and gaming–and it is a waste of time and effort to attempt such a thing.
This calls to mind when Lionel made pastel colored trains and train cars to appeal to females. The effort bombed, the sets were recalled and re-dine as standard models, and those pastel ones that survived are rare collectors items.
So much for this topic.

One thing that jumped out at me was his flat statement that he was a “biological determinist”. Gygax had no training in biology, no college degree at all — he was an insurance agent before he became famous as a gamer. You can dismiss anything he says about “brain function” as a product of ignorance.

He mentions that few women were interested in his game in 1974-75, when they “tested” the idea. Women were not interested, according to him, because their brains were different. I have an alternative explanation: here’s Gygax writing about the subject in 1975.

I have been accused of being a nasty, old, sexist-male Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gender names, and so forth. I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging_ section, in the ‘Whorses and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part of dealith with ‘Hags and Crones’, and thought of perhaps adding and appendix of ‘Midieval Harems, Slave Girls and Going Viking’. Damn right I am a sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room. They can jolly well stay away from war-gaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.

Wow. Just wow. What an asshole.

Were you shocked by gamergate in the 2010s? I was. I shouldn’t have been, if I’d been paying attention in the 1970s. I don’t think Gygax was a cause, but a symptom of an attitude common at the time.

Let’s not forget the weird racism in old school D&D, either. I suspect he was a “race realist” in addition to being a “sex realist”, and now it’s coloring my impressions of the game.

I do love a good spleen

David Gerard’s spleen is quite nice.

Why these fucking bozos piss me the fuck off
1 was drafting stuff for this book and it kept turning into short historics where I kept adding “[TK add detail]” and it felt like giving myself homework. That makes for text that bores the reader ‘cos it bores the author.
So no. I’m writing from the spleen here. It’s the only way this can work and have power.
What I hate about AT hype is that it’s by the same shitty bozos who fuck up everything else. They have no approach to the world other than fucking stuff up with money and power via technology.
As a technologist myself (a Unix/Linux system administrator for a few decades), I’m even more pissed off because the technologies are actually interesting, They do things! You could do good things with them! Even the generative stuff, you could play with it and make interesting things!
But no — these bozos being who they are, all they can think of is how to turn it to abuses. Machine learning is for systemic bias. Generative Al is for reducing artists’ labour conditions.
And the power consumption, my God! These bozos were bad enough when they were pushing crypto, and in Al they’ve even managed to replace the ghastly power waste!
Al is not about technology — it’s about power over you.

That all rings true. The technology is interesting and potentially useful, the problem is the techbro cult that is monetizing it all.

Here’s an interesting point. AI used to be marketed as “Expert Systems” back in the 1980s which faded away in the 90s, according to Wikipedia.

In the 1990s and beyond, the term expert system and the idea of a standalone AI system mostly dropped from the IT lexicon. There are two interpretations of this. One is that “expert systems failed”: the IT world moved on because expert systems did not deliver on their over hyped promise.[38][39] The other is the mirror opposite, that expert systems were simply victims of their success: as IT professionals grasped concepts such as rule engines, such tools migrated from being standalone tools for developing special purpose expert systems, to being one of many standard tools.[40] Other researchers suggest that Expert Systems caused inter-company power struggles when the IT organization lost its exclusivity in software modifications to users or Knowledge Engineers.

There are reasons it became less popular as a marketing term.

  1. Expert systems have superficial knowledge, and a simple task can potentially become computationally expensive.
  2. Expert systems require knowledge engineers to input the data, data acquisition is very hard.
  3. The expert system may choose the most inappropriate method for solving a particular problem.
  4. Problems of ethics in the use of any form of AI are very relevant at present.
  5. It is a closed world with specific knowledge, in which there is no deep perception of concepts and their interrelationships until an expert provides them.

Sound familiar?

I guess I’m supposed to be happy

Minnesota, as a state, is happier than California?

I don’t quite trust these things. They always have to juggle a whole bunch of parameters to come up with a single composite score like “happiness,” and you can get any answer you want with the right weights. They mention a few inputs but don’t tell us how they manipulate them.

OK, they include weather, but it must be scaled way down for us to beat California.

True story: last week I checked the weather before I went on a walk, and the computer told me it was -3°. No problem, I thought, that was almost balmy. Unfortunately, the weather site was telling me the temperature in °F — my wife prefers Fahrenheit, while I think in Celsius — and that meant it was actually -20°C. I went on my walk, all bundled up, but 20 minutes later noticed that I couldn’t feel my toes.

But sure, Minnesota is much happier than California. At least we’re not in Lose-iana.

It’s a wrap

Portrait of the Fall 2024 semester

The grades for all of my classes, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, and History of Evolutionary Thought, and Cell Biology lab, and Biological Communication II, have been submitted. I am done. This was not my favorite semester of the 50-some semesters I’ve taught here.

Now I’m getting ready for spring semester — or rather, I have been getting ready. I set up fly stocks way back in early November, I have to do one more generation, and then I set up all the flies for our first lab. Bonus: next semester, I have no classes on Fridays. Three day weekends every week! That might make up for all the grading I’ll have to do in the writing class I’ll be teaching.

Scientists as scoundrels

No scientist has ever looked at the state of science funding and thought it was great. The pressure is tremendous and the success rate for grants is dismal. But hey, it could get so much worse and probably will. The incoming administration is flagrantly anti-science.

Trump has been getting cozy with the Argentinan president, Javier Milei, and the two have been up to no good.

Last month, Milei pulled Argentina’s delegates out of negotiations at the United Nations COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, where world leaders were discussing how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and pay for such efforts around the globe. The move came hours after he spoke with US president-elect Donald Trump, who has signalled that he will remove the United States from such negotiations when he takes office next month. Trump and Milei have expressed mutual admiration.

But guess what?

It has been one year since libertarian President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and the nation’s science is facing collapse, researchers say. Milei’s agenda to reduce the country’s deficit and lower inflation — which had topped 211% last year — has meant that, as his administration’s slogan says, “there is no money” for science or anything else.

“We are in a very, very critical situation,” says Jorge Geffner, director of the Institute for Biomedical Research in Retroviruses and AIDS (INBIRS) in Buenos Aires. He adds that the Innovation, Science and Technology Secretariat, once the country’s main science ministry but downgraded by Milei to a secretariat with less power, is working with a budget that is one-third lower than last year.

Argentinian scientists who are paid by the government have lost up to 30% of their income, Geffner says. (As of 2022, the government funded about 60% of research and development in Argentina, and the rest came from the private sector and international contributions.) As a result, the country is facing massive brain drain. At INBIRS, about half of its staff members are either considering finding jobs in other countries or already doing the paperwork, Geffner adds.

Milei does not hold scientists in high regard.

Milei has not minced words about his feelings towards scientists. Rather than having their research subsidized by the government, he said during a forum in September, “I invite them to go out into the market. Investigate, publish and see if people are interested or not, instead of hiding like scoundrels behind the coercive force of the state”.

Scientists aren’t going to be friends with Trump, the flamboyant idiot who would appoint RFK jr to run the NIH and Elon Musk to shred the economy and wants to shut down public education, so I think we can expect the situation for science in this country to get progressively worse. Other countries already have saturated populations of scientists, so if there were to be a reverse brain drain, I don’t know where we could go. Does New Zealand have room for a million expatriated American scientists? Canada? Germany? For American science to abruptly collapse would be a catastrophe for the whole world.

Surprise, the Earth is a globe

I hate to mention it again, but since I mentioned “The Final Experiment” before, I guess I should note that it has been concluded. On 14 December, observers in Antarctica watched the sun stay above the horizon for 24 hours, as predicted. Ho hum.

This was a stupid, attention-grubbing stunt. People have lived and worked in Antarctica for decades, so this phenomenon has been reported many times. It’s routine. The only novelty is that this evangelical pastor, Will Duffy, dredged up some of the dumbest people on the internet and spent a lot of money to get them to stand somewhere near the South Pole and look up. Some concede that what they saw doesn’t fit their expectations, while lots of others stayed home and closed their eyes. This “experiment” will accomplish nothing, other than to advertise an anti-abortion evangelical freak as somehow pro-science. Flat earth is being used as a tool for science-washing Christian nonsense.