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.

Thank the OSS!

“Simple Sabotage Field Manual” by United States. Office of Strategic Services is a historical publication written during the early 1940s, amid World War II. This manual acts as a guide for ordinary civilians to conduct simple acts of sabotage against enemy operations without the need for specialized training or equipment. Its main topic revolves around promoting small, accessible forms of resistance that could collectively disrupt the enemy’s war effort. The manual outlines various strategies and techniques for citizens to engage in sabotage that could be executed discreetly and with minimal risk. It provides specific suggestions for targeting transportation, communication, and industrial facilities to create delays and inefficiencies in enemy operations. The manual emphasizes the power of many individuals acting independently to contribute to a larger campaign of disruption, encouraging simple acts such as misplacing tools, delaying communication, or damaging equipment with household items. Overall, the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” serves as a unique historical artifact that illustrates grassroots resistance efforts and the belief in the collective power of ordinary people during wartime.

This video from Some More News has some good suggestions about what how to resist a fascist takeover. One little suggestion I want to bring up is that the video recommends a pamphlet, the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a book published by the US government during WWII to provide ideas for the citizens living under the Nazi regime. Suddenly, the old is new again!

The book first talks about how to motivate citizens to become subtle saboteurs. Spread the news around!

To incite the citizen to the active practice of simple sabotage and to keep him practicing that sabotage over sustained periods is a special problem.

Simple sabotage is often an act which the citizen performs according to his own initiative and inclination. Acts of destruction do not bring him any personal gain and may be completely foreign to his habitually conservationist attitude toward materials and tools. Purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature. He frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage.

(1) Personal Motives

(a) The ordinary citizen very probably has no immediate personal motive for committing simple sabotage. Instead, he must be made to anticipate indirect personal gain, such as might come with enemy evacuation or destruction of the ruling government group. Gains should be stated as specifically as possible for the area addressed: simple sabotage will hasten the day when Commissioner X and his deputies Y and Z will be thrown out, when particularly obnoxious decrees and restrictions will be abolished, when food will arrive, and so on. Abstract verbalizations about personal liberty, freedom of the press, and so on, will not be convincing in most parts of the world. In many areas they will not even be comprehensible.

(b) Since the effect of his own acts is limited, the saboteur may become discouraged unless he feels that he is a member of a large, though unseen, group of saboteurs operating against the enemy or the government of his own country and elsewhere. This can be conveyed indirectly: suggestions which he reads and hears can include observations that a particular technique has been successful in this or that district. Even if the technique is not applicable to his surroundings, another’s success will encourage him to attempt similar acts. It also can be conveyed directly: statements praising the effectiveness of simple sabotage can be contrived which will be published by white radio, freedom stations, and the subversive press. Estimates of the proportion of the population engaged in sabotage can be disseminated. Instances of successful sabotage already are being broadcast by white radio and freedom stations, and this should be continued and expanded where compatible with security.

(c) More important than (a) or (b) would be to create a situation in which the citizen-saboteur acquires a sense of responsibility and begins to educate others in simple sabotage.

Then the fun stuff. There are many little ideas about how to screw up the smooth operation of factories, but reading it first made me think of annoying high school pranks. One of the unfortunate side-effects of disseminating this information is you can expect to see more exploding plumbing in the toilets of your local public schools.

(1) Ruin warehouse stock by setting the automatic sprinkler system to work. You can do this by tapping the sprinkler heads sharply with a hammer or by holding a match under them.

(2) Forget to provide paper in toilets; put tightly rolled paper, hair, and other obstructions in the W. C. Saturate a sponge with a thick starch or sugar solution. Squeeze it tightly into a ball, wrap it with string, and dry. Remove the string when fully dried. The sponge will be in the form of a tight hard ball. Flush down a

W. C. or otherwise introduce into a sewer line. The sponge will gradually expand to its normal size and plug the sewage system.

(3) Put a coin beneath a bulb in a public building during the daytime, so that fuses will blow out when lights are turned on at night. The fuses themselves may be rendered ineffective by putting a coin behind them or loading them with heavy wire. Then a short-circuit may either start a fire, damage transformers, or blow out a central fuse which will interrupt distribution of electricity to a large area.

(4) Jam paper, bits of wood, hairpins, and anything else that will fit, into the locks of all unguarded entrances to public buildings.

Somebody needs to print out copies of this manual and hand them out at the protests at Tesla factories and sales rooms. We need to understand that Tesla and Elon Musk are the enemy. Likewise, Trump’s hotels need to be brought down. I notice that the manual has had 77,604 downlads in the last 30 days. Get yours before the government shuts it down!

I can’t really use it, though. I’m at one of the institutions targeted for destruction by the MAGA regime, and what I need is information on how to reinforce the spines of our administrators, and how to support a university under siege.

Universities need to FIGHT BACK

We’re all aware that the Secret Police swept in and sent a Tufts graduate student to a concentration camp in Louisiana. They also detained Mahmoud Khalil from Columbia University (we also know that Columbia is chickenshit).

Now it’s the University of Minnesota’s turn.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials Thursday detained a University of Minnesota graduate student at an off-campus residence, according to an email to students and staff from the University of Minnesota.

We here at the University of Minnesota learned about this through an email message sent out by the administration.

Dear students, faculty and staff,

We are writing to inform you about a deeply concerning situation involving one of our international graduate students at the University of Minnesota.

We learned that, on March 27 at an off-campus residence, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials detained a graduate student enrolled on our Twin Cities campus. We are actively working to gather more details about this incident.

In cases like this, the University takes steps to ensure students are connected to internal resources and support, such as Student Legal Service and International Student and Scholar Services.

The University had no prior knowledge of this incident and did not share any information with federal authorities before it occurred.

It is important to note that our campus departments of public safety, including UMPD, do not enforce federal immigration laws, and our officers do not inquire about an individual’s immigration status. Their focus remains on public safety, fostering trust and maintaining strong relationships across the University community.

As we work to gather more information, please know the University has information, resources and FAQs about federal immigration policies available on the Rapid Response website.

We understand how distressing this news may be for members of our University community. If you or someone you know needs mental health support during this time, please visit mentalhealth.umn.edu, which connects you to resources across all five campuses.

Rebecca Cunningham
President

Calvin Phillips
Vice President for Student Affairs

Mercedes Ramírez Fernández
Vice President for Equity and Diversity

They’re trying to gather more information, but the primary purpose of this email was to say “we didn’t do anything, it’s not our fault!” I’d like to know what the university is preparing to do in response, and how they intend to stop future abductions of our students by the criminals running ICE and DHS. Because that’s what’s happening: the federal government is trying to intimidate our universities by random kidnapping of our students, and we need to take strong positive action to prevent it.

It doesn’t help that the University of Michigan and Harvard, along with many others, have been in a mad scramble to surrender to the totalitarians.

Here’s a handy list of students who have been targeted for harassment and deportation. See if you can tell what they all have in common.

The Na-K pump is not controversial at all

Every few weeks, I get a fresh comment on an old video I made a about a year ago about Gilbert Ling. It’s low level stuff, remarkable only for the persistent trickle of comments I get, and because there are apparently people on the internet who practically worship this guy, Ling, who most people — even professional biologists — have never heard of.

Quick summary: Ling was an old scientist who, in the 1940s, concluded that the molecular engine that drives ion gradients in cells, the sodium-potassium pump, didn’t exist. That was a reasonable doubt in the ’40s, but became quixotic and bizarre as the evidence accumulated over the subsequent decades. Ling invented an idea he called the Association Induction hypothesis, and later the Polarized-Oriented Multilayer theory of cell water, neither of which have any empirical foundation, while the sodium-potassium pump is one of the better characterized molecules in the cell.

I think that explains the longevity of the support for his crackpottery. People love weird models of water, especially the quacks, who greatly appreciate having a cheap, ubiquitous substance that they can spin mystical jargon around to inflate the appearance of value. There are lots of miracle water claims on the internet, like Gel Water, H3O2, and its unlikely chemical structure.

I think I’m getting criticized by quacks who revere Ling as a credentialed scientist who legitimizes their opposition to scientific authorities and provides a pseudoscientific framework for their rationalizations.

Also, all the people whining about the oppression of poor Gilbert Ling can’t read, can’t understand the content of a video even, and can’t comprehend even a lay explanation of a biological phenomenon. This guy, for instance, tries to summarize what I wrote and doesn’t even come close.

@juanpablogallardov: And if I can summarize your presentation is based on three points, potassium pumps exist because their proponents won nobel prizes, there is a mathematical model and Ling was too arrogant. That is your whole basis, quite poor I would say.
@PZMyersBiology: @juanpablogallardov No. because some people isolated, sequenced, and characterized the behavior of the pump…incidentally, they won a Nobel for their work.

Yeah. What I said.

Jehovah’s got competition

Here’s a provocative idea from Gregory Paul: the churches are dying.

One might think that the religion in its vast array of guises continues to be a potent force in human societies. And of course in some ways it remains so, especially in the conservative, reactionary, often proautocracy, sometimes violent flavors that are causing so much trouble around today’s world – think of the Russian Orthodox church in bed with Putin and his war, and the Evangelical driven MAGA fast working to turn the USA into a Christian Nationalist Autocracy. But at the same time theism is in grave crisis as it suffers enormous losses in popularity in much of the world. Most of the first world has been highly secularized for decades. Even the United States, long thought the last bastion of popular western religion Christianity especially, is seeing the churches losing ground like a downhill skier, with membership down forty percent since the turn of the century to under half the population, The Southern Baptists are shrinking, those who do not believe in God were a mere few percent when Ike was president, hit near a tenth in the 2000s, and are nearly a fifth if not more these days. Bible literalism is down to a fifth as creationism is slipping, while support for evolutionary science grows. As Ronald Inglehart detailed in Religion’s Sudden Decline, theism is in big demographic trouble in much of the second and third worlds as well. So much so that about half of the people of the globe and even more among Americans no longer think religion has the answers to societies problems.

An anecdotal observation in support of this idea is that I’m seeing a lot of strident, desperate apologetics in my in-box and online, and all of it is stupid. Seriously. William Lane Craig? Lee Strobel? Josh McDowell? Frank Turek? Greg Koukl? These people are the worst, and their arguments are all old and tired. Then there are there followers, who are even worse.

It would be nice to imagine that people are finally waking up, that there is new wave of rationalism that is causing people to abandon old dogmas, that atheism is finally winning. Paul makes a case that that helps, but that it can’t be the main impetus for people losing their religion. Just look around you — is MAGA a rational movement? Is the American government a shining beacon of reason?

Paul argues that there is something else driving people out of the churches.

But there is another aspect of modernity that is giving popular religion a sucker punch in its vulnerable supernaturalistic belly, an item as far as I know what not been discussed to date. And that secularization force is….

Aliens.

Especially, ancient aliens.

Not actual ancient aliens that visited our pretty little planet in ancient times and in the process set up human civilizations while being mistaken for the gods that silly people then worship. The possibility that they really existed being very, very minimal to say the most. It’s the new, thrilling and hip belief in ancient astronauts, the exciting new and modern creation myth, that is helping wreck that old timey, yawn inducing religion.

He points out lots of circumstantial evidence for that. There’s this new wave of gullibility demonstrated in popular TV programming. How can Ancient Aliens be so popular? I tried watching Graham Hancock once, and couldn’t cope with his combination of ignorance and confidence. Science fiction and fantasy have taken over the movies, which us SF fans might think is benign, except we aren’t wondering why people flocked to Star Wars.

Paul is also a science popularizer, and he’s running into a rising class of inquiry. Did ancient aliens kill the dinosaurs? That’s a question I never even thought of until now.

While flat earth geography remains fringe, AA is transforming the culture. When folks learn I research dinosaurs they often ask me the Big Four – are birds dinosaurs (yes like bats are flying mammals), were dinosaurs warm-blooded (yep), how do we know what color they were (we usually don’t, but of late preserved color pigments are giving us clues), and did the asteroid really kill them off (looks like, although massive volcanism going on down in India may have played a role). But I have of late received a new query. It starts with the asker looking at me as if I am going to tell them the real truth! So they make the ask. Was it aliens that actually killed off the dinosaurs to clear the way for humanity? I say no – can then see their disappointment that I am part of the conspiracy to hide the plain truth – and proceed to explain why the documentary biz is all about making money in part based on my personal experience and they don’t care what kind of schlock goods they put out as long as it generates revenue from the viewers whose interests are low on their priority list. I hope to at least sow some seeds of doubt. Worth a shot.

Come to think of it, I was also surprised by how many people have asked me whether octopus were of alien origin, an idea I would never have taken seriously.

Get ready for more stories like this

Only two months into Trump’s reign, and three prominent Yale professors depart for a Canadian university. These professors started planning to leave the country back in November, which is amazing — they negotiated salaries and startup and facilities, and the University of Toronto cleared everything and made room and got them positions in only two months? That’s moving at light speed for a university.

Unfortunately the part of the story that won’t make the news is all the faculty who want to get out but can’t. Someone like me, who has a good reputation as a teacher, is a dime-a-dozen nobody; Canada has swarms of people who are excellent teachers, and plenty of people who are great researchers, so most of the professors in the US aren’t going to be able to emigrate (I’m also near the end of my career, so there’d be no point to hiring me.) A lucky few are going to be able to escape, and they’re going to have to move fast, before the pipeline is clogged.

And yeah, if I were 20 years younger I’d be putting an application package together, and mailing them off to every college in Canada. Does the Northwest Territories have any openings? I’d take it. A shack on King William Island, with a population of auks needing biology training? Sign me up.

The secret police are here

Way, way back in time, when the atheist schism was running hot, Freethoughtblogs and Skepchick were accused of being like the Stasi by Paula Kirby, a journalist (and also Richard Dawkins’ mistress). It was an event that roiled the atheist blogosphere for a few months. What was notable about it was the accusation that leftists and liberals and feminists were synonymous with the secret police, just itching to disappear anyone they didn’t like, which was weird given that, up to that time, I kind liked Kirby. It’s petty, but right now I wish I could rub her face in a demonstration of how the Stasi would actually behave.

Chilling, isn’t it? The swarm of black-hooded, masked cops surrounding a young woman on the street, handcuffing her, and walking her to a dark car and taking her away. Only it’s not East Germany. It’s Boston. The woman is Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student studying at Tufts University, who was arrested because she participated in a pro-Palestinian protest and wrote an opinion piece for the university newspaper, which of course has been characterized as pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas activity. You can be disappeared for that. She is currently being held at a detention center concentration camp in Louisiana. No charges were filed. No evidence was presented. No due process. No trial.

Surveillance video released Wednesday and obtained from a neighbor by the advocacy group Muslim Justice League appears to show six plainclothes officers casually approaching Ozturk as she walks alone on a sidewalk.
One officer wearing a hat and hoodie grabs her arms, causing Ozturk to shriek in fear as another pulls out a concealed badge on a lanyard and confiscates her cell phone.
Shortly afterward, the officers all pull cloth coverings over their mouths and noses, some of them wearing sunglasses, as one of them restrains Ozturk’s hands behind her back.
As the officers say, “We’re the police,” a person not seen in the video can be heard responding, “Yeah, you don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”
One minute after the encounter began, Ozturk is walked into a waiting SUV and driven away.
ICE has not responded to CNN’s request for comment on Ozturk’s case.

Welcome to America.

Hey, Canadians and Mexicans and Europeans etc. who are considering studying in the USA — don’t. Stay home. There are great universities in your home countries or just about anywhere else in the world. Here, you risk finding your studies interrupted by an unplanned vacation in an El Salvadoran prison.