They disrespect the people they claim to be defending

Every time. Every time these conservative defenders of all that is right and good try to explain what they’re trying to do, they end up smearing everyone involved. Remember the pious anti-feminists who tried to tell us that they are supporters of womanhood and femininity, so they have to accuse women of being sluts? Same thing now with the preachers of true manhood, like Josh Hawley.

I have to wonder who these men are that are so hurt and despairing that they have retreated into video games and porn? All you men out there who read this, and play games (OK, or watch porn, you don’t need to admit it): are you all just doing it because you’re oppressed and had your feelings hurt and don’t know what else to do while sitting around suffering with self-pity?

My exposure to multiplayer games is limited, but it does add to my appreciation of all those macho, aggressive players who called me a “fag” or “bitch” or used the chat to brag about their sexual conquests to imagine that they were all weeping and masturbating while they were doing it. Josh tells me that’s what they’re doing, and would he lie?

Say you’re out trick-or-treating tonight

You want to recognize our house. First tip is that it’s pumpkin-colored. Then look for the giant red-eyed glowing spider over the door, and the blinking lights of the smaller male climbing the wall to reach her. That’s us! We’re giving out M&Ms and peanut butter cups.

Also, as a nice touch, the decorative stonework planter is full of nothing but thistles. The person answering the door might be my witchy-wife, because I’m still clomping about in slow motion with The Boot clamped around my ankle.

Billionaires are a plague on the planet

Yet another example of why I despise billionaires: they see our underfunded universities as a playground for their vanity projects, which our administrators will gratefully accept without regard for the purpose of their institution. Just look at UC Santa Barbara. It’s got one of the most beautiful campuses anywhere, and one asshole with money beyond sense has decided to build a prison for students as an experiment.

Charles Munger left $200 million to the university on the condition that they must build a mega-dorm exactly as his blueprints dictate. There’s a problem right there: it’s very nice of rich people to give money to universities, but donors should respect the fact that the university is supposed to know what they’re doing and that rigid demands from inflexible outsiders are not helpful. The university should have just said “NO!” early in the planning stages of the donation. Now they’re stuck with it.

The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly. Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas, where they could interact and collaborate. He also argues the off-site prefabrication of standardized building elements ― the nine residential levels feature identical floor plans ― would save on cost. The entire proposal, which comes as UCSB desperately attempts to add to its overstretched housing stock, is budgeted somewhere in the range of $1.5 billion.

You read that right. Charles Munger donated $200 million in such a way as to force the university to spend another $1,300 million on this boondoggle. His design is a nightmare. It’s a collection of uncomfortably tiny, windowless sleeping rooms surrounding a common area, with the intent that students will be forced to interact in the shared space, especially since they’ll be deprived of views of the beaches or ocean. Those are terrible distractions, you know.

If I were a shiny new high school graduate considering UCSB, the environment would be a major part of the appeal, and telling me I’d be living in a sealed box with artificial lighting, only two exits from the building, and 7 strangers elbow-to-elbow would send me running elsewhere. That sounds more like a penitentiary or worse, the premise for a reality TV show. The architects hired to implement the design have already resigned (but who needs them anyway? Munger provided the blueprints, that job is done.)

One of the architects explains why it is a bad design.

McFadden draws striking comparisons between Munger Hall and other large structures to illustrate its colossal footprint. Currently, he said, the largest single dormitory in the world is Bancroft Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy, which houses 4,000 students and is composed of multiple wings wrapped around numerous courtyards with over 25 entrances.

“Munger Hall, in comparison, is a single block housing 4,500 students with two entrances,” McFadden said, and would qualify as the eighth densest neighborhood on the planet, falling just short of Dhaka, Bangladesh. It would be able to house Princeton University’s entire undergraduate population, or all five Claremont Colleges. “The project is essentially the student life portion of a mid-sized university campus in a box,” he said.

The project is utterly detached from its physical setting, McFadden goes on, and has no relationship to UCSB’s “spectacular coastal location.” It is also out of place with the scale and texture of the rest of campus, he said, “an alien world parked at the corner of the campus, not an integrally related extension of it.” Even the rooftop courtyard looks inward and “may as well be on the ground in the desert as on the eleventh floor on the coast of California,” he said.

Oh, but of course it’s going to be named Munger Hall. Munger is a college dropout turned lawyer and investment banker, so it’s perfectly normal that he gets his name splattered on buildings in campuses all across the nation.

Some journalists need to STFU

Editors seem to love to publish waffling centrist apologists for journalistic weaseling, and I hate it. Here’s some opinion columnist saying The media slant on Joe Rogan and covid has been wrong. Journalists must do better. He thinks journalism has been too hard on that hack.

In my experience, a journalist who admits uncertainty and owns up to mistakes is ultimately more trusted, not less so. (Even opinion writers should be accountable to facts and alive to the unknowable.)

I agree. So what misstatement of the facts did CNN make?

For this reason, CNN is wrong to double down on its smug reports that vaccine-skeptic podcaster Joe Rogan treated his coronavirus with “horse dewormer.” He did not, as nearly as I can determine. Rogan’s covid-19 was treated, he said, with a number of medicines, including the anti-parasite drug ivermectin — the same medication that former president Jimmy Carter’s foundation has used to fight the scourge of river blindness in Africa and Latin America. Like many drugs, ivermectin also has veterinary applications.

CNN reported that Rogan had treated his infection with a cocktail of glop — antibodies and ivermectin and vitamins, and who knows what else. That is accurate. That’s what Rogan himself announced. He was dosing himself with an anti-parasitic drug to treat a virus. This is a problem, because it spreads the word that maybe taking random drugs is an effective way to handle a specific disease, and maybe this columnist hasn’t noticed, but there are people refusing to take the effective treatment because they’re doping themselves with horse dewormer or betadine. We did not mock Rogan enough.

Further, talking about river blindness is a dishonest distraction. It’s irrelevant. Did Joe Rogan have onchocerciasis? He had COVID-19.

So far, there isn’t a lot of evidence that ivermectin is a good anti-covid therapy, and federal agencies have warned people who hear about the drug not to consume a paste intended for livestock. But that doesn’t mean Rogan ate horse dewormer. You don’t fight disinformation with disinformation. Not if you’re a good reporter.

A good reporter would explain that Rogan was misleading his audience by taking horse dewormer seriously as a treatment for a virus. They’d also mention that the evidence is in: ivermectin is not a good anti-COVID-19 therapy.

All we have here is a hack writing dodgy crap to sow doubt. Here he is talking about how the vaccines are “new” and might have “unforeseen effects”.

CNN’s pundits might not have sneered at Rogan if he had toed the line on coronavirus vaccines — even if it is a line that is underinformed and overconfident. I yield to no one in my enthusiasm for these vaccines. They are wonderfully effective, and the speed of their development was a scientific triumph. However: The vaccines are new. There are unanswered questions about long-term effectiveness and potentially unforeseen effects. And even vaccinated people keep dying — albeit at much lower rates. It’s understandable that some — such as Rogan — will air doubts. CNN shouldn’t be stigmatizing their natural skepticism.

What I learned from this is that David Von Drehle, the author, is a marginal crank and not a reasonable source (he got his start as a sports writer, and evolved into a political pundit — he has zero qualifications in science or medicine). I’ll remember that name.

Dune: epic, majestic, stately, beautiful

We had a good time at DUNE (or, as the poster calls it, DUNC) last night. It was excellent! It’s true to the original story for the most part, and the special effects were impressive. It’s a movie where you can just sit back and enjoy the slow build with occasional bursts of action, and the plot overall is not stupid.

One matter of taste: this is not a superhero movie. No slam-bam non-stop overpowered people smashing buildings and chins. It really is all slow imagery: space ships don’t swoop with blasters blazing, immense geometric shapes float down to the planet and drift onto plains of sand. It’s a thing. If you don’t appreciate the idea of taking your time in a movie, you may not have a good time. I was in the mood for it, so I found it pleasant and thoughtful.

On the other hand, it didn’t get very far into the plot before just…ending. It only got as far as Jessica and Paul fleeing the invasion of the Harkonnens to end up in Stilgar’s sietch. It’s been decades since I read the book, and what is that? About a third of the way in? I was just getting on a roll here when I had to go home. And it ends on such a downer moment! There has to be at least one more movie, maybe two, to bring it to its complex conclusion. It looks like an expensive movie, too, with a star-power cast and lots of fancy computer work (ooh, the ornithopters were amazing), so I’m going to have to tell you all that you’re required to go so it makes lots of money and bankrolls and brings me some resolution.

One minor complaint that isn’t so much about Dune as it is about this kind of drama in general. I attended with my wife, who has some hearing impairments, and in those quiet moments where they were talking, everyone tends to whisper at each other. It was annoying. Jessica and Paul are hiding in a tent deep in the desert, alone, talking about their situation and advancing a little exposition, and they are whispering for dramatic effect. You’re in the desert! Alone! Talk normally, as people do. I will say this for super-hero movies: they are very shouty. People emote loudly. It’s just that whenever a plot has some subtlety and thoughtful tension to it, the way they express it in Dune is by having the actors drop their voices into a low raspy register.

Don’t let that stop you, though! You must go see it so there’s a chance they’ll make the next episode in the story just for me!

Someday, I could be a houseplant

First, I’d have to become a corpse, though…so no hurry. No hurry at all. Here’s a video about “natural organic reduction”, or corpse composting, which is a pretty cool option. The body is put into a box for a month, breaks down, gets turned into soil, and then can be used for soil restoration, or just for gardening, if you’d like.

Unfortunately, there’s only a few states that allow this legally. My home state of Washington — even my home town south of Seattle — have facilities for this, so maybe I’ll be able to take advantage of it someday.

I’m thinking, maybe a spider plant?