The university board of regents member, Steve Sviggum (for some reason, I always think of him as a Ralph Sviggum), who suggest that maybe the University of Minnesota Morris is too diverse, is still squatting on the board, despite calls to resign. The latest comes from student leaders at all the branch campuses.

Dear Regent Sviggum:

We write to you today asking for your immediate resignation from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents.

Your question at the October 13th Mission Fulfillment committee meeting, in which you asked whether or not the Morris campus had become ‘too diverse’, demonstrated your inability to fulfill the University’s institutional commitment to equity and diversity as written in Board of Regents policy.

While we acknowledge your public apology, what students have shared about your visit to the Morris campus last month make it clear that your apology was meaningless. We do not believe that your reported behavior when interacting with Morris students from marginalized communities is consistent with someone who truly believes that diversity is a strength.

Finally, we acknowledge that many of our campuses are currently facing enrollment struggles. We firmly believe that encouraging students from diverse backgrounds to attend our colleges will be a part of the solution to those struggles. A recent study conducted by Niche found that diversity was one of the top aspects high school seniors want out of their college experience. With that in mind, we are concerned that your continued presence on the Board of Regents will signal a hostile attitude toward diversity and deter prospective students from choosing one of the five University of Minnesota campuses.

He’s lingering on like a foul odor, and it’s quite clear that he has no intention of leaving until he is forced out. The latest bit of petty bullying from him occurred at a board of regents meeting to which student leaders were invited.

Yeah, he’s not leaving. Right now he’s clinging to his position out of spite.

By the way, here are the stats on Morris enrollment.

The University of Minnesota’s strategic plan calls for the Morris campus to have 1,700 students by 2025, but it had just 1,068 at one recent count. About 41% of students describe themselves as a person of color, up from 21% a decade ago.

I was here a decade ago (two decades ago even), and I’m here now. We’ve had no decline in the ability, the enthusiasm, or the brilliance of our students over that time. So much for “too much diversity”!

Finished. All exams graded. All final grades calculated. All letter grades submitted to the registrar.

A day at the beach would be nice, the best I could manage was a walk through the snow. Maybe popcorn and a movie at home tonight? Early to bed and sleep until Christmas? My ambitions are simple and uncomplicated.

Schläfst du, Lehrer? I did not sleep well last night. I was up and down all night long, struggling to get the rest I need today. You see, I did a terrible thing: I set the deadline for submission of all finals, final essays, and term papers in all three of my classes for the same instant, at midnight last night. I think I may have accidentally wired a connection from the digital bit bucket to my brain, so all night long as papers were sent in I’d get a jolt of electrons directly into the attention centers of my hindbrain.

Or it might have just been general dread at what I was going to find waiting for me in the morning. Those damn Valkyries were galloping through my head all night long, and now I must rise! Reite zur Wal!

Hojotoho! hojotoho! heiaha! heiaha!

I’ve been an aquarist for a few decades, but the largest aquarium I’ve ever owned was 29 gallons. I was more about assembling many aquaria, and I think maybe the largest total capacity I’ve ever had was about 150 gallons. Every aquarist has the nightmare of something happening to the aquaria — I remember George Streisinger (the original zebrafish guy) recounting his terrible dream about the quonset hut where the entire initial zebrafish colony was housed having a catastrophic collapse and all his work getting wiped out.

This is a setup for the fabulous Berlin AquaDom, a giant million liter aquarium housing about 1500 exotic fish. Here it is, isn’t it beautiful?

Fantastic. I wonder what kind of nightmares the owners had? Because they all just came true.

There was speculation freezing temperatures that got down to minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight caused a crack in the acrylic glass tank, which then exploded under the weight of the water. Police said there was no evidence the incident resulted from a malicious act.

Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.

I imagine Australia doesn’t have the same problems we do here in Minnesota — the major artery to Morris is a sheet of ice right now, with drifting snow blowing around — but still this is a bad time to travel, as FDotM illustrates.

Trains? We ain’t got no stinkin’ trains. They even discontinued the bus service, and we have to somehow get ourselves to a town 45 minutes away to get a shuttle. My choice is the first one: stay at home with the pigs and chickens…only in this case, it’s a cat and a lot of spiders. My wife and I will be spending Christmas home alone in a small snowy midwestern town.

So what are you doing for the holidays?

First, I publicly deplore all stalkers, and apparently some people have been stalking and harassing Elon Musk, and someone was following his family around. This is despicable. There are people, irrespective of what political position they hold, who lose all perspective and turn their personal dislike for someone into a crusade, and that is a behavior that must be opposed.

However, it is interesting that rather than relying on the police, the law, and social opprobrium to deal with the problem, Musk is lashing out at journalism.

Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.

The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.

The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.

@ElonJet wasn’t stalking him. The account was posting publicly available information that you can still get online (although less conveniently formatted), and it had been arbitrarily closed by Musk, after he’d said he wouldn’t.

On Wednesday, @ElonJet was permanently suspended despite a tweet from Musk weeks earlier, saying he would keep it up as part of “my commitment to free speech.”

So much for his commitment to free speech. His latest spasm is even more revealing, though — he’s killing accounts for even mentioning the @ElonJet account, or reporting on confrontations with his stalker.

Around 11:30 p.m. Thursday, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces chat — essentially a public conference call — with several journalists, including some who had been banned, in which he reiterated his claim that they had “doxed” him.

The journalists challenged him on this.

“You’re suggesting that we’re sharing your address, which is not true,” said Harwell.

Musk retorted, “You posted a link to the address.”

Harwell replied, “In the course of reporting on @ElonJet, we posted a link to @ElonJet, which is now not online.”

Musk left the call abruptly about four minutes into it.

He has since shut down Twitter Spaces. Or maybe it just broke because he’s been starving the maintenance teams?

We’re now entering the tyrant’s paranoia phase, where he is afraid of all the enemies he imagines are out to get him. He’s losing everywhere — Twitter was never a money-maker to begin with, but now Tesla’s value is plummeting, people are beginning to look at his other business ventures with a skeptical eye (The Boring Company and Hyperloop were clearly useless scams intended to kill mass transit), and his Mars fantasies are pretentious delusions — and he’s seeing well-deserved criticism as personal attacks and even threats to his life. This is a bad attitude to have if you’re trying to run a company whose whole purpose is to allow and encourage free discussion about anything and everything. If his incompetence doesn’t kill Twitter, his eagerness to ban journalists who tweet will do the job.

It’s also hypocritical. Many of us have experienced online stalking that has risen to disruptive levels, far worse than what Elon Musk gets. The old Twitter just shrugged and ignored it, allowing Nazis and misogynists to harass whoever they wanted, and Musk has made it worse. You want to cry and complain about people picking on you, but at the same time you’ve dismantled what little machinery Twitter had in place to police that kind of behavior? I’m not going to feel much sympathy for your chickenshit fee-fees.

I stepped out into the darkness this morning — we’re trapped at home in another wet, sloppy snowstorm.

Then I read this account of a Midwestern winter romance.

“When I’m around you, I can’t think straight,” he said. Actually, it was hypothermia.

It’s all too true. Every word of it.

OK already. It’s supposed to be my break, but I had to take care of some things, for the spring term. So I got students registered for my writing course, got flies ordered for my genetics course, and worked out my spring calendar. One pleasant surprise: my schedule fell out in such a way that I have no classes on Friday (three day weekends all semester long!) and no class before 11:45, which is a bit of a waste since I’m up by 6am every day anyway. Although it does mean I’ll have a fair amount of Spider Time to look forward to.

Now go away, job. I don’t want to think about you any more until January.

Except for the grading I have to do on Saturday, that is.

Some of us are trying to make ends meet. Some of us are worrying about how we can afford retirement. Some of us are looking at medical bills and weeping. But not Elon Musk! He’s the what-me-worry kid. He borrowed billions for an impulsive purchase of Twitter, and he’s not worried at all about his rather desperate situation.

With interest on his loans totaling over $150m/month and a company grossing $5B before screwing it all up and chasing the advertisers out, Twitter’s reluctant purchaser Elon Musk seems to be running out of options.

He’s bleeding $150 million every month on just the interest payments? On a company he is visibly mismanaging? In his shoes (his brightly-colored, oversized clown shoes), I’d be a wreck. I’d be worried about all the employees I was letting down, and how I’d meet operating costs, let alone the interest. But not Elon! He has a plan!

To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said. Twitter has also refused to pay a $197,725 bill for private charter flights made the week of Mr. Musk’s takeover, according to a copy of a lawsuit filed in New Hampshire District Court and obtained by The New York Times.

Twitter’s leaders have also discussed the consequences of denying severance payments to thousands of people who have been laid off since the takeover, two people familiar with the talks said. And Mr. Musk has threatened employees with lawsuits if they talk to the media and “act in a manner contrary to the company’s interest,” according to an internal email sent last Friday.

The aggressive moves signal that Mr. Musk is still slashing expenditures and is bending or breaking Twitter’s previous agreements to make his mark. His reign has been characterized by chaos, a series of resignations and layoffs, reversals of the platform’s previous suspensions and rules, and capricious decisions that have driven away advertisers.

Whoa, you can do that? I could just refuse to make our mortgage payments or skip out on our credit card bill? That would free up a whole lot of money that I could spend on fun stuff.

I think, though, that at some point the law would catch up with me, and I’d be evicted or forced to meet my contractual obligations or maybe even be arrested and jailed. Could that happen to the second richest man in the world? Probably not, because the world is not just. We’ll have to settle for watching his reputation get flushed away.

I feel like I’ve been railing against nonsense for my entire life. I got into the skepticism side of everything starting with my opposition to creationism — there I was, diligently studying developmental and evolutionary biology, and I started encountering these raving loons who outright rejected all of science while claiming the earth was 6,000 years old and that all life was magically created in a short week. It was offensive. It was absurd. Yet those kooks continue to thrive.

Since then, the bullshit has continued to pile up. We have flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, QAnon conspiracy theorists, sovereign citizens, crypto fanatics, and satanic panics, all patently bogus, and they have led to a world of transphobia, homophobia, insurrections, armed militias, anti-education sentiment, and a Supreme Court and Congress packed with some of the dumbest idjits ever to grace this country. People hold the incredible as credible. The media take the silly seriously.

What is going on? It’s an epidemic of idiocy.

I admit that I live in a bubble of sanity, but people outside that bubble aren’t stupid. They’ve been misled and misinformed, their fears have been stoked, but the people wearing MAGA hats and attending anti-vax rallies are also a minority. Perhaps a growing minority, but still…they shouldn’t have as much influence as they do. In a sensible world, they ought to be laughed at.

I’m going to blame social media. I saw it on Facebook, with old friends getting sucked down into a vortex of insanity, people self-reinforcing each other over the latest extreme conspiracy theory, which would be actively promoted by the medium. It was an environment designed for kooks; they got free license to say anything, which was fine, but then criticism of bad ideas was walled off and contained, so the circle-jerks grew unchecked. If you dared to speak up and say, “Errm, the world is round, all the evidence says so” you would be shouted down by a massive crowd of people finding confidence in their numbers. It was ugly. I finally had enough and had to leave that site, cutting off all connections and closing my account.

Now it’s Twitter. This service has the potential to be even worse than Facebook, because now it has been bought up by a billionaire with bad taste and bad ideas who is endorsing QAnon, going full anti-vax, and calling for Fauci to be imprisoned. He’s insane. He’s going to lead Twitter into full collapse as a madhouse of raging nitwits.

That also leads into another big American difficulty — the way unfettered capitalism has produced a class of overvalued morons who can buy further degradation of the system.

It’s a nightmare, and I can’t abide it. I’m eventually going to have to kill my Twitter account, in the same way I murdered my Facebook account. Right now, I’m using Twitter as a free advertising service for the blog, and that’s it. I post links to Pharyngula there, but I am as of this moment refusing to engage further on the site: no other chatter, no conversation, no discussion — if you want to talk to me (and I do want to talk with other people), we’ll all have to make the effort to find other ways to engage. I’m on Mastodon, I have YouTube, and most of all, I have Freethoughtblogs.

I don’t know what else to do. Social media is a failed experiment that has had disastrous consequences. Bring back RSS!